The Most Famous Professors in Storyville Were James P Johnson and Art Tatum
13.10. – Happy Altogether !!! Fine art Tatum, an African American pianist, and one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, was born on this date in 1909, in Toledo, OH.
Tatum was blind in one heart and visually impaired in the other. A child prodigy with perfect pitch, Tatum learned to play by ear, picking out church hymns by the age of three, learning tunes from the radio, and copying pianoforte-roll recordings his mother owned. He adult an incredibly fast playing style, without losing accuracy.
Tatum drew inspiration from his contemporaries James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, who exemplified the stride piano style, and from the more "modern" Earl Hines.
During a 1932-33 tour with Adelaide Hall, Tatum made his get-go solo recordings, then went on to work every bit a soloist in various clubs throughout the Us, every bit well as in Europe. A major event in Tatum's meteoric rising to success was his appearance at a cutting contest in 1933 in New York Metropolis that included Waller, Johnson, and Willie "The Panthera leo" Smith. Standard contest pieces included Johnson's "Harlem Strut" and "Carolina Shout" and Fats Waller's "Handful of Keys." Tatum triumphed with his arrangements of "Tea for Two" and "Tiger Rag," in a functioning which was considered to be the last give-and-take in stride piano. Tatum'south debut was celebrated because he outplayed the aristocracy competition and heralded the demise of the step era.
He eventually formed a trio with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart in 1943. In 1953, he began working with Norman Granz, which led to collaborations with the likes of Benny Carter, Ben Webster, and Roy Eldridge.
Tatum'south technique was distinctive, and his easily seemed to glide effortlessly over difficult passages. Tatum played at phenomenal speed, with superb accurateness and timing, scintillating runs in which his fingers seemed to inappreciably motion. His technique was all the more than remarkable considering that he drank prodigious amounts of alcohol when performing,notwithstanding his recordings are never sloppy.
Tatum was an innovator in reharmonizing melodies, and many of his harmonic concepts and larger chord voicings were well ahead of their time in the 1930s (except for their partial emergence in popular songs of the jazz age) and they would be explored by bebop-era musicians 20 years later.
Tatum's fans included such classical musicians as pianist Vladimir Horowitz and conductor Leopold Stokowski. Horowitz was amazed at Tatum's technical command. Recordings that reveal his gifts include "The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces," Vols. ane-8 and "The Tatum Group Masterpieces," Vols. one-eight.
Tatum was respected past fellow musicians and often thought of as super-human. His intricate and technically dazzling improvisational flourishes helped to ascertain the very core of the bebop dictionary, with armada-fingered runs and adventurous improvisations. He worked steadily in solo and trio settings, with occasional forays using larger groups, until his death on Nov 5, 1956.
Tatum posthumously received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Accolade in 1989.
Fifty years ago Sunday, the jazz musician Art Tatum died. He's been chosen i of the pianoforte geniuses of all time, in whatever genre. Nonetheless his legacy is ofttimes disregarded.
It's hard to summon enough superlatives for Tatum'southward piano playing: his harmonic invention, his technical virtuosity, his rhythmic daring. The slap-up stride pianist Fats Waller famously appear one nighttime when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, "I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the business firm."
The musical prodigy was born in Toledo, Ohio, to a mechanic and a domestic who worked in white homes. Legally blind and largely self-taught, Tatum memorized unabridged pianoforte rolls, and captivated music from the radio and the Victrola. He emerged in the 1930s every bit a fully formed musician whose improvisational skill quickly became legend.
In that location had never before been anyone like Fine art Tatum.
"Tatum'south playing was unworldly, unreal, considering his standard was so high," says Dick Hyman, a Florida-based pianist and composer who is considered a great performer of early on piano jazz.
"Tatum's harmonies to begin with were beyond what everyone was doing at the time… actually beyond what anybody'southward done since," Hyman says.
The highly regarded jazz critic and author Gary Giddins listens to lots and lots of jazz. Simply he says he plays sure artists more often than others.
"Tatum is one of them," Giddins says. "He's endlessly fascinating. You know, people used to criticize Tatum and they would say things similar, 'Well, information technology'south too ornamental… in that location's likewise much decorative stuff.' That is the essence of Tatum. If you don't like his ornament, you should be listening to someone else. That's where his genius is."
People who heard Tatum on a tape for the first time oft thought they were listening to 2 piano players.
He became a phenomenon in New York. Information technology wasn't unusual to look up and see the classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz or the composer George Gershwin sitting in the audience in awe.
He commonly played solo, considering information technology was and so hard for accompanists to follow his dazzling, volcanic musical ideas. He tried to play everything he heard in his head.
Whitney Balliett, longtimeNew Yorker jazz critic, in one case observed: "Tatum's mind abhorred a vacuum."
The jazz pianist and educator, Dr. Billy Taylor — a protege of Tatum's — says his mentor could even make a bad pianoforte sound skillful.
"He really heard so many things," Taylor says. "The piano was out of tune, he'd make it piece of work so that fifty-fifty the annotation was out of tune, he'd utilize that."
Over the past year, Storyville Records, a Danish characterization, released nine CDs full of rare Tatum material. They're what i collector calls "the equivalent of discovering unpublished Shakespeare plays."
Many of these previously unreleased recordings came from the vault of a retired real estate executive named Arnold Laubich. He says he first heard Tatum as a teenager — more than 60 years ago — and never got over it. He is the world's preeminent collector of Art Tatum recordings.
The Storyville CDs are remarkable because they offer an audio glimpse into the invisible globe of jazz — the later-hours parties where musicians unwound and tried out new songs and new ideas, or just had fun.
"He played all dark and into the day, and often 'til noon or after, from the night before," Laubich says. "And this is what he would practice. He would go to these places. And sometimes he'd go from place to place and crowds would follow him. But the crowds were friends."
Art Tatum died on Nov. 5, 1956 at 47. Expiry came from complications associated with his prodigious drinking.
Laubich says a couple years ago he gave a lecture on Tatum to a class at City College in New York. No one in the class had heard of Tatum.
He has never joined the pantheon of jazz greats — Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis. There's no Tatum songbook, because he rarely composed. In fact, it's said he was so original that he re-composed every song he e'er played.
His piano playing was so advanced almost nobody can re-create him.
And yet, his genius is remembered, in small, but significant ways.
A few years agone, a immature MIT grad student invented a term that's now in common usage in the field of computational musicology: The tatum.
It means "the smallest perceptual fourth dimension unit of measurement in music."
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Source: http://jazzbluesnews.com/2018/10/12/art-tatum-one-of-the-greatest-jazz-pianists-of-all-time-video/
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