Art Tatum

Did You Know?

• Tatum avoided joining the Musicians' Union for as long as he could, not wanting to be restricted by its rules.
• He disliked having attention drawn to his blindness and planned his independent walk to the piano in clubs.
• In after-hours sessions with friends, Tatum sometimes sang the blues in a night-weary, slurry voice with sexual innuendos.

Early life

Tatum's mother, Mildred Hoskins, was a domestic worker born in Martinsville, Virginia, around 1890; his father, Arthur Tatum Sr., was a mechanic from Statesville, North Carolina. The couple moved to Toledo, Ohio, in 1909, where Art was born on October 13, the oldest surviving child. He had a sister, Arline, born nine years later, and a brother, Karl, two years after that, who became a social worker. The family was conventional and church-going. From infancy, Tatum had impaired vision, most likely due to cataracts. Eye operations by age 11 allowed him to see close objects and possibly distinguish colors, but an assault in his early twenties left him completely blind in his left eye and with very limited vision in his right. Despite this, he enjoyed playing cards and pool. It is likely he was exposed to church music early, including at Grace Presbyterian Church. He began piano at a young age, playing by ear with an excellent memory and sense of pitch; other musicians reported he had perfect pitch. As a child he insisted the piano be tuned often. He learned tunes from radio, records, and piano roll recordings. He denied the story that his ability developed from trying to reproduce piano roll recordings made by two performers. His lifelong interest in sports included an encyclopedic memory for baseball statistics.

Career and adult life

In 1927, after winning an amateur competition, Tatum began playing on Toledo radio station WSPD during interludes in a morning shopping program and soon had his own daily program. After regular club dates, he often visited after-hours clubs to be with other musicians, preferring to play after all others had finished, frequently playing for hours into dawn. His radio show was scheduled for noon, allowing rest before evening performances. During 1928–29, the program was rebroadcast nationwide by the Blue Network. He began playing in larger Midwestern cities including Cleveland, Columbus, and Detroit. National performers such as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson visited clubs where he played and were impressed. Although encouraged, Tatum felt he was not musically ready to move to New York in the late 1920s. In 1932, vocalist Adelaide Hall heard him play in Toledo and recruited him as part of her band. On August 5, 1932, Hall and her band recorded two sides that were Tatum's first studio recordings; two more sides followed five days later, along with a solo piano test-pressing of 'Tea for Two' that was not released for several decades.

Style and technique

Saxophonist Benny Green wrote that Tatum was the only jazz musician to attempt to conceive a style based upon all styles and synthesize them into something personal. He transformed preceding jazz piano through virtuosity, creating harmonic sweeps of color and unpredictable shifts of rhythm. Musicologist Lewis Porter identified three aspects a casual listener might miss: dissonance in his chords, advanced use of substitute chord progressions, and occasional bitonality. Examples of bitonality on record go back to 1934, making Tatum the most advanced harmonically among jazz musicians until Lennie Tristano. Before Tatum, jazz harmony was mainly triadic; he went beyond that, influenced by Debussy and Ravel, incorporating upper intervals such as elevenths and thirteenths and adding tenths to left-hand stride vocabulary. Tatum improvised by implying or playing the original melody or fragments while superimposing countermelodies and new phrases to build new structures based on variation. His flexibility extended to rhythm: regardless of tempo, he could alter the number of notes per beat and use techniques to change rhythmic intensity and shape. He could move away from an established tempo for extended periods without losing the beat.

Legacy

Art Tatum’s improvisations pushed jazz piano into new territory. Pianists like Adam Makowicz, Simon Nabatov, Oscar Peterson, and Martial Solal carried forward his virtuosic solo work. Even musicians working in other styles—Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, and Herbie Hancock—studied his recordings closely, memorizing and replaying them to learn. Mary Lou Williams recalled that Tatum showed her how to strike notes, control them without using the pedals, and keep her fingers flat on the keys for a pure tone. Beyond the piano, Tatum’s harmonic and rhythmic innovations reshaped jazz as a whole. His frequent chord changes made other musicians more aware of harmonic possibilities, which helped set the stage for bebop in the 1940s. His modern chord voicings and substitutions were also groundbreaking. Many non-pianists tried to bring his keyboard brilliance to their own instruments. Saxophonist Charlie Parker, new to New York, worked washing dishes in a restaurant where Tatum played and listened to him often; the key idea Parker took away was that any note could work in a chord if properly resolved. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie was influenced by Tatum’s speed, harmony, and bold solos. Vocalist Tony Bennett absorbed Tatum’s phrasing into his singing. Saxophonist Coleman Hawkins changed his approach after hearing Tatum in Toledo in the 1920s; Hawkins’s arpeggio-based style and expanding chord vocabulary were confirmed and encouraged by Tatum, and that style helped make the saxophone the leading jazz instrument.