October 13th: Art Tatum's 100th Birthday
I first heard about Art Tatum almost forty years ago. I read about him in a book by Leonard Feather. Like other critics and jazz authorities, Feather described Tatum as a genius and master non-pareil of the jazz piano. After reading that, I searched around record stores in Montreal for a Tatum album ( this was the early 60s) and found one, the name of which I have forgotten. I listened to it multiple times, and was confounded and befuddled, and not sure what the fuss was all about.
On the album, Tatum payed, as he almost always did, solo, and favoured syrupy standards to which I didn't relate very well, way back then. There were songs such as "I Surrender Dear" and "When Your Lover Has Gone". They weren't the best known tunes in the great American songbook, and I had never heard them before - not knowingly, at any rate.
In any case, I was not fond of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Judy Garland middle-aged peoples' music at that time. It was one thing for Miles Davis to deconstruct "Bye Bye Blackbird" at the Blackhawk in Chicago, in such a way that one forgot the sentimentality and cheesy lyrics of the original. (Footnote: I no longer eschew the lyrics of such standard tunes. Au contraire, I appreciate their lyrical and poetic worldview). It was another for Perry Como to oh-so-smoothly croon those standards, wearing his trademark cardigan, and making all the housewives swoon. I have a lot more time, now, for the classic singers of standards than I did in my teens. They seemed embarrassingly sweet and sentimental to me then, at a very unsentimental stage in my own life.
To me, it seemed that Tatum's approach these corny, old pop tunes was closer to the commercial world of Perry Como and his ilk that to the jazz world of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. It took a while for me to understand that Tatum specialized in what one writer, in a very different context, called "impacted fractionalism". What Tatum was doing was, seemingly, playing the songs straight, while slipping in a mind-boggling panoply of out-there musical innovations woven into the interstitial ornamentations that he threw away so effortlessly.
Just imagine a work of fiction, that, on the face of it seems like conventional, chronological, 19th century narrative. All very familiar and predictable, except for one wrinkle: the author has included extensive footnotes, written in a wildly experimental fashion, presaging or echoing Joyce,Lowry, Kafka, Hawkes, Kerouac, Eliot, etc. You can still just read the conventional "story" and have it make sense. The author has cleverly consigned all his/her literary innovations to the margins, in that way allowing his novel to appear to be nothing more than another commercially acceptable work of conventional storytelling.
That is what Tatum was up to, either by accident or design (or, maybe, a little bit of both). He played pop tunes of his time, and entertained folks who were used to what Dave McKenna, in describing himself, called "saloon pianists". He made no pretense of being a pure artist, re-thinking and de-constructing the repertoire. Tatum just played away, as though he had no higher purpose than entertaining us. But, laced into those entertaining readings of the standards, were complex Rococo runs, ornaments, obbligato and "trompe-d'oeil" tricks, (where he seemed to be wandering away from the form, while all the while keeping a steady beat and never losing track of the underlying harmonic sequence).
At times one can easily find Tatum's playing overly flamboyant and technically over-wrought. It seems, sometimes, like he is cooking with too much sugar and spice -- and maybe flambé-ing his dishes in cognac to wretched excess. A jazz broadcaster once told me that after listening to Tatum she sometimes feels like brushing her teeth!
But the more you listen; the more you hear -- and the more you realize that, hiding just behind the smiling, effervescent entertainer, was a great and inimitable artist. Like so many great artists of the jazz world his candle burned too bright and for too short a time. He died, if memory serves me right, more than half a century ago, in part, victim (they say) of his own prodigious appetite for alcohol - especially beer, in industrial quantities. Fortunately, he left an extensive record of his genius on disc, now more available in CD reissues and other more avant-garde forms than when I was in my teens, searching for anything he recorded.
Had he lived, October 13th, 2009 would be Tatum's 100th birthday. Happy Birthday Art. We're still entertained, and blown-away, by your timeless and always-brilliant takes on those old, corny and sentimental tunes.
