Piano Starts Here

Artist: Art Tatum
Label: Sony
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 074646469026
EAN: 0074646469026
ASIN: B000002AAW

Release Date: 1995-09-26

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Tracks:

Tea For Two
St. Louis Blues
Tiger Rag
Sophisticated Lady
How High The Moon
Humoresque
Someone To Watch Over Me
Yesterdays
I Know That You Know
Willow Weep For Me
Tatum Pole Boogie
The Kerry Dance
The Man I Love

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Customer Reviews:

Piano not only starts here, it ends here, too! (or, Why Art Tatum is God).......2006-12-21

This album offers a good cross-section of Art Tatum's solo piano style, including ballads and up-tempo pieces recorded in the 1930s and 40s.

Listening to Art Tatum's masterful performances these past 30 years, something strikes me as odd: I have yet to hear him make a mistake, not even a minor technical misstep in one of his lightning-quick arpeggios. Listen to his rendition of I Know That You Know, and marvel as we all have. What he accomplishes at those speeds, however, is incomprehensible. That alone might validate the legendary comment which the great Fats Waller spoke when, upon seeing Tatum in the audience at one of his concerts, stood up to proclaim, "Ladies and gentleman, I play the piano. But God is in the house tonight."

Ironically, three decades later when Oscar Peterson was a guest on the Merv Griffin Show, Griffin introduced him by echoing those words.

Peterson, however, who is far and away the greatest living jazz pianist and successor to Tatum's prodigious technique, makes mistakes. I know, small potatoes. Everyone makes mistakes. The fact that I've never heard one from Tatum after 30 years continues to amaze me.

Every Peterson performance is driven by his patented, relentless insistence on rhythm. The overpowering pulse that flows--or, more accurately, marches--through his Bosendorfer, is the primary force behind his playing, as he has often noted. Obviously, Tatum relies on rhythm as well. But where Oscar shouts his use of rhythm, Art's application is remarkably subtle and in service to his overall performance, not at center stage. This lends a delightful buoyancy and effortlessness to his playing, even at tempo. He spares you his labor and provides the gift of music in its purest form, leaving the listener in a state of sublime perplexity thinking 'My God, how can a human being possibly do this?!'

He accomplished these feats through nature's bequests and rigorous, classically oriented study of the instrument from a very young age. Because Tatum was born in 1909, when recorded sound was in its infancy, recordings of him as a youth don't exist. However, many people who heard him play in his formative years believed his technique to be virtually complete from the beginning.

Peterson has often related a story from a period in his teens when he confidently believed he was the greatest piano player around. One day his father arrived home with a recording of Tatum's Tiger Rag (included on this disc). After the younger Peterson listened to it, he refused to believe only one person was playing the piano. When his father finally convinced him, he didn't touch a piano key for months. Peterson once compared Tatum to a lion: "It's beautiful and you want to get up close to it, but it's a little frightening." Eventually the two became good friends, and when Peterson, a Canadian, heard that Art was dying, he flew out to Los Angeles to be with him at the end.

Perhaps most astonishing, Art Tatum--an intelligent and eloquent man with a great sense of humor--was blind almost from birth, suffered various medical afflictions throughout his short life (he ate irregularly, drank excessively, and succumbed to uremia in 1956, at the age of 47), and he lived in an era when African-Americans were treated more lowly than second-class citizens. Nevertheless, he raised the bar of instrumental performance so drastically that even 50 years after his death, no other musician has been able to approach it. Simply put, he possessed the ability to take any thought whatsoever and express it on a piano. Even in his final months, people marveled at his playing. Musicians as well as musical scholars universally consider Tatum to be the greatest improvisational musician who ever lived--on any instrument. Any competent pianist understands why listening to him is at once elating, and frightening. When Art Tatum sat down in front of a piano, he didn't become the piano. The piano became him.

I'm grateful for the gift of Art Tatum's music. Listen closely to this record and you'll understand why.

Good Lord!.......2006-11-02

From all I've read and heard, when jazz musicians first heard this guy play it was like a collective "NOW what are we supposed to do?" went up in the air. Tatum upped the ante so radically that it took about a decade for everyone to catch up(he is considered an early inspiration for the bebop movement, Charlie Parker himself saying that he wished he could play "...like Tatum's right hand.").

Bud Powell and Oscar Peterson are the offspring of Tatum's genius. All the others- from Monk to Evans to Hancock- merely stand in awe of him.

a mixed bag.......2005-05-30

A music on this disc is very good and can be a good introduction into Tatum's world.
It's also not too complicated.
Bad news is quite poor sound quality.
Good for listenign through PC speakers but decent Hi-Fi system reveals all recording's shortcomings and make it quite disapointing.

Tatum At His Best.......2005-05-23

This is undoubtedly one of the greatest jazz albums out there. The pure genuis of Tatum is simply astounding. Although Tatum plays almost all standards on this album, he plays them in his own woderfully complex and creative style in a manner that makes his versions unbeatable. Anyone who thinks that Monk was the greatest jazz piano player of all time better pick this up and go to school. His version of "Tea For Two" is still considered to be the standard by which all versions are measured by. "Tiger Rag" is played so unbelievably fast and complex that it sounds like there are three pianists playing at the same time! Every song on this album is a gem so pick this one up A.S.A.P. You will not be disappointed.

Tatum, a great American genius.......2004-08-19

When I was in college and studying piano, I chanced upon this album on an old Columbia LP. I could not believe my ears, then, and am still stunned by the playing on here now. What Tatum does is nearly impossible, both as a musical and as a technical concept, juxtaposing each hand moving independently of the other to create massive, swirling collages of sound. When Tatum's first solo records (reproduced here) first appeared in 1933, he was accused of using a second pianist on the sessions!

The remainder of these cuts come from a concert in 1949, when Tatum was at the very peak of his powers. Several of these pieces were re-recorded for Norman Granz's Clef label a few years later (now reissued on Pablo CDs as "The Tatum Solo Masterpieces"), but these versions are even more spontaneous and exciting. This version of "Yesterdays," in particular, inspired me to attempt to play it, a venture I soon discovered impossible once I got past the intro into the swirling figures!

Tatum was often accused of playing superfluous runs and arpeggios, especially for white or mixed audiences, in order to add unnecessary "flash" to his playing. There is certainly some truth in this statement. In his few surviving live recordings before audiences in all-black clubs, Tatum plays less floridly, more inventively at times, than he does here, but that is like accusing a world-class gymnast of waving his arms in the air as he or she sticks their landing...this would in no way detract from the beauty or originality of the routine itself. Tatum's elegance, and eloquence, may not be greatly helped by his glassy runs, but if one accept them for what they are the essential core of his genius is still apparent.

This CD reissue is vastly superior to the original LP release as it totally eliminates the artificial "stereo" sound considered so chic in those days. Highly recommended!!

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