ART TATUM BODY AND SOUL 12 A COMET FULL

He says he first heard Tatum as a teenager - more than 60 years ago - and never got over it. Many of these previously unreleased recordings came from the vault of a retired real estate executive named Arnold Laubich. They're what one collector calls 'the equivalent of discovering unpublished Shakespeare plays.'

ART TATUM BODY AND SOUL 12 A COMET FULL

Over the past year, Storyville Records, a Danish label, released nine CDs full of rare Tatum material. 'The piano was out of tune, he'd make it work so that even the note was out of tune, he'd use that.' 'He really heard so many things,' Taylor says. Billy Taylor - a protege of Tatum's - says his mentor could even make a bad piano sound good. Whitney Balliett, longtime New Yorker jazz critic, once observed: 'Tatum's mind abhorred a vacuum.' He tried to play everything he heard in his head. He usually played solo, because it was so hard for accompanists to follow his dazzling, volcanic musical ideas. It wasn't unusual to look up and see the classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz or the composer George Gershwin sitting in the audience in awe. People who heard Tatum on a record for the first time often thought they were listening to two piano players. If you don't like his ornament, you should be listening to someone else. there's too much decorative stuff.' That is the essence of Tatum. You know, people used to criticize Tatum and they would say things like, 'Well, it's too ornamental. But he says he plays certain artists more often than others. The highly regarded jazz critic and author Gary Giddins listens to lots and lots of jazz. really beyond what anybody's done since,' Hyman says. 'Tatum's harmonies to begin with were beyond what anybody was doing at the time. 'Tatum's playing was unworldly, unreal, because his standard was so high,' says Dick Hyman, a Florida-based pianist and composer who is considered a great performer of early piano jazz. There had never before been anyone like Art Tatum. He emerged in the 1930s as a fully formed musician whose improvisational skill quickly became legend. Legally blind and largely self-taught, Tatum memorized entire piano rolls, and absorbed music from the radio and the Victrola. The musical prodigy was born in Toledo, Ohio, to a mechanic and a domestic who worked in white homes. The great stride pianist Fats Waller famously announced one night when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, 'I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house.' It's hard to summon enough superlatives for Tatum's piano playing: his harmonic invention, his technical virtuosity, his rhythmic daring. He's been called one of the piano geniuses of all time, in any genre. Tatum at the piano, in a photo taken sometime in 1937.ДЇifty years ago Sunday, the jazz musician Art Tatum died.

Art tatum body and soul 12-a comet