Piano Starts Here: Art Tatum
May 17 2009

Art Tatum. Talk about shock and awe.

The vagaries of taste impose caution. The "best", the "most", and the "greatest" are subjectives always open to challenge. A few artists stand so tall, however, that the sniper's spitballs and brickbats never reach them. Art Tatum is one of them.

You'd have to be brave or nuts, or both, to deny that Art Tatum was jazz's greatest pianist.

The Pianobabbler was entering both adolescence and his life in piano when he first heard Tatum's piano playing. Shock and awe. Plain and simple. How could one person play so much piano? Where could those harmonic ideas possibly come from? That uncanny sense of time???? What do I do to create the same impact with my music?

The Pianobabbler has never found the answers to these questions.

Tatum lived from 1909 to 1956. Listening to him, lo these many years on, the shock and awe remain. As do the pleasure, the depth and the joy.

A recording of one Tatum concert was entitled Piano Starts Here. Whatever the subjectivities, the Pianobabbler holds that title as a self-evident. (Piano Starts Here is still available. It and stands as one of the greatest jazz, and piano, recordings. Ever.)

A few years after first experiencing Tatum's music, the Pianobabbler wrote an article- more accurately, purged in words his paralyzing reverence -about Tatum.

It’s a young student’s work. There was little written about Tatum when I wrote it. Sadly this is still true. There is one biography: James Lester's Too Marvelous For Words (1994, Oxford U.P.). It is disappointing. Too facile. Facts with litle insight.

Arnold Laubich and Ray Spencer's Art Tatum: A Guide to His Recorded Music (1982, Scarecrow Press/ Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers) gives a grand overview of the pianist's life. But it is primarily a discography, albeit a wonderful one.

The two the finest works on Tatum are Ph.D. theses: Joseph A. Howard's 3-volume The Improvisational Techniques of Art Tatum (1978, Dept. of Music - Case Western), and Felicity Howlett’s An introduction to Art Tatum's performance approaches: Composition, improvisation, and melodic variation (1983, Cornell University). However, their works are not commercially available. Their academic roots also shade the topic in a certain opacity.

After these studies of Tatum, the pickings get slim. Passages in the odd reference work. A Wikipedia entry. Some books of music transcriptions. Some articles.

So it remains as true as it was when I wrote my article, that there is far too little reading material on this towering musician.

My student paper was a biographical analysis of Art Tatum. I think it stands the test of time. The Pianobbaler felt it would be a good idea to put it up on his blog. So, here it is, in its original form. The unexpurgated, uncorrected text of my 1978 paper.

Based only on secondary sources, it is only a synthesis, through combination, elimination and deduction, of everything written by 1978 on Tatum, at least everything that could be found. I've added nothing to it. It refers to no post-1978 sources. There is a bibliography at the end.

With this paper I want to bring to Art Tatum the tribute and honour he deserves but rarely receives. It's the best quid pro quo I can offer for the enrichment he and his music have brought to me and the world.

One consolation for the lack of literature on Tatum: the advent of the Internet has made video of Tatum, cruelly unseen for years, available (however dubious the copyright issues.) In watching Tatum, we see his genius, and how he achieved a wealth of sound, with a relative economy of means. Two clips on Youtube show Tatum playing his stunning arrangement of Jerome Kern's Yesterdays, and his reworking of Dvorak's Humoresque. Divine.

- Youtube video of Tatum playing 'Yesterdays'
- Ron Davis on Art Tatum- The full 1978 Article (PDF, (c) Ron Davis)

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