Tatum's Dissonant, "Avant-Garde" Side, Part 3, the 1950s, Summary Conclusions, + Bill Evans BONUS

His impact on jazz history.

(Note: Paying subscribers, as usual your bonus is at the very bottom—a recording of Bill Evans at age 19!))

Thank you for listening to the audio examples in Part 1 and Part 2 with an open mind. In this last part I continue to make the case that Art Tatum was way more adventurous than most people realize. The examples in this part are perhaps even more “way out” than what I shared with you before! (And for paying subscribers there is a bonus recording at the end of Bill Evans showing his Tatum influence—in 1949!)

First, here are three excerpts from The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces, which were recorded at marathon studio sessions in 1953 and 1954. Here is the ending of “Embraceable You”—prepare for some shocking, and exciting, harsh sounds from 0:24 to the end!:

Now, a longer excerpt, from "Tenderly"—this starts with a transition, and then at 0:06 he begins the complete last chorus. He plays it so abstractly that it’s challenging to follow. You’ll hear one of those big “crush chords” at 0:22, after which Art breaks up the rhythm in a kind of “double time feel” until 0:30. His playing calms down, and the second half of the chorus starts gently at 0:54. From 1:18 to the end he plays with no tempo, and some rich, dense harmonies:

Now, please listen to "I've Got the World on a String.” This is just the bridge, where the lyrics go: “Life's a wonderful thing / As long as I've got that string…” But it’s never been played like this before!:

All three excerpts are, I’m sure you’ll agree, violent and harshly dissonant. Strong stuff indeed! And also astoundingly creative!

And finally, some audio clips from 20th Century Piano Genius. This 2-disc set, released on Verve in 1996 (and mostly available on various LPs before that), captures Tatum at the home of film score composer Ray Heindorf in 1950 and again in 1955. (The latter event was reportedly the “wrap party”—a celebration of finishing—for the film Pete Kelly’s Blues, for which Heindorf did some of the music.) Art plays on a fine piano near a good tape recorder, for a small audience that, judging from the audible comments between them and Art, includes at least two knowledgeable pianists. Tatum holds nothing back; if you’re going to listen to just one Tatum set, this is the one that I recommend. (It’s also on all the streaming services. Just put in the album’s name.) But, as with all Tatum, you have to listen closely to catch all of the details.

As I mentioned in Part 2, “Over the Rainbow,” with its simple scalar melody, invites chord substitutions — and Tatum really gets into it this time, right from the start:

Finally, let’s return to the song we started with in Part 1, “After You’ve Gone,” but this time from the 1950 “private party” session. He takes it at a slow tempo, and these are the ending seconds. He’s very serene at first, and then at 0:31 he goes into a cadenza that is astonishing!!:

One of the main points that I’d like to leave with you is that these are not isolated “deviations.” These are absolutely typical of Tatum’s style. I could add dozens more — in fact, I have about 30 more examples in my notes, easily enough for more Tatum posts in the future. (I might do some more—let me know if you’d like that.) You should also check out the examples recommended in Schuller’s book, about 10 of which he illustrates with notation.

So, as I’ve shown, if you study Tatum's recordings closely, you’ll gather the opposite impression from the conventional wisdom. He's usually discussed as somebody who devised virtuosic arrangements of pop songs, and once in a while pushed the envelope into dissonance and experimentation. But on close listen, you come away with the opposite impression — that Tatum must have been a highly experimental artist who was confined to playing popular songs because of the era in which he lived, and the style of music that he specialized in. After all, he played jazz, as opposed to contemporary classical music. And jazz musicians in his era didn't routinely indulge in playing outside the key!

Now, this is important: I’ve had people tell me, “Okay, but I still think that Tatum was a conservative artist who occasionally played something avant-garde. So what?” That makes zero sense!! Think about it—if he was so conservative, where on earth would he have come up with these avant-garde ideas? It makes no sense, for example, to assume that the night in Milwaukee that we heard last time was the only occasion that he ever experimented with going out of the key in a long right-hand line. Besides, there are just too many examples of this type of thing, many more than anybody has ever noticed, for someone to claim that these are “accidents” or “aberrations.”

Let’s face it—the only sensible explanation is that he was in fact an avant-gardist who kept his experimentation under wraps most of the time (but not nearly as often as people assume—as you’ve heard!). In fact, Schuller notes that Tatum said on several occasions that audiences would not be able to follow him if he went too “far out.” (Schuller gives no source for this, and I haven’t found it in the few audio and print interviews that Tatum left behind. However Gunther knew a lot of musicians personally, and he may have heard this directly from Art.)

Now let’s return to the question of Tatum’s influence. If he was a bit cautious about going too far out in the studio, but generally got freer and wilder in more informal settings, what then must his audiences have experienced? One can only imagine —and it begins to explain why his influence in fact was huge, and extended far beyond pianists.

For instance, Charlie Parker took a job at Jimmy's Chicken Shack when he arrived in Harlem around late April or early May 1939, simply because it allowed him to listen to Tatum playing there night after night. Pianist Sadik Hakim (born in 1919 as Argonne Thornton) worked with Parker in Chicago, probably in April 1944, and he recalled as follows:

After his gig in the Loop, Tatum would come down to a club on the South Side, drinking beer after beer and playing for five or six hours.  All piano players in the city would be there.  I remember Bird telling me then, “I wish I could play like Tatum’s right hand.”

(Hakim also said “I remember hearing Art Tatum with Bird in Chicago,” but from the context, I think Hakim meant that he and Bird listened to Tatum together, not that Bird played with Tatum.)

John Coltrane also heard Tatum “live.” When Coltrane was a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s small group, they appeared on a TV program in Hollywood around October 1950, and Art Tatum performed solo on the same show! (Sorry, this program was only broadcast, not preserved!) And Coltrane wrote that later (probably in the fall of 1954), while John was on tour in Cleveland with another group, “There were Art, Slam Stewart, Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown at a private session in some lady’s attic. They played from 2:30 in the morning to 8:30—just whatever they felt like playing. I’ve never heard so much music.”

And look at what saxophonist Archie Shepp wrote about Coltrane and Tatum in his foreword to the 1983 edition of Ben Sidran’s book Black Talk

The details of what Shepp says appear to have been influenced by what Coltrane wrote in 1960: “I could stack up chords—say, on a C7, I sometimes superimposed an Eb7, up to an F#7, down to an F. That way I could play three chords on one.” But, even if the details might be off, even if Coltrane only said that he got ideas from Tatum for his harmonic approach, that alone is significant.

So, it appears that both Bird and Trane not only might have used some of Tatum’s fast runs, as most people assume, but that Tatum’s influence goes further—they also took harmonic ideas from Tatum. They could have arpeggiated his dense chords (played them one note at a time) on their saxophones, and also learned from Tatum’s substitute chord progressions (as Shepp suggested about Coltrane). And of course they heard Tatum going in and out of the key. Coltrane famously did that in the 1960s, but so did Parker, mostly on “live” bootleg recordings, especially in the early 1950s.

Pianists who have named Tatum as a primary influence include such a diverse group as Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, Hank Jones, and Oscar Peterson, to name just a few prominent examples. Bill Evans never spoke much about his roots, and I don’t think he ever named Tatum. But on his own private recordings from his formative years in the 1940s, the impact of Tatum is undeniable.

(To everyone: I will do a study of Evans’s private recordings later on. Paying subscribers, scroll down to hear a Tatum-influenced medley by Bill Evans from 1949!)

The late Billy Taylor, a Tatum protégé who used to hang out with him, taught that Monk was also a Tatum acolyte, based mainly on the fact that Monk had a few Tatum-esque runs under his fingers. (You hear this most clearly in Monk’s solo recordings.) But, as I’ll show at a later date, Monk’s fast runs mostly come from Teddy Wilson and Fats Waller, not Tatum. Still, Tatum had a profound impact on Monk, but in a different way than Taylor realized: Based on the recordings you’ve just heard, there is good reason to believe that Monk was deep into Tatum’s harmonic ideas, and into Tatum’s whole approach to re-harmonization. In fact, this represents a deeper impact than if Monk had simply copied a few fast runs.

Jazz historian and Mingus scholar Stefano Zenni from Italy adds, “You can add Charles Mingus to the list of musicians influenced by Tatum. He made it clear that Tatum's harmonic conceptions had a big impact on him. And according to Brian Priestley’s Mingus biography (p.55), he played with the Tatum trio in early 1954 for four weeks at the local Birdland in Miami Beach.” (You can read some of Zenni’s fine work on early Mingus in English here.)

So, to sum up, let’s see: If Tatum influenced Bird, Monk, Trane, Bud, Mingus and thousands of others; if he pioneered the modern language of voicings (adding notes to chords to “spice” them up); if he shaped the entire concept of “chord substitution” that has been essential to jazz from bebop until today; if he was the first to play melodic lines that went outside the key — If he did all this, can we say that he had an influence? Yes, yes, and yes: Clearly, his influence was absolutely immense!

All the best,

Lewis

(Paying subscribers, keep scrolling down please!)