Art Tatum

At the end of his first Three Deuces stint, Tatum moved to California, traveling by train because of his fear of flying.

In California, Tatum also played for Hollywood parties and appeared on Bing Crosby’s radio program late in 1936. He recorded in Los Angeles for the first time early the following year – four tracks as the sextet named Art Tatum and His Swingsters, for Decca Records.

Continuing to travel by long-distance train, Tatum settled into a pattern of performances at major jazz clubs in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, interspersed with appearances at minor clubs.

1938–1949

In March 1938, Tatum and his wife embarked on the Queen Mary for England. He performed there for three months and enjoyed the quiet listeners who, unlike some American audiences, did not talk over his playing.

While in England, he twice appeared on the BBC television program Starlight. Four of his very limited compositions were also published in Britain.

The overseas trip appeared to have boosted his reputation, particularly with the white public, and he was able to have club residencies of at least several weeks at a time in New York over the following few years, sometimes with stipulations that no food or drink would be served while he was playing.

Tatum recorded 16 tracks in August 1938, but they were not released for at least a decade. A similar thing happened the following year: of the 18 sides he recorded, only two were issued as 78s.

A possible explanation is that big band music and vocalists were popular, so very few jazz pianists made solo recordings, and there was a very limited market for them. One of the releases, a version of “Tea for Two”, was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1986.

One recording from early in 1941, however, was commercially successful, with sales of perhaps 500,000. This was “Wee Baby Blues”, performed by a sextet and with the addition of Big Joe Turner on vocals.

Informal performances of Tatum’s playing in 1940 and 1941 were released after his death on the album God Is in the House, for which he was awarded the 1973 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Soloist.

The album title came from Waller’s words when he saw Tatum enter the club he was playing in: “I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house.”

Tatum formed a trio with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart. With the trio, he enjoyed more popular success, although some critics expressed disappointment. However, Tatum was awarded Esquire magazine’s prize for pianists in its 1944 critics’ poll.

All of Tatum’s studio recordings in 1944 were with the trio, and radio appearances continued. He abandoned the trio in 1944, possibly at an agent’s behest, and did not record with one again for eight years.

Early in 1945, Billboard reported that Tatum was being paid $1,150 a week as a soloist by the Downbeat club on 52nd Street to play four sets of twenty minutes each per night. This was described much later as an “unheard-of figure” for the time.

The Billboard reviewer commented that “Tatum is given a broken-down instrument, some bad lights and nothing else”, and observed that he was almost inaudible beyond the front seating because of the audience noise.

Tatum in 1946

Aided by name recognition from his record sales and reduced entertainer availability because of the World War II draft, Tatum began to play in more formal jazz concert settings in 1944 – appearing at concert halls in towns and universities all around the United States.

The venues were much larger than jazz clubs – some had capacities in excess of 3,000 people – allowing Tatum to earn more money for much less work. Despite the more formal concert settings, Tatum preferred not to adhere to a set program of pieces for these performances.

Performances at concert settings continued in the second half of the 1940s, including participation in Norman Granz-produced Jazz at the Philharmonic events. In 1947 Tatum again appeared on film, this time in The Fabulous Dorseys.

In 1949 he signed to Capitol Records and recorded 26 pieces for them. He also played for the first time at Club Alamo in Detroit but stopped when a black friend was not served. The owner subsequently advertised that black customers were welcome, and Tatum went on to play there frequently in the following few years.

Although Tatum remained an admired figure, his popularity waned in the mid-to-late 1940s. This was because of the advent of bebop – a musical style that Tatum did not embrace.

1950–1956

In 1951 Tatum began working with a trio with bassist Stewart and guitarist Everett Barksdale. In 1952 Tatum toured the United States with fellow pianists Erroll Garner, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis, for concerts billed as “Piano Parade”.

Tatum’s four-year absence from the recording studios as a soloist ended when Granz, who owned Clef Records, decided to record his solo playing in a way that was unprecedented in the recording industry: invite him into the studio, start the tape, and let him play whatever he felt like playing.

At the time this was an astonishing enterprise, the most extensive recording that had been done of any jazz figure. Over several sessions starting late in 1953, Tatum recorded 124 solo tracks, all but three of which were released, spread over a total of 14 LPs.

Granz reported that the recording tape ran out during one piece, but Tatum, instead of starting again from the beginning, asked to listen to a playback of just the final eight bars, then continued the performance from there on the new tape, keeping to the same tempo as on the first attempt. The solo pieces were released by Clef as The Genius of Art Tatum and were added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978.

Tatum was, variously, criticized for not playing real jazz, the choice of material, and being past his best, and praised for the enthralling intricacy and detail of his playing, and his technical perfection.

Nevertheless, the releases renewed attention on the pianist, including for a newer generation; he won DownBeat magazine’s critics’ poll for pianists three years in a row from 1954.

Following a health warning, Tatum stopped drinking in 1954 and lost weight. That year, his trio was part of bandleader Stan Kenton’s 10-week tour named “Festival of Modern American Jazz”.

The trio did not play with Kenton’s orchestra on the tour, but they had the same performance schedule, meaning Tatum sometimes traveled long distances by overnight train while the others stayed in a hotel and then took a morning flight.

By 1956, Tatum’s health had deteriorated due to advanced uremia. Nevertheless, in August of that year, he played to the biggest audience of his career: 19,000 gathered at the Hollywood Bowl for another Granz-led event.

The following month, he had the last of the Granz group recording sessions, with saxophonist Ben Webster, and then played at least two concerts in October. He was too unwell to continue touring, so returned to his home in Los Angeles. Musicians visited him on November 4, and other pianists played for him as he lay in bed.

Tatum died the following day, at Queen of Angels Medical Center in Los Angeles, from uremia. He was buried at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles but was moved to the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California in 1992 by his second wife, so she could be buried next to him.

Tatum was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1964 and was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989.

Personality and habits

Tatum was independent-minded and generous with his time and money. He avoided joining the Musicians’ Union for as long as he could because he felt that he would be restricted by having to follow its rules.

He also disliked anything that drew attention to his blindness: he did not want to be physically led, so planned his independent walk to the piano in clubs where possible.

People who met Tatum consistently “describe him as totally lacking in arrogance or ostentation”, and as being gentlemanly in behavior. He typically gave very little information about himself in interviews and preferred not to discuss his personal life or history with others, even with people he knew.
After hours and repertoire

Tatum was said to be more spontaneous and creative in free-form nocturnal sessions than in his scheduled performances.

In a professional setting, he would often give audiences what they wanted – performances of songs that were similar to his recorded versions – but decline to play encores.

In after-hours sessions with friends, he would play the blues, improvise for long periods on the same sequence of chords, and move even more away from the melody of a composition. Tatum also sometimes sang the blues in such settings, accompanying himself on piano.

In after-hours performances, Tatum’s repertoire was much wider than for professional appearances, for which his staples were American popular songs.
During his career, he also played his own arrangements of a few classical piano pieces, including Dvořák’s Humoresque and Massenet’s “Élégie”, and recorded around a dozen blues pieces.

Over time, he added to his repertoire – by the late 1940s, most of the new pieces were medium-tempo ballads but also included compositions that presented him with harmonic challenges, such as the simplicity of “Caravan” and complexity of “Have You Met Miss Jones?” He did not add to the classical pieces he had used earlier.

Style and technique

Saxophonist Benny Green wrote that Tatum was the only jazz musician to “attempt to conceive a style based upon all styles, to master the mannerisms of all schools, and then synthesize those into something personal”.

Tatum was able to transform the styles of preceding jazz piano through virtuosity: where other pianists had employed repetitive rhythmic patterns and relatively simple decoration, he created “harmonic sweeps of color and unpredictable and ever-changing shifts of rhythm.”

Musicologist Lewis Porter identified three aspects of Tatum’s playing that a casual listener might miss: the dissonance in his chords; his advanced use of substitute chord progressions; and his occasional use of bitonality (playing in two keys at the same time).

On occasion, the bitonality was against what another musician was playing, as in “Lonesome Graveyard Blues” with guitarist Oscar Moore. Prior to Tatum, jazz harmony was mainly triadic, with flattened sevenths and infrequent ninths.

He went beyond this, influenced by the harmonies of Debussy and Ravel. He incorporated upper intervals such as elevenths and thirteenths and added tenths to the left-hand vocabulary of the earlier stride piano style.

Tatum had a different way of improvising from what is typical in modern jazz. He did not try to create new melodic lines over a harmonic progression. Instead, he implied or played the original melody or fragments of it, while superimposing countermelodies and new phrases to create new structures based on the variation.

“The harmonic lines may be altered, reworked, or rhythmically rephrased for moments at a time, but they are still the base underneath Tatum’s superstructures. The melodic lines may be transformed into fresh shapes with only a note or a beat or a phrase particle retained to associate the new with the original, yet the melody remains, if only in the listener’s imagination.”

This flexibility extended to his use of rhythm: he employed “ever-changing combinations of notes per beat even in the most rapid passages. He could apply different variation techniques simultaneously, and used subtle rhythmic intensification and relaxation to give clear identity and shape to his phrases.”

His rhythmic sense allowed him to move away from the established tempo of a piece for extended periods without losing the beat.

For critic Martin Williams, there was also the matter of the pianist’s sly humor when playing: “when we fear he is reaching the limits of romantic bombast, a quirky phrase, an exaggerated ornament will remind us that Tatum may be having us on.

He is also inviting us to share the joke and heartily kidding himself as well as the concert hall traditions to which he alludes.”

Prior to the 1940s, Tatum’s style was based on popular song form, which often meant two bars of melodic development followed by two more melodically static bars, which he filled with very fast runs or arpeggios.

From the 1940s, he progressively lengthened the runs to eight or more bars, sometimes continuing them across the natural eight-bar boundaries within a composition’s structure, and began to use a harder, more aggressive attack.

He also increased the frequency of harmonic substitutions and the variety of musical devices played by his left hand and developed a greater harmonic and contrapuntal balance across the piano’s upper and lower registers.

Critic Whitney Balliett commented on the overall form of Tatum’s style: “his strange, multiplied chords, still largely unmatched by his followers, his laying on of two and three and four melodic levels at once was orchestral and even symphonic.”

This style was not one that could be adapted to the form of bebop: “the orchestral approach to the keyboard was too thick, too textured to work in the context of a bebop rhythm section.”

A general criticism of him in a group setting was that he overwhelmed the other musicians, and appeared to compete with any soloist that he was ostensibly supporting.

Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco said that playing with Tatum was “like chasing a train”, and the pianist himself said that a band got in his way.

Tatum was serious at the keyboard, not attempting crowd-pleasing gestures, and he maintained a calm demeanor. This accentuated the impact of his playing on observers, as did his seemingly effortless technique, as fellow pianist Hank Jones noted – the apparently horizontal gliding of his hands across the keys stunned his contemporaries.

Tatum’s relatively straight-fingered technique compared to the curvature taught in classical training contributed to this visual impression: a critic wrote in 1935 that, when playing, “Tatum’s hand is almost perfectly horizontal, and his fingers seem to actuate around a horizontal line drawn from wrist to fingertip.”

Tatum was able to use his thumbs and little fingers to add melody lines while playing something else with his other fingers.

Drummer Bill Douglass, who played with Tatum, commented that the pianist would “do runs with these two fingers up here and then the other two fingers of the same hand playing something else down there. Two fingers on the black keys, and then the other two fingers would be playing something else on the white keys. He could do that in either hand”.

His large hands allowed him to play a left-hand trill with his thumb and forefinger while also using his little finger to play a note an octave lower.

He was also capable of reaching twelfth intervals in either hand and could play a succession of chords at rapid tempos. He also had a strong sense of time and was able to play any of his chosen material in any key.

Tatum’s touch has also attracted attention: for Balliett, “No pianist has ever hit notes more beautifully. Each one was light and complete and resonant, like the letters on a finely printed page. Vast lower-register chords were unblurred, and his highest notes were polished silver.”

Tatum could maintain these qualities of touch and tone even at the most rapid tempos when almost all other pianists would be incapable of playing the notes at all.

Pianist Chick Corea commented that “Tatum is the only pianist I know of before Bill Evans that also had that feather-light touch – even though he probably spent his early years playing on really bad instruments.”

Among the musicians who said that Tatum could make a bad piano sound good were Billy Taylor and Gerald Wiggins. The latter revealed that Tatum was able to identify and avoid using any keys on a bad piano that were not working, while guitarist Les Paul recounted that Tatum sometimes resorted to pulling up stuck keys with one hand, mid-performance so that he could play them again.

Influence

Tatum’s improvisational style extended what was possible on jazz piano. The virtuoso solo aspects of Tatum’s style were taken on by pianists such as Adam Makowicz, Simon Nabatov, Oscar Peterson, and Martial Solal.

Even “musicians of radically different outlook, such as Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, and Herbie Hancock, learned key Tatum performances by rote, though few could compass his technical range or re-create his inimitable, plush tone.” Although Powell was of the bebop movement, his prolific and exciting style showed Tatum’s influence.

Mary Lou Williams said, “Tatum taught me how to hit my notes, how to control them without using pedals. And he showed me how to keep my fingers flat on the keys to get that clean tone.”

Tatum’s influence went beyond the piano, however: his innovations in harmony and rhythm established new ground in jazz more broadly. He made jazz musicians more aware of harmonic possibilities by changing the chords that he used with great frequency; this helped lay the foundations for the emergence of bebop in the 1940s. He also pioneered modern chord voicing and chord substitution in jazz.

Other musicians sought to transfer elements of Tatum’s pianistic virtuosity to their own instruments.

When newly arrived in New York, saxophonist Charlie Parker worked for three months as a dishwasher in a restaurant where Tatum was performing and often listened to the pianist.

“Perhaps the most important idea Parker learned from Tatum was that any note could be made to fit in a chord if suitably resolved.” Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie was also affected by Tatum’s speed, harmony, and daring solos.

Vocalist Tony Bennett incorporated aspects of Tatum into his singing: “I’d listen to his records almost daily and try to phrase like him. I just take his phrasing and sing it that way.”

Saxophonist Coleman Hawkins changed his playing style after hearing Tatum play in Toledo in the 1920s: Hawkins’s “arpeggio-based style and his growing vocabulary of chords, of passing chords and the relationships of chords, were confirmed and encouraged by his response to Art Tatum.”

Some musicians were negatively affected by exposure to Tatum’s abilities. Many pianists tried to copy him and attain the same level of ability, hindering their progress towards finding their own style.

Others, including trumpeter Rex Stewart and pianists Oscar Peterson and Bobby Short, were overwhelmed and began to question their own abilities.

Some musicians, including Les Paul and Everett Barksdale, stopped playing the piano and switched to another instrument after hearing Tatum.

Critical standing

There is little published information available about Tatum’s life. One full-length biography has been published – Too Marvelous for Words (1994), written by James Lester.

This lack of detailed coverage may be attributable to Tatum’s life and music not fitting any of the established critical narratives or frameworks for jazz: many historians of the music have marginalized him for this, so “not only is Tatum underrepresented in jazz criticism but his presence in jazz historiography seems largely to prompt no particular effort in historians beyond descriptive writing designed to summarize his pianistic approach”.

Critics have expressed strong opinions about Tatum’s artistry: “Some applaud Tatum as supremely inventive, while others say that he was boringly repetitive and that he barely improvised.”

Gary Giddins suggested that Tatum’s standing has not been elevated to the very highest level of jazz stars among the public because he did not employ the expected linear style of improvisation, and instead played in a way that listeners have to listen to with concentration, so he “becalms many listeners into hapless indifference”.

Recognition outside music

In 1993, an MIT student in the field of computational musicology coined the term “tatum”, which was named in recognition of the pianist’s speed. It has been defined as “the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase”, and “the fastest pulse present in a piece of music”.

In 2003, a historical marker was placed outside Tatum’s childhood home at 1123 City Park Avenue in Toledo, but by 2017 the unoccupied property was in a state of disrepair. At the Lucas County Arena of Toledo, a 27-feet-high sculpture, the “Art Tatum Celebration Column”, was unveiled in 2009.

References:

James Lester: Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum.

Wikipedia.