God is in the House

Sightings - November 14, 2009

You Never Saw Art Tatum Sweat

That's why the centennial of his birth went all but unnoticed
Terry Teachout

For the critic, the word "best" is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely and you're likely to get your hand blown off. But you won't get many arguments from musicians if you toss it at Art Tatum, who was born a century ago last month. Tatum was—and is—the most admired jazz pianist who ever lived, a super-virtuoso whose whirlwind technique left his colleagues speechless with envy. "When that man turns on the powerhouse," Fats Waller said, "don't no one play him down." Nor was his renown restricted to the world of jazz: Vladimir Horowitz loved Tatum's playing so much that he made his own arrangement of "Tea for Two," a song that was one of Tatum's specialties. Yet outside of Toledo, Ohio, Tatum's home town, the centennial of his birth on Oct. 13 went all but unnoticed. And though the greatest of all jazz pianists is as revered today as he was in his lifetime, he is essentially unknown to the public at large.

On the other hand, Tatum, who died in 1956, was never a full-fledged celebrity, not even in the days when he got written up in Time magazine and made occasional appearances on such popular TV programs as "The Tonight Show." Unlike Waller, Duke Ellington or Ella Fitzgerald, who knew the profitable secret of mass appeal, he was an artist's artist known mainly to those who were already in the know.

What was it about Tatum that kept him in relative obscurity? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that his personality was almost entirely opaque. We're told that he liked baseball and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer by the quart, but little else is known for sure about his private life. James Lester's "Too Marvelous for Words," published in 1994, is the only biography of Tatum, and it fails to give much of a sense of what he was like offstage, not because Mr. Lester fell down on the job but because Tatum was unforthcoming on the rare occasions when he talked to journalists. In his most extended interview, a conversation with Willis Conover of the Voice of America, he is well-spoken but frustratingly noncommittal. The only surprise comes when he confesses that "I don't feel that I have all of the technical facilities that I would like to have." That's the musical equivalent of hearing Alfred Hitchcock tell a reporter that he wished his movies were scarier!

Not only did Tatum keep his own counsel, but he broke a cardinal rule of success for the performing artist: He made it look too easy. Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.

Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money's worth. I can't count the number of jazz pianists who have described the experience of hearing Tatum for the first time in words similar to those of Gerald Wiggins: "I thought it was two guys playing the piano." But there was nothing to see in person, just a burly, impassive man who sat quietly at the keyboard, never moving his hands a millimeter more than necessary. In one of the few surviving film clips of Tatum's playing, a 1954 TV performance of Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays" that can be viewed on YouTube, you can see for yourself what Jon Hendricks meant when he said that on the bandstand, Tatum looked "like an accountant—he just did his work." Close your eyes and it sounds as though someone had tossed a string of lit firecrackers into the Steinway. Open them and it looks as though you're watching a court reporter take down the testimony of a witness in a civil suit.

Is it possible to wow the public without tossing your hair around? Yes and no. Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible. Tatum, by contrast, was more like Jascha Heifetz, a titan of the violin who brought off his stupendous feats of technical wizardry without ever cracking a smile or looking anything other than blasé—and though Heifetz was immensely famous, he was always more respected than loved.

The great violin teacher Carl Flesch got to the bottom of this paradox when he observed that "people would forgive Heifetz his technical infallibility only if he made them forget it by putting his entire personality behind it." The operative word here is forgive. To the small-d democrat, virtuosity is an insult, a tactless reminder of human inequality that can only be forgiven when the artist makes clear through visible effort how high a price he has paid for his great gifts. Art Tatum, like Heifetz, was too proud to make that concession. He did all his sweating offstage. That's why his exquisitely refined pianism will never be truly popular: No matter how much beer he drank, you could never mistake him for one of the guys.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong," out next month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

Self-assigned stories

Slideshow









Roy DeCarava, a retrospective Q 779 DeCarava
Roy DeCarava, photographs Q 779 DeCarava


Interesting tie-in to jazz musicians, including Coltrane.


Photographer Roy DeCarava is pictured in his Brooklyn home in 1991.

Vermeer's "The Milkmaid"

Obituaries

Today a spate of obits; included some from previous days.


Bruce Wasserstein, Lazard Banker, Dies at 61 Mr. Wasserstein was a Wall Street investment banker who helped pioneer the hostile takeover and reshaped the mergers and acquisitions business into a high art. Brother of Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright (Heidi Chronicles).

Al Martino, Singer of Pop Ballads, Is Dead at 82



Al Martino as Johnny Fontane in a scene from "The Godfather." Mr. Martino, 82, was renowned for a string of hits, including “Spanish Eyes” and “Volare,” and for his role as the wedding singer in “The Godfather.”





Nan Robertson, Who Chronicled Discrimination Suit at The Times, Is Dead at 83 Ms. Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, was widely known for her book “The Girls in the Balcony.”


Captain Lou Albano, Wrestler and Showman, Dies at 76 Mr. Albano was a pro wrestling villain who reinvented himself as a pop culture celebrity in a Cyndi Lauper music video and in movies and television.

William Wayne Justice, Noted Judge, Dies at 89 Judge Justice of Federal District Court ruled on ground-breaking class-action suits that compelled Texas to integrate schools, reform prisons, and educate illegal immigrants.
If he'd gotten to the Supreme Court, he would've been Justice Justice.

Dickie Peterson, Singer for Rock Band Blue Cheer, Dies at 63Mr. Peterson’s screaming vocals and pounding bass lines helped push the psychedelic blues-rock trio Blue Cheer into the musical territory that would later be called heavy metal.


September 27, 2009 : William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79 Mr. Safire was a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The Times. Quite a combination of careers. Dig the PC.

James P. Johnson

October 6, 2009 - Music Review Raising Roof and Headstone for Pioneering Pianist By BEN RATLIFF A definition of righteousness: about 75 people, crammed into the West Village club Smalls, watching a series of pianists play James P. Johnson on a grand piano in a benefit concert to buy a headstone for his grave. Like all the other stride-piano soloists of the teens and 1920s, Johnson has been lodged in a historical second tier, probably because he’s not known for band music and didn’t tour sufficiently. But he’s the truest passageway from pre-jazz to jazz-as-we-know-it. He was a pioneering and powerful solo pianist, a composer of short sketches (including “The Charleston,” his era-defining hit, and “Carolina Shout,” his finger-buster étude) and extended orchestral works.

Fats Waller does a great rendition of Carolina Shout.

Duke Ellington learned “Carolina Shout” from a piano roll and finally met Johnson at a concert in Washington in 1921. Afterward they stayed out until 10 a.m. “What I absorbed on that occasion,” Ellington wrote later, “might, I think, have constituted a whole semester in a conservatory.” He homed in on Johnson’s strong, grounding swing and sweet, splashing melodies; to link Scott Joplin and Ellington — or even Joplin and Thelonious Monk — you need to put Johnson between them.

The link.

Johnson died in 1955 fairly isolated after four years of illness, and his body lies in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens. The spot was found in February by Scott Brown, a Johnson scholar, and the idea was hatched for “James P. Johnson’s Last Rent Party,” a daylong blowout of Johnsonia at Smalls on Sunday, with historical talks and performances.
The day ended with five hours of solo piano — by 12 performers — and a little bit of four-hands playing. Unlike the Harlem rent parties Johnson used to play, it wasn’t remotely a competition. Though several pianists wrestled with the same material (especially the charging “Carolina Shout”), the emphasis was not on besting one another but on beneficially knocking the tunes around, treating fairly neglected music like common repertory.
Ethan Iverson, the pianist from the Bad Plus, announced that the beginning of his set would be “classical”: an earnest shot at Johnson’s style. He played “Carolina Shout” with sensitivity and clarity, keeping the stride rhythm steady in the left hand. Then he went off into his own updated, posteverything style, full of explicit dissonance, repetition and strange dynamics.

“The Charleston” was his killer: it started with deliberately messy tone rows, his two hands playing at cross-purposes, the left staccato and slow, the right flowing and medium-tempo. Inevitably, and with humor, he finished in the song’s proper style.

Mike Lipskin, a pianist based in San Francisco who studied with the stride pianist Willie (The Lion) Smith, played stride-piano songs as if they were his drinking buddies: his versions of Johnson’s “It Takes Love to Cure the Heart’s Disease” and Luckey Roberts’s “Pork and Beans” were rowdy and familiar, and he made Johnson’s “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)” mellifluous and lovely, smiling at the audience rather than monitoring the difficult variations in his left-hand stride patterns.

Aaron Diehl performing in front of a photograph of James P. Johnson on Sunday.

The evening’s revelation was Aaron Diehl, a pianist in his mid-20s who has played with Wynton Marsalis and Wycliffe Gordon. His style, on “Scaling the Blues,” “Over the Bars” and the second movement of Johnson’s “Jazzamine Concerto,” was modest, secure and insinuating, with an iron sense of time. A few different pianists worked in their own tunes as Johnson tributes; Mr. Diehl’s was a slow, gorgeous blues.


Ted Rosenthal and Dick Hyman closed the night. They performed some pieces together at the keyboard, including “Twilight Rag”; then Mr. Hyman, one of the world’s great specialists in early jazz piano, performed Johnson’s music with well-practiced dynamic shifts, elegant and sometimes a bit too showy for the circumstances. But complaining is pointless. Mr. Hyman smoothly played the entire 10-minutes-plus solo-piano version of Johnson’s “Yamekraw,” a rhapsody with classical flourishes and stride interjections. Who else does that?

'The Man Who Waited'

View Slideshow


Mr. Bergman was born in New Orleans and raised mostly in Minneapolis. He began taking and developing snapshots at age 6, and save for a few teenage years he has strived to be a great photographer-artist ever since. But he has remained an out-of-step one, isolated from contemporary tastes, a cult figure to the few who have seen his work in person or in a 1998 book.

Finally, and separately, Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery, and Phong Bui, a curatorial adviser at P.S.1, decided to give Mr. Bergman shows. The works that will go on display later this month were shot from the mid-1980s to about 1996. They are intense, soul-stirring, intimate color portraits, all untitled, all unlabeled as to place or person: There's just a date and a few technical details. Stripped of information, the viewer is forced to consider the human condition.

Mr. Bergman won't explain his art: "It's visual," he says. "I don't need to talk about it." But he does tell the story of a subject in the Bronx who asked him where he was from. When Mr. Bergman said "Minnesota," the man said, "You come all this way only to see yourself."

One day, in 1966, a friend showed him a book that changed his life—Robert Frank's "The Americans." As soon as he saw Frank's empathetic pictures of ordinary people, he purchased a Nikon 35mm.

It wasn't that Mr. Bergman imitated Mr. Frank. Rather, he says, "what was so breathtaking about Frank was that his work proved that the main thing one needed was a personal vision, and the main thing one needed to serve that vision was intuition and feeling."

Went to see the exhibit on Sunday 15 November, at PS 1. The photo were large, unlabeled, several pictures to a room. Each subject was centered in the frame; only one was smiling. The PS 1 space has very high ceilings, creaking floors, and big windows. It was very enjoyable.

For most New Yorkers today, the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) means the gilded bronze equestrian monument to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street: Victory, crowned with laurel and clutching a palm frond, strides ahead of the bearded general, with his fierce gaze and windblown cape, erect on his snorting horse. A century ago, Saint-Gaudens would have also been widely known for his Diana—a tall, athletic nude, stepping forward as she releases an arrow from her bow—a landmark sculpture that once dominated the New York skyline from the tower of the original Madison Square Garden. (Removed when the building was razed in 1925, Diana is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In 1908, not long after the sculptor's death, the Metropolitan Museum installed a memorial exhibition of 154 of Saint-Gaudens's works in the Great Hall—what was then the Sculpture Court. Now we can broaden our acquaintance with the artist at the far more modest "Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," a finely tuned exhibition, on view through Nov. 15, that showcases the Met's considerable holdings of the sculptor's works and provides a context for his celebrated monuments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bronze cast of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, 1910. That the Sherman Monument largely defines Saint-Gaudens for many of us is entirely appropriate. The sculpture exemplifies his distinctive refined, vigorous style, a synthesis of acutely observed naturalism and classical idealism, informed by the legacy of the Renaissance. The Sherman Monument shares the assured forms and the tense equilibrium between powerful warhorse and powerful rider first announced by those quintessential mounted warriors of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata, in Padua, and Verrocchio's Colleoni, in Venice. There are even echoes of the iconic Roman bronze that inspired both Donatello and Verrocchio, the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, once the centerpiece of the Campidoglio, in Rome.


Verrocchio's Colleoni



















Donatello's Gattamelata