CD review: Art Tatum – Wizard on the Keys 2022: Video, CD cover

“By all the criteria of the nineteenth-century piano tradition, Art Tatum made himself into a piano virtuoso worthy to be compared to the best who have ever played.

This achievement certainly did not come from years of hard labor under European-trained teachers, which is the usual route for concert pianists. It seems instead to have come from a very fine match between the opportunities the piano offers, on the one hand, and Tatum’s innate sensitivities and gifts of coordination, on the other. Once he had been exposed to it and his mind had gotten its teeth into it, he was launched into a search for higher and higher levels of achievement, in the same way the great European artists had been.

He responded sensitively to the nature of the piano, as they had, and he arrived, probably independently, at many of the same ways of dealing with it as they had. His basic gifts, in other words, were world-class, and his gifts drove him to be the pianist he was. Tatum wove the virtuoso tradition and the jazz idiom together in his playing, from the early days of his development, and brought a previously unimagined level of playing into jazz.”

01. St. Louis Blues
02. Moonglow
03. Moon Song
04. No, No, Nanette: Tea for Two
05. Murder at the Vanities: Cocktails for Two
06. Present Arms: You took advantage of me
07. Gone with the Wind
08. Honeysuckle Rose
09. The Boys from Syracuse: This can’t be love
10. One Damn Thing After Another: My heart stood still
11. The Gay Divore: Night and day
12. Oh, Kay!: Someone to watch over me
13. I surrender dear
14. Sweet Lorraine
15. Three Sisters: I won’t dance
16. The moon Is low
17. Smiles: Time on my hands
18. In a sentimental mood
19. Clowns in Clover: Don’t blame me
20. Goin’ Home