Incomparable: Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces

It is said that young men edit the work of old men. The sad-eyed, blue-collar alcoholics in the short stories of Raymond Carver are, in some sense, sparse parodies of the lost, quiet sophisticates of Ernest Hemingway's novels. The work of Jackson Pollock is, in fact, the world of violent mo­tion found in the regionalist paintings of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, lifted in­to abstract expressionism. Both Philip Glass and Steve Reich are godchildren of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich who have taken segments of high romanticism in ear­ly 20th-century music and frozen them through repetition into the hypnotism of the minimalist school so popular with this yuppie generation.

I make this point because I do not think it holds true in the case of Art Tatum. He did have a tremendous influence on pianists who followed him. (Indeed, he helped shape an entire generation of "bop" players in the late '40s with his propensi­ty toward making inadvertent key changes in the middle of a tune.) For all their dif­ferences in style, for example, Thelonius Monk and Tatum are kin. Monk, with his seeming lack of technique, attacked the piano like a child seeing a keyboard for the first time. He played astringent, asym­metrical little melodies (tike the title song from Misterioso, Columbia 2416) that would appear to be a galaxy away from Tatum's virtuoso technique, dazzling with its torrents of arpeggios.

But Tatum too knew and practiced this kind of obliqueness as yet another one of his tricks. You can hear a "Monkish" ap­proach to "There'll Never Be Another You," where Tatum introduces a curious little phrase played in three octaves before beginning the chorus. It has nothing to do with the standard melody and yet somehow it fits. And again on "Heat Wave" Tatum produces a countermelody in the left hand that would for Monk be the entirety of the piece.

Oscar Peterson is a more direct descen­dant of Tatum (one who is heard to good advantage on MHS 7514A; MHC 9514F with vibe player Milt Jackson). With his whirlwind speed and dexterity, Peterson spins out lines that sweep the listener along with the force of melodic credibility. But there is a radical difference between Peter­son and his mentor (who could play "Flight of the Bumblebee" at the speed of 420 on a metronome). Peterson's solos are crisp, predictable, and friendly displays of vir­tuosity. They are attractive encounters with an improvisational sensibility that is comfortable in its logic and stays fairly close to the context of ballad or blues.

But Tatum ... Listen to "I'll See You 1n My Dreams.'' After an introduction that defies any structural analysis Tatum creates a hur­ricane of left- and right-hand runs that takes what is basically an innocuous ballad into Poe's maelstrom. It was typical of Tatum never to do what was expected: he might stop in mid-flight with one melody and come running up a set of scales with another, then begin where he left off with the original, without once stepping out of tempo.

Hence there can be no parody of Tatum's work, no extrapolation that extends what he accomplished in the 100-odd perfor­mances in the Masterpieces. Tatum incor­porated all known styles, from Fats Waller's stride to Earl Hines' horn-like lines. But he went beyond them all to a complex form of chord substitution that would later become standard fare, to a style uniquely his in which he played through, underneath, and above the harmonies to create a world of his own.

Tatum, who was nearly blind for most of his life, insisted that he could see col­ors. My theory is that he could do just that. He was able to sit down at the piano, dissect the spectrum of white noise into thousands of textural variations, putting them all back together in a rainbow that showered his listeners with the delights of new textures and arrangements. There has been none like him since.