Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Arthur Tatum, Jr. was born in Toledo, Ohio on October 13, 1909. His father was a guitarist and his mother played piano. A prodigy with perfect pitch, Tatum learned to play by ear, picking out church hymns by the age of three, learning tunes from the radio and copying piano-roll recordings his mother owned. As a child he was also very sensitive to the piano’s intonation and insisted it be tuned often. He developed an incredibly fast playing style, without losing accuracy.

Suffering from infancy with cataracts that left him blind in one eye and only very limited vision in the other, Art had a number of surgical procedures to improve his eye condition but lost some of the benefits when he was assaulted in 1930. He enrolled in the Columbus School for the Blind and studied music, piano and learned Braille. Drawing inspiration from pianists James P. Weldon and Fats Waller, who exemplified the stride piano style, he also identified with the more modern style of Earl Hines.

By the age of 19, he was playing with singer Jon Hendricks at the Waiter’s and Bellmen’s Club. As word of Tatum spread, national performers including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Joe Turner and Fletcher Henderson when passing through Toledo would make it a point to drop in to hear the piano phenomenon. However, the major event that propelled his meteoric rise to success was his appearance at a 1933 cutting contest at Morgan’s Bar in New York City that included Waller, Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Standard contest pieces included Johnson’s “Harlem Strut” and “Carolina Shout” and Fats Waller’s “Handful of Keys.” Tatum triumphed with his arrangements of “Tea For Two” and “Tiger Rag”, in a performance that was considered to be the last word in stride piano. Tatum’s debut was historic because he outplayed the elite competition and heralded the demise of the stride era.

Tatum went on to have a prolific performing and recording career being widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time. The virtuoso, while piano was his most obvious skill, he also had an encyclopedic memory for Major League Baseball statistics. Art Tatum passed away at age 47 from kidney failure on November 5, 1956 in Los Angeles, California.

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