Art Tatum - Piano Starts Here

Yeah, it is that good

The jazz novice speaks again: Don't let the superlatives (from these amateur reviewers or some of Tatum's contemporaries) compel you to look for flaws that everyone else must have missed. You're not going to find them. While I'm still not experienced enough to confirm that Tatum was indeed the best jazz pianist that ever lived, I can say that he is the best I have ever heard. Of course he can master the fundamentals of his pieces- most of the greats can. What sets him apart from everyone else I have ever heard are the textured and varied nuances he adds to just about every piece on this album and the breakneck, breath-taking speed at which he does it. Speed, of course, can be cheap- just another trick up a second-rate musician's sleeve to cover his sloppiness or the inability to find the soul of the piece. Tatum found the soul, but with a wink.

How great is Tatum? In his hands, "Tea for Two" is as deep and complicated as Monk's "Eronel", "How High the Moon" goes from a favorite jazz standard to a revelation and "Yesterdays" and "Someone to Watch Over Me", both so often smothered with overstylization, are stripped down such that their original intents can shine through.

Sadly, speed means just that- the CD feels like it's over in half an hour. The silver lining is that you have that much more time to listen to it again and again. December 31, 2007

The Master of The Keyboard Live

Recorded at the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium in 1949, one can begin to imagine what it must have been like attending an Art Tatum concert. "Piano Starts Here" wonderfully captures the moment. Floating fingers across ivory keys is the best I can describe Mr. Tatum's talent. In the words of his fellow contemporaries, "God just came in". That was the cue for anyone else at the piano to step aside. June 28, 2007

Art Tatum CD

As usual, Amazon came through. They shipped the product as promised and it arrived a day early. The product was in good condition and played on all my various CD players. The music was unsurpassable. Tatum was a genius. 'Nuff said. As it was recorded from old LP's and other recordings it was not of modern-day sound quality, but I knew that going in. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed listening to the music since I received the CD. Recommend this album to any jazz, piano, and/or music fan. May 12, 2007

Piano not only starts here, it ends here, too! (or, Why Art Tatum is God)

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. December 21, 2006

Good Lord!

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. November 2, 2006

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