The History of Jazz (22 page)

Word of mouth had brought news of Tatum’s piano prowess to other parts of the jazz world. Still, the Harlem musicians were not prepared for the impact that Tatum made when he traveled to New York as an accompanist to singer Adelaide Hall in 1932. Within days of his arrival, the local piano titans had decided to test the mettle of the newcomer from Toledo. Tatum found himself escorted to a Harlem nightspot where the greatest masters of stride—including Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Willie “The Lion” Smith—were ready to do battle. When it came Tatum’s time to play, he let loose with a dazzling “Tea for Two” full of dense harmonies and sweeping runs and arpeggios that left the audience speechless. James P. Johnson gamely followed with his “Carolina Shout,” and Waller checked in with his “Handful of Keys,” but Tatum responded with a virtuoso version of “Tiger Rag,” taken at a breakneck tempo, that made comparisons pointless. Johnson returned to the keyboard with a final fiery rendition of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,” and though Waller later said he had never heard this elder statesman of stride play quite so well, the final verdict was no longer in doubt. “That Tatum, he was just too good,” Waller later recollected. “He had too much technique. When that man turns on the powerhouse, don’t no one play him down. He sounds like a brass band.” James P. Johnson, for his part, later mused, “When Tatum played ‘Tea for Two’ that night, I guess that was the first time I ever heard it really
played
.”
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Several months later, Tatum made his first records, which included the two showpieces he had performed at that Harlem cutting contest. In later years, Tatum expanded his range of pianistic devices and became even more daring harmonically, but for the most part these early recordings reveal a style almost fully formed, at least from the standpoint of technique and showmanship. Over the next three decades, Tatum recorded frequently, laying down over six hundred tracks as soloist or bandleader. Despite the many virtues of Tatum’s music from the 1930s and 1940s, he remains best known for a massive recording project made under the supervision of producer Norman Granz and completed toward the close of the pianist’s career. Between December 1953 and September 1956, Tatum recorded over two hundred numbers for Granz, most done in a single take during marathon sessions. This body of work features Tatum both as a soloist and in collaborations with other jazz masters, including especially successful pairings with Ben Webster and Roy Eldridge. These late recordings reveal a mature, secure artist playing at near peak level. Somewhat less elegant but more viscerally exciting are the handful of live performances that Tatum left behind. Informal sessions recorded in the early 1940s by Jerry Newman, a Columbia University graduate student at the time, showcase Tatum in a looser, uninhibited mood at various Harlem nightspots—playing, accompanying, even singing the blues. These majestic performances, both playful and aweinspiring, give credence to the view that Tatum was at his best when playing after hours. Also worth noting is Tatum’s Shrine Auditorium concert from 1949, where the pianist’s astonishing double-time work on “I Know That You Know” (at a tempo well over four hundred beats per minute), his titanic Gershwin medley, and the sly dissonances of “The Kerry Dance” hint at the broad range of his musical imagination. In November 1956, a short while after completing the recording project instigated by Granz, Tatum died in Los Angeles from uremia at age forty-seven.

Tatum’s work, for all its virtues, was not above reproach. In some respects, he stands out as one of the most controversial figures in the history of the music, with supporters and detractors much at odds. French critic André Hodeir, in a celebrated attack, lamented the limitations of Tatum’s repertoire (built, he asserted, on “sentimental ballads” and “popular hits”), his preference for embellishing the melody of a song rather than constructing original improvisations, as well as Tatum’s overreliance on arpeggios, scales, and other keyboard flourishes. Gunther Schuller, in his 1989 study
The Swing Era
, amplifies on Hodeir’s points, describing Tatum’s work as predictable and highly derivative (“the entire range of Tatum’s virtuosic skills, including his lightning fast arpeggios and runs, are set forth in the middle-to-late nineteenth-century piano literature. … It is simply untrue that Tatum created his arabesque, virtuoso technique out of the blue”).
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These criticisms are not without validity, but they need to be placed in context. First, with regard to repertoire, jazz fans are certainly justified in lamenting that Tatum did not focus more attention on original compositions and ambitious large-scale projects. Yet how can one fault Tatum’s reliance on the great popular songwriters of his time? Drawing almost entirely on the masterpieces of his contemporaries, which included George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, and others, Tatum consistently featured the finest songs of his day—indeed, of his century—oftentimes recognizing them long before they had become standards. (On his first record session, Tatum performed “Sophisticated Lady” although Ellington’s own debut recording of the piece was literally only a few weeks old at the time.) As for Tatum’s dependence on the virtuoso tricks of nineteenth-century classical music, a similarly equivocal response must be made. True, the superficial piano pyrotechnics may be derivative, but where is the nineteenth-century equivalent of Tatum’s inspired passing chord reharmonizations, sometimes seasoned with hints of bitonality and playful dissonances, and executed with rapidfire precision? Or of his rhythmic explosions in which the ground beat is eclipsed by a dizzying two-handed cannonade of notes? Or of his syncopated stride eruptions, which push the metronome settings to hitherto unknown levels? Within the annals of classical music there is no equivalent, and although jazz historians can trace the roots of some of these techniques to Hines, Waller, and others, Tatum elevates them to a level of brilliance not found in the original sources. As to Tatum’s delight in ornamenting the melody of a piece, one is as justified in praising as in critiquing these reworkings of the original songs, given the ingenuity and inexhaustible variety Tatum brings to the task. Finally, the complaint that Tatum did not improvise, but merely played set pieces, must be dismissed by anyone who has listened to his many recordings, especially those made in informal settings where Tatum was often at his best, and invariably at his most daring.

In truth, the closer one gets to the core of Tatum’s music, and away from the surface activity, the more original it sounds. The strongest validation of this comes not from jazz critics but from the musicians themselves, who are anything but ambiguous on this account. A survey of musicians conducted in 1956 by Leonard Feather for his
Encyclopedia of Jazz
found a stunning 68 percent of them citing Tatum as the preeminent jazz pianist. A 1985 survey of jazz pianists conducted by Gene Lees again placed Tatum comfortably on top, suggesting that despite the passing of almost three decades, changing tastes, and the emergence of many new masters of the keyboard, Tatum had lost none of his power to astonish and inspire, and often to dismay, other practitioners of the art.

THE BIRTH OF THE BIG BAND

The emergence of the big band idiom, with its subtle interweaving of four sections— saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and rhythm—may seem, with the benefit of hindsight, an inevitable development in the evolution of jazz music. Was it not some law of aesthetic Darwinism that forced the rough-and-ready small combos of early jazz to give way to the more robust and polished orchestras of Ellington and Goodman? Not really. The connecting line between the roots of jazz and the later big band sound is far from direct or clear. During the so-called Jazz Age, most of the music’s key exponents focused their creative energy on soloing not bandleading, on improvisation not orchestration, on an interplay between individual instruments not between sections. The move to a more compositionally oriented idiom of dance music, under the rubric of big band jazz, was anything but smooth or obvious at the time. Commercial pressures, rather than artistic prerogatives, stand out as the spur that forced many early jazz players (including Armstrong, Beiderbecke, and Hines) to embrace the big band idiom. But even in the new setting, they remained improvisers, first and foremost, not orchestrators or composers. A different body of individuals, with different talents and inclinations—Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Ferde Grofé, Benny Carter, Bill Challis, Art Hickman, and others— would be required to decipher the artistic implications in this shift in the public’s taste, to comprehend it as a guidepost pointing to a truly revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change in the sound of American band music.

As in so many other aspects of the history of jazz, the intermingling of musical genres played a critical role in shaping a new idiom, and New York served as the crucible in which this fusion of styles took place. As early as 1915, the Original Creole Orchestra featuring Freddie Keppard performed in New York; its success paved the way for the more celebrated visit of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917. By the close of World War I, the influence of these jazz ensembles could be heard throughout the city at vaudeville shows, theaters, society dances, restaurants, and cabarets— indeed, almost anywhere live music was performed. The jazz idiom, in this setting, was already revealing its omnivorous diet—a trait we will witness repeatedly in the course of this history—and was foraging now in Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and wherever else a fertile musical enivronment could be found. It could digest other musical styles, in whole or in part, all the while maintaining its distinctive characteristics. Certainly this quality, more than any other, proved decisive in the development of that distinctively American orchestra: the jazz big band.

The recorded work of James Reese Europe reflects the degree to which syncopation had entered the dance orchestra vocabulary even before the 1920s. In 1912, Europe brought an African American orchestra into Carnegie Hall for a celebrated performance, silencing the naysayers—including Will Marion Cook, who predicted that the concert would be a fiasco that would “set the Negro race back fifty years.”
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But the event proved to be a huge success, and Europe returned for follow-up performances in 1913 and 1914. Europe would exert even more influence through his Society Orchestra’s accompaniment of the celebrated dance team of Irene and Vernon Castle, who established the foxtrot as a dance sensation. A short while later, Europe formed a military band that played a key role in popularizing African American music among overseas audiences. Despite these substantial achievements, it would be going too far to see James Reese Europe as the originator of the jazz big band style. With its ponderous sound, which relied heavily on unison voicings, and its lack of improvisational fire, Europe’s Society Orchestra stood out as a late flowering of the ragtime idiom, rather than as a harbinger of the Jazz Age. Nonetheless, the role of the Europe ensemble in supporting new popular dance styles was indicative of an important change in American tastes—and one that anticipated the later evolution of big band jazz.

In the years before 1910, mainstream social dancing in America had relied primarily on European-influenced waltzes, galops, polkas, jigs, quadrilles, and the like with only occasional crossover dances, such as the cakewalk, coming from African American culture. But, by 1914, new and different dance steps were gaining widespread popularity—so much so that the Vatican felt compelled that year to publicly denounce the turkey trot and the tango. Building off the musical support of James Reese Europe, the Castles incorporated elements of different vernacular dances into their polished performances, creating a jazzier, less refined style that rapidly gained the favor of East Coast society. Through their exhibitions and their New York school, they served as an important link between African American dance and white society. Histories of jazz often overlook the critical role these shifting currents in social dancing exerted on the music. The changing nature of the jazz orchestra in New York during the years following the Castle-Europe collaboration was, in many ways, dictated from the dance floor as much as from the bandstand.

Fletcher Henderson, who helped define the emerging jazz big band sound in the 1920s, also drew inspiration not just from New Orleans and Chicago jazz, but even more from these currents of popular music and dance that were sweeping New York in those years. Ethel Waters, in a telling anecdote, described how she had to force Henderson to listen to player piano rolls so that he could understand how to accompany her properly on a blues recording. Henderson was a quick study and eventually made extensive use of the blues in his music, but initially it was the ethos of the ballrooms, of Tin Pan Alley, of Broadway and vaudeville, as well as of the rag bands of the Northeast that set the context for his dramatic reconstruction of the American jazz orchestra. In truth, by both temperament and training, Henderson was an unlikely jazz innovator. Born in Cuthbert, Georgia, in 1897, Fletcher Henderson was raised in a middle-class black family where European concert music, not rags and blues, was considered an indispensable part of a youngster’s education. He went on to take a degree in chemistry and mathematics at Atlanta University, and his decision to move to New York was ostensibly motivated by his desire to find a job as a chemist. With his reserved and unassuming demeanor, Henderson made little headway in chemistry, and soon found himself demonstrating songs, at $22.50 per week, for the Pace-Handy Music Company, a black-owned publishing house of the day, an involvement that eventually led to Henderson’s role organizing studio sessions for Harry Pace’s Black Swan record label. Hiring and performing in various studio groups, Henderson had found a way to make a living, but still might never have parlayed this opportunity into a full-time career as a bandleader had his sidemen not talked him into auditioning for an opening for a dance orchestra at the Club Alabam on West Forty-fourth Street. He secured the Alabam gig, which soon led to a more visible engagement at Roseland, then in the process of becoming the most important ballroom in New York, if not the whole country. For the next decade, Henderson used this venue as his home base, as he developed a new, progressive jazz vocabulary in synergistic relationship with the popular dance styles of the day.