Hey there — greetings from Cologne, where I’m gearing up for the German Jazz Prize ceremony this evening. I’ll have a full report on this experience for you soon.
But before I dive into juror-and-presenter mode, I wanted to fire off a quick dispatch related to Record Store Day, which hath brought an especially rich trove of archival jazz this year. At WRTI, I enlisted our entire corps of jazz hosts to blurb this bounty, almost a dozen albums’ worth. Elsewhere, you’ve probably already seen some intelligent, anticipatory chatter about a few of the hotter items, involving titans like Sonny Rollins and Yusef Lateef. (More on those below.)
I’d like to take a slightly different approach here, and tell you about the one Record Store Day release that unexpectedly got me, as they say, in my feelings. This is from another titan, pianist Art Tatum — a 3-CD set on Resonance Records titled Jewels in the Treasure Box: The 1953 Chicago Blue Note Jazz Club Recordings. Sourced from tapes made with a portable recorder by club owner Frank Holzfeind, it’s a faithful chronicle of Tatum’s trio at the time, with Everett Barksdale on guitar and Slam Stewart on bass. The set draws from six sets in August 1953, just over 70 years ago, complete with Tatum’s between-song banter and even the odd audience request.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed, there’s a story behind my emotional response to this music. Before we go there, allow me to keep my critic hat on for just another moment, as I declare that this music is not only dazzling and delightful but also of considerable historical significance. That’s partly because any new slab of Tatum on record fits that definition, but mainly due to the fact that this working trio was such a sympathetic unit — and as such, a key stabilizing agent for Tatum’s mercurial genius.
The historian Brent Hayes Edwards, in his conscientious booklet essay, homes in early on a related insight about the man other pianists only half-jokingly called God:
That Tatum “occupied his own county,” as the critic Whitney Balliett once wrote, has ironically left him on the outskirts of the music he did so much to define. We are still not quite sure what to do with him. Tatum remains a bit of an alien, viewed as essentially a solo artist in a music defined by collaboration and dialogue and as a musician with a sensibility so futuristic that, over a half-century after his death, a pianist as advanced as Herbie Hancock would say that “harmonically, Tatum played a lot of things which are still ahead of what I’m doing. I’m still trying to discover certain chords he used.”
That singling out of Tatum’s complex harmonic invention — an argument also often made these days by Dr. Lewis Porter, including in an essay I had the privilege of editing — crucially centers his piano brilliance around something other than velocity and flash. His technical facility was so dazzling on its face that it often takes center stage, but there was so much more going on in Tatum’s playing. Listening to these fly-on-the-wall tapes, you hear the totality, including his capacity for lyrical restraint.
I first came to terms with that understanding 25 years ago, when I was working with George Wein on his autobiography. Before he was known as the producer and co-founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, George — then in his 20s — built a reputation as the proprietor of Storyville, a Boston club. Some of his most vivid recollections from a long career took place at Storyville, partly because he was so fresh to the business, still finding it hard to believe that artists on the level of Tatum, Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker were passing through his club.
As a pianist himself, George was completely enchanted by Tatum. But one of my favorite stories about the man came from Joyce Wein, his wife and trusted partner in so many things. During the years I worked on George’s book, Joyce became no less of a mentor to me; she was the person who taught me foundational cooking and entertaining skills, and imparted countless discerning insights about art and culture (and tennis, and Scrabble). My favorite Storyville story about Tatum is one that George implored Joyce to tell me herself. I drew on both of their reminiscences for the following section in the book, Myself Among Others: A Life in Music.
Working with Art Tatum was a dream come true. On this first Storyville engagement, he brought the basisist Slam Stewart and the guitarist Everett Barksdale. These particular musicians understood Tatum's complex harmonies. (Years later, Slam Stewart became a regular with my band, the Newport All Stars, and provided me with some of the most enjoyable musical moments in my life — he was one of a kind.) Art was a master of harmonic improvisation; he would play several choruses of a melody and change harmonic structures at will. At times, it appeared that he might not be following the tempo he had set for a tune he was playing; the beat seemed to disappear. Then: Bam! Without missing a beat, he'd come back in tempo; he'd been keeping perfect time all along.
Art was playing opposite the singer Maxine Sullivan, who was well known for her swinging rendition of the Scottish folk song “Loch Lomond.” During the ‘40s she had recorded with her husband, the bassist John Kirby.
Joyce Alexander often dropped by during this run. Joyce was an enthusiastic jazz fan, and she was thrilled to be at a table with Art Tatum. On one such occasion, Joyce and Art were sitting together during the last set of the evening; there were very few people in the club. Maxine Sullivan finished her set, and Joyce expressed some disappointment.
“Oh, she didn't sing ‘I'm Comin’ Virginia.’” The tune was one of Sullivan's modest hits.
“That’s all right,” Tatum said, ever the gentleman. “I’ll play it for you.”
Joyce smiled. “Thank you very much, Mr. Tatum. but it’s a very simple song. It doesn’t lend itself to a lot of arpeggios or runs.”
At this naïve suggestion, Art merely chuckled. In the middle of his next set. he played “I’m Comin’ Virginia,” stating the melody very simply. During his improvisational choruses, he did one intricate run, and immediately exclaimed: “Oh! I’m sorry, Joyce.” From that moment on, we had a tradition with Tatum. Joyce and I would sit in the front of the club during his last set. He would play our requests, tunes like “What Does It Take?” and “Would You Like to Take a Walk?” that nobody else played.
Joyce couldn’t ever get through the story of Tatum and “I’m Comin’ Virginia” without laughing — a sharp exclamation mark of a laugh, like a guffaw — leaving no doubt that the joke was at her own expense. I loved that, partly because it was a welcome reminder that even someone as worldly and socially adept as Joyce Wein was once a bright kid who could put her foot in her mouth. But I also love the fondness and friendship at the heart of the story, the way that it illuminates Joyce and George in their courtship era, and all the shared enthusiasms that bonded them together.
There was another song that George and Joyce loved to ask Tatum to play, and it was “Sweet Lorraine” — because the first line of that song’s lyrics, “I’ve just found joy,” formed a sort of inside joke between them (“Joy” being short for “Joyce”).
When I first popped Jewels in the Treasure Box into my car CD player, I grabbed Disc 3, realizing my mistake only as Tatum starts introducing the first tune. “We want to feature Slam Stewart, Everett Barksdale — feature everybody, on ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” he says. The trio starts into the song, and before I realized what was happening, I had a catch in my throat.
I hadn’t thought about the fact that this Tatum trio was the same one that first appeared at Storyville, possibly within a month or two of the Chicago gig. Everything just clicked as I heard Tatum finesse that melody. Later on the same disc, he plays a brightly swinging “Out of Nowhere” full of his trademark flourishes, and follows it with “Would You Like to Take a Walk?” — for me, another callback to the Storyville tale. I like to imagine that the latter tune might even have been in Tatum’s active rotation that summer because of George and Joyce’s friendly request.
At the Wein residence on the Upper East Side, there used to be several photographs framed in the guest bathroom — including Herman Leonard’s beatific portrait of Art Tatum, taken in 1955, a year before he died. Jewels in the Treasure Box features that photograph as its cover image. Listening to this newly unearthed testament of Tatum and his trio at the Blue Note in Chicago, I imagine them doing the same thing the at Storyville in Boston. I think about all of the good feeling engendered in those musical moments. And just as it reminds me fondly of Joyce and George Wein, two souls I loved who are no longer with us, it’s a reason to check my superlatives around Art Tatum — a God at the piano, sure. But also, in all the best ways, also a guy.
Stray Notes
A few posts by Substack colleagues heralding other new Record Store Day releases:
Robert C. Gilbert on Yusef Lateef (and Alice Coltrane’s Live at Carnegie Hall)
Phil Freeman on Cannonball Adderley (and his forthcoming Cecil Taylor book!)
Remind me to tell you about Slam Stewart's handshake as revealed to me by my dad who experienced it.