The Sound World of Art Tatum

Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago
The Sound World of Art Tatum

Author(s): David Horn
Source: Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2, European Perspectives on Black Music
(Autumn, 2000), pp. 237-257
Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University
of Illinois Press
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THE SOUND WORLD OF ART TATUM

DAVID HORN
When a French journalist asked writer Andre Gide in 1905 whom

considered to be France's greatest poet, Gide responded "Victor Hug
helas!" (quoted in Richardson 1976, 294). It became a celebrated rema
and must rank as one of the most concise yet pregnant summaries of
ambivalent response to an artist's reputation ever uttered. Beginnin
one might imagine hearing Gide speak it-with sharply rising anticip
tion, it dissolves instantly into disappointment. Although none
expressed it quite so succinctly, many jazz writers have felt much t

same about Art Tatum. A not-uncommon judgment is that he ha
unrivaled, exciting technique but lacked the creative imagination to
that technique to maximum use. "A superficial bravura technique
Paganini," one writer called it, adding for good measure, "and w
interest does that merit?" (Wiedemann 1955, 28).

Tatum's admirers have been legion, of course, evidence of which ca
found in a range of sources, from comments by musicians in intervi
to letters in magazines, from articles in the jazz press to entries in re
ence books. Almost without exception, they emphasize in particular
originality of his style and the marriage of technique to harmonic in
vation, but it is not unusual also to find assessments that amount to a
description of the complete musician. In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz,
for example, Felicity Howlett and J. Bradford Robinson (1988, 519) write
that "Tatum's technical abilities, lightness of touch, and control of a full
range of the instrument were unprecedented.... [H]e had an unerring

sense of rhythm and swing, a seemingly unlimited capacity to expand
and enrich a melody, and a profound and continually evolving grasp of
substitute harmonies."
DAVID HORN is director of the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool.
is joint managing editor of The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and co-editor of
Cambridge Companion to Jazz.
237
238
BMR Journal
One of the problems with which jazz historiography has been faced is
Tatum's evident lack of fit into established narratives and agreed values.
Among musicians (where reverence for him was almost unanimous),

some solved the problem by ceasing to consider him as a jazz musician.
As fellow pianist and contemporary Teddy Wilson told an interviewer
after Tatum's death, "Back in the old days, we put Tatum in a special category and did not discuss him as a jazz pianist-he was in a category by
himself, and we then talked about the others; those who played in bands"
(quoted in Young 1963, 23). In a similar vein, more recently, critic Gary
Giddins (1998, 439) entitled an essay on Tatum, "Art Tatum (Sui
Generis)."
Taken as a whole, jazz historiography seems to have resigned itself to
a bemused ambivalence in regard to Tatum and to have postponed
resolving the issue by consigning him to the special kind of marginality

reserved for talented non sequiturs. As a consequence, not only is Tatum
underrepresented in jazz criticism but his presence in jazz historiography
seems largely to prompt no particular effort in historians beyond descriptive writing designed to summarize his pianistic approach. Had his biography been more dramatic, his behavior more unpredictable, his person-
ality more charismatic-had he been one of those whom jazz
historiography has seen as "spectacularly socially dysfunctional practi-
tioners available for romanticisation" (Johnson 2002)-it is possible,

given the way that these things work, that his music would be thought to
have signification on other levels. Although evidently fiercely proud of
his skills, Tatum was an easy-going generous spirit, whose lifestyle,

tuned though it was to the demands of late-night (often all-night) music
making, appeared to have absorbed little of its more "colorful" side
beyond a fatal taste for drink.

The combination of disagreement over Tatum's status and the relative
marginality of his position in much jazz historiography suggests that we
are in the presence of processes of generic canonization. Gary Tomlinson
(1991, 245) has described the jazz canon: "a strategy for exclusion, a
closed and elite collection of 'classic' works that together define what is
and isn't jazz." The canon has been established through the intervention
of what Tomlinson calls an "internalist ideology," which accords absolute
priority to musical features and in the process distances the music, as he
puts it, "from the complex and largely extramusical negotiations that
made it and sustain it" (247-248).
But there are alternatives. Internalism and canons, in Tomlinson's view,
constitute "a narrowly based value judgement that cannot do justice to
the complex dialogues of self and other in which culture is created"

(248-249). And it is in this spirit that I want to suggest not only that
Horn * The Sound World of Art Tatum
239
Tatum stands in need of reconsideration but that such reconsideration
can help us reassess our critical processes. One can make a case for suggesting that Tatum deserves renewed attention on technical, formalist
grounds alone. There is a need for further close examination of his tech
nique, free from prejudice or unbridled enthusiasm, building on the pio
neering work of Felicity Howlett (1983). But that should not-cannot-be
all that there is to say. The very fact that Tatum's music was (and to a
large extent still is) in tension with the dominant critical paradigms sug
gests that the "dialogues of self and other" that underlie cultural produ
tion are indeed complex in this case and deserve some unraveling.
On the face of it, Tatum may appear a perverse choice of a musician
around whom to examine such a subject. Where some recent jazz schol-
arship, under the influence of ethnomusicology, has emphasized th
interactive nature of jazz, the dominance of solo performance in Tatum'
career tends to leave him saddled with descriptions such as Gunthe
Schuller's (1989, 477) that refer to the "solitary nature of his art" and th
see him as "artistically a loner." That he was so revered by fellow mus
cians may only make him less malleable to the purposes of cultural analy
sis; a "musicians' musician," as Max Jones (1956, 8) once described him,
may sound unpromising territory on which to uncover the dialogic

drama in the interplay of cultures. But the point is not to test a method on
an individual; rather, it is the reverse. The aim is not to replace one set o
dominant paradigms with another but to attempt to understand something of the specificity of an individual self, occupying its own uniqu
place and time and articulating itself-performing, if you will-in an
through sets of dialogical relationships.

Such activity rarely takes place on an even playing field and almost
invariably involves processes of negotiation with hegemonic discourses
It will be necessary, therefore, to look again at some of the elements tha
have made Art Tatum controversial. But first we need to locate him.
Locating Tatum
First, a brief but essential look at his early biography. Art Tatum was
born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1909. He was blind in one eye and had limited
sight in the other. It is hard at this distance to ascertain the extent to
which, as a black youngster, Tatum would have had a significantly different experience of music from that of white youngsters in Toledo. The
black population of Toledo was small, between 1 and 2 percent around
1910, and the Tatums lived in a relatively unsegregated neighborhood.
For all children in that neighborhood, music could be encountered live in
a designated number of public places, some open (especially the street
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BMR Journal
with its marching bands, perhaps street musicians), some in framed

spaces, chief among which would be the church and the school, perhaps
also the theater or the tent show. It was also encountered in the home,
both live and-as yet in small measure-in technically reproduced form.
In the 1910s, the latter meant a phonograph for some, but more com-
monly a piano-roll player. The Tatums had a piano at home, and Art
began to experiment on it early, but there is no evidence of their being a
particularly musical family. At some point, Tatum had a black piano

teacher, Overton G. Rainey, who may have given Tatum the basis of piano
technique and a familiarity with the popular classical repertoire. It is
unlikely that Rainey encouraged his pupils in African-American idioms
(Lester 1994, 37-38). Tatum also attended the Toledo School of Music, but
for the most part he seems to have been self-taught.
By the mid-1920s, Tatum had become celebrated locally as a gifted and
versatile pianist. According to his biographer James Lester, he was in regular demand as a provider of music for social occasions, playing "probably one-steps, two-steps, cake-walks, and rags that were still so popular
then" (42)-popular across the spectrum of society in which a young

black pianist could move in Toledo. Despite the unsegregated nature of
the Tatums' domestic environment, the world of public entertainment
was a different matter. When he began to enter the twilight world of clubs
and bars in his later teenage years, Tatum's experience was unusual in
one sense, in that his family, although priding themselves on their

respectability, seem to have raised no particular objection (19).
In the midst of this young black pianist's expanding sound world, jazz
emerged to play a crucial role. By the early 1920s, jazz had become the
first music associated with African-American culture to achieve a wide-
spread penetration into homes and communities via the new medium of
recording. Tatum taught himself to copy recordings by New York-based
pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, among others, and by 1926 was
playing professionally in Toledo clubs where jazz was performed. By

1929, he was performing on radio in the area. In 1932, he left Toledo, hired
by touring singer Adelaide Hall as one of her pianists, and the following
year made his first solo recordings for Brunswick in New York. These
moves provided the first-and quite dramatic-steps from a local and
regional celebrity to a national reputation that would sustain him, albeit
with ups and downs, until the end of his life. Art Tatum died in Los
Angeles in 1956.
Many people have commented on the apparent gap between the musically undistinguished surroundings of Tatum's early years and the scale
of his technical achievement. Teddy Wilson, for example, declared that he
had "never been able to trace the influence in Tatum-where and how he
241
evolved that way of playing in Toledo, Ohio." Noting that Tatum "never
played with a rhythm section before he came to New York," Wilson

remarked in particular that Tatum "was improvis[ing] those harmonies
... long before he came East. No other pianist had, even remotely, that
conception of playing" (quoted in Young 1963, 23).
Clearly, Tatum's was a special talent that no amount of contextualization can explain. But we can attempt to track the roots of his perspective
across the interactive flow of music and musicians that peopled his
world. Although it may be possible to argue a case for placing this perspective entirely, or almost entirely, within African-American culture and
to portray Tatum as one particular product of forces at work in fashioning distinctive cultural responses to the social experiences of being black
in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there
seems to be no special evidence for the view that he grew up and formed
his outlooks and approaches in an environment characterized above all by
racially determined cultural demarcation. Nor is there any evidence that
his sound world was controlled and dictated by jazz. This is not, of
course, to say that being black was of no significance in the story of his
life and his art or to question the obviously profound influence of jazz on
his life. But his sound world seems to have been formed by exposure to
the products of a wide range of musical cultures (embracing nineteenth-
century parlor songs and popular classics, marches, ragtime, and
Protestant church music), and he seems to have been equally interested

in most of them, regardless of their provenance.
It is no less true of Tatum than of his contemporaries in music that his
musical environment was not restricted to one style of music (it may have
been particularly significant for him, as I shall consider later). It is doubtful whether sealing oneself off musically, severely restricting one's musical experience according to taste, was ever a realistic option in the United
States, but by the 1920s, with the arrival of commercial radio broadcasting, it was almost impossible. Tatum grew up during years of profound
change in the ways in which music could be experienced. Individualsboth musicians and nonmusicians-constructed their use of music (as
they still may do) according to factors in their individual circumstances
and to their own particular position in a network crossing many spheres
of life. How they did so was affected in considerable measure by factors
(operating singly or, more probably, in combinations) such as class, race,
gender, religion, mobility, geographical location, and purchasing power.
It was also influenced by the activities of agents of provision and by the
variety of opportunities and constraints that presented themselves. At the
time of Tatum's birth, these agents of provision included not only songwriters, performers, and instrument makers but numerous intermedi-
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BMR Journal
aries: publishers, retailers, theatrical entrepreneurs, and venue owners. It

also included a young but steadily growing body of record companies.
In Tatum's early years, the world of commercial popular music,
although increasingly complex, continued to be dominated by a conjuncture that had been in force for some time. That conjuncture placed class
and economic factors in coalition with the activities of a particular group-
ing of intermediaries-piano manufacturers, sheet-music publishers,

retailers, performers, and theater owners-while leaving space for other
factors, such as race, as partial variables. It may well have been that one
factor in Tatum's personal makeup, his visual impairment-as a result of
which printed notation was of limited personal value (although he did
learn to read music)-in effect gave him a route out from at least part of
this particular dominant alliance and encouraged both his ear and his
practice of experimentation. In any case, by the time he was a teenager
the old coalition had substantially broken apart, to be replaced by one in
which the new media of recordings and radio played a dominant role. In
this new situation, the power of visual technology in alliance with sound
had been challenged by that of sound alone; and by the time visual technology reasserted itself in the movies, sound alone was too well established to be threatened by a competing technology.
In the new environment, the factor of race was both more and less
important. It was more important because the intermediary role played
by sound-based media was far more suitable to vernacular African-
American musical practice than was that of the print and notation-based
media, which had only grafted African-American music onto their production in a small way-and, it is often argued, at the price of considerable distortion. Now, African-American music was not only a significant
element in the industrial production of music (i.e., in the record companies' catalogs), but much of it was marketed in such a way (i.e., primarily at a black audience) as to emphasize that it was part of black culture.
But race was also less important because, while one product of the sound
media-records-was produced and sold within a structure that accepted race as a distinguishing factor, the other-radio-relied on a technology that offered the opportunity for those who controlled it to substan-
tially ignore boundaries such as those determined by class, race, and
geography. Radio airwaves could penetrate the lives of anyone who met
the one basic requirement-access to a set-and ignore other previously
decisive differences. A key part of its method was based on the recognition that, once a home possessed a radio, access to music required no further investment. Radio used this to extend its audience, not by sustaining
the heterogeneous appeal favored by the record industry (although radio
243
programming catered to some degree to what later became known as

niche markets) but by making fewer products work harder.
There is no doubt that in Toledo Tatum heard African-American music
on the radio in the shape of performances by Duke Ellington and Fats

Waller; and, according to his biography, he himself broadcast on radio
there. Equally, however, there seems little doubt that radio provided
Tatum, like many others, with an unprecedented potential exposure to
the stream of popular music that dominated the airwaves. To give but
one example, he is known to have been a devotee of the pianist Lee Sims,
who made many radio appearances in the late 1920s, featuring his par-
ticular orchestral approach to popular piano music and his particular

fondness for runs and arpeggios (Lester 1994, 123-126; Spencer 1978).
Tatum was not the only black musician of the time to demonstrate a
great familiarity with the dominant popular music tradition of his day,
but I suggest that in few if any other contemporary black musicians within the compass of jazz was that tradition both so essential to his own selfexpression and so inescapably present in its execution. No doubt, on a
day-to-day level he gained that familiarity by a number of routes, including recordings of other black musicians performing their versions of the
songs of the day. But perhaps as a consequence of his partial blindness,
he was an avid radio listener (he was particularly fond of sports broadcasting). He also had remarkable musical memory. It is surely more than
mere coincidence that the particular popular tunes on which he constructed his music (or perhaps more accurately, to which his music was a
response) were almost all staple fare for radio orchestras. A partial sample of tunes performed by Tatum in his career shows that a significant
proportion date from the 1920s and early 1930s, before he left Toledo for
New York (see Table 1). If Tatum's recordings are anything to go by (and
given his personal reticence, little else exists from the man himself), these
tunes played a major part in the soundscape of his life.
Hegemonies, Dialogues, and Intertexts
We will return to the subject of Tatum's sound world later. Let us now
turn once again to his reputation. I want in particular to identify some of
the specific features that critics have noted as characteristic of his method
and to consider whether-and if so, how and with what consequenceswe can reassess these in light of Tomlinson's enjoinder to remember the
"complex dialogues of self and other in which culture is created."
One of the most common methods of summarizing how Tatum differed from other jazz musicians has been to place him in relation to other
jazz pianists, to identify strands of influence, and on that basis to estab-
BMR Journal
244
Table 1. Publication dates of a selection of tunesfeatured in Art Tatum recordings

After You've Gone 1918
Aunt Hagar's Blues 1920
(Back Home in) Indiana 1917
Begin the Beguine 1935

Body and Soul 1930
I Can't Give You Anything bu
I Cover the Waterfront 1933
It's Only a Paper Moon 1933

Jitterbug Waltz 1942
Love
for
Sale
1930
Making Whoopee 1928

Mean
to
Me
1929
Mighty Like a Rose 1901

My Heart Stood Still 1927
Over the Rainbow 1939
September Song 1938

She's Funny That Way 1928
Someone to Watch Over Me 1926
Stay as Sweet as You Are 1934

Sweet
Tea
Lorraine
for
Two
1928
1924
There Will Never Be Another You 1942

Too Marvelous for Words 1937
The Very Thought of You 1934
When Your Lover Has Gone 1931
Willow Weep for Me 1932

Without a Song 1929
lish his uniqueness. British critic Ray Spence

vides a particularly concise instance of this
style reveals the foundation of James P. Jo
Hines. To this Tatum added exciting new di
on which he superimposed those sparklin
most common Johnson-Waller trademark fou
hand and the use of thirds and broken ch

Hines influence revealed itself in passag
octaves." Spencer goes on to identify and sp

from outside of the sphere of jazz: "The run
duced into his solos originated from his stud
245
adapted them to the jazz idiom and made them an integral part of his
style. I think it is likely that Tatum's knowledge of advanced harmony
came from the same source" (11). Spencer's choice of "exciting" to

describe Tatum's harmonic approach and "sparkling" to describe his
introduction of runs and arpeggios suggests that he has no particular

problem with either of these features of Tatum's style. He provides a
number of examples of harmonic innovations, including how Tatum

"used chromatically a series of chord changes of minor sevenths to dominant sevenths in his 1934 recording of 'When a Woman Loves a Man'"
(11). Other critics and musicians have shared Spencer's enthusiasm (for
example, Teddy Wilson, quoted earlier). But by no means is everyone
equally content with the particular matter of the "sparkling runs and
arpeggios." Gunther Schuller (1989, 480), for example, speaks of Tatum's
"careening arabesques." Schuller, in fact, is a skeptic in matters regarding
both harmony and "ornamentation," declaring that "Tatum's 'originality'
was undercut by the redundancy with which he used certain harmonic
and ornamental devices" (481). As a result, in his view, Tatum's art is
more accurately designated a craft, for it "remains eclectic, largely predictable, and surface" (478).
At stake here for Schuller is the inviolability of a certain notion of artis-
tic value, as applied to jazz. Tatum's approach, he states, means that he

"was not truly speaking an improviser" (481). Whereas outstanding jazz
musicians create original material out of old, Tatum "simply appropriated that which already existed and elaborated upon it" (480). In sum, "His
was a profuse art, so abundant that its problems were not . . . how to
attain greater technical control of his materials, but, rather, how to channel his superior gifts into a more deeply expressive and creatively original language--challenges which, if his career is seen in the long view, he
did not entirely meet" (477). Whether Schuller was consciously echoing
the earlier critique offered in 1959 by the French critic Andre Hodeir,
there are striking similarities. Hodeir, too, complained about (among
other things) ornamentation, finding that "overall, too many decorative
effects stand in the way of the continuity and even the unity of a musical
discourse" (Hodeir 1962, 179). While the particular target here is the
same, the ideal against which Hodeir believes it should be measured is

even grander than Schuller's. In writing of Tatum's "lack of ambition" in
remaining close to the melody, Hodeir contrives a total put-down, the
more severe for the faint praise that precedes it: "Equipped with greater
technical means and a better imagination than one finds in any other
pianist, he has an easy time doing superbly what I would have preferred
not to have seen him bother with at all " (176).
Tatum's fondness for quotation has also periodically irritated critics.
BMR Journal
246
British writer Michael Gibson (1960, 3), for example, deplored the "long
series of inapposite, showy and altogether incomprehensible .. quotations" that Tatum began to include in the mid-1940s. "Why," he asks
impatiently, "should My Old Kentucky Home ... be deliberately added
as a rehearsed coda to Someone to Watch Over Me?"
From these critiques, we can identify a set of practices that are judged
to be fundamentally problematic: elaboration, ornamentation, decora-
tion, appropriation, eclecticism, quotation, and preservation of the
melody. Frequently linked to these are a number of adjectives: surface,

profuse, and abundant. Absent (in the critics' terms) are deep expression
creatively original language, and unity of discourse. It is clear that the
critics are judging these practices by their lack of fit to an already estab
lished idea, in effect, to what a musical ideal (one notable here by it
absence) should contain. My concern here is partly with what this says
about the ideal but chiefly with the evident lack of interest in the possi
bility of alternative perspectives and interpretations.
Although most jazz criticism covering the period of Tatum's career,
including the school of writing represented by these examples, acknowledges the existence of a relationship between the original piece and the
jazz performance, it shows little or no enduring interest in that relation
ship. Indeed, apart from noting the harmonic changes that the origina
provides, the role of the prior musical data is regularly reduced to a min
imum. The aim of identifying how closely the musician in question fit
the ideal is not one that allows much space for dealing with relationship
of this kind. In Tatum's case, it is striking that the factors identified as
problematic all place the existence of a relationship in a more prominent
position: elaboration, decoration, and ornamentation all concede a considerable level of importance and persistence to the prior music on whic
these practices are worked; eclecticism, appropriation, and quotation

point to interactive processes between two pieces of music; and the
preservation of melody suggests a relationship based on coexistence, in

which one piece is embedded in another.
If the kind of jazz writing in which Art Tatum is typically featured has
little interest in such relationships (whether it is broadly pro-Tatum o

not), the same is clearly not the case with theoretical ideas developed in
other critical quarters, most notably in the poststructuralist perspective
found most obviously (but not uniquely) in semiotics and in literary and
cultural studies and collected together under the term intertextuality. A
Richard Middleton (2000, 61) has noted, the key feature of this "rather
modish term," namely, that "all texts make sense only through their rela
tionships, explicit or implicit, with other texts," means that it embraces
range of techniques, including borrowing, parody, quotation, allusion,
247
glossing, and punning. The basic requirement that unites them, that a text
refer to other texts, results in a concept that "pushes against the tendential self-sufficiency of 'works'."
Finding the one term intertextuality inadequate to cover the variations
it reveals in practice, some theorists have attempted to develop subcate-
gories. One such is Canadian musicologist Gerard Genette. Genette's

ideas, set out in his 1982 study Palimpsestes-in itself a suggestive title for
our purposes-have been very usefully laid out and applied by fellow
Canadian Serge Lacasse (2000, 35ff), in the field of popular music. As
Lacasse explains, in Genette's formulation transtextuality becomes the
umbrella term. For Genette, transtextuality means (to quote from
Lacasse's summary) "any type of relation, explicit or not, that may link a
text with others" (36). That, basically, is other people's "intertextuality."
Beneath the umbrella term are five subcategories, identifying five different types of textual relationship: intertextuality, hypertextuality, metatex-
tuality, architextuality, and paratextuality. The first two of these concern

us here. Genette uses intertextuality to mean "the effective presence of a
text within another" (38), that is, the "copresence" of two texts.
Hypertextuality refers to "any relationship uniting a text B (the 'hypertext') to an earlier text A (the 'hypotext'), upon which it is grafted in a
manner that is not that of commentary." (A commentarial relationship is
the main characteristic of metatextuality.) "In other words," states

Lacasse, "a hypertext is a result of some kind of transformation or imitation
of a hypotext"; it involves practices that "aim at producing a new text out

of a previous one." Intertextuality, by comparison, involves practices that
"aim at including elements of a previous text within the present text" (37;
emphasis added).
It is not difficult to relate both of these terms to a great deal of jazz. In
approaches that are based on taking a preexistent musical idea-be it a

tune, a phrase, a scale, or a rhythm-and creating a performance that
derives elements from that idea, there is inevitably a "copresence" in
some form, even if the degree of departure from the original varies and
even if, in some cases, what is being engaged with is an "original" that
has already undergone a degree of transformation in the musician's

mind. "The effective presence of one text within another" (intertextuality) is a particularly concise way of summarizing the ongoing presence of
the original musical idea, whether that presence is notable as harmony,
melody, rhythm, or all three. It also places the phenomena of quotation
and allusion (often a source of irritation for critics, whichever musician is
responsible) in a wider context. Similarly, it makes a great deal of sense to
describe many jazz performances as being directed toward "producing a
new text out of a previous one." In the jazz performances of some of
BMR Journal
248
Tatum's contemporaries, who like him learned their trade in the 1920s
and 1930s and also based much of their music on popular songs of the
day, it is clearly appropriate to speak of the creation of a new text from an
old one. One thinks of Coleman Hawkins' celebrated 1939 recording of

"Body and Soul" or of numerous recordings by Lester Young in which he
seems able to breathe new life into the dry bones of a song, such as his
1945 recording with Nat King Cole of "Mean to Me." (Young's approach,
like Tatum's, is also notable for its fondess for playfulness, a characteristic Genette and Lacasse place under the heading of hypertextuality.)
In much of the jazz performed in Tatum's adult life, intertextuality and
hypertextuality are both present, but the combination is rarely an even
one. To put it another way, not all jazz performances that are predicated
upon the presence of one text within another appear to want to transform
that text in order to create a new one out of the encounter. Equally, not all
jazz performances that arise out of a separate text have much interest in
that text beyond the raw data it provides (which usually means chord
progressions).
The distinction is not necessarily one that can be drawn by putting
individual musicians on one side of the line or the other: they are quite
likely to use both approaches on different occasions. Instead, we can

speak of intertextual and hypertextual tendencies. Many of Sidney
Bechet's recorded performances, for example, can be described as predominantly intertextual: the original melody dominates a recording such
as "Sweet Lorraine" (1940), whose beauty lies in a combination of melodic variation, subtleties of rhythm, and above all, the sonorities obtained
by the duetting frontline musicians, Bechet and trumpeter Muggsy

Spanier. Other Bechet performances, such as the celebrated "Blue
Horizon" (1945), are more transformative: Bechet's miraculous variations
of sound and musical line produce a recording that has been much
admired as, in effect, a new text.
One can identify intertextuality and hypertextuality in Art Tatum's

music also. Intertextuality in Genette's sense is present in his fondness for
quotation that so annoyed Gibson. (A good example is "Nobody Knows
the Trouble I've Seen," interpolated regularly into "Body and Soul.") He
also uses an approach that is closer to allusion, hinting at another
melody.1 But more important, the term copresence draws attention to the
frequent prominence of the original in Tatum's approach. Hypertextuality for its part seems clearly present in the way in which he takes an exist-
1. In Serge Lacasse's application of Genette's theory to popular music, he provides a

number of types of intertextuality and hypertextuality, among them quotation and allusion,
parody and pastiche.
249
ing popular song and effects some kind of transformation. This is apparent in his custom of altering the harmony of a song during his performance (Benny Green once described a Tatum treatment of Ellington's
"Sittin' and a-Rockin"' as "skittering with grace down unsuspected harmonic corridors" [Green 1975]). But the transformation he effects is often
much more extensive. For example, in his 1953 Los Angeles performance
of "Love for Sale," the original remains recognizable melodically but in
no other way, finding itself involved in a complex sound environment in
which harmony, rhythm, tone color, and mood shift rapidly, humorously,
and sometimes dramatically. As Lester (1994, 130-131) has suggested,

such transformations also have an architectural quality, where "large
thought-out patterns (give) coherence to details that might seem fragmentary."
Despite these transformations, it may not be entirely appropriate to
speak-or speak only-of the creation of a new text. Tatum can be listened
to and thought about in this way, but I suggest that certain factors make it
uncomfortable as an overall interpretive stance. Here, we return to the

"problematic" features of Tatum's style. I want to focus on two in particular. The first is the persistence of melody. Although there is much variety
in how Tatum goes about his work, certain features are common to many
recorded performances. One is the way in which the original melody
retains a distinctive presence in the midst of much, often quite frenetic,
activity. It does not, however, dominate. It stimulates activity, and often
appears to be the center of activity, without dictating it. Although often
fragmented, it remains as a kind of hard core, involved in the activity but
relatively unaffected by it. No matter that Tatum subjects it sometimes to
a harmonic rewrite, no matter how much he sometimes varies it-so that,
employing the everday language often used to describe musical interpre-
tation, one could perhaps say he "gets inside the music"-he appears
above all to want to keep the original melody out there where he can hear
it and talk with it. Occasionally, he seems to want to rid himself of it but
cannot. In these circumstances, it makes little sense to speak of Tatum
absorbing the original, or interpreting it, or re-creating it-or indeed overpowering it. It is, in the end, an immutable companion.
The second "problematic" feature embraces the three related terms

elaboration, ornamentation, and decoration (for convenience, I subsume
them under the term ornamentation). In broad terms, much musical ornamentation acknowledges the dominant presence of the idea being ornamented and does nothing to challenge it. Indeed, in baroque music it was
commonly thought that ornamentation of a melody enhanced the
melody's character. Other types of ornamentation are designed to add an

element of display. This display does not attempt to affect the musical
250
BMR Journal
idea or indeed any subsequent development, extension, or other teleological occurrence in which the idea is involved; instead, it draws atten-
tion to itself-sometimes modestly, sometimes with no modesty. In

Tatum there is ornamentation of the melody in the "traditional" sense, by
means of devices such as appoggiatura; equally, there are instances in

which the ornamentation may seem to be engaged in self-display. But-
and perhaps more important than either of these-there are also the
devices that are associated with ornamentation but to which Tatum gives
a space, and role, of their own. Especially prominent are the runs-"the
frequent left-hand, right-hand, and two-handed runs, all superlative and
incomparable," as Samuel Floyd (1995, 112) has described them.
Although we could discuss these features separately in this way, it does
not entirely make sense to do so. For the focus is not on the persistence of
melody pure and simple but on the way that persistence is handled; and
one major way in which Tatum handles it is, almost literally, by the ornamentation. Examples are plentiful. In both the 1945 V-disc recording of
"Lover" and the 1955 recording of "When Your Lover Has Gone," Tatum
uses the ornamental devices to walk around the melody. They keep a bit
of distance from it, then come close to it; they talk with it, toy with it, spin
off it, push it aside, and then let it back in; perhaps we could say, they find
ways to live with it. It is a rich and restless dialogue.
The dialogue between ornamentation and melody is not the entire

story, however; ornamentation does not work with (at, alongside)
melody alone, any more than does any element in Tatum's style in its
relationship with anything else.
Another key element is his famous left-hand bass patterns. Tatum's left
hand has been much admired, even by some of his sternest critics, but his
decoration has not; yet both are part of the same enterprise.
Beyond the Text I: Space and Theater
How can that enterprise be described? In a formalist sense it is possible, and important, to build a picture of the relationship between structure and detail in a Tatum performance and so obtain the evidence that
will allow us to confirm Howlett's (1983, 236) unexceptional but significant comment that "there is often a variety of musical activity taking
place simultaneously." The excursion into intertextuality and hypertextuality is not only highly suggestive for styles of jazz that were current in
Tatum's lifetime; it also enables us to begin to see beyond formalism into

the complexity of dialogical relationships in Tatum's music, relationships
both between musical texts (his and the preexisting ones he chooses) and
within the ones he creates. But then what?
251
I confess to feeling uneasy about taking theories developed for the

study of literary texts and applying them too rigidly to music, especially
if the process results in excessive attention being paid to certain aspects
and too little to others. Theories based on notions of textuality-howev-
er broadly the notion of a text may be understood-almost inevitably

focus attention on the results of activity and away from the activity itself.
One possible solution may be found in the work of Ingrid Monson (1996),
who has proposed the term intermusicality as a musical equivalent of

intertextuality to describe the ways in jazz that interplay is conveyed
aurally through musical sound itself. More than can be expected from
intertextuality, intermusicality draws attention to interactive activity in
performance, whether between musicians or within the music.2 Monson
uses intermusicality in the context of group interaction, but can we adapt
the term for Tatum?
Such highly accomplished pianists as Oscar Peterson and Hank Jones

have jokingly referred to their impression that Tatum must have more
than two hands or that there must be more than one person playing
(Lester 1994, 44-45; Pullman 1996). One can approach the often-bewildering intersecting activity that Tatum presents as "a variety of musical
activity taking place simultaneously"-in other words, as a complex layered treatment of time. But we can also hear the various lines (whether
such a line is an ornament, a rhythmic figure, an ostinato pattern) as creating patterns of movement across space. In this space, as prowling lefthand figures, dramatic runs, fragments of melody, and heavy chords
interact and intersect, they create the impression of multiple presences,
each with a role to play.
The theatrical metaphor is not accidental. It is tempting to think of any
jazz soloist as engrossed in an abstract challenge with the many parameters of musical expression-perhaps especially tempting when the soloist
is blind or partially blind-and clearly Tatum set himself enormous technical challenges with his material. But a Tatum performance is not only
about abstract challenges. The way in which he preserves the persona of
the tune and introduces all manner of gesture and movement around it,
and conversation with it, suggests a conception that is dramatic, even
theatrical.
Space and movement, gesture and dialogue between characters are all
readily apparent in a recording such as "Please Be Kind" (1955). Here,

Tatum employs a favorite tactic of a slow introduction, not out of tempo
but with no stated rhythm. Right- and left-hand phrases toy with the
2. Monson does not attempt to introduce any subcategories along the lines of Genette's
sophisticated system, but there seems to be no particular reason why something similar
could not be attempted.
252
BMR Journal
melody in an exploratory fashion, as if in an initial process of getting

acquainted. Then the left hand introduces a regular rhythmic movement,
and it is not too much to say that the multiple presences begin to dance.
A choreographed theater of the mind it may be, but one with very realistic touches. The left-hand figure is a bit discordant, somewhat disgruntled, out of sorts, or uncooperative; then it gradually comes around.
Thinking of his music in this way enables us to begin to put into context the widespread unease that is often felt about ornamentation in
Tatum's music. Unease with ornamentation and decoration-with what
Schuller had in mind when he termed Tatum's art "profuse"-has a long

history, especially in Protestant cultures. It links to fear of display and
progresses readily to accusations of insincerity. Historically, part of this
fear has often been directed at theatricality. Jonas Barish (1981, 117) see
the hostility characteristic of antitheatricality as based in fear of the neg
ative effect on order and stability of an emphasis "that prizes ... exploration, flexibility, variety and versatility." As such, antitheatricality
embodies "an ideal of rectitude," central to which is truth to oneself
(echoing the Puritan-derived fear of dissembling). This ideal of rectitude

is pitted against an "ideal of plenitude." In the case of jazz writing, the
two ideals are not so diametrically opposed; the components of plenitude
(exploration, flexibility, variety, and versatility) are seen as central to th
music. But rather than leave them in tension, the workings of the jazz
canon have reconciled them in a particular way. Plenitude may be reconciled with rectitude if it is grounded in practice that has internal organic
unity and if it is the authentic reflection of the inner person (whatever his
or her character). This approach has great difficulty when faced by
Tatumesque ornamentation, which seems less preoccupied with organic

unity or inner self. On top of that, the multiple presences that populate
the Tatumesque world are not shy. They have no fear of display; it is par
of their way of life, part of what enables them to relate to one another.
In the context of an Art Tatum performance, the concepts subsumed

under Genette's transtextuality and Monson's intermusicality lack the
ability to suggest another set of relationships: that between the Tatum
performance itself and the performative activity it represents. In other
words, we are in the presence of the "word facing both ways." Mikhail
Bakhtin's phrase acknowledges both the dialogical relationships between
the original musical ideas (especially melodies) and Tatum's perfor
mance, and those within the performance, but it also draws attention to
the fact that that performance faces outward toward another.
253
Beyond the Text II: Dualities and Sound Worlds
This exploration so far has, I hope, done something to reveal the dialogical complexity in Art Tatum's music, but we still need to examine that
complexity in a broader cultural sense. One can take a cue from Monson
(1996, 129) and note that intermusical relationships "may be intercultural relationships as well." She is speaking of the way in which jazz musi-
cians draw on music from outside of African-American music: "The cul-
tural knowledge of African American musicians includes familiarity with

both 'black' and 'white' music, and it is upon all of this knowledge that a
musician draws in the act of performance. This is what I mean when I say
that music making is an active participant in cultural discourse" (130).
As Monson acknowledges and discusses, the concept of signifying has
become noted for its ability to make a link between ideas derived from
intertextuality and the specificities of the black experience in response to
its complex cultural encounters. The now well-known term requires no
detailed description or analysis here, but some key ideas need to be

emphasized. In the seminal text by Henry Louis Gates (1988), the folk tales
of the trickster figure, the signifying monkey, and their African predeces-
sors are used as a key to develop an argument that there is a centrality in

African-American cultural practice of a set of rhetorical interpretive strate-
gies that are based around figurative troping devices and that proceed not
by passing on information but, like the monkey, by manipulating it. Thus,
"One does not signify something; rather, one signifies in some way" (54).
A key element in signifying that others have picked out from Gates's
formulation has been the act of working transformatively on preexisting
material. This is seen clearly in Floyd's (1995, 8) summary of how the concept translates into music: "Musical signifyin(g) is the rhetorical use of
pre-existing material as a means of demonstrating respect for or poking
fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastiche,

implication, indirection, humor, tone play or word play, the illusion of
speech or narration, or other troping mechanisms."
Use of the term developed originally within African-American vernacular culture, where it meant, as anthropologist Roger Abrahams (1970,
264) neatly summarized it, "a language of implication." From this, Gates
deduced that the vernacular culture had "decolonized" the term from its
original English usage. In the process, as Gates (1988, 50) put it, the
semantic register had been replaced with the rhetorical, the syntagmatic
axis with the paradigmatic. "Everything that must be excluded for mean-
ing to remain coherent and linear comes to bear in the process of
Signifyin(g)."3 But at the same time, in Gates's theorization, the shadow

3. Gates' reason for adopting the spelling "Signifyin(g)" is that it enables him to represent
254
BMR Journal
of the "other" earlier meaning of "to signify" remains: the fact that the act
of signifying, in whatever context, could be taken as part of a syntagmatic chain of meaning is part of the ambiguity.
Many scholars have noted the duality that this involves, as well as its
possible indebtedness to W.E.B. Du Bois' famous double consciousness

metaphor. While acknowledging this, Gates also draws Bakhtin into the
frame. Bakhtin's concept of the double-voiced utterance allows the

important perception that an utterance can have a new semantic orientation inserted into it and still retain its earlier orientation; and that utter-
ances can be inscribed with each other's meanings (always allowing for
the unequal power relations often at work in each context). This in turn
enables Gates to encapsulate signifying as "black double-voicedness"
(Gates 1988, 50-51).

The concept can appear overarching, but two related factors give support to the idea that signifying may be an appropriate term to use in
exploring African-American musical culture. First, although the term is
no more peculiar to music than intertextuality and related terms, it distinguishes itself in being a vernacular term that has been adopted and
adapted for use in academic discourse. For Gates, this is not accidental;
he insisted that there was no academically imposed distance between his
theoretical approach and vernacular usage and that he was identifying "a
theory of criticism that is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition"
(xix). And indeed, the word does occur in vernacular speech in musical
contexts (for example, in the title of a Count Basie recording).
Second, Gates submits that, although parallel types of interpretive
strategy exist in other cultures, a distinctive term is needed because
African-American experience is different. The idea of signifying keeps us

alert to the fact that, in the context of North America, faced with the per-
sistence and insistence of the dominant culture, the specific cultural prac-
tice of manipulating cultural data in ways that mixed semantic and
rhetorical registers-a practice that African-American culture no doubt

shared with other cultures-acquired a particular significance. Across the
years, it came to be used with increasing sophistication not just as a survival mechanism but as a creative response.
In many respects, the term signifying is an appropriate one to use in dis-
cussing Art Tatum, and it is the context in which he is briefly discussed

by Floyd (1995, 112-113). Although signifying lacks the subtle variations
of the nest of terms brought together by Genette under transtextuality, it
comes close to Monson's intermusicality in its stress on highlighting

orthographically the fact that African-American culture signifies on the processes of signif-
cation typical of mainstream culture. As he puts it, "the absent g is a figure for the
Signifyin(g) black difference" (Gates 1988, 46).
255
activity in preference to the consequences of activity; indeed, as a verb

rather than an abstract noun, it embodies that preference within itself. In
discussing the applicability of signifying, Monson (1996, 87) cautions

against extending its use to the works of individuals. What is lost, she
maintains, "is a sense of how signifying as an aesthetic developed from
interactive, participatory, turn-taking games and genres that are multiply
authored." But far from being a reason not to extend the idea to an individual such as Art Tatum, that very description seems to encapsulate
much of his music. Single-authored though it may be, his music could be
said to be built around re-presenting "interactive, participatory, turn-tak-
ing games" in which the multiple presences do their own dialogical

authoring.
But there is more. Signifying adds to the frame the crucial element of
cultural particularity, connecting dialogues of self and other to the specific experiences of being an African-American artist. Tatum's music as
we have discussed it not only explores dialogic relationships between

texts, between text and performance, and between performance and performance, but it also explores relationships with the dominant culture. In
basing his music almost entirely on that culture's Tin Pan Alley and
Broadway repertoire, Tatum could be said to be signifying on some
important representatives of that culture's badge of identity. In this context, the fascinating encounters between the melody, almost stubborn in
its persistence, and the apparently endlessly varied movement and gesture around it constitute eloquent statements in the tradition of "black
double-voicedness." The mixing of semantic and rhetorical registers is
readily apparent in a performance such as "Danny Boy," recorded live in
1955 in the home of Hollywood musical director Ray Heindorf. Here,

Tatum plays with and gently parodies the famous Irish tune, while at the
same time loving it to death. One suspects, listening to the reactions of his
audience, that they got the idea too.
Yet once again, we should be wary of drawing the interpretive string
too tightly around the object of study. Monson (1996, 125) reminds us that
"[e]ach individual has a personal listening world that intersects to a

greater or lesser degree with those of other participants in a particular
musical tradition, but no two people are likely to have exactly the same
sound worlds." These diverse sound worlds are inevitably structured:
there are always forces at work that tend toward unification, centralization, and standardization, and there are forces that encourage multiplici-
ty and, in Bakhtin's term, heteroglossia. But there are no absolutes.
Certain patterns, certain power relations between sonic forces, may be

more likely in any given context (such as African-American culture) and
may have a powerful role to play, but ultimately, the way particular
256
BMR Journal
forms of musical expression are structured in relation to one another also

varies from person to person. Monson quotes approvingly from the poet
Elizabeth Alexander, who, she says, "has proposed the term collage to
describe the multiplicity of voices that coexist in African-American identity. Alexander ... explicitly moves away from a dichotomous opposition
of black and white to a perspective that includes multiple voices. She

rejects the notion that African Americans speak from a state of 'spiritual
and cultural schizophrenia and self-division' in favor of a conception that
'maps a theoretical space in which the myriad particulars of identity can
reside"' (100). That is the kind of thing I have been attempting here.
Art Tatum performed most frequently as a soloist and so has often been
judged as such, complete with all the trappings of a monological individualist, insufficiently interested in understanding others. But I have
tried to suggest that his personal world was replete with a multiplicity of
others. The myriad particulars of his identity can only begin to be under-
stood when we accept the heterogeneity of his musical and cultural
world, the multiple presences with which he peopled the world he created, and the complex dialogical interplay it drew on and expressed.
DISCOGRAPHY
Bechet, Sidney. Blue horizon. Sidney Bechet: Jazz classics. Vol. 1. Blue Note CDP7893842.
Compact disc.
.Sweet Lorraine. Bechet-Spanier bigfour. Joker SM3090.
Hawkins, Coleman. Body and soul. Smithsonian collection of classic jazz. Columbia Special
Products P6 11891.
Tatum, Art. Danny boy. Art Tatum: 20th century piano genius. Verve 531 763-2. Compact disc.
. Love for sale. The Tatum solo masterpieces. Vol. 1. Pablo 2310-723.
. Lover. Art Tatum: The V-discs. Black Lion Records BLP 30203.
. Please be kind. The Tatum Solo masterpieces. Vol. 10. Pablo 2310-862.
. When your lover has gone. The Tatum solo masterpieces. Vol. 10. Pablo 2310-862.
Young, Lester. Mean to me. Lester swings. Verve 2610 039.
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Philadelphia. 2nd ed. Chicago: Aldine.
Barish, Jonas. 1981. The antitheatrical prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1995. The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the
United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criti-
cism. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Genette, G6rard. 1982. Palimpsestes: La litterature au second degre. Paris: Seuil.

Gibson, Michael. 1960. The paradox of Art Tatum. Jazz Journal 12, no. 10 (October): 3-4.
Giddins, Gary. 1998. Art Tatum (sui generis). In Visions ofjazz: Thefirst century, 439-444. New
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Howlett, Felicity. 1983. An introduction to Art Tatum's performance approaches:

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Johnson, Bruce. 2002. Jazz practices. In The Cambridge companion to jazz, edited by David
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The Sound World of Art Tatum

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Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago

The Sound World of Art Tatum

THE SOUND WORLD OF ART TATUM

When a French journalist asked writer Andre Gide in 1905 whom

tion, it dissolves instantly into disappointment. Although none

expressed it quite so succinctly, many jazz writers have felt much t

interest does that merit?" (Wiedemann 1955, 28).

range of the instrument were unprecedented.... [H]e had an unerring

Among musicians (where reverence for him was almost unanimous),

Giddins (1998, 439) entitled an essay on Tatum, "Art Tatum (Sui

a bemused ambivalence in regard to Tatum and to have postponed

resolving the issue by consigning him to the special kind of marginality

ality more charismatic-had he been one of those whom jazz

historiography has seen as "spectacularly socially dysfunctional practi-

tioners available for romanticisation" (Johnson 2002)-it is possible,

his skills, Tatum was an easy-going generous spirit, whose lifestyle,

making, appeared to have absorbed little of its more "colorful" side

beyond a fatal taste for drink.

the complex dialogues of self and other in which culture is created"

Horn * The Sound World of Art Tatum

Tatum stands in need of reconsideration but that such reconsideration

arship, under the influence of ethnomusicology, has emphasized th

interactive nature of jazz, the dominance of solo performance in Tatum'

career tends to leave him saddled with descriptions such as Gunthe

may sound unpromising territory on which to uncover the dialogic

place and time and articulating itself-performing, if you will-in an

through sets of dialogical relationships.

with its marching bands, perhaps street musicians), some in framed

particularly musical family. At some point, Tatum had a black piano

then" (42)-popular across the spectrum of society in which a young

one sense, in that his family, although priding themselves on their

first music associated with African-American culture to achieve a wide-

playing professionally in Toledo clubs where jazz was performed. By

moves provided the first-and quite dramatic-steps from a local and

regional celebrity to a national reputation that would sustain him, albeit

Horn * The Sound World of Art Tatum

played with a rhythm section before he came to New York," Wilson

century parlor songs and popular classics, marches, ragtime, and

Protestant church music), and he seems to have been equally interested

aries: publishers, retailers, theatrical entrepreneurs, and venue owners. It

In Tatum's early years, the world of commercial popular music,

ing of intermediaries-piano manufacturers, sheet-music publishers,

by sound-based media was far more suitable to vernacular African-

tially ignore boundaries such as those determined by class, race, and

Horn * The Sound World of Art Tatum

programming catered to some degree to what later became known as

There is no doubt that in Toledo Tatum heard African-American music

on the radio in the shape of performances by Duke Ellington and Fats

ticular orchestral approach to popular piano music and his particular

Table 1. Publication dates of a selection of tunesfeatured in Art Tatum recordings

Aunt Hagar's Blues 1920

(Back Home in) Indiana 1917

Begin the Beguine 1935

I Cover the Waterfront 1933

It's Only a Paper Moon 1933

Making Whoopee 1928

Mighty Like a Rose 1901

September Song 1938

Someone to Watch Over Me 1926

Stay as Sweet as You Are 1934

There Will Never Be Another You 1942

The Very Thought of You 1934

When Your Lover Has Gone 1931

Willow Weep for Me 1932