Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 2 (1992)
15 tracks, 63 minutes
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There’s a great story that Oscar Peterson used to tell. Peterson himself was a child prodigy of both jazz and classical piano. Once, his father thought he was getting a bit too big for his boots, he sat him down and put on a record of Art Tatum playing ‘Tiger Rag’. Understandably, it blew little Oscar away. ‘Who are these musicians?’ he asked; ‘Not musicians, one, one man,’ was the answer. That’s enough to break an ego. The addendum of ‘also he was blind’ was probably unnecessary, but certainly adds to the humbling experience. Peterson couldn’t play for several weeks, and had nightmares – all his preconceptions of what great piano, great jazz and great classical music were exploded. Eventually he came back to the piano with renewed fervour, became a true master and then, about 80 years later, was written about in a blog called 365 Good Albums, surely a pinnacle of a storied career.
What music can scare a piano prodigy into crying themselves to sleep at night? So many jazz musicians could be described as virtuosic in their performance simply because jazz itself often requires virtuosity, with high technicality and a constant pushing of boundaries almost innate within good jazz, but Art Tatum was something else. He did things with a piano that were barely thought possible.
As per little Oscar Peterson’s misunderstanding, the way Tatum plays sounded (and still does sound) as if ten digits and one brain just isn’t enough. For starters, just the way he played the notes is astounding: changing complex chords every beat (or more); incredibly intricate runs played with lightning speed; layering many levels of syncopation and polyrhythm on top of each other like a musical moiré; even the way he could play two parts of entirely distinct rhythmic and melodic shape at once. His original training as a classical pianist is very evident in the way he approached the keyboard and his arrangements. It works the other way, too: he had such a heavyweight jazz mind that his performance of pieces from the classical world are infused with a jazz that’s completely inherent in his playing – you can hear that in his stampeding version of Massenet’s ‘Élégie’ from Les Érinnyes that opens today’s album.
That’s because his virtuosity reached beyond even his extraordinary playing skills. His use of harmony changed the way jazz worked forever. This wasn’t him playing things that people thought were impossible, instead he was playing things that were possible, but shouldn’t sound good. His harmonisations are built in a way that, out of context, would sound strange, clashing and chaotic. Chords were extended so far to include dissonant intervals such as tenths, elevenths and thirteenths (for the musicologically uninitiated, the basic chord goes up to the fifth interval), he changed the shape of the chords so that the notes were spread out in entirely new ways, and he swapped up chords that the brain would expect for ones that were sometimes only vaguely related, allowing the ear to hear colours that would otherwise have been inaccessible. On top of all that, he also enjoyed using bitonality – that is, playing the melody in a different key than the chords. Put it all together and it should have sounded cacophonous, but it didn’t. It certainly sounded dissonant, but those dissonances were beautiful rather than aggressive. Don’t ask me how he did it – chords have always baffled me – but whatever it is, it became the blueprint for generations of jazz musicians since.
The way Art Tatum played could – and probably will – be studied for centuries. How rare for one person to completely change the direction of any discipline, let alone one as multifaceted as jazz, but Art Tatum did it, and those ramifications are still heard today, in jazz, classical music, hip-hop and beyond. And he did it all while being mind-bendingly virtuosic and a showman at the same time. No wonder it broke Oscar Peterson’s brain.
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