Art Tatum

Art Tatum had a technique so far beyond everyone else’s that the stories sound made up. The one where a young Tatum walks into a club, sits down, and the working pianist quietly packs up – that one happened more than once. Players like Vladimir Horowitz, from the classical world, came to listen in disbelief. He was nearly blind, largely self-taught, and possibly the most gifted pianist of the twentieth century in any genre.

What he did was reharmonize and ornament a song on the fly, running cascades of notes through chord changes he was inventing as he went, at tempos that seemed physically impossible. He turned solo piano into an orchestra. A simple standard like “Tea for Two” became, in his hands, a fireworks display with structure underneath the dazzle.

Some critics complained there was too much – too many notes, too much filigree. They missed the point. The flood was the art, and inside it was a harmonic imagination that fed bebop and everything after. Younger musicians studied his records like scripture.

He worked mostly solo and in a celebrated trio, never quite a household name, because what he did was too rarefied for the charts. But among musicians his name still ends arguments. The ceiling. The one nobody got past.