Tatum Descending Right-Hand Runs

Art Tatum: Descending Right-Hand Runs

Tatum favoured three-finger runs, usually 3-2-1, sometimes just 2-1. The strongest fingers naturally give the smoothest, most even result. As Chopin intimated, it's all about fingering. The runs should be like waterfalls, pearling, cascading. That means cultivating a subconscious response, a Zen-like 'no-thinking'—which in the end just translates to lots and lots of work, at least for me.

Tatum often liked to start these descending runs with an initial flourish, a turn slightly different fingering to the recurring pattern, so I have included a few of them in the following examples. They fit under the fingers and serve as a 'springboard' for the run. I would like to eventually be able to mix and match these runs so what may begin up high as a 9th arpeggio becomes a 13th, then scales (literally) down to the target note. What seems fuzzy at the moment for the artist after due process (practice) can indeed become natural, and express in an organic musical way.

For other viewpoints there are a few Tatum books out there, please check them out if you haven't already. I first discovered the genius of Tatum's conception about twenty years ago, the "I Surrender Dear" transcription, but I began my specific investigation of his runs due to the inspiration of a guy on YT under the moniker rkjp56. Please check them out:

https://www.youtube.com/user/rkjp56/videos

Man, thank you for sharing this beautiful knowledge. 

Besides a couple of transcription albums, there's a great book called "The Right Hand According To Tatum" by Riccardo Scivales. It has some fantastic stuff. But I always thought, what about Tatum's left hand? That subject to me is even more interesting, and after I get through these right hand concepts I'll be delving into those dark and very interesting waters. 

Again, I reiterate these are my Tatum 'pickings', my observations. You may have different views, different conclusions. Everything you find here should be considered my take on Tatum, and music in general. We don’t have any definitive guide as to what fingering he used when, where and in what context. So in this sense, please view the following as my educated guesswork, even though I'm in a constant process of trying out and establishing the best fingerings that work for me.

And by highlighting Tatum in these initial posts, I don't want to convey the impression that many might jump to - that this is the music of the past and somehow irrelevant. My whole take on this is that we should look at these ideas and build on them. To make Tatum's concepts work in a new way, to integrate them with everything else we play from the more contemporary tradition.

I would like to get this kind of information out there because I don’t really find it anywhere else on the net. What I'd like to get across is the Tatum concept of harp-like arpeggios using a simplified fingering which gives an even sound to the descending patterns. Seeing the piano is a just like a harp it seems a pity that modern jazz piano has seemingly forgotten this aspect which so pervades classical and romantic piano tradition. Let's not forget that Tatum was thoroughly schooled in the European classical tradition, just as much as he was in the blues. And have you heard him sing the blues?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eecqu_YSPZY

The plan is to present my current take on all the descending 9ths chords; then the descending 13ths and their variations; then look at other runs and effects, such as whole-tone clusters (foreshadowing Monk). Quite a lot of Tatum is the genesis for later piano developments, which should be acknowledged. In later posts I'll be taking apart Tatum's left-hand concepts, and look at how he made a simple II-V pattern, a two-bar sequence into eight chords as a flowing melodic accompaniment.

Tatum 13ths

The first time I really got into Tatum was through his recording of "I Surrender Dear" (1955).



I had the transcription, and I was fascinated mainly because he was actually playing 'live' all those wonderful arranging concepts I'd been interested in, but never really knew how it could be incorporated into jazz improvisation before. Maybe it sounds dumb to some people. It's hard to explain what exactly motivated me to explore Tatum, because as a piano player I had nowhere near the level of requisite technique usually associated with attempting anything Tatum-esque. Maybe it was because I was such a novice in comparison, I had nothing to lose, in a way: it's like a mountain peak that you're forever striving to reach. And I like an impossible challenge. There aren't too many musicians in history that we can say are close to perfection, but I think Art Tatum is one of them. If we had recordings of J. S. Bach or Chopin, we might all agree on that point.

But jazz is all about making whatever it is you like into your own, so that you own it. Whether I'm playing some Tatum-inspired phrase at 1/10 or even 1/100th the speed and accuracy he played, doesn't matter to me in the slightest. What matters to me is if I can use his concepts in my own playing, to make them mean something, truly incorporating them into my own playing. It can't sound forced. In the literature you will find many jazz commentators who'll tell you Tatum wasn't really 'jazz' because he played the same arrangement all the time. But these people have no idea what a working musician's life was like back then - and I mean a solo pianist's working life. You have to have a plan, a structure, some kind of edifice on which to build your sandcastles.

Tatum was legally blind, yet he mastered not only the 'licks' of the classical repertoire (to put it crudely), but also the whole gamut of jazz piano: so much so that he is a virtual compendium of the complete history of jazz piano, with foreshadowings of the future.

This track was recorded near the end of his life, in the marathon Norman Granz sessions for Verve Records in January 1955. But you gotta hear the mid-1930s Tatum to fully appreciate what he could do and what he meant for musicians of the time.

This was the lick that first got me - the D13 and how it resolved to the Dm in the key of C. The following excerpt is the first seven bars from Jed Distler's Art Tatum Jazz Masters Series, an invaluable book of Tatum's transcriptions. And with acknowledgements by the likes of Dick Hyman and Felicity Howlett (whose thesis I've yet to read), this is an authoritative document.

here is the D13 lick excerpted from bar 6:

the audio excerpt, from a bar before:



This is a great example of the famous 2-1 fingering for which he was famous:

How simple and beautiful!

Once you get the idea, you can expand the concept to the other 13ths.

The point being, the 13th chord is the quintessential jazz chord, the sound that is so captivating to the humans that are really awake out there. As I pointed out in earlier posts, this sound was first introduced through classical music, Ravel and Debussy, but I'm sure it can be traced back much further.

In our next post we'll look at the 13th chord conceptually, and the ridiculous attempts by Wickedpedia to muddy the issue, you can bet on purpose.

Tatum fingerings: Dominant 9th chords - C9 to Db9

C9: 2-1 fingering

same fingering for F9:

and Bb9:

Eb9 is one of the trickier ones, needing the 4th finger as the pivot.

This one is not very practicable. But neither is the most obvious 5-3-2-1. The whole point of this series is to explore the Tatum 1-2-3 fingerings, fingerings to make for more even runs.

Even though I'm running through all twelve 9th chords fingerings here, some are just not used, even by Tatum. Some phrases work great in one key, terrible in another.

Eb9 is a bit of a conundrum to me at the moment. There are a few variations, such as:

As I mentioned previously, in offering my fingerings for these chords, I'm wanting to share my explorations and discoveries, investigate how they can be integrated into contemporary jazz piano practice, and maybe extended into big band or orchestral concepts. It's all music, but I like investigating the 'nitty-gritty'. And investigating Tatum takes us back to the source, as it were, because a lot of Chopin and classical piano involves harp-like runs, and we know Tatum was thoroughly grounded in the 19th century romantic piano tradition.

In no sense am I suggesting these are definitive fingerings; rather, I encourage you to explore them yourself. I'm simply attempting to illustrate this Tatum concept, backed up by my own research—the idea being to make the fingerings of these harp-lie runs as even as possible without resorting to hand/finger contortions.

Ab9:

Thumb on Gb and C. Thumb on the tritone, the Devil's interval!

You should be getting the general idea that the hand makes a crab-like motion, alternating (pivot) 2-3:

Db9:

Thumb again on the tritone, this time F and B (Cb), alternating 2-3

As I mentioned previously, any dominant 9th chord is like a minor 6th or a half-diminished, so you get three for the price of one.

Continued in the next post.

Tatum fingerings: Dominant 9th chords - Gb9 to G9

Now we've come halfway round the cycle from C to F# - or is it Gb? We don't use the key of Cb major all that often, but I still seem to think of it more as a Gb9 myself. It's whether you like having Bb and Fb instead of A# and E. In this 'borderline' territory between sharps and flats, arrangers always should go with the simplest solution. It's OK to use the more common enharmonic names.

Gb9:

Thumb on the Bb & E, tritone.

If you prefer to see it as an F#9, here it is in the key of B:

B9:

Thumb on the D# & A, tritone again.

E9:

Thumb on the D. This one needs the 4th finger as a pivot on the B to D (4-1).

These excerpts are simply to show my current fingerings, not intended as any kind of specific drill or exercise. The only important point I would stress when practicing them is to play them in time, slow medium and fast, semiquavers or triplets. But they should relate to the basic pulse, they should always be recognizable subdivisions, at least in practice sessions.

To reiterate on the bigger musical picture: all this work on runs amounts musically to fractions of seconds in actual performance, when playing (jazz) time. If playing rubato, of course the runs can be extended or stretched out. But to my mind, the run is all about gesture, not something to be itself 'noteworthy' - pun intended!

A9:

Thumb on B and E, 3-2 pivot.

D9:

Same fingering as A9.

G9:

This one is quite difficult; I think the key (pun unintended) is to feel the pivot between 3 & 2.

That concludes all the Tatum dominant 9th chords fingerings. In future posts we'll be looking at the more exciting 13ths, and some of the variations possible in mixing and matching these ideas.

Tatum - "Yesterdays" live TV 1954

Let's have a look at Art Tatum in action. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is probably worth a thousand times times that - is that a million? Who cares? It's the lesson of a lifetime in three minutes. It's like a great painting you can keep returning to again and again, and still find new things in it you never appreciated before.

We know this arrangement was one of Tatum's 'party pieces', specialties that any solo performer must have. He recorded it many times. But in Tatum there is always improvisation in the sense that he is making everything sound fresh, and the differences and moods between versions become more apparent, the more you get to know him. Listen to the way he plays along the with the house band, playing their "we're back on" cue after commercials; making his own segue into his classic version of "Yesterdays". There is the whole history of jazz piano here, looking both forward and backward at the same time, but always so hip. The word 'stride' even seems inadequate. Hear the Monk-like seconds clusters? He was a big influence on the beboppers; that story about Bird getting a job as a dishwasher so he could listen to Tatum play every night. He wanted to be able to play his alto like Tatum's right hand.

This was recorded on Spike Jones' TV show in 1954 (he would pass away only months later, in 1956).

 

Just now in writing this post, checking the link from my YT channel to this post and listening to the track again, I thought it sounded 'too' fast, even for Tatum. Mechanically, unnaturally fast. Sure enough, after checking, it's sounding in Eb minor, instead of D minor. The pitch is wrong; we can see that he's definitely playing in Dm. And I'm sure all pianos were A=440 by the mid-50s.

I don't know why I didn't pick it straight away...but there ain't no perfect pitch in my 'shed. And no one said a word in the comments on YT. Where are all the perfect pitch people? 32,500 views so far, and not one soul picked it up.

I've now checked my original video file, then got out the DVD and checked that; both Ebm. Then I looked at other Tatum clips or docos on YT—all are Ebm. What's going on? Can everything on the internet and media be sourced from that one clip? (it comes from "Tatum Art" box set, Storyville Records 1088603, 2008). Maybe that's a sign of just how narrow our 'net' really is. Anyway, I'll be working towards getting a true key of Dm version out soon, somehow, once I figure out how to detune a video down a semitone.

As expected Tatum's harmonies are unusual. Let's look at the opening bars of the melody.
This the original Jerome Kern:

Notice the movement is from Cm in the first bar, to Fm6 in the second - not the more modern interpretation Dm7b5 | G7b9. This is because there is no implied G7, no B natural in that second bar. That is a clue that Kern was after a modal effect, a pivoting or rocking from the tonic Cm (C-Eb-G) to the Fm6/Ddim (D-F-Ab), a I-II swaying. The only difference between the Fm6 and Dm7b5 is what bass note you have: if an F in the bass, it's an Fm6; if a D, then a Dm7b5. Note the slight ambiguity here in Kern's bass figures, almost like the second bar is | Fm6-Dm7b5-Fm6-Dm7b5 |. This is also because the melody note is an F, so he doesn't keep that F in the bass.

Now let's check out Tatum's version compared to the original Kern harmonies for these first two bars. Because I think Tatum's choices had a lot to do with the natural resonances of the actual piano pitches, as well as finger/hand feeling, I'm transposing the Kern up a tone to Dm, so we can contrast with Tatum's take on the harmony:

That's a pretty interesting re-harmonization. Those sixths in the left hand were a common feature of Tatum's left hand chordal concept. I've called them 'diminished', but notice there is no 5th or flat 5th; we could just as easily call it Bbm6 - Am6. In fact if we played an E on the Bb it doesn't sound right, likewise an Eb on the A. So they're neither really 'diminished' or 'minor 6ths' in the strict sense. This Bbm6 voicing is like the top half of an Eb9, the Am6 likewise D9. But theoretical 'missing notes' from chords is what the palette of harmony is meant to be about. Sometimes two notes is all you need.

Tatum could easily span the Ab-C tenth on the Ab6 (sounding more like an Abma7 with the melody note G) although here it looks like he could be playing the C with the right hand. But he could play all 12 major 10ths - bang, down straight. Wouldn't that be a nice ability to have? To be able to nail every major tenth with the left hand, without having to roll/fake them.

As for the G7b5 - well the Db is so low it's a kind of a toss up between G7b5 and Db7b5. Half and half, top 'n' bottom. I've seen this voicing in Johnny Richards charts, in "Monk's Mood", a very ''40s' early bop sound with the low b5 (Db) almost in competition with the root (G). Usually the b5 on a dominant 7th will be more like a #11, that is, an 11th away from the root tone or fundamental. Here it's right up against it. And the Db in this context is kinda sounding like the C# of A7, the leading tone to get back to Dm again.

Sure, Tatum played this arrangement over and over, refining it over the years. But isn't that what 'living' arranging really is - making something that's basically worked-out come alive and fresh, like the performer just thought of it?