A native of Toledo, Ohio, Art Tatum's big splash came in 1932, when at the age of 22 he accompanied singer Adelaide Hall to New York as her pianist. Not many outside of Ohio knew of Tatum, but the Harlem stride pianists knew. At a New York night spot Tatum dueled "Fats" Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith and James P. Johnson in a cutting contest for the ages. Tatum wowed the crowd with "Tea for Two" but his breakneck-speed version of "Tiger Rag" left them completely limp with exhaustion. The Harlem legends knew they had been cut, and young Art Tatum was on top of the world. A year later, he recorded "Tea for Two," "St. Louis Blues," "Tiger Rag," and "Sophisticated Lady" and thus was begun a great career of playing night gigs - trio and solo, playing after hours with his friends and fellow musicians all through the night, recording, and travel.
Art Tatum was legally blind in one eye and poor-sighted in the other, yet he had an independent spirit and claimed to be able to do everything in life that a normal-sighted person would. Oddly, his poor eyesight may have contributed to his success as a pianist. As a young man, he could not read music, and acquired several piano rolls of the music of Lee Sims and others, trying to emulate them at the keyboard in strict time. Little did he know that in making those piano rolls, often two pianists were employed at the same time! Thus was Tatum able to build his technique with both hands to give the listener the impression that more than one person was playing at once.
My appreciation for Art Tatum as a musician came along slowly. Some 30 years ago, I bought a CD of his Decca tracks from about 1940. These revealed Tatum to be in the style of the Harlem stride pianists, with a few harmonic twists. For instance, in the opening of "Tiger Rag," Tatum experiments with some impressionistic parallel chords a la Debussy. He also used Massenet's "Elegy" and Dvorak's "Humoresque" as vehicles for his unique expression. There is evidence that in another era, Tatum would have been a great classical pianist, but in the 1930s and 1940s for a man of African-American descent, there was no place for Art Tatum in the classical world.
About 15 years later, I found myself listening to some of Tatum's later recordings, his "Solo Masterpieces" from the early 1950's, recorded about 3-4 years before his premature death in 1956 due to kidney failure. Tatum was in a very different place by this time. He was plumbing new harmonic depths and exploring all the colors available to him at the keyboard. Chord substitutions were bolder and more remote. Finding a full appreciation of Tatum now took about 5-10 listenings per track, with a preference of about 20-25 times to get the full effect. But what a reward at the end of the journey!
My opinion of Art Tatum has changed over the years. I used to be awed by his technical prowess, his blinding-speed versions of Tiger Rag and Elegie and St. Louis Blues and others. Now, I am more enamored of his mind than his fingers. This man, who never read music and never wrote anything down, was literally a composer at the keyboard, in real time. Surely his later versions of Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays" and Dvorak's "Humoresque" and others were pre-typed. In other words, they didn't change from performance to performance. But the colors and the harmonic variances he achieved through chord substitutions, the use of spacing at the keyboard, his endlessly fascinating ability to keep the left hand in perfect time no matter what technically blinding melismas were happening in the right hand - these were and are qualities that make listening to Art Tatum's music at the very least, a pleasure. For me, Tatum has become almost an obsession - having heard the best, it's hard to part with it and listen to somebody else.
Here is a clip of a mature Art Tatum performing “She’s Funny That Way” in the 1950’s…..
Quotes about Tatum:
Teddy Wilson: "Maybe this will explain Art Tatum. If you put a piano in a room, just a bare piano. Then you get all the finest jazz pianists in the world and let them play in the presence of Art Tatum. Then let Art Tatum play ... everyone there will sound like an amateur."
Sergei Rachmaninoff: "If this man ever tried to play serious music, we'd all be in trouble."
Famous classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz, hearing Tatum live, simply wept.
Leonard Feather: "The greatest soloist in jazz history, regardless of instrument."
Fats Waller: "Ladies and gentlemen, I play piano, but God is in the house tonight."
