Art Tatum - "Too Marvelous for Words" - James Lester

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“By all the criteria of the nineteenth-century piano tradition, Art Tatum made himself into a piano virtuoso worthy to be compared to the best who have ever played. This achievement certainly did not come from years of hard labor under European-trained teachers, which is the usual route for concert pianists. It seems instead to have come from a very fine match between the opportunities the piano offers, on the one hand, and Tatum's innate sensitivities and gifts of coordination, on the other. Once he had been exposed to it and his mind had gotten its teeth into it, he was launched into a search for higher and higher levels of achievement, in the same way the great European artists had been.

He responded sensitively to the nature of the piano, as they had, and he arrived, probably independently, at many of the same ways of dealing with it as they had. His basic gifts, in other words, were world-class, and his gifts drove him to be the pianist he was. Tatum wove the virtuoso tradition and the jazz idiom together in his playing, from the early days of his development, and brought a previously unimagined level of playing into jazz.”

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

"The true genius is not helpfully communicative. … In reality, he lacks the key to verbal communication of his inner motivations, except within his art.   .   .   .  He does not seek self-knowledge, gives no account of himself, neglects and consumes himself.   .   .   .   He burns up, but does not defy the burning: rather, he ignores it. He does not see himself in relation to the world. He doesn't see himself at all."

- HILDESHEIMER, Mozart (on the difference between the true genius and the would-be genius)

“And so will someone when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life, Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life….)"                               

- WALT WHITMAN

“This book is dedicated to the hundreds of jazz musicians whose lives and contributions also deserve books but will probably never get them.”

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

Much of what Jazz musicians do goes up into the air, or, in today’s parlance, the ether. To say that their art is ephemeral would be an understatement in the extreme. The music is here one moment and gone the next. It seems sometimes that this is also the case with the Jazz musicians, too: here today gone tomorrow.

Mercifully, there are some book-length treatments of their music and careers; more and more it seems as Jazz moves more closely into the academic world. There are articles and interviews in the major music magazine that have focused on Jazz over the years, both at home and abroad:  Jazz Journal, Melody Maker, DownBeat, Metronome, Esquire, Playboy, JazzTimes, and a few others, come to mind.

I suppose, many Jazz musicians would prefer it this way: let the music speak for itself; it’s not about me.

But it’s hard not to wonder how they came to develop their marvelous talents and skills; to know more about the musician behind the music.

Phineas Newborn, Jr., who the eminent Jazz author Leonard Feather called one of the three greatest Jazz pianists of all time along with Art Tatum and Bud Powell, died a virtual unknown and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Memphis, Tennessee.  And, there is as yet, to my knowledge, no full length biography of Phineas [pronounced “Fine As”] and one wonders if there ever will be.

One of the main reasons that I started this blog was to do my part to provide some in-depth profiles to help remedy what James Lester underscores in his dedicatory statement to his biography of Art Tatum: “This book is dedicated to the hundreds of jazz musicians whose lives and contributions also deserve books but will probably never get them.”

Thank goodness for the tenacity [and temerity?] of James Lester for when he went looking for a biography of Art Tatum, who many consider to me the greatest Jazz pianist of all time, he couldn’t find one.

So, he decided to write one himself.

He explains how it all came to be in the following Introduction to Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum.

[Should you be in the mood to enhance your reading experience of this piece, rack up the 8 volumes of Art Tatum’s Solo Masterpieces [Pablo], set the controls on your CD changer for random play, pour yourself a glass of your favorite red plonk and sit back to enjoy what at some point in the process should be an out-of-body experience as all of your senses engage in the World of Art Tatum. There’s never been a “world” quite like it and I doubt that there ever will be one again.]

Introduction

“... a creature who, for all his fame. still stands in need of a tittle understanding." - LYTTON STRACHEY (referring to Shelley)

ART TATUM'S NAME is now a secure part of American popular culture, and almost everyone understands that to put someone on Tatum's level is to bestow the highest praise. A play reviewer can write: "Stoppard handles words the way that Art Tatum used to handle a keyboard," and the compliment is widely understood, even by people who never heard Art play the piano. More than thirty-five years after his death, his name is still a metaphor for excellence, and not just in America but the world over. I recently met a young jazz pianist and her mother, both from Azerbaijan in the former Soviet Union, and they were offended that I thought they might not know who Art Tatum was.

But who was Art Tatum?

In 1988 I set out to find a good biography of Tatum. I wanted to learn something about where such a giant had come from, who his own idols had been, what experiences had made him the figure I knew, what sort of a person he was, what sort of life he had when he wasn't playing. It astonished me to discover that no biography of Tatum has yet been published. No fellow pianist, no Jazz writer, no family member, in the thirty-seven years since his death, has yet undertaken a written record of his life. No wonder that if he exists at all for lovers of jazz he exists as a distant, an almost abstract figure, a black eminence waving his hands over the keyboard and thundering through the jazz world.

Art Tatum has not been forgotten, certainly not by the experts. Billv Taylor's 1983 book, Jazz Piano, has more entries in the index for Art Tatum than for any other name, and Gunther Schuller, in his 1989 hook, The Swing Era, Volume 2, gives more pages to Tatum than to any other soloist. The Smithsonian collection of recordings Jazz Piano, released in 1989, has more tracks of TatuirTs playing than of any other pianist. There are currently several concert pianists (for example, Steven Mayer) who pay their respects to Tatum by frequently playing transcriptions of his recordings in their programs, along with the standard classical piano repertoire. I recently attended a performance by Stanley Cowell, a significant post-Tatum jazz pianist, who devoted his whole concert to playing Art Tatum arrangements. Unfortunately there were far more of us in the audience over fifty than under forty; Cowell was preaching to the converted. (Cowell has gone on, incidentally, to compose a piano concerto dedicated to the memory of Art.)

But nothing has come along to tell us who he was. My aim has been to write the book I was unable to find in 1988, to do my best to answer the question of where he came from, and to put into a coherent narrative all the fragments of information about his life that now exist only in isolated sources and in personal memories.

My intent has not been to provide a reference work, documenting his career, the chronology of his public appearances, the dates and places of his recordings. I wanted to get the musician into focus as a person.

I regret that I didn't start sooner. There is some excellent material about Tatum, the musician, already in print. There is an admirable discography (Laubich and Spencer) and three technical analyses of his performance style (Howard, Howlett, and Schuller). Even the dedicated searcher, however, will turn up little about the people and events in Tatum's life. Several brief biographical sketches, most of which cover the same ground, can be found in chapter or magazine article form, and there are short paragraphs buried in other narratives. But each of these comprises only a few fragments of his story, and when I had read through them all I longed to find out how they

really fit together.

Tatum, I soon realized, was more a worthy than a promising subject for a biography - I was particularly interested in personal interviews with people who had known him or worked with him, of course, but 1988 was a very late date on which to start collecting living memories about Art Tatum. His contemporaries, those who were still with us, were in the general vicinity of eighty years old and were showing a marked tendency to shuffle off this mortal coil, all too often before I could reach them. One of his two living relatives and his widow, for reasons which I could never persuade them to reveal to me, were uncooperative.

Getting acquainted with people who knew Art personally, from early schoolmates to those who spent his last days with him, has been far and away the most enjoyable part of writing this book. Of course, there is often no hard evidence against which to evaluate personal accounts of incidents, and one either finds the account plausible or one does not. As an audience for many stories, I've found myself involved in a lot of what may be sifting fiction from fiction. If they were good stories, and not outrageously improbable, I have included them.

It is especially frustrating that there is no almost no record of the man's own report of himself, in his own words. No one I've talked to ever received a letter from Tatum, and his very limited vision makes it plausible that there may be no letters (although I can't be sure that his relatives don't possess some). Many potential interviewers saw him as a bit aloof and unapproachable  —and never approached him. Barry Ulanov knew and interviewed a large proportion of top Jazz figures in Tatum's era, but told me that he "gave up as fruitless any attempt to get a long narrative from him," as he would have liked to. The 1930s and '40s abounded with jazz greats who were more than willing to talk, and the reluctant or retiring ones got passed over. The few published interviews with Tatum have a curious quality; in them, he sounds genial and cooperative but gives almost no information in reply to the interviewer's questions. Without some expression of his own attitudes it is almost impossible to imagine his inner world, the place from which he emerged from time to time to astound us.

Musically, we don't need to know about that, but having it would let us feel much closer to the man. When I spoke about Art with Ellis Marsalis, a jazz pianist and teacher, and father of (among others) Wynton and Branford Marsalis, he remarked that no one could write about Tatum properly who hadn't "gigged," or worked as a jazz musician himself. I want to say here, at the beginning, something about my credentials for writing a biography of a jazz pianist.

The last time I wrote about jazz was in 1941. I was in the eighth grade and wrote a prize-winning essay on the "comeback" of Louis Armstrong. (Little did I realize that the comeback of which I wrote was to be onlv the first of several—it was in fact impossible to keep Louis down.) For my prize I chose a biography of W. C. Handy, composer of, among other things, the "St. Louis Blues" (St. Louis is my home town). I tell you this to make it clear that I am not a Jazz academic, not a jazz critic, not even an occasional contributor of articles on jazz in any form. My connection with jazz has been as an avid listener and as a moonlighting performer, on both piano and trombone.

Music in our household was determined by my mother's taste which ran to Wayne King and Guy Lombardo, the simplest and most pre-digested music of its time. I was a child during the Depression, and the radio in our house was generally tuned to those "sweet bands" that seemed to console America in that often sad era. Somehow I found my way to the right stuff by the time I was on the brink of being a teenager. I was buying (and I now confess to the world occasionally stealing) 78 rpm recordings of the Jazz bands of Will Hudson, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and other hot bands of the late 1930s, and listening secretly after bedtime to radio station WIL for the best jazz program on the air in St. Louis. Having started piano lessons at around age eight or nine, at my own instigation, I had found the world of "Pine Top" Smith, Meade Lux Lewis, Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, and of course Tatum, by the time I was thirteen (not, I admit, without pausing briefly to pay attention to such society pianists as Eddy Duchin and Carmen Cavallero — blame it on my youth).

I have been playing semi-professionally since 1941. I think my first paid appearance as a performer was at a block party in the Italian section of St. Louis. I was on piano and the band was on a six-foot high platform in the middle of the street. We played with such vigor that my fingers bled under the nails (not for the last time). I learned boogie-woogie and it made me very popular at parties, but as time went on it was Teddy Wilson whom I tried more and more to sound like. I loved Wilson's crisp and polished style, the clarity and sparkle of his melodic lines, the variety and interest of his left hand, the tenths constantly in motion, and those crystalline runs that sounded so spontaneous and yet inevitable at the same time. His sophistication and rich musicality, and maybe also his introverted character, appealed to my own personality much more than did "getting into the gorilla bag" (the phrase is Oscar Peterson's) with boogie-woogie. Finally, there was the fact that Wilson sounded accessible to me. I could hear what he was doing, and with enough work it seemed it might just be within reach. Tatum, of course, never was within reach, and I turned to him purely for musical experiences and not for a model. Tatum was there to define the limits of the possible, as he still is.

Since then I have held union cards in six major cities, as a pianist and a trombonist. In an Army Special Services unit in 1946 I played lead trombone in the big band, piano in a small group featuring the tenor player Warne Marsh, and wrote the book of arrangements for the band. I did several arrangements for the George Hudson band in St. Louis, the pride of the black community there, and was introduced by Hudson as a potential arranger to Lionel Hampton. In more recent years I've played hundreds of dances and private parties, in big bands and in smaller groups. My unknowing mentor Teddy Wilson once heard me play and commented (so I'm told), "He really seems to know what he's doing"—faint praise, perhaps, but from such a source it meant worlds to me. (There is a line in a novel that describes how I sometimes feel about my own playing, in which one of the characters says about another: "He seems to know what he's doing even if he can't do it.")

My vocation has been elsewhere, as a psychologist, but I have gigged. Those are my "credentials" and combined with my interest in Tatum they have given me the brashness to pursue the writing of this book. At least it seems brash to me; as an editor of DownBeat once remarked to a feature writer, "Tatum is a really big subject."

ART TATUM, COMING from out of nowhere (this is not a slight on Toledo, Ohio, but a comment on the disparity between his background and his accomplishment), set a precedent and a standard by which generations of Jazz pianists could not escape judging themselves — even though by such a standard failure was almost guaranteed. Jimmy Knepper, the New York-based jazz trombonist, put this idea simply: "Tatum, Parker, and a few others got Jazz out of the simple stage and now it's imperative to be a virtuoso."

Tatum was indeed a virtuoso, on several levels, and there is absolutely no dispute about his technical brilliance. It is the element or his playing that is easiest to assess, since his playing practically demands to be measured against the standards of the whole Western tradition of the concert piano, and to my mind at least Tatum is best understood in the light of that tradition. Consider some educated descriptions of his playing:

“. . . almost every one of Tatum's performances is from a pianistic-technical point of view a marvel of perfection ... his playing must be heard to be believed, and in its technical perfection it is something beyond verbal description, at least this author's verbal capacities. The note-perfect clarity of Tatum's runs, the hardly believable leaps to the outer registers of the piano (he is not known ever to have missed one), his deep-in-the-keys full piano sonority, the tone and touch control in pyrotechnical passages clearly beyond the abilities of the vast majority of pianists to merely render the notes in some nominal way — these are miracles of performance which must be appreciated aurally." [Schuller, Swing Era, 482)

“Tatum's style was notable for its touch, its speed and accuracy, and its harmonic and rhythmic imagination. No pianist has ever hit notes more beautifully. Each one — no matter how fast the tempo — 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. . . . His speed and precision were almost shocking. Flawless sixteenth-note runs poured up and down the keyboard, each note perfectly accented, and the chords and figures in the left hand sometimes sounded two-handed. Such virtuosity can he an end in itself, and Tatum was delighted to let it be in his up-tempo flag-wavers, when he spectacularly became a high-wire artist, a scaler of Everests. Tatum's bedrock sense of rhythm enabled him to play out-of-tempo interludes or whole choruses that doubled the impact of the implied beat, and his harmonic sense — his strange, multiplied chords, still largely unmatched by his followers, his laving on of two and three and four melodic levels at once — was orchestral and even symphonic. [Whitney Balliett, Ecstasy, 113]

Listening to a really good pianist one might say, "I could never do that." But confronted with Tatum most musicians have said to themselves, "Nobody can do that!" "To have heard him play," one pianist wrote, "was as awe-inspiring as to have seen the Grand Canyon or Halley's comet. . . ." It seems to me, however, that Teddy Wilson, a contemporary, close friend, and first-class player himself, put the paean to Tatum in its clearest form:

“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. Pianists with regular styles will sound like beginners. Art Tatum played with such superiority that he was above style. It is almost like a golfer who can hit a hole in one every time he picks up the iron. It was a special kind of ability he had. If I had to choose an all-'round instrumentalist, in a classical vein, or in a more modem vein, I'd choose Art Tatum.”

The famous Tatum runs are certainly what first jump out at you; they are, someone said, like the arc left against the night sky by a Fourth of July sparkler. They can dominate your attention, and they have given generations of pianists a sense of inferiority. But it has to be said, and then underlined, that to stop there is to miss most of what is significant about Tatum. As one record reviewer put it: "Art Tatum's performances demand much of the listener. He is not easy and cannot be fully discovered with one or two surface listenings. Of course, you get the gloss, the flash, his elegant sound. But there is so much more." What can be missed by a casual listener is the tremendous structural complexity in what he did, and the very advanced (for Jazz) harmonies that he used. (Chapter 7 includes a discussion of Tatum's performance style.)

Tatum's virtuosity is not for everybody, however. His dazzling command of the keyboard has been a wedge that has divided opinion about him. There has been a minority of critics who find in him an unnecessary ornateness or even floridity, a shallowness, "an excess of hyperbole." One of the most polite expressions of this point of view was that "his tendency to display his accomplishments sometimes gets in the way of a performance." The cultivation of virtuoso skill has always exposed players to the same criticism: NO SOUL. Performers back to Franz Liszt and beyond have suffered this criticism: decoration, not substance; effect, not content. In the case of Jazz musicians the complaint is that showy displays of musical athleticism take the place of musical thought and usurp the place of more significant improvisation. Jazz criticism is a murky, subjective thing, but one important criterion has always been originality; whenever skill seems to have replaced imagination, or prepared devices take the place of creativity, a reputation suffers. Because of his virtuosity, it has never been easy to judge Tatum by this particular criterion.

It is clear, though, that what Tatum did, as Knepper suggested, was considerably more than add one more to the variety of Jazz piano styles. His harmonic and rhythmic innovations affected the whole context for jazz playing, and not just for pianists. In the scope of his influence he is comparable to Louis Armstrong before him, and to Charlie Parker who came after. He is, however, impossible to categorize as to style — he seemed to develop along a track of his own even though he was thoroughly aware of the action on all the adjacent tracks. And he is difficult to assess clearly because it's hard to know what standards to apply. Whitney Balliett with his reliable deftness of language summed him up in 1968, and captured a central truth about Tatum's career : "No one ever knew exactly what he was or what to do with him. He was said to be the greatest Jazz pianist who ever lived and he was said to be not a Jazz pianist at all. He was admired by classical pianists ... by Jazz musicians, and by dazzled, tin-eared laymen. People poked fun at his ornate style . . . and then wept at his next brilliance . . . nobody has decided yet what kind of a pianist he was" [Balliett, Ecstasy, III). The clearest light can be thrown on Tatum, I think, if we see him as a displaced person, a kind of outsider, keeping alive an old tradition (piano virtuosity) in an alien country (Jazz).

In the descriptions of many listeners, hearing Art Tatum for the first time was somewhat like living through an earthquake — it astonished, it alarmed, it could shake one's foundations. Inflated as that may sound in the 1990s, when performance expectations are vastly different from what they were in Tatum's era, it was overwhelmingly true in the 1930s and 40s. Musicians traveling from city to city were already telling each other in the late 1920s about the unbelievable piano playing they had heard in Toledo, and he was well on his way to becoming a living legend before he made his first solo recordings in 1933. The impact on his listeners was made all the greater by the knowledge that Art Tatum was nearly blind.

I liken Tatum to an earthquake advisedly. Earthquakes are not only impressive but they can be destructive. I never heard anyone say that Tatum inspired him or her to play the piano. A really accomplished musician might find encouragement. Mel Powell, who had intensive classical training as a child and later won rave reviews as a teen-age pianist and arranger with Benny Goodman, told me his first experience with Tatum's playing was positive: "What it probably did was to encourage me to see that that kind of sheer instrumental virtuosity that I'd been cultivating in the other world of music not only had a place [in Jazz] but was the summit."  More than a few-musicians, however, were anything but encouraged by him; Rex Stewart, who is best known for having become a star in Duke Ellington's trumpet section, reports that after his first encounter with Art Tatum he somehow felt he was inadequate at filling Louis Armstrong's shoes (with the Fletcher Henderson band of 1928), and he "toyed with the idea of giving up the horn and going back to school" (Stewart). Bobby Short, who is best known as an entertainer rather than a Jazz pianist but who is none the less talented for that, was once "stopped in his tracks" by Tatum:

“. . . one day Len [Short's manager] took me into Lyon and Healey's music store to listen to a Tatum record. His technique was like Horowitz's. He was a wizard, I listened to the recording and I was shocked to hell! When it was finished, the salesman said, "Do you play the piano, son?" Yes, I did. "Would you play for us?" I crossed over to the piano and sat down, and because I was so impressionable and depended on my ear for so much, found that I couldn't play the piano at all. Not a note. Tatum had undone me to that extent. I could not get my fingers to react to my mind, because mv mind was suddenly overflowing. I'd been stopped in my tracks.”  [Black and White Baby, 157-58]

The pianist Lennie Tristano noticed this phenomenon in some of his listeners and called it "kinesthetic paralysis." Even Oscar Peterson had to go through this experience. In an interview (with Andre Previn) Peterson described his very first encounter with the Tatum technique. In his teens his father — perhaps thinking that Oscar was getting too big a head about his playing ("I thought I was pretty heavy at school, you know—I'd play in all the lunch hours with allthe chicks around the auditorium.")—sat him down to listen to the Tatum recording of "Tiger Rag," one of Art's early recordings which simply blew everyone away, including the ascendant Oscar: "And, truthfully, I gave up the piano for two solid months; and I had crying fits at night." Oscar Peterson!? (In a different interview, with a Time researcher, Peterson said he gave up playing for three weeks. Whichever it was, Oscar was clearly shaken up.)

Some people who thought they were becoming piano players gave up the instrument for another; for example, Les Paul, the renowned guitarist, told me: "When I saw Tatum, and heard Art Tatum, I quit playing the piano. . . . I just sez, that's not for me. 'Cause this guy, I'll never be able to beat a blind black man playing piano like that. . . . This guy is just way, way too good, and he's got so much going." Everett Barksdale, who later had the little-envied job of playing guitar in Tatum's Trio in the '50s, heard him in Detroit in 1926 when he still considered himself a piano player: "This is unbelievable, I don't believe anybody can do that thing on the instrument," he remembered thinking, and "so that was the end of my piano career." And many of the pianists who kept going carried the scars for years; I have heard Johnny Guarnieri, who had an entirely respectable career as a jazz pianist, first in a small Artie Shaw group and later as a solo performer, say that he was fifty-five years old before he realized he didn't have to play like Tatum. Many pianists spent years of their careers "chasing after him," trying to reach his level of accomplishment, even trying to play exactly like him, to the detriment of tapping their own creativity or finding their own style.

Tatum's astonishing technique not only stunned jazz musicians (and paralyzed a few) but also won the admiration of some of the prominent concert artists, conductors, and composers of the day— such artists as Gershwin, Leopold Godowsky, Paderewski, and Rachmaninoff. Most important to Tatum, Vladimir Horowitz admired and praised him, often extravagantly. Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, said in a television interview that from the moment he first heard Tatum on record he "absolutely fell in love with him." When the great Soviet violinist David Oistrakh arrived in America, one of the first things he wanted to do was shop the record stores for Tatum recordings.

Gershwin "listened with rapture" to Tatum, especially when the songs were Gershwin's own, such as "Liza" and “I’ve Got Rhythm." He once gave a party especially for Tatum at his 72nd Street apartment in New York. One of the guests was the famous concert pianist Leopold Godowsky (from whom Fats Waller is alleged to have taken some lessons), and one who was there reported that "Godowsky listened with amazement for twenty minutes to Tatum's remarkable runs, embroideries, counter-figures and passage playing" (Oscar Levant, A Smattering of Ignorance, 195).

With the technical ability to make concert musicians pay attention, and with the improvisational creativity to make jazz musicians go anywhere to hear him (John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet once spent $1000 in a week listening to Tatum on 52nd Street), he had the potential for being a giant in either world. What did he really want? How did he really see himself? There was no question in which world he would have to make his career. Partly because of his blindness (although we don't really know how much that handicapped him in learning composed pieces), but mainly because of the barriers a black musician faced in his time, Jazz offered Tatum the only viable way forward in music. He took it and ran.”

How Art Tatum Got His Style

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Stay with this; it’s short but you’ll like where it’s going and the premise it’s based on.

It's not often that you hear comparisons between Brubeck and Tatum, or for that matter, between Brubeck and Teddy Wilson, Billy Kyle, Milt Buckner and Thomas “Fats” Waller, but those comparisons are for another time [see the blog feature “Dave Brubeck: Solo Piano Player”].

But while Art Tatum’s condition of blindness was known about from an early age, Dave Brubeck’s eye problems stemming from an affliction known as strabismus - a condition in which the visual axes of the eyes are not parallel and the eyes appear to be looking in different directions - was rarely noted.

What has been recognized is that Tatum’s blindness caused him to rely on his ears as the platform from which he derived his phenomenal technique, but what hasn’t been credited is that Dave’s abnormal alignment of the eyes and the related squinting also caused him to develop his style aurally.

Both Tatum and Brubeck heard the music because each, for different reasons, couldn’t see it. 

Here’s how Philip Clark describes the similarities in the development of Brubeck and Tatum’s pianism in his Dave Brubeck A Life in Time [pp. 311-312] 

“The picture that emerges of the young Dave, holed up on the ranch in lone, anxiously cupping his ears to the radio in the hope of catching a morsel of Benny Goodman or Count Basie on the radio, is of a dreamer—a teenager lost in music. To that extent he was his mother's son, and Bessie tried to instill in him a well-read, rigorous musicality that she could recognize and respect. For the first time, though, Brubeck's determination to do things his own way came to the fore. Despite Bessie's best efforts to teach Dave written notation, he much preferred to eavesdrop as Bessie taught her other students, then regurgitate what he had heard by ear. 

Dave's reluctance to engage with notation began with a childhood diagnosis of strabismus, which left him wearing glasses at an early age and made reading music a near impossibility. It took Bessie a while to cotton on to the fact that she was being hoodwinked—a situation that she came to accept.

Could Dave's aural development and perception—his acute, bat-sharp ears—have been heightened by his visual impairment? Not that Brubeck knew it, but there was an intriguing precedent for a pianist with sight problems but all-hearing ears. 

Art Tatum, 90 percent blind from birth, was born in Toledo, Ohio, ten years before Brubeck. Making his formative steps as a pianist, he replicated the 78 rpm records that littered the Tatum home to the best of his ability, his aural imagination and burgeoning technique finding workable solutions to the problem of how to copy what he was hearing. 

Only subsequently did he realize he had been listening to four-hand boogie-woogie performances by Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons and had negotiated a way of rendering their performances with two hands. As Tatum continued to practice, broadcasts of master pianists like Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Earl Hines mulched with the classical music he heard — Horowitz and Godowsky playing Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, and American light classical music by Victor Herbert and Edward MacDowell. 

Through the imagination of his inner ear, Tatum instinctively blended the figurations and gestures of early jazz and stride piano into the elaborate ornamentation he'd heard—but not read—in classical music.”

Art Tatum - Genius in Prospect and Retrospect

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Genius is an overworked word in this era of thunderous hyperbolic press agency. Still, when one considers Arthur Tatum, there is no other proper descriptive adjective for referring to his talents. I have purposely pluralized them, for Tatum possessed several gifts—most of which remained unknown to all but a few of his best friends—his prodigious memory, his grasp of all sports statistics and his skill at playing cards.”

“At the piano, Art seemingly delighted in creating impossible problems from the standpoint of harmonies and chord progressions. Then he would gleefully impro-

vise sequence upon sequence until the phrase emerged as a complete entity within the structure of whatever composition he happened to be playing. Many is the time I have heard him speed blithely into what I feared was a musical cul-de-sac, only to hear the tying resolution come shining through. This required great knowledge, dexterity and daring.”

“Perhaps Art Tatum would have been assured a firmer place in musical history if he had not alienated too many of the self-righteous aficionados who preferred their piano sounds less embroidered, less imaginative and more orthodox. Therefore, it follows that Tatum would never be their favorite pianist. Posterity tends to prove that Art requires neither champion nor defense, since the proof of his genius remains intact and unblemished. The beauty within the framework of his music transcends the opinions of critics, aficionados, fans and musicians themselves. History is the arbiter. For the truly great, fame is not fleeting but everlasting.”

- Rex Stewart, Jazz trumpet player and author

In his impeccably written American Masters: 56 Portraits in Jazz, the esteemed author Whitney Balliett observed:

“Great talent often has a divine air: it's there, but no one knows where it comes from. Tatum's gifts were no exception; his background was plain and strict….

“Tatum was a restless, compulsive player who abhorred silence. He used the piano's orchestral possibilities to the fullest, simultaneously maintaining a melodic voice, a harmonic voice, a variety of decorative voices, and a kind of whimsical voice, a laughing, look-Ma-no-hands voice. The effect was both confounding and exhilarating.

Tatum had two main modes—the flashy, kaleidoscopic style he used on the job, and the straight-ahead jazz style, which emerges in fragments from his few after-hours recordings and from some of the recordings made with his various trios (piano, guitar, and bass), which seemed to galvanize him. (Tatum did not have an easy time playing with other instruments; he tended to compete with them, then overrun them.) He offered the first style to the public, which accepted it with awe, and he used the second to delight himself and his peers….”

“Tatum did not fit comfortably in jazz, for his playing, which was largely orchestral, both encompassed it and overflowed it. He occupied his own country. His playing was shaped primarily by his technique, which was prodigious, even virtuosic. Tatum had an angelic touch: no pianist has got a better sound out of the instrument. He was completely ambidextrous. And he could move his hands at bewildering speeds, whether through gargantuan arpeggios, oompah stride basses, on-the-beat tenths, or single-note melodic lines. No matter how fast he played or how intense and complex his harmonic inventions became, his attack kept its commanding clarity. The Duke Ellington cornetist Rex Stewart, who turned into something of a writer in his later years, said of Tatum in his Jazz Masters of the Thirties:”

“At every dance that Fletcher Henderson's band played, there'd be someone boasting about hometown talent. Usually, the local talent was pretty bad, and we were reluctant to take the word of anyone but a darn-good musician, such as alto saxophonist Milton Senior of McKinney's Cotton Pickers, who was touting a piano player.

"Out of this world," Milton said. We were persuaded to go to the club where this pianist was working.

The setting was not impressive; it was in an alley, in the middle of Toledo's Bohemian section. I 'm not sure if the year was 1926 or 1927, but I am sure that my first impression of Art Tatum was a lasting one. As a matter of fact, the experience was almost traumatic for me, and for a brief spell afterward, I toyed with the idea of giving up my horn and returning to school.

Looking back, I can see why Tatum had this effect on me. Not only did he play all that piano, but, by doing so, he also reminded me of how inadequately I was filling Louis Armstrong's chair with the Henderson band.

To a man, we were astonished, gassed, and just couldn't believe our eyes and ears. How could this nearly blind young fellow extract so much beauty out of an old beat-up upright piano that looked like a relic from the Civil War? Our drummer, Kaiser Marshall, turned to Henderson and said it for all of us:

"Well, it just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover. There's a beat-up old piano, and that kid makes it sound like a Steinway. Go ahead, Smack, let's see you sit down to that box. I bet it won't come out the same."

Fletcher just shrugged his shoulders and answered philosophically, "I am pretty sure that we are in the presence of one of the greatest talents that you or I will ever hear. So don't try to be funny."

Coleman Hawkins was so taken by Tatum's playing that he immediately started creating another style for himself, based on what he'd heard Tatum play that night—and forever after dropped his slap-tongue style.

To our surprise, this talented youngster was quite insecure and asked us humbly, "Do you think I can make it in the big city [meaning New York]?" We assured him that he would make it, that the entire world would be at his feet once he put Toledo behind him. Turning away, he sadly shook his head, saying, kind of to himself, "I ain't ready yet."

However, as far as we were concerned, he was half-past ready! I can see now that Tatum really thought he was too green and unequipped for the Apple, because he spent the next few years in another alley in another Ohio city — Cleveland—at a place called Val's.

It was probably at Val's that Paul Whiteman "discovered" him a year or so later, when Art was 19, and took him to New York to be featured with the Whiteman band. But insecurity and homesickness combined to make him miserable, and after a short time, he fled back to Toledo. This is a good example of a man being at the crossroads and taking the wrong turn.

After returning home, Tatum gradually became confident that he could hold his own. When Don Redman was passing through Toledo a year or so later, Art told him, "Tell them New York cats to look out. Here comes Tatum! And I mean every living 'tub' with the exception of Fats Waller and Willie the Lion."

At that time, Art had never heard of Donald (the Beetle) Lambert, a famous

young piano player around New York in the '20s, and he came into the picture too late to have heard Seminole, an American Indian guitar and piano player whose left hand was actually faster than most pianists' right hands. In any case, to Tatum, Fats was Mr. Piano.

The admiration was reciprocated. The story goes that Fats, the cheerful little earful, was in great form while appearing in the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. Fats was in orbit that night, slaying the crowd, singing and wiggling his behind to his hit "Honeysuckle Rose."

Suddenly he jumped up like he'd been stung by a bee and, in one of those rapid changes of character for which he was famous, announced in stentorian tones: "Ladies and gentlemen, God is in the house tonight. May I introduce the one and only Art Tatum."

I did not witness this scene, but so many people have related the incident that I am inclined to believe it. At any rate, before Tatum did much playing in New York, he spent a period of time with vocalist Adelaide Hall as part of a two-piano team, the other accompanist being Joe Turner (the pianist). Miss Hall, then big in the profession, took them with her on a European tour.

In appearance, Tatum was not especially noteworthy. His was not a face that one would pick out of a crowd. He was about 5 feet, 7 inches tall and of average build when he was young but grew somewhat portly over the years. Art was not only a rather heavy- drinker but was also fond of home cooking and savored good food. As he became affluent, his favorite restaurant was Mike Lyman's in Hollywood, which used to be one of Los Angeles' best.

An only child, Tatum was born in Toledo on Oct. 13, 1910. He came into the world with milk cataracts in both eyes, which impaired his sight to the point of almost total blindness. After 13 operations, the doctors were able to restore a considerable amount of vision in one eye. Then Tatum had a great misfortune; he was assaulted by a holdup man, who, in the scuffle, hit Tatum in the good eye with a blackjack. The carefully restored vision was gone forever, and Tatum was left with the ability to see only large objects or smaller ones held very close to his "good" eye.

Art had several fancy stories to explain his blindness, and a favorite was to tell in great detail how a football injury caused his lack of sight. I've heard him go into the routine: he was playing halfback for his high school team on this rainy day; they were in the huddle; then lined up; the ball was snapped... wait a minute—there's a fumble! Tatum recovers... he's at the 45-yard line, the 35, the 25! Sprinting like mad, he is heading for a touchdown! Then, out of nowhere, a mountain falls on him and just before oblivion descends, Tatum realized he has been tackled by Two-Ton Tony, the biggest follow on either team. He is carried off the field, a hero, but has had trouble with his eyes ever since.

The real stories about Art are so unusual that one could drag out the cliche about fact being stranger than fiction. When Art was three, his mother took him along to choir practice. After they returned home, she went into the kitchen to prepare dinner and heard someone fumbling with a hymn on the piano. Assuming that a member of the church had dropped by and was waiting for her come out of the kitchen, she called out, "Who's there?" No one-answered, so she entered the parlor, and there sat three-year-old Art, absorbed in playing the hymn.

He continued playing piano by ear, and he could play anything he heard. Curiously, there was once a counterpart of Tatum in a slave known as Blind Tom. Tom earned a fortune for his master, performing before amazed audiences the most difficult music of his time after a single hearing. But Tom couldn't improvise; he lacked the added gift that was Tatum's.

Tatum played piano several years before starting formal training. He learned to read notes in Braille. He would touch the Braille manuscript, play a few bars on the piano, touch the notation, play... until he completed a tune. After that, he never "read" the song again; he knew it forever. He could play any music he had ever heard. One time, at a recording session, the singer asked if he knew a certain tune. Art answered, "Hum a few bars." As the singer hummed, Art was not more than a half-second behind, playing the song with chords and embellishments as if he had always known it, instead of hearing it then for the first time.

His mother, recognizing that he had an unusual ear, gave him four years of formal training in the classics. Then the day came when the teacher called it halt to the studies, saying, "That's as far as I can teach you. Now, you teach me."

Tatum carried his perception to the nth degree, Eddie Beal, one of Art's devoted disciples, recalls their first meeting, which happened at the old Breakfast Club on Los Angeles' Central Avenue at about 4 a.m. The news had spread that Tatum was in town and could be expected to make the scene that morning. Just as Tatum entered the room, as Beal tells it, "Whoever was playing the piano jumped up from the stool, causing an empty beer can to fall off the piano. Tatum greeted the cats all around, then said, 'Drop that can again. It's a Pabst can, and the note it sounded was a B-flat.'" Rozelle Cayle, one of Tatum's closest friends, tops this story by saying that Tatum could tell the key of any sound, including a flushing toilet.

Genius is an overworked word in this era of thunderous hyperbolic press agency. Still, when one considers Arthur Tatum, there is no other proper descriptive adjective for referring to his talents. I have purposely pluralized them, for Tatum possessed several gifts — most of which remained unknown to all but a few of his best friends — his prodigious memory, his grasp of all sports statistics and his skill at playing cards.

Art was a formidable opponent in all types of card games, although bid whist was his favorite. There are a few bridge champions still around who recall the fun they had when Tatum played with them. According to one's reminiscence, Art would pick up his cards as dealt, hold them about one inch from the good eye, adjust them into suits and from then on, never looked at his hand again. He could actually recall every card that was played, when, and by whom. Furthermore, he played his own cards like a master.

He had an incredible memory not only for cards but also for voices as well. One account of his aptitude in catching voices has been told and retold. It seems that while playing London with Adelaide Hall hack in the late '30s, he was introduced to a certain person and immediately swept along the receiving line. Six years later, when he was playing in Hollywood, the person came to see Tatum. He greeted him with, "Hello, Art. How are you? I'll bet you don't remember me." Tatum replied, "Sure I remember you. Gee, you're looking good. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you at that party in London, Your name is Lord So and So.'”

I realize that nature has a way of compensating for any inaccuracy, but Tatum's abilities transcended ordinary compensation. With only a high school education, he was a storehouse of information. His favorite sports were baseball and football, followed by horseracing. Tatum could quote baseball pitchers records, batting averages for almost all players in both big leagues, names and positions for almost all players, the game records any year, and so forth. Rozelle Gayle, one of Tatum's closest friends, recalls back in Art's Chicago days (the '30s) that all the musicians frequented the drugstore on the corner of 47th Street and South Park. Art became so respected as an authority on any subject (and that included population statistics) that the fellows would have him settle their arguments, instead of telephoning a newspaper.

Despite impaired vision, he was a very independent man. He had little methods to avoid being helped. For example, he always asked the bank to give all his money in new $5 bills, which he put in a certain pocket. When he had to pay for something, he gave a $5 and then counted his change by fingering the $1 bills and feeling the coins. The 1’s then went into a certain pocket and the coins into another. He had a mind like an adding machine and always knew exactly how much money he had.

One of the most significant aspects of Tatum's artistry stemmed from his constant self-change.

At the piano, Art seemingly delighted in creating impossible problems from the standpoint of harmonies and chord progressions. Then he would gleefully improvise sequence upon sequence until the phrase emerged as a complete entity within the structure of whatever composition he happened to be playing. Many is the time I have heard him speed blithely into what I feared was a musical cul-de-sac, only to hear the tying resolution come shining through. This required great knowledge, dexterity and daring. Tatum achieved much of this through constant practice, working hours every day on the exercises to keep his fingers nimble enough to obey that quick, creative mind. He did not run through variations of songs or work on new inventions to dazzle his audiences. Rather, he ran scales and ordinary practice exercises, and if one didn't know who was doing the laborious, monotonous piano routines, he would never guess that it was a jazzman working out.

Another form of practice was unique with Tatum. He constantly manipulated a filbert nut through his fingers, so quickly that if you tried to watch him, the vision blurred. He worked with one nut until it became sleek and shiny from handling. When it came time to replace it, he would go to the market and feel nut after nut — a, whole bin full, until he found one just the right size and shape for his exercises. Art's hands were of unusual formation, though just the normal size for a man of his height and build. But when he wanted to, he somehow could make his fingers span a 12th on the keyboard. The average male hand spans nine or 10 of the white notes, 11 is considered wizard, but 12 is out of this world. Perhaps the spread developed from that seeming complete relaxation of the fingers — they never rose far above the keyboard and looked almost double-jointed as he ran phenomenally rapid, complex runs. His lightning execution was the result of all that practice, along with the instant communication between his fingers and brain. His touch produced a sound no other pianist has been able to capture. The method he used was his secret, which he never revealed. The Steinway was his favorite piano, but sometimes he played in a club that had a miserable piano with broken ivories and sour notes. He would run his fingers over the keyboard to detect these. Then he would play that night in keys that would avoid as much as possible the bad notes. Anything he could play, he could play in any key.

With all that talent, perhaps it is not strange the effect that Art had on other pianists. When he went where they were playing, his presence made them uncomfortable. Some would hunt for excuses to keep from playing in front of the master. Others would make all kinds of errors on things that, under other circumstances, they could play without even thinking about it. There was the case of the young fellow who played a great solo, not being aware that Tatum was in the house. When Art congratulated him later, he fainted.

This sort of adulation did not turn Tatum's head, and he continually sought reassurance after a performance. Any friend who was present would be asked, "How was it?" One couldn't ask for more humility from a king of his instrument.

A little-known fact is that Art also played the accordion. Back in Ohio, before he had gained success, he was offered a year's contract in a nightclub if he would double on accordion. He quickly mastered the instrument and fulfilled the engagement, but he never liked the accordion and after that gig, he never played it again.

Tatum always liked to hear other piano players, young or old, male or female. He could find something kind to say even about quite bad performers. Sometimes his companion would suggest leaving a club where the pianist could only play some clunky blues in one key. But Art would say, "No, I want to hear his story. Every piano player has a story to tell."

His intimates (two of whom—Eddie Beal and Rozelle Gayle—I thank for much of this information) agree that Tatum's favorites on the piano were Fats Waller, Willie (the Lion) Smith and Earl Hines. He also liked lots of the youngsters, including Nat Cole, Billy Taylor and Hank Jones.

In the days when most musicians enjoyed hanging out with each other, Art and Meade Lux Lewis palled around; Two more dissimilar chums could hardly be imagined. Tatum was a rather brooding, bearlike figure of a man, and Meade Lux was a plump, jolly little fellow. They kept a running joke going between themselves, Meade Lux cracking that Art was cheap, even if Tatum was paying the tab.

Tatum's leisure hours began when almost everyone else was asleep, at 4 a.m. or so. He liked to sit and talk, drink and play, after he finished work.

There was a serious and well-hidden side to the man. His secret ambition was to become known as a classical composer, and somewhere there exist fragments of compositions he put on tape for orchestration at some later date.

Tatum also wanted, very definitely, to he featured as a soloist accompanied by the Boston or New York symphony orchestras, which he considered among the world's best As a matter of record, this admiration for the longer-haired musical forms was mirrored; he had numerous fans among classical players, who were astonished at his skill, technique and imagination. To them, his gifts were supernatural. Vladimir Horowitz, who frequently came to hear Art play, said that if Tatum had taken up classical piano, he'd have been outstanding in the field.

It's been said that Tatum forced today's one-hand style of piano into being because after he'd finished playing all over the instrument with both hands, the only way for the piano to go was back, until the people forgot how much Tatum played.

Another of Art's ambitions, also unrealized, was to be a blues singer! He loved to relax by playing and singing the blues. He knew he didn't have much of a voice, but when he was offstage, he'd sing the blues. He had a feeling for the form but kept that side of himself well hidden from the public. He really adored Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith and, especially, Big Joe Turner. Most musicians could never guess what Art was going to play from one moment to the next, which made the group he had with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart unquestionably the best combo he ever had. The trio played on New York's 52nd Street around 1945. These three communicated, anticipated and embellished each other as if one person were playing all three instruments. It was uncanny when it's considered that they never played it safe, never put in hours of rehearsal with each sequence pinpointed. On the contrary, every tune was an adventure, since nobody could predict where Art's mind would take them.

Tatum loved to go from one key to another without his left hand ever breaking the rhythm of his stride. Even in this, he was unpredictable, since he never went to the obvious transpositions, like a third above. No, Art would jump from B-flat to E-natural and make the listener love it.

While Art was alive, and as great as he was, there were still a few detractors. One such critic had been trained as a classical pianist hut was trying desperately to apply his academic training to jazz. This fellow said, during one of Tatum's superb performances, "Sure, Art's great, but he fingers the keys the wrong way."

How sour can grapes get?

Another compatriot who used to haunt every place that Art played, night after night, made the public statement: "Good God! This Tatum is the greatest! Thank God he's black — otherwise nobody's job would be safe." I suspect there was a lot of truth in that remark.

Art never seemed to let the inequities of his situation bother him. Still, in the early morning when he had consumed a few cans of beer and was surrounded by his personal camp followers, he would unburden himself, asking, "Did you hear so-and-so's latest record? What a waste of wax, for Christ's sake! There must be over 2,000 fellows who can play more than this cat. But you see who he's recording for? It will probably sell half a million copies while Willie the Lion just sits back smoking his cigar, without a gig. When will it end?"

Tatum was a great crusader against discrimination, but in his own quiet way. He used to cancel engagements if he found that the club excluded colored persons. Loyalty to his friends, even when it was not advantageous to his career, was another strong point. (I recall the time I went to catch him at a club called the Streets of Paris, in Los Angeles. After a period of superlative enjoyment, I went to the piano to pay my respects and leave. But just as Art said, "Hello, how long have you been in the joint?" Cesar Romero and Loretta Young walked up. So I stepped back to let Art converse with the movie royalty. Art said, "Come on back here. I want to introduce you. Cesar, Loretta, I want you to meet Rex Stewart," and went on to build me up, undeservedly, till they asked for my autograph!)

Art was no glad-hander. He was polite, reserved, affable but not particularly communicative unless the conversation was about one of his hobbies. A more self-effacing person would be hard to find, and he was generous to a fault with his friends. Yet he could summon up a tremendous amount of outraged dignity when it was called for.

Perhaps Art Tatum would have been assured a firmer place in musical history if he had not alienated too many of the self-righteous aficionados who preferred their piano sounds less embroidered, less imaginative and more orthodox. Therefore, it follows that Tatum would never be their favorite pianist. Posterity tends to prove that Art requires neither champion nor defense, since the proof of his genius remains intact and unblemished. The beauty within the framework of his music transcends the opinions of critics, aficionados, fans and musicians themselves. History is the arbiter. For the truly great, fame is not fleeting but everlasting.