Art Tatum: “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (1953)
The quotation is from Fats Waller, one of the truly great piano players of jazz in his own right. But he’s referring to Art Tatum. Everyone, everyone, agrees that Tatum was, bar none, the most proficient and arguably the best pianist in jazz’s one-hundred-year-plus history.
Waller wasn’t the only musician of note to praise him. Rachmaninoff called Tatum the “[greatest] pianist in any style.” Chick Corea said Tatum “convinced [other piano players that] he was playing the impossible.” Stanley Cowell wrote that Tatum “played so much … I thought the piano was going to break.” The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia said he used to put Tatum records on the turntable “when I want to feel really small …. [He] makes [other musicians] want to go home and burn their instruments.”
He was the greatest jazz musician I could have seen but didn’t, alas.
It was the spring or fall of 1956, I think fall. Tatum was booked to play a week with a trio (piano, bass, drums) at the Cotton Club in Cleveland. Tatum wasn’t my thing but I knew he was a legend. I was more of a bopper then and whatever Tatum played, it certainly wasn’t bop. His technique was incredible but I thought he used it primarily to embellish melody and I wanted it rewritten, not adorned. Tatum’s trademark runs up and down the keyboard, the rich orchestral two-handed chords he produced, the lightning fast changes of rhythm and melody, the mixing of classical style and piano stride — all seemed florid to me. I knew that no one played as many notes as he did or played them as fast and clean, but for me they were too many. I only owned one album of his at the time and not the best, a low fi cheapo from RCA Victor or Columbia.
When I heard Tatum was coming to Cleveland, I made plans to see him. But when we got to the Cotton Club that night, there was a notice on the door stating that Tatum had cancelled: he wouldn’t play Cleveland that week at all. It turned out he wouldn’t play anywhere again. He was lying in a hospital bed in L.A. dying of uremia, kidney failure. He was 47.
The more I listened to jazz, the more I came to appreciate Tatum. In the fifties, producer Norman Granz of Clef Records (later Norgran, Verve and Pablo Records) did the music world a favor by bringing Tatum into the recording studio and letting the tape roll while the great master played solo, whatever came to his mind. Tatum recorded sixty-eight tracks across three days, all but three in one take, pulling the music up from the depths of his prodigious musical memory. While he was at it, Granz brought in compatible partners and recorded them with Tatum trios, quartets, one sextet. Among them were jazz legends Ben Webster on tenor sax and Benny Carter on alto. The solo sessions are unbelievable. The group sessions vary from good to brilliant: the Webster and Carter sessions are brilliant and there is a lovely trio session which is one of the few where Tatum played with his accompanists rather than over them.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Tatum, Webster, Red Callender bass, Bill Douglass drums: “My Ideal” (1953)
MUSIC & ME 