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Norman Granz and Verve Records (1944 - 1962)
by Russell Perry
In July 2, 1944, Norman Granz, a jazz fan and small-time LA promoter staged a concert in the Philharmonic Auditorium with $300 of borrowed money. His “Jazz at the Philharmonic" concerts were hugely successful and became tours that ran until 1957. These tours and the record labels they spawned—Clef, Norgran and especially Verve—became home to many of the great players of the 1950s, often mainstream players who had a lot of music left to play, but were not necessarily at ...
Continue ReadingArt Tatum: Trio Days
by Marc Davis
I was wrong. I like Art Tatum. But in a slightly different way. My introduction to Art Tatum, many years ago, was a series of solo piano albums. They left me cold. No question, the man was gifted beyond belief. He could play faster, more accurately and with a greater sense of fun and originality than almost any pianist between Fats Waller and Thelonious Monk. And yet his solo work never felt right to me. Something ...
Continue ReadingArt Tatum: Solo Masterpieces, Volume One
by C. Michael Bailey
Art TatumSolo Masterpieces, Volume OneOJC1975/2013 If blues icon Robert Johnson is a phantom, then pianist Art Tatum is a myth. In spite of James Lester's 1995 biography Too Marvelous For Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum (Oxford University Press, 1995), little is known of Tatum, whose piano talent has yet to be equaled more than fifty years after his death. It is acknowledged by more than one authority that ...
Continue ReadingArt Tatum Goes To College
by Nick Catalano
After teaching jazz studies at my university for over 30 years, I have amended many original pedagogical goals and done a great deal of revisionist thinking. Although some of my students are part-time musicians, mostly with perfunctory training, most of them like the pop music of the day and take my course because they have heard that jazz music might be “cool." The course is taught chronologically, and it is always gratifying to see them respond enthusiastically ...
Continue ReadingArt Tatum: Piano Starts Here. Live at the Shrine.
by AAJ Italy Staff
Questo disco contiene la ristampa del celebre Live at the Shrine del 1949, rielaborato con l'ausilio congiunto di pianoforte e software informatico. I fan di Tatum faranno bene a tenersi alla larga da questa iniziativa editoriale, rivolta più agli integralisti dell'audiofilia che non agli appassionati di jazz. Lo si capisce già dalla lettura delle note di copertina, dove si parla di tutto (microfoni, files informatici, computer) tranne che della musica eseguita, peraltro sacrificata sull'altare dell'edulcorazione sonora. In un sol colpo ...
Continue ReadingArt Tatum: Piano Starts Here: Live at the Shrine
by David Rickert
The Zenph recording technology will be the most important aspect in deciding whether you will give this Tatum album a spin, so here are the details; the engineers have taken Tatum's Piano Starts Here, a fifty year old live recording, and rerecorded it by digitized the music, capturing every single nuance from touch to pedal action, and recorded it again through a piano fashioned for the purpose, capturing in both stereo surround and binaural stereo. Thus the poor recording quality ...
Continue ReadingArt Tatum: The Best of the Pablo Solo Masterpieces
by Dr. Judith Schlesinger
I have a dear friend, an accomplished jazz pianist, who used to attach the following tag to his e-mail: “I believe in God and Art Tatum — not necessarily in that order." I too appreciate Tatum's peerless mastery of keys and harmonies, his signature inventiveness, impeccable inner metronome, feathery runs, and pioneering ability to bridge the stride before him with the bop that lay ahead. But I can't take too much of him at one sitting, and I finally recognized ...
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