Art Tatum Techniques and Concepts

Art Tatum: Musical Techniques and Concepts

In this series I propose to highlight what I consider some of Art Tatum’s most exciting musical discoveries, ideas that I think we can and should use today. The idea of developing a driving left hand, a 'rhythm section' in itself, which at the same time has the subtlety to musically balance the right hand's ideas, is intriguing, a little bit like climbing Mount Everest. The art of making a rhythm section in your left hand hand while still swinging and playing what you want in your right hand - the ideal. It's an exciting challenge, and for me this thought started with Tatum, and has lately been extended by listening to Dave McKenna.

Please don't get me wrong on this: I love Bill Evans' solo style and all the other great players. The music changed with the times, the musicians went with it, even though there's plenty of proof now that those societal changes were orchestrated by external powerful forces that had virtually nothing to do with love of music.

First I propose to examine Tatum's use of descending right-hand runs and patterns, then his left-hand chordal concepts. I will be exploring Tatum's conceptual fingering style on runs, not so much his random 'fill-in' improvisations, found in any of his transcriptions, where his notes choices in the right hand 'disagree' with the chord to the extent that you start to realize he's using the pianistic feel of the keys (what feels good under the fingers/keys) as opposed to a thought-out lick on a chord.

The key point in this concept is to realize is that the right hand is subordinate to the left hand: the left hand is the rhythmic anchor, so everything in the right hand is basically 'whatever you can fit in'. That's why the runs have to sound effortless, because the time feel is all-important. And that's why so many of Tatum's "random fill-ins", as I call them, are not chord-melody based but literally finger or hand-shape based.

To get back to my theme, by examining Tatum's music - much like Charlie Parker's - I believe we are opening the door to further discoveries in the world of classic jazz arranging.

So in describing these runs and their fingerings, I would like to stress that I am concentrating on a relatively minor part of the total musical experience. I get that. What I'm doing is zooming in on a particular facet of Tatum’s performance, for which he is deservedly well-known, and exploring it. But in what we might call good all-round musical practice, harp-like runs such as Tatum used would constitute a relatively small part of the solo jazz pianist’s total bag of tricks. No-one is ever going to outdo Tatum, and more importantly no-one is ever going to sound like the real emotional Tatum, the one I love, not the flashy one. And so we have to realise that in order to incorporate some of his devices in our own playing, we have to do a hell of a lot of work for a relatively brief musical result. To be able to use them at all musically, it takes many hours practicing a run, thousands of times over, until it can be incorporated naturally in a jazz performance. It takes years for it to come out naturally (unless you're working 6 nights a week). Again, that particular run or partial-run maybe lasting for only a second or two in actual performance.

What I am getting at is that we can use and should build upon the techniques of the past, such as these Tatum runs, to add to our arsenal of solo piano techniques.

Future posts will explore Tatum fingerings for descending 9ths and 13th runs.

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.