Tatum: His Dissonant, "Avant-Garde" Side, Part 4!: Who Came Before Him,"Body and Soul" + Bonus

(Paying Subscribers, a recording of one of Tatum’s favorites, Lee Sims, is at the bottom for you.)

My Tatum essays have been some of my most widely read posts. But even after all the mind-blowing Tatum audio that I have already posted for you in Parts 1,2 and 3, I found my mouth wide open in joy and astonishment as I prepared today’s audio clips for you. I repeat what I wrote in Part 1—this is Absolutely not background music! These examples are very short but they are very dense, detailed and surprising. Wait until you have no distractions, then listen closely, and prepare to be transformed.

If you haven’t been following this series, please go back and check out the first three installments, because together they created, I hope, a new view of Tatum. In Part 1, I discussed Tatum’s methods of exploration, and illustrated with audio his early radical recordings, plus one audio clip of a composer who probably influenced him. In Part 2, I shared many outrageous audio excerpts of Tatum in the 1940s. In Part 3, I focused on some astounding dissonant audio moments from the 1950s, and concluded with some fundamental points about who Tatum really was as a musician, and how deep his influence was on All jazz artists.

But who influenced Tatum? Who came before him? I mentioned in Part 1 that he knew of, and was even compared with, modern classical composers of the day such as Cyril Scott. And he absolutely had heard the wild work of Earl Hines. But when asked about his influences in an interview such as the one with Leigh Kammen from the radio, he only ever mentioned two musicians: Fats Waller, who you’ve probably heard, and Lee Sims, who is forgotten today. Sims (1898-1966) was a pianist-entertainer, something like piano stars Eddy Duchin and Carmen Cavallaro of the 1930s and beyond. That is, he played complicated and technically challenging but light-hearted piano pieces, often solo and sometimes with orchestras.

Sims was not known as an improviser. He played his own compositions, and his written arrangements of popular songs. He did record an “Improvisation” and another called “Improvisations,” but those were written pieces with orchestra, along the idea of what Gershwin and others used to call a “Rhapsody.” But Sims could throw in some daring chord substitutions on occasion. Listen to this excerpt from his arrangement of “Body and Soul” (recorded on December 31, 1930). May I assume that you know the main melody (the A section)? (If not, please listen first to any vocal version online so that you can compare it with today’s audio samples.) Well, have you ever heard it played with these chords under it?!:

Say what??!! Unexpected, yes? (Paying Subscribers, you can listen to the entire recording below.) Also, the general arrangement approach that Sims used is similar to what Tatum would later typically do: Begin in free time, without a beat, then go into a swinging section, possibly with some double-time, and end with a brief out-of-time section and some fast, showy runs. During the 1920s and early 1930s, that is, in Tatum’s formative years (remember, he was born in 1909), Sims was very active making some piano rolls, many recordings, and especially broadcasting on the radio. And young Tatum was listening.

For the rest of this post, let’s check out what Tatum did on the same song, “Body and Soul.” You will immediately notice that he does not copy Sims in any way. He may have been inspired in some ways by Sims, but there is absolutely no attempt to imitate. Art had plenty of his own ideas.

For example, here is the A section, the first 8 bars of the song, completely re-imagined, from a radio transcription (that is, pre-recorded for broadcast) for the Standard company in August 1938. On your second listen, pause it at 0:07 for an unexpected harmonic progression—you will ask yourself, where is he going? He continues to insert a sequence of chords that are not in the original song. But here’s the biggest surprise—this passage sounds like the chord style associated with Milt Buckner, and later with George Shearing. But Milt would make his first recordings in December 1941. Evidently, Tatum was already doing this in 1938! (He plays a similar passage in other performances of “Body,” but this is the earliest one.) Listen please:

From October 1945 (a recording session for V-Discs, that is, “Victory” 78s for soldiers), here is the last A section and ending. (This one appears to play in C major, but I don’t know if it was transferred at the correct speed. On the other hand, Tatum did sometimes change the key of a song and I do think he played “Body and Soul” in C sometimes.) Please listen twice, and the second time, check out the chords at 0:07, 0:11 and especially the big chord at 0:15. And how about that ending, in and out of key, which is something like Ravel?!:

I’ve mentioned before that if you could only hear one Tatum album, I would recommend that you listen to 20th Century Piano Genius (double-CD or streaming—more information about this recording is in my Part 3). He was recorded at two private parties, one in 1950 and one in 1955, playing for a musically knowledgeable audience. At each party he played “Body and Soul.” Here’s the beginning of the 1950 performance (another one in C major). There’s a beautiful and original introduction that ends with three big, rich, complex chords. Let’s listen to those three chords first—this is a great example of the thick, dissonant voicings that I referred to in my Part 1. In fact, please play this two or three times:

Now, let’s hear the full introduction and the first A section. Those three chords are at 0:14. Then his melody statement is full of invention, starting with a note that’s a half-step higher than one expects (at 0:23), lots of added chord sequences, and a surprising chord at 0:41. Please drop everything, and listen closely:

One might think that his introduction is taken from the published intro (aka the “verse”) of the song. But that verse is almost never performed, and in any case it’s nothing like what Art plays. If you’re curious, you can hear it in Libby Holman’s recording of “Body,” one of the first, from October 1930 (exact date unknown, but you may be interested to know that Louis Armstrong recorded it on October 7).

And here’s the beginning of Tatum’s version at the 1955 party (also in C). He plays a totally different, even more lovely introduction. Art takes more time on this one, and he sneaks in the A section melody starting at 0:13, without making it obvious. The first chorus doesn’t actually begin until 0:24. Please enjoy it:

But, wait a minute—haven’t we read that Tatum supposedly had everything worked out, and just played his memorized arrangements the same way every time? Well, that is obviously completely wrong. “Body and Soul” is only one song out of many, and he hardly repeats himself at all through these many versions! In fact Tomás Jonsson, a pianist and graduate student at the University of North Texas, has looked in a recent paper at Tatum’s trio arrangements of classical pieces—he focuses on Rubinstein’s “Melody in F.” In this type of complicated and very rehearsed setting, the idea is to highlight the well-loved theme. There are only a few spaces here and there for Tatum to improvise. This is the very type of piece where one might expect that almost anybody would repeat themselves. But Jonsson demonstrated that Art’s improvisations are totally new every time! (You can read the paper here, and please send comments or questions through his website linked above.)

Does that mean that Art never repeated himself? No, he had certain favorite routines that he sometimes came back to. For example, I mentioned above that the reworked A section from 1938 appeared in later versions as well. But that only takes up 8 measures, a few seconds of a 3-minute performance—and he didn’t always play it the same way. In addition, this is actually further proof of my point, that Tatum was at heart an experimental artist. That “A section,” which is very daring even by today’s standards, and unthinkable in 1938, was, in other words, not improvised. It was clearly worked out beforehand, to be inserted into various performances of “Body and Soul.” That means that he would work on these adventurous ideas at home. In other words, they were no accident! So the fact that some of his wildest passages were thought out and perfected at home does not contradict my view—it only strengthens my argument.

I hope that you, like me, get joy from the richness of Tatum’s ideas, the beauty of his sound, the lyricism of his melodic inventions. I find myself listening to these passages over and over, just for pleasure. And believe it or not, I have only touched the surface of Tatum’s work on this one tune. There are a number of other recordings of him playing “Body and Soul.” I will be posting more Tatum installments, you can be sure.

All the best,

Lewis