TATUM: Improvisations
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Art Tatum (1909-1956) Improvisations As one story goes, in the mid 1940s in a jazz club in New York, Art Tatum sat at his piano unaware that Vladimir...
Art Tatum (1909-1956)
Improvisations
As one story goes, in the mid 1940s in a jazz club in
New York, Art Tatum sat at his piano unaware that
Vladimir Horowitz lurked just inside the club's
entrance, a fedora drawn down to disguise his
prominent face. Further inside, Mary Lou Williams, a
successful jazz pianist of the day, sat at a table with
Duke Ellington. Ellington, who later said he felt too
overwhelmed to express his feelings, was only one of
scores of musicians who sat in the small club that night,
silently watching their idol. Horowitz, apparently
dumbfounded, later remarked that he could believe
neither his eyes nor his ears.
There exist many contemporary accounts of Tatum
causing such reactions and it is fortunate that recordings
exist which would tend to substantiate the various
claims. Of these recordings Oscar Peterson said "There
is so much in them yet unheard, even by the trained ear.
One feels almost premature in making an assessment".
Almost forty years after Tatum's death, his
accomplishment is still the subject of enjoyment,
conversation and awe, as much among classical
musicians as jazz artists.
It was logical that Duke Ellington, one of
America's most gifted composers, should recognize the
scope of Tatum's gifts. Beyond Tatum's incredible
technique, his enormous repertory of American
vernacular music and his facility as a jazz ensemble
player, Ellington must have marvelled at the
unparalleled richness of his improvisations, their
harmonic and contrapuntal beauty, their complexity -
and the conciseness. Ellington's own scores impressed
listeners as containing orchestral colours unique to midtwentieth-
century music, much the way in which
Stravinsky's colossal three pieces of 1910 - 20 broke
new ground in their day. Similarly, jazz historians view
the music tradition from which Tatum came, namely
Harlem Stride, as a classic musical style with a
distinctive language of its own. Derived from Ragtime,
its foremost practitioners included Thomas "Fats"
Waller, of whom Tatum said "Fats, man, that's where I
come from. And quite a place to come from".
Fats's piano rolls evidently made their way out to
Toledo, Ohio, where Tatum grew up. So did the music
of Lee Sims, the only other musician Tatum ever
acknowledged as an influence. In recordings that are
rarely heard today, Sims played elegant, florid
arrangements of American songs from the early part of
this century, gracefully covering the keyboard in the
manner of, say, Thalberg or Mendelssohn. Tatum
himself, it is important to note, studied classical piano
with a Toledo musician named Overton Rainey. The
influence of Sims, Tatum's classical training and
continuous lifelong exposure to classical music are
subtly, yet unquestionably felt throughout Tatum's
work. From right- hand passagework sometimes based
on nineteenth-century music to actual transcriptions of
classical compositions and quotations from Ravel to
Ethelbert Nevin, Tatum honoured the classical tradition
in many subtle ways.
As an assimilator of Harlem Stride, Tatum almost
immediately surpassed his mentors. His left hand, now
"striding", now "walking" in parallel motion, was
flawlessly secure and steady. Where Fats Waller
alternated low notes with mid-register chords, Tatum
tried out basses with seamless tenths, often with notes in
between. So-called "substitute" chords, made up of
harmonies not envisaged by the composers of the
original tunes, are already much in evidence in early
Tatum. A striking example is the two-bar descending
line of parallel chords leading back to the restatement of
Tea for Two, about thirty seconds into the solo. The
passage is not dissimilar to the kind of parallel motion
one sees often in Debussy, and certainly it must have
stood out in Harlem in 1933.
Most noticeably, florid and spectacularly rapid
passagework set Tatum apart from his jazz influences.
By 1933 he had developed an arsenal of pianistic
embellishments which, when slowed down and
analysed, are clearly derived from the slower paced runs
of earlier stride pianists and related to, though different
from, passages found in Chopin, Liszt and their
contemporaries.
One barometer of Tatum's development is his ever
more far-reaching harmonic vocabulary. By the time he
recorded Lover Come Back To Me, dissonance resolves
to yet more dissonance, fully resolving only at phrase
ending - and sometimes not even then. And what
dissonance this is! Not random in the slightest, but
completely the result of Tatum's pushing against the
outer limits of a system derived from earlier diatonic
harmony, where basic chord relationships are kept
strictly intact.
Tatum's transcriptions of actual classical
compositions demonstrate his wit and charm. As Fats
Waller was wont to do, Tatum also enjoyed cracking a
smile, and his conversation of Dvořak's somewhat
sentimental Humoresque, from folksy to downright
sassy, is memorable. Elegy features almost classical
configurations in the right hand, as opposed to the
shimmering, speeded-up Waller-like runs in the 1933
solos.
Another characteristic of the best classical music is
found more and more as Tatum develops: conciseness
of expression. From Mozart to Debussy, economy of
expression was a virtue, and in Tatum's repertoire there
existed certain pieces which were recorded over and
over again, each time more concisely. The 1940 Sweet
Lorraine, though not Tatum's last, is unsurpassable in
this respect. Each succeeding restatement of the tune
completely alters it slightly, yet the differences are so
small and well chosen that a first time listener who
comes in the room in the midst of the solo almost cannot
be sure that he is not hearing the actual tune. That
Tatum's improvisations on the tune here are as pleasing
as the tune itself, yet hardly different from it, shows a
level of musical thought to which few jazz artists have
ever aspired. It was as if Tatum, when at his best,
possessed a gift for instant composition, much in the
way that Mozart composed in his head and only wrote it
down later.
Tatum's work was, among other things, a fusion of
Harlem Stride, ingenious pianistic extensions, humour,
harmony that stretched its language to the limits, and
the subtlest of improvisational techniques. His complex
art justifies hearing, rehearing, study and performance.
Steven Mayer