The History of Jazz (21 page)

Before he got through too many stanzas the Lion was standing over him, cigar blazing. Like if the cat was weak with the left hand, the Lion would say, “What’s the matter, are you a cripple?” Or, “When did you break your left arm?” Or, “Get up, I will show you how it’s supposed to go.”

Smith’s swagger was as much a part of his reputation as his playing. “When Willie Smith walked into a place,” James P. Johnson explained, “his every move was a picture … studied, practiced and developed just like it was a complicated piano piece.” Nat Hentoff likened the Lion’s stroll to the keyboard to “Don Juan on the way to an assignation.”
¹⁴

Smith met formidable competitors in the nightspots and rent parties where Harlem stride evolved. In addition to Johnson, these late-night sessions might feature any one of a number of keyboard protagonists. Taken as a whole, they form a cast of characters worthy of a Damon Runyon novel. Luckey Roberts had worked as a child acrobat before becoming a professional pianist and brought a flair for dramatic pyrotechnics with him to the keyboard. His massive hands could span a fourteenth, and his octaves and tremolos were the envy of his peers. Little is known about stride player Abba Labba, but his powerful left hand and predilection for sophisticated harmonic substitutions may have prefigured the later work of Art Tatum. Another mysterious stride master, known simply as Seminole, was a formidable southpaw—in his autobiography Count Basie recalls losing a cutting contest to him, lamenting “he had a left hand like everybody else had a right hand. … And he dethroned me. Took my crown!”
¹⁵
Donald Lambert spent only four years in Harlem, but though he was nicknamed the Lamb he was more than ready to match up with the Lion at piano battles. “I believe this performance is technically impossible,” Ethan Iverson, a historian of the keyboard as well as a skilled practitioner himself with his trio The Bad Plus, has quipped with regard to Lambert’s rendition of “Anitra’s Dance”; but a surviving video testifies to Lambert’s ability to play it with just his two hands and no assistance from the audience.
¹⁶
Eubie Blake, a songwriter and raconteur as well as a noted pianist, was another charismatic exponent of the new style. Earl Hines recalls Blake, during this era, sporting a raccoon coat and derby, and always carrying a cane to enhance his stage presence—even when no stage was in sight; but Blake saved his best effects for the piano, where he would lift his hands high, in theatrical fashion, sometimes conducting with one, while continuing to pound the keys with the other. Blake lived to celebrate his hundredth birthday (although official documents only give him credit for ninety-six years at his death in 1983), but by any measure he spent more than eighty of them earning his living in the music industry, entertaining audiences with a keyboard style that combined a sure sense of ragged syncopation with a sensitivity to the melodic possibilities of popular music.

Yet Thomas “Fats” Waller did more than any of these players to bring the Harlem style to the attention of the broader American public. Born in Harlem on May 21, 1904, Waller honed his skills by drawing on the full range of opportunities that New York City could provide. His teachers included two great local institutions, Juilliard and James P. Johnson, as well as much in between. His early performance venues were equally diverse, reflecting Waller’s adaptability to a gamut of settings, from the sacred to the profane. He was heard at religious services (where his father, a Baptist lay preacher, presided); at Harlem’s Lincoln Theater, where he accompanied silent movies on the pipe organ; at rent parties and cabarets; literally everywhere and anywhere a keyboard might be at hand. His pristine piano tone and and technical assurance could well have distinguished him even in symphonic settings. Yet these considerable skills as an instrumentalist were eventually overshadowed by Waller’s other talents. While still in his teens, Waller initiated his career as a songwriter, and over the next two decades he would produce a number of successful compositions, many of which remain jazz standards, including “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Squeeze Me,” and “Jitterbug Waltz.” In time, Waller’s comedic abilities and engaging stage persona would add further momentum to his career, pointing to a range of further opportunities, only some of which he lived to realize.

Waller’s reputation in the jazz world rests primarily on his many boisterous performances and recordings—the latter comprising around six hundred tracks made over a twenty-year period. With unflagging exuberance, Waller talked, sang, joked, exhorted band members, and, almost as an afterthought, played the piano on these memorable sides. At times, they sound more like a party veering out of control than a recording session. Indeed, this was the quintessential party music for those who had come of age under Prohibition—a time when the most festive soirees were, by definition, illicit. Waller was skilled at playing Falstaff to this generation, hinting at speakeasy enticements with a wink of the eye, a telling quip, or other intimations of immorality. True, a cavalier aesthetic has always dominated jazz, celebrating the eternal in the most intense aspects of the here and now—do we expect anything less from an art form built on improvisation?—but few artists pushed this attitude to the extremes that Waller did. And audiences loved it. With a winning, warm demeanor, Waller made them feel like they were honored guests at his party, drinking from the best bottle in the house, privy to the wittiest asides, and seated front-row center to hear the band.

Although Waller’s small-combo work captured the public’s imagination, his solo keyboard performances, documented on a handful of recordings and player piano rolls, remain his most poised statements as a jazz artist. Familiar stride piano elements—an oompah left hand coupled with syncopated right-hand figures—serve as the building blocks of his playing here, but Waller leavens them with a compositional ingenuity that raises them above the work of his peers. Waller’s solo work reveals his omnivorous musical appetite, drawing on the blues (hear the majestic slow blues in “Numb Fumblin’ ”), classical music (evoked, for instance, in the high-register figures of “African Ripples”), and boogie-woogie (note its ingenious interpolation in the opening phrase of “Alligator Crawl”), as well as the ragtime roots of the music (as in “Handful of Keys” and “Smashing Thirds”). On “Viper’s Drag,” Waller toys with the contrast between an ominous dark opening theme in a minor key and a swinging major mode section—a device Ellington used frequently during this same period in crafting his own version of Harlem jazz. Combining his talents as a pianist and his sense of compositional balance, Waller’s solo works stand out as the high point of the Harlem stride tradition.

While most other jazz musicians of his generation gravitated toward the big bands in the 1930s and 1940s, Waller cultivated other ambitions. His activities took him anywhere and everywhere the entertainment industry flourished, from the theaters of Broadway to the motion picture studios of Hollywood. Even when he confined his attentions to music, Waller’s restless seeking after new challenges was ever apparent. In a half-dozen areas—as pianist, organist, vocalist, songwriter, bandleader, and sideman—he made a mark that is still felt in the worlds of jazz and popular music. His successes of the prewar years were topped by a well-received 1938 European tour. In Scotland, wearing a Glengarry tartan, he dazzled the audience with a Harlem stride reworking of “Loch Lomond” and was brought back for ten curtain calls. The following year he returned to England, where he worked on a grand scale, composing and recording his “London Suite,” comprising six piano sketches. Back in the States, he performed and recorded prolifically and undertook a range of new projects. In 1943, Waller managed to write the music for the stage show
Early to Bed
, tour extensively, and travel to Hollywood to costar in the film
Stormy Weather
(along with Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson). The strain of pursuing these multiple careers may have been too much. On December 15, 1943, Waller died of pneumonia while on a cross-country train trip back to New York. At the time of his passing, he was at the peak of his popularity. Had he lived, Waller would no doubt have built on his early forays into radio and movies and would have been a natural for the medium of television.

Around this same time, another vernacular form of African American keyboard music was making a mark on American popular tastes. Boogie-woogie, as this style was called, first came to the attention of the music industry in the 1920s but achieved its greatest popularity in the early 1940s, when the faddish sound served as the basis for a number of hit records. This musical idiom combined insistent left-hand patterns based on blues chord progressions with syncopated melody lines or block chords in the right hand. The style demanded exceptional hand independence and a sure sense of time from the performer. The term
boogie-woogie
first came into use in the late 1920s—although the roots of this style may date back to the late nineteenth century—and might have originally applied to a dance that was accompanied by this boisterous piano music (implied, for example, in Pine Top Smith’s spoken commentary on “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” from 1928). The style achieved its highest pitch as unaccompanied keyboard music, although it was not uncommon for pianists to perform together in duos and trios, as on “Boogie Woogie Prayer” recorded by Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson. The leading practitioners occasionally tried their dextrous hands at other keyboard styles, but, for the most part, boogie-woogie remained a fringe music, lingering in the interstices between blues and jazz. For a brief spell, mainstream performers embraced it, as demonstrated by Tommy Dorsey in “Boogie Woogie” (1938), Count Basie in “Basie Boogie” (1941), and the Andrews Sisters in “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (1941). More authentic examples of the idiom can be found in such recordings as Meade Lux Lewis’s “Honky Tonk Train Blues” and Albert Ammons’s “Shout for Joy.”

Historians of these and other early twentieth-century piano styles—Harlem stride, boogie-woogie, and other strands of jazz and popular keyboard music—face their greatest challenge in trying to place the genre-crossing and genre-busting artist Art Tatum, whose work from the early 1930s through the mid-1950s seemed to set its own rules and follow its own evolutionary schemas. He stands out as the greatest virtuoso in the Harlem stride piano tradition—and also demonstrated his mastery, on many occasions, of boogie-woogie—yet he also did much more; as such, he remains a complex and controversial figure, one difficult to situate with any real precision in the stylistic pigeonholes commonly used in histories of modern American music. One invariably ends up reaching for the oldest cliché of them all: simply asserting that Tatum was “ahead of his time.” Yet it is equally valid to see Tatum as obsessed with the achievements of the past, not just in jazz but also in classical music, given the bravura Lisztian aspects of his playing.

Certainly Tatum’s vision of jazz music was initially inspired by the Harlem stride tradition, and though he stayed true to many of its mannerisms and devices until the end of his career, he more often than not subverted these selfsame conventions, tore them apart, and used them piecemeal in building his own grandiloquent conception of jazz piano. For Tatum, Harlem stride served as a foundation on which more complex musical superstructures could be built, just as medieval Christians often constructed cathedrals on the sites of pagan shrines. And though some might suggest that Art Tatum represented the finest flowering of the Harlem stride tradition, in point of fact, he rang its death knell. In developing his mature style, Tatum all but exhausted the possibilities of stride, forcing later piano modernists—Monk, Powell, Tristano, Brubeck, Evans, and others—to veer off into far different directions in an attempt to work their way outside the massive shadow of this imposing figure. Because of this, much of the musical vocabulary developed by Tatum remains unassimilated by later jazz pianists. Long after the phraseology of such later jazz masters as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane has been widely imitated and mastered, Tatum’s legacy still sits in probate, waiting for a new generation of pianists to lay claim to its many riches.

Tatum’s virtuosity clouds the issue of his role in the history of jazz. Although his music has been, by turns, lauded and attacked for its showmanship and often gratuitous displays of technique, Tatum’s importance is as much due to his advanced musical conception as to his agile fingers. True, no other jazz pianist of his generation (or later ones, for that matter) could equal the speed and clarity of his execution. But equally compelling are the structural components of his playing. Employing massive chord voicings as building blocks, Tatum created dazzling harmonic variations and elevated passing chords (often compacted four to a bar, measure after measure) to a level of sophistication that has never been surpassed in either jazz or classical music. And though some of his techniques—abrupt modulations, rhythmic disjunctions, interpolations from concert hall pieces—had been employed by earlier players, none had incorporated them into the jazz idiom with the grace, ease, and creativity of Art Tatum. By the time he had completed his heroic task of recrafting the jazz keyboard vocabulary, he had taken the various hints and ideas that had existed earlier in the African American tradition and mixed them with large doses of European classical music to form a systematic, all-encompassing vision of jazz piano.

Tatum was born in Toledo, Ohio, on October 13, 1909, far afield from Harlem and the other centers of jazz activity. Afflicted with cataracts in both eyes, Tatum underwent thirteen operations in his youth, which eventually restored reasonable sight to one eye. But a blow to the head from an assailant, dating probably from the pianist’s early twenties, undid much of the benefit of these procedures. For the rest of his life, Tatum enjoyed only partial sight in his right eye and remained totally blind in his left. But, as seems so often the case with blind musicians, Tatum compensated for his poor vision through a preternatural acuteness of ear. At age three, he amazed his mother by picking out melodies on the piano that he had heard her sing at a choir rehearsal, and before long he was imitating jazz pieces learned from player pianos and radio broadcasts. Tatum’s mother, as well as his teacher Overton Rainey, of the Toledo School of Music, attempted to steer the youngster into a career in classical music. But though Tatum showed an extraordinary talent for playing the concert hall repertoire, his attraction to jazz eventually proved decisive. At age sixteen he began working in and around Toledo, and by his late teens he was performing on a local radio station.