ART TATUM: JEWELS IN THE TREASURE BOX / Night and Day. Just One of Those Things (Cole Porter). Where or When. Lover (Rodgers-Hart). On the Sunny Side of the Street (McHugh-Fields). Soft Winds (Goodman-Royal). These Foolish Things (Maschwitz-Strachey). Flying Home (Hampton-Goodman). Memories of You (Blake-Razaf). What Does it Take? (Burke-Van Heusen). Tenderly (Lawrence-Bross). Crazy Rhythm (Kahn-Caesar-Meyer). The Man I Love. Someone to Watch Over Me (G. & I. Gershwin). Tea for Two (Youmans-Caesar). I Cover the Waterfront. Out of Nowhere (Green-Heyman). Body and Soul (Green-Heyman-Sour-Eyton). Laura (Raskin-Mercer). Humoresque (Antonin Dvořák). Begin the Beguine (Cole Porter). Medley: There Will Never Be Another You (Warren-Gordon); September Song (Weill-Anderson). Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (Barris-Koehler-Moll). St. Louis Blues (W.C. Handy). After You’ve Gone (Creamer-Layton). Elegie (Jules Massenet). Sweet Lorraine (Burwell-Parish). (Back Home Again in) Indiana (Hanley-MacDonald). Taboo (Ernesto Lecuona). Judy (Carmichael-Lerner). Dark Eyes (trad.) Stompin’ At the Savoy (Sampson-Goodman-Webb). If (Hargreaves-Evans-Damerell). Would You Like to Take a Walk? (Warren-Dixon-Rose). Stardust (Carmichael-Parish). Air Mail Special (Goodman-Christian-Mundy). I’ve Got the World on a String (Arlen-Koehler). The Kerry Dance (Mollow-Lynam) / Art Tatum, pno; Everett Barksdale, gt; Slam Stewart, bs / Resonance Records HCD-2064
There are, however, certain anomalies regarding Tatum that I don’t think have ever been discussed, at least not in print. First and foremost, with his almost superhuman technique—accomplished, due to his poor eyesight, with two fingers in the right hand(!!!)—he was clearly capable of playing things that no other pianist could, yet he never expanded his repertoire to include the large number of jazz piano compositions that emerged during the span of his career. Nor, except for a short showpiece called The Shout, did he ever compose a single piece for the piano, which he was clearly capable of doing. Instead, he stuck doggedly to what jazz musicians like to call the “great American songbook,” pop tunes written mostly between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, and that was that. This tells me that Tatum was basically a lover of tonal tunes, often of a sentimental nature. The only classical pieces he adapted to his style were Dvořák’s Humoresque and Massenet’s Élégie (erroneously credited in the booklet to Cliff Burwell and Mitchell Parish). Of course, other jazz pianists played some of this repertoire, but not nearly as much of it as Tatum did.
Anomaly No. 2: for a man who was essentially friendly, outgoing and quite considerate of his fans—he always played requests and frequently gave autographs—he more or less lived the life of a hard-drinking hermit who lived for his instrument. Perhaps he had to in order to keep up his technique as well as he did over such a long period of time, but on a certain level he had to know that he was destroying himself with all that alcohol (mostly beer, three six-paxks of Pabst Blue Ribbon every night of the week). Why? Did he have a death wish? Psychologically, he didn’t fit the type, yet that’s what he did.
Anomaly No. 3: despite being essentially a one-man band at the keyboard, he did enjoy playing with like-minded musicians. Even in the late 1930s, he made some group sessions for Decca. He played at the Esquire All-Star Jazz Concert in 1944 with other musicians, including Louis Armstrong, appeared in the 1947 film The Fabulous Dorseys with both Dorsey brothers, Charlie Barnet, Ziggy Elman and drummer Ray Bauduc, formed his drummerless trio in 1944 in imitation of Nat “King” Cole and stayed with it for the rest of his life, and did not balk when Norman Granz set him up in group sessions for recordings, yet he could be very stand-offish with others. One time, Charlie Parker was in attendance when he played and felt so inspired that he opened up his alto case, took out his saxophone and went up to the bandstand to jam with him, only to be aggressively waved off by Tatum who also shook his head for “No!”
Anomaly No. 4, and probably the most puzzling: although he clearly enjoyed cutting any and every pianist who dared challenge him, he openly admitted listening to every jazz pianist he could because he always learned something from all of them. Earl Hines was his favorite, a fact that Earl never learned until after Tatum’s death (why did he hide it from him??), but also “adopted” Dorothy Donegan as his surrogate in cutting contests. (His line was, “Let’s see if you can play better than this little girl here. If you can, then I’ll take you on.”) Tatum even went out of his way to hear Henry Byrd, a.k.a. Professor Longhair, in New Orleans, and was fascinated by his “steel drum” approach to playing the piano.
Tatum occasionally granted interviews, particularly with Willis Conover of the Voice of America broadcasts, and graciously answered every question put to him, but for some reason Conover never once thought to ask him the question every jazz musicians would have liked to know the answer to: how did he approach and construct his improvisations? Did he simply take them one bar at a time, one chorus at a time, or did he have a “long view” of each piece he played? The answer would clearly have been instructive, because despite the split-second, spontaneous things he did to a tune, there always seemed to be an underlying structure to his solos. Apropos the comment I made in the previous paragraph, although he never publicly credited Earl Hines as a primary influence, he was always gracious enough to credit Lee Sims, a non-jazz piano stylist of the 1920s and ‘30s who had a technique nearly as good as Tatum’s and also constructed his solos in a linear fashion.
To the best of my knowledge, Tatum only appeared on television twice, once on the Spike Jones Show, playing his famous arrangement of Yesterdays (many people forget that Jones had started out as a jazz drummer and always loved jazz even during his ling career as a comedy bandleader) and once on Steve Allen’s Tonight show. It clearly wasn’t much, but it was something.
Yet the biggest mystery, to me, is this: Why on earth did it take SEVENTY-ONE YEARS for these recordings to be released? I place no blame on album producer and part-label owner Zev Feldman, who was first contacted about these tapes in 2020, although four years seems a pretty long gestation period, but the family of Frank Holzfeind, who owned the Blue Note in Chicago and taped most of the jazz musicians who played there, has had these tapes in their possession all this time, and except during the 1960s when Tatum’s name faded a bit in luster due to the Free Jazz movement the pianist has steadfastly remained an icon. Why not approach Norman Granz after he founded his Pablo label in the 1970s and finally reissued all his magnificent Tatum recordings on LP? Or, if Granz wasn’t interested, why not one of the enterprising indie labels like Black Lion, Storyville, Fresh Sound or LaserLight, which were heavy into issues of rare jazz recordings from the late 1970s onward? I always felt, perhaps wrongly, that LaserLight was a shoestring label that probably didn’t pay royalties to artists’ families, but I know the others do.
I think that most Tatum admirers know that Leopold Godowsky, Vladimir Horowitz and José Iturbi all thought very highly of Tatum’s gifts, but I recently ran across a story I had never heard before. In 1934, Sergei Rachmaninoff was in New York to play one of his piano concerti and, later, to record it in Philadelphia. Horowitz insisted that Rachmaninoff come with him to hear Art play. Rachmaninoff sat through the full set, just watching and listening silently. When the set was finished, he turned to Horowitz and said, “If this man ever decides to play classical music, we’re all in trouble.” A year later, when he was in Switzerland writing his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Rachmaninoff later told friend that he was thinking of Tatum when he wrote the 15th variation, which is all in 16th notes.
There is also a comment on the YouTube video for this story by @Sincebrassnorstone that is rather mind-boggling:
The former principal flute of the Pittsburgh symphony, Bernard Goldberg, told me he heard Art Tatum live once. In between sets, he was playing a prelude and fugue from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, but it was in the wrong key! Bernie went up and asked about this. Tatum replied that he could play them in all the keys!
And now, back to our regularly scheduled review.
The sound quality, even after having experts work on it, is somewhat thin. Tatum usually insisted on having a good, well-tuned piano in every club he performed in. His preference was for a Steinway, but not every club owner could supply one. I don’t know what brand of piano he used for these Blue Note dates. My guess is that the sound is a little thin because Holzfeind didn’t use a professional mic set-up, but at least everything is clear. Tatum formed his drummerless trio, which was inspired by Nat “King” Cole’s, in 1945 with Slam Stewart on bass and Tiny Grimes on guitar. Both were outstanding musicians, but especially Stewart. Famed for his ability to play bowed improvisations on the bass while humming along with his own playing, he came to prominence in 1938 as part of a duo with the extraordinary guitarist-singer Bulee “Slim” Gaillard (the duo appeared in the Olsen and Johnson comedy film, Hellzapoppin’), but prominent jazz musicians, including several boppers, all praised Stewart’s ear and his ability to follow other musicians flawlessly no matter how far-out they played. Tatum was lucky enough to keep Stewart in his trio to the end of his life, but by 1949 Grimes had been replaced by Everett Barksdale. Barksdale was a less viscerally exciting guitarist than Grimes, but had an even better ear. He also played some of the most exquisitely beautiful electric guitar you’ll ever hear in your life, and Tatum loved this aspect of his playing.
Tatum sounds especially relaxed in the opening set. Some jazz critics, Gunther Schuller among them, criticized Tatum for not swinging enough as well as for cramming his solos with too many notes, but the opening Night and Day certainly swings hard. The whole trio seems to have been particularly relaxed in this setting; they probably had a pretty hip audience, and not the usual New York crowd that ate, drank and talked all through their sets. Tatum is as virtuosic as ever, but I immediately noted that he really didn’t cram his playing up with sixteenths and thirty-second notes as much as he did in his New York and Baltimore remotes or on a lot of the trio’s recordings (the Capitol sessions of 1949-50 were an exception; both Tatum and the trio sounded as relaxed there as they do here). It’s still recognizably Tatum, then, but he’s relaxed and in an inventive mood. He doesn’t even modulate harmonically quite as much as he did on other trio sets and recordings. He had nothing to “prove” to this audience, thus he could just relax and play what he wanted.
Barksdale takes a long solo on the second number, Where or When, that perfectly fits the description I made of his playing. He wasn’t the kind of guitarist who specialized in “flash,” but he didn’t have to. Every note he played had a place in the solo and every solo he played fit into the harmonic and rhythmic scheme that Tatum was laying down. In short, this entire set shows us a relaxed, swinging Tatum. Yes, he gives us some baroque playing in the finale of Where or When, and in Sunny Side of the Street he does pull out all the stops with some truly virtuosic playing—this is more like the kind of style that I loved, but Schuller hated—yet once again, everything swings. Due to the fast tempo of this performance, Barksdale has to play faster as well, but he’s not even as flashy as Stewart, yet he says just as much. Those many modern-day jazz guitarists who wonder why I don’t review their CDs need to listen to Barksdale. Along with Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and Oscar Moore, Barksdale is one of my favorite of all electric guitarists. In addition to everything else I’ve said of him, Barksdale also had a sound that “shimmered” when he played..perhaps not quite as noticeable on these tapes, but very noticeable on the commercial recordings.
Perhaps it’s the sound quality of the tape, but to my ears Tatum plays here with more dynamics contrast than he usually did elsewhere. Listen, for instance, to his solos on Don’t Blame Me, particularly the last one. He actually makes a noticeable difference between his soft playing and his more forceful fortes, and even in some of the flashy pieces like Soft Winds., his playing is more dynamic than usual. This, in itself, helps to make this set of recordings extremely valuable. What you hear on this recording is much, much closer to the Art Tatum who was very occasionally recorded in one of his legendary late-night jam sessions. He’s thoroughly enjoying himself, and because of this you, the listener, are the beneficiary of his rather jolly effusion.
In the first chorus of These Foolish Things Tatum finally takes the gloves off and gives us his richly decorated modulations within a phrase, a measure, sometimes within a half-measure, yet he pulls back to what was for him fairly straightforward accompaniment when Barksdale and Stewart play. This was something he could but didn’t always do. Go back and listen to the Fabulous Dorseys jam session; he stays very busy at the keyboard behind those soloists once the tempo ramps up. But not here. Tatum so changes the basic melody of Flying Home that at first I didn’t even recognize it, but again, he’s in a playful mood.
Of course I could go much further in analyzing these performances (check out my analysis of his Solo Masterpieces by clicking HERE), but I really don’t have time to write a doctoral dissertation at the moment. What I particularly love about this set is the rare combination of virtuosity and relaxation, truly inventive playing and whimsical flights of fancy, and this mood continues throughout the entire album. Just to cite one particularly scintillating track out of many, listen to what he does on What Does it Take?, a particularly minor song by Johnny Burke and Jimmy van Heusen that never really became a hit. Art and the trio turn it into a mini-masterpiece, without even doing too much to the harmony.
This entire collection is a living testimony to the title of one tune that was recorded at a late-night session by Tatum, Knock Yourself Out. Even at his most baroque moments, i.e. Tenderly in which he does indulge in his patented double and quadruple-time runs (even throwing in a quote from Ferde Grofe’s On the Trail, as was his wont in this song), there’s just a different vibe to the performance here than others by him. I also loved the boogie bass he inserted into St. Louis Blues here, as well as his playful breaks on After You’ve Gone.
Part of the Tatum legend was that, except when eating, drinking, sleeping or talking to people, he never stopped playing the piano. It was the love of his life, he poured everything he had into it, and kept trying to find new ways to play the old tunes, although he once admitted to Willis Conover that he frequently had to play some songs in person exactly the way he did on the records because “they expect it.” There are several tunes here that are played in a very similar or identical way to other performances and/or recordings (The Man I Love, Tea for Two, Sweet Lorraine and Massenet’s Élégie among them), but not really all that many. As the set progresses, Tatum adds a few solo performances, and these are where one hears him repeating his musical conceptions from the recordings more often, but there are still surprises here. Listen, for instance, to the way he plays Ernesto Lecuona’s Taboo. This was one of his greatest solo recordings in the Norman Granz series, but here the tempo is faster and the improvisations a bit wilder.
Like a very few black jazz musicians of his time—Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Fats Waller, Roy Eldridge and, alone among the boppers, Dizzy Gillespie—Tatum was able to form a bond with his audiences that transcended race, and he was the only one of that group who did so without mugging or camping it up. His audiences worshipped his talent as believers going to a shrine, but they also responded to the personal warmth he exuded. These valuable live tapes give you a good idea of how he was able to do this. Yes, they were dazzled by his technique but they were also charmed by the puckish humor of his playing and they could tell, if they were a good audience, that he really appreciated their close attention to the details of his playing. Tatum may indeed have died somewhat unfulfilled in life—he never got a solo concert in a legitimate venue, was never respected publicly for the extraordinary breadth of his talent—but as long as he could get listeners to understand and appreciate what he was doing from a musical stand point, he felt that he had knocked down a huge wall.
And he did.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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Stepping back for a moment from the narrative of such events to the provable quality of Kastorsky’s voice as we hear it on records, one can understand both reactions. Although he could clearly touch the low notes required for his many roles, Vladimir Kastorsky did not have a “classic” Russian bass sound—even less so than his younger rival, Feodor Chaliapin, who was already established as a major star during these years when Kastorsky was still struggling. Except for his perfect and beautiful Russian diction, Kastorsky sounded more like a French bass. His timbre was light in texture, with a brightness not commonly heard in Russian basses and the ability to sing a baritone high A with ease. In addition, his way of managing his voice and his exquisite phrasing also sounded more French than Russian. These qualities are exactly the things that so overwhelmed me when I first heard him that I was moved to write this appreciation. His singing had a very high degree of finish to it. He could modulate and color his voice like a master painter; he sang words poetically, only occasionally cutting loose with the kind of dramatic force that most people associate with Russian basses. He was also virtually alone in his time for singing arias as written and not distorting the musical line with long-held notes, rubato and rallentando effects. When you listen to Kastorsky sing “Le veau d’or” from Faust, he does not introduce the “traditional” slowed-down passages that every other bass of the time—including French ones like Pol Plançon and Marcel Journet—did in their performances and recordings. He did not sing Mozart’s “Deh’ vieni alla finestra” from Don Giovanni with traditional bel canto dragging out of the line. And this same meticulous musicianship was brought to bear even in the Russian roles he sang. His is the only recorded performance of Pimen’s aria from Boris Godunov I’ve heard in which he sings the notes with exactly the right note-values; the only recorded performance of Marcel’s “Piff! Paff!” from Les Huguenots in which he SINGS the notes on those words instead of barking them out; and surely one of the most poetic of all Prince Gremins in Onegin. Everything he sang was an artistic masterpiece. Everything he sang had meticulous musicality and a high degree of emotional involvement without EVER going “over the top,” as Chaliapin did on a regular basis. But because Chaliapin was such a transcendent genius of an interpreter, fully inhabiting his roles whereas others like Kastorsky just acted them out in a more conventional fashion, he became the standard by which everyone else was judged. A meticulous, polished vocal artist like Kastorsky was appreciated very highly by some, but either misunderstood or puzzled over by others.
THE ART MUSIC LOUNGE 