Art Tatum

Among jazz’s most remarkable figures stood Art Tatum, a pianist whose technical command allowed him to generate blisteringly swift passages in both hands at once. His unaccompanied 1933 reading of “Tiger Rag” produced the uncanny effect of three players improvising together, while his harmonic language operated three decades ahead of prevailing practice, forcing every serious pianist to confront his innovations. Tatum handled stride, swing, and boogie-woogie at speeds and densities once thought impossible; his swift reflexes and limitless imagination continually supplied fresh, often forward-looking ideas that left his contemporaries behind.

Sightless from birth, he obtained modest formal instruction at the Toledo School of Music yet remained largely self-taught. Although he absorbed passing influences from Fats Waller and certain semi-classical pianists of the 1920s, no clear source accounts for the originality of his thinking. Professional work began in Toledo during the mid-1920s, followed by a radio program that ran from 1929 to 1930. In 1932 he traveled to New York with vocalist Adelaide Hall and made his first recordings as one of two pianists accompanying her. Listeners who had never witnessed him live encountered the full measure of his talent through the solo sides of 1933, especially “Tiger Rag.”

During the 1930s Tatum worked for stretches in Cleveland, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, adding a visit to England in 1938. Although he led a successful trio in the mid-1940s that featured guitarist Tiny Grimes, later replaced by Everett Barksdale, and bassist Slam Stewart, he spent most of his career as a soloist whose presence could intimidate any rival. Observers sometimes complained of excessive technique, of rehearsed and unchanging treatments of certain tunes, and of an overabundance of notes, yet these reservations lose force beside his radical reworkings of “Yesterdays,” “Begin the Beguine,” and “Humoresque.” Tatum never composed originals, but his transformations of standards gave even the most familiar material the character of new creations.

He recorded for Decca throughout the 1930s and for Capitol in the late 1940s, appeared prominently at the Esquire Metropolitan Opera House concert of 1944, and made his only screen appearance in the 1947 film The Fabulous Dorseys, leading a heated blues jam session. Near the end of his life in the 1950s he recorded extensively for Norman Granz, both alone and with all-star groups; the resulting material has been reissued by Pablo in a six-CD box set. Tatum’s early death from uremia has not diminished his stature; his recordings continue to unsettle modern pianists.