# Art Tatum: great jazz pianist or greatest jazz pianist?



## regressivetransphobe (May 16, 2011)

> Rachmaninov said that he understood what Tatum played, but was unable to do the same. And also 'If this man ever decides to play serious music we're all in trouble.'
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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

I have to say that I don't consider him a great artist, at least for what I've heard. Sure, he had that incredible technique (but I don't see many talking of the technique of Bernard Peiffer or Umberto Cesari) and in the thirties he was also the most harmonically advanced jazz pianist at the time (before people like Tristano or Monk) and I really like that aspect of his playing. But basically he was a shredder of the piano. No melody, pauses, no development of ideas, just those furious runs all over the keyboard, and when he played in bands he didn't play with them, he dominated the band.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

I never could get into Art Tatum. But I was never an avid listener of those older jazz styles. Fats Waller is more fun anyway. And Duke Ellington had a beautiful economical style that was instantly recognizable and soulful. Not a big fan of piano shredders. I'd rather listen to Monk, Bill Evans, Kenny Barron, or Herbie Hancock.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

norman bates said:


> I have to say that I don't consider him a great artist, at least for what I've heard. Sure, he had that incredible technique (but I don't see many talking of the technique of Bernard Peiffer or Umberto Cesari) and in the thirties he was also the most harmonically advanced jazz pianist at the time (before people like Tristano or Monk) and I really like that aspect of his playing. But basically he was a shredder of the piano. No melody, pauses, no development of ideas, just those furious runs all over the keyboard, and when he played in bands he didn't play with them, he dominated the band.


I don't know about his work with bands, but "no melody, no pauses" doesn't sound like Art Tatum to me. I hear rag melodies played and then developed (or at the very least distorted) in various ways, and his rhythms astound me.


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## JohnD (Jan 27, 2014)

"No melody" is not an accurate description of Art Tatum's style of playing, in my opinion. His later recordings may rely a bit too heavily on technique, but he's definitely among the piano greats. What was Fats Waller's comment when Tatum showed up at one of his shows? Something like "I play piano, but God is in the house tonight."


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

science said:


> I don't know about his work with bands, but "no melody, no pauses" doesn't sound like Art Tatum to me. I hear rag melodies played and then developed (or at the very least distorted) in various ways, and his rhythms astound me.


You and JohnD are both right, probably "no pauses" it's not a good expression. What I mean is that in his playing there's no... I don't know how to call it, in italian I'd say "respiro", that was the thing Miles Davis admired in Ahmad Jamal. And also "no melody" I mean that usually his improvisations seems to me just embellishments of the melody. At least considering what I've heard.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

norman bates said:


> You and JohnD are both right, probably "no pauses" it's not a good expression. What I mean is that in his playing there's no... I don't know how to call it, in italian I'd say "respiro", that was the thing Miles Davis admired in *Ahmad Jamal.* And also "no melody" I mean that usually* his improvisations seems to me just embellishments of the melody.* At least considering what I've heard.


Two things, I have a hard time taking Ahmad Jamal's playing seriously, especially the albums that influenced Miles Davis, it's basically a cocktail trio. You are right about the Art Tatum his improvisations though but that is not really the point of his music.

Who needs a piano player anyway?





I should not forget the greatest saxophone player of all time.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Piwikiwi said:


> Two things, I have a hard time taking Ahmad Jamal's playing seriously, especially the albums that influenced Miles Davis, it's basically a cocktail trio.


He's not one of my favorite pianists (even if I like him more than Tatum, and by the way "cocktail trio" sounds a bit reductive), but anyway the use of space it's something that you can find not just in Jamal or Monk, but also in virtuosos like Denny Zeitlin or Bill Evans, Bud Powell and tons of other. They can play fast but that means that they could not stop, or play slower, or very slow. Tatum gives me the impression that he didn't know how to do it, he play fast everything, like he was a Malmsteen of the piano, just showing his chops. Obviously he was a much more talented musician than the swedish guitarist but that's why I can listen Tatum only in small doses.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

norman bates said:


> You and JohnD are both right, probably "no pauses" it's not a good expression. What I mean is that in his playing there's no... I don't know how to call it, in italian I'd say "respiro", that was the thing Miles Davis admired in Ahmad Jamal. And also "no melody" I mean that usually his improvisations seems to me just embellishments of the melody. At least considering what I've heard.


Maybe you're on to something, but I don't think it's something that is going to bother me in the near future. Tatum's got enough good stuff for me in his music that if he doesn't have some other good stuff I'll still enjoy it.


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## cwarchc (Apr 28, 2012)

I have to admit it doesn't float my boat either
I much prefer a touch of Monk or Peterson


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## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

Add me to the doubters.


"Too many notes"

(I probably to dim to get him, never mind there's plenty else to occupy me)


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## Guest (Apr 30, 2015)

The mistake that everybody seems to be making is assuming that Tatum was a jazz player. He was not. He played jazz with no more seriousness than he played classical. Almost nothing of Tatum's style or technique has found its way into jazz even though his style incorporates literally _*everything*_ that can be found in both the black American and European styles. Picture Tatum's music as a towering skyscraper with only the ground floor occupied. The vast majority of his musical inventory is unexplored, unused. I far prefer his solo stuff to his band stuff because he soars when he's by himself but the trouble is that he is truly by himself. When he's playing with a band, you can hear how restricted he is because jazz can't hold him, can't tame him, can't ultimately use him.

Some of the stuff he does in this clip has never been done by any other pianist in the history of the instrument.






He is no more decipherable to the jazzmen than he is to the classical pianists.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Art Tatum was a genius but not my favorite pianist in jazz for all time.

For me, that award goes to Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor but not both simultaneously .

Bill Evans was a sheer master of the fine instrument... composing some of the greatest jazz standards ever.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Victor Redseal said:


> The mistake that everybody seems to be making is assuming that Tatum was a jazz player. He was not. He played jazz with no more seriousness than he played classical. Almost nothing of Tatum's style or technique has found its way into jazz even though his style incorporates literally _*everything*_ that can be found in both the black American and European styles. Picture Tatum's music as a towering skyscraper with only the ground floor occupied. The vast majority of his musical inventory is unexplored, unused.


I'm wondering what it's that you consider unexplored or unused. To me he was without a doubt a jazz pianist, and the most interesting part of his pianism was his harmonic knowledge, that really was ahead of its time. But even in his early day I can think of Clarence Profit or Cy Walter who had a similar language (they were friends and they often played together), and talking of harmonically advanced stuff it could be mentioned also In a mist composed by Bix Beiderbecke.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Warning - layman observations, but: 

I´ve got one of those very cheap 10 CD boxes & though I like him & enjoy hearing him now and then, the "too many notes"-remark above also seems relevant from time to time for me; however, the ensemble recordings and their interplay make a better environment for his often restless style (if one could characterize it as that), I think. Also, one could wish for longer, more meditative pieces, like it was the case with Bill Evans, for example, though the recording habits of the day set a limit.


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## Guest (May 1, 2015)

norman bates said:


> I'm wondering what it's that you consider unexplored or unused. To me he was without a doubt a jazz pianist, and the most interesting part of his pianism was his harmonic knowledge, that really was ahead of its time. But even in his early day I can think of Clarence Profit or Cy Walter who had a similar language (they were friends and they often played together), and talking of harmonically advanced stuff it could be mentioned also In a mist composed by Bix Beiderbecke.


I don't know if people even understand the depth and breadth of his harmonic genius. Tatum could (and did) sit down at pianos that were out of tune and play them so that all that out-of-tuneness somehow sound perfectly natural and it didn't matter if all the keys were out of tune or only some of them. He didn't find ways to get around the dissonance, he incorporated so that it became a necessary part of the music. Whether an instrument was in tune did not even matter to him.

The complaint that there are too many notes is, as I said in another post, like complaining that the Three Stooges were too stupid. That's where the genius of the whole system lies. He plays notes SO fast, that were they any shorter in duration they would be imperceptible (this duration is even called "the tatum" because nobody else plays them). But the real shock is that he IS playing notes too short to hear in addition to all the tatums he is interspersing them with. You can only perceive of them subconsciously. If you took those notes too short to hear and stretch them out, they form their own lucid, coherent melodies. Asking Tatum to slow it down would be like asking Dizzy Gillespie to play like Louis Armstrong just because, while you recognize Diz's genius, you prefer Armstrong.

Another area where Tatum has not been matched is his ability to span incredibly wide lengths across the piano keys. It seems to be superhuman at times. Whether he could really stretch his fingers that wide or had some secret method is the source of some amount of conjecture.






Even those artists who have learned a bit of Tatumesque playing just copy him--what they can copy of him.

Tatum used jazz as the current medium to express his ideas but jazz was a plaything to him--a frame but not the painting. His music transcended jazz. Before there was bop, he was already transcending it. What he did with notes, he also did with styles--play them so fast and switch between them before the listener could get a fix on what he was doing. And there was nothing he couldn't play in any style he wanted to. Long before John Cage performed "Williams Mix" (1952), Tatum had already done the same thing on piano and didn't need to write a new piece--he could do it with ANY piece at all.

The dense blocks of chords he can throw into a short space is not anything I've ever heard duplicated and probably never will. Another thing about Tatum was that he seldom ventured outside the stride piano idiom long after stride ceased to be a relevant force in jazz (if stride can be properly understood to be jazz). He showed little to no interest in updating his sound which would indicate he was not a serious jazz musician. Had he lived longer, he might have started updating but we'll never know.


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## padraic (Feb 26, 2015)

While his skill was ridiculous, when in the mood for jazz I'd reach instead for Herbie, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Monk, etc.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Victor Redseal said:


> His music transcended jazz .


I disagree about this. He had an original style, but that could be said of many other great pianists, Ellington, Monk, Powell, Nichols, Tristano, Jamal, Evans, Hill, Sun ra, Taylor, Blake and many others (and the same goes for musicians who played other instruments, originality is a big part of jazz).


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## Piccis (Aug 5, 2017)

Hi, so you know Umberto Cesari?
I've been doing a research about him, I'm from Italy and would like to know if and where he is known abroad. How did you get to know him?


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## AfterHours (Mar 27, 2017)

If you're looking for transcendent talents that changed Jazz history and produced some of the greatest albums of all time (any genre: Classical, Rock or Jazz), then: Anthony Davis, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra are probably the greatest ever (each of them a wholly unique style/synthesis of styles). Myra Melford and Lennie Tristano deserve serious consideration too, among several others that have been mentioned such as Ellington, Monk, Evans, etc.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

People are so right about Art Tatum. Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz used to go out at night to hear him. One of my favorites is Tatum's awesome performance of Tea for Two. He was better than just a great jazz pianist; he was one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time - that places him in a much higher dimension where the immortals dwell on Mount Olympus.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Piccis said:


> Hi, so you know Umberto Cesari?
> I've been doing a research about him, I'm from Italy and would like to know if and where he is known abroad. How did you get to know him?


Sadly I don't think he's well know outside Italy... e io sono italiano.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

He is not only one of the greatest jazz pianists, but one of the greatest ever. Horowitz said he'd be out of a job if Art got into classical. His music is kind of boring to me though. The descending right hand runs which sound like glissando's become too repetitive after a while between different songs.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Phil loves classical said:


> He is not only one of the greatest jazz pianists, but one of the greatest ever. Horowitz said he'd be out of a job if Art got into classical. His music is kind of boring to me though.* The descending right hand runs which sound like glissando's become too repetitive after a while* between different songs.


I've always hated that. I definitely prefer to hear a pianist like Duke Ellington, that with his limited technique always played thinking at the tune. Tatum was always showing his technique, and his right hand was most of the time just playing fast ornaments. 
Ellington was a great artist, Tatum a great technician (altough saved by his harmonic creativity).


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Well, for a start, when people start with the words: 'greatest jazz pianist' there are going to be other contenders; not least of whom would be Earl Hines who was probably the most influential jazz pianist and is a direct line running between ragtime and bebop. His style not only influenced Tatum, but was a model for Monk (who was essentially a stride pianist).

Tatum was magnificent, but once someone reaches his stature the 'greatness' is always questioned. Most pianists pay homage to him and it's standard etiquette to acknowledge the great pioneers. So when we see someone like Oscar Peterson - who incidentally is very Tatum like - saying Tatum was great/the greatest, we are just seeing gratitude and admiration.

Tatum's _Piano Starts Here_ was among the first jazz albums I ever heard and all these years later I still think it's fantastic. There's a lot of inventive improvisation, not just empty runs and showmanship. His performance of Willow Weep For Me in that album is superlative.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

I think most people here are acknowledging Tatums craftmanship while he's not their favorite jazz pianist at the same timel for a lack of emotion in his playing and interpretations. At least I do. Tatums very good but I never feel inclined to play his music.


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