The sound world of Art Tatum.

When a French journalist asked writer Andre Gide in 1905 whom he considered to be France's greatest poet, Gide responded "Victor Hugo, helas!" (quoted in Richardson 1976, 294). It became a celebrated remark and must rank as one of the most concise yet pregnant summaries of an ambivalent response to an artist's reputation ever uttered. Beginning--as one might imagine hearing Gide speak it--with sharply rising anticipation, it dissolves instantly into disappointment. Although none has expressed it quite so succinctly, many jazz writers have felt much the same about Art Tatum. A not-uncommon judgment is that he had an unrivaled, exciting technique but lacked the creative imagination to put that technique to maximum use. "A superficial bravura technique a la Paganini," one writer called it, adding for good measure, "and what interest does that merit?" (Wiedemann 1955, 28).

Tatum's admirers have been legion, of course, evidence of which can be found in a range of sources, from comments by musicians in interviews to letters in magazines, from articles in the jazz press to entries in reference books. Almost without exception, they emphasize in particular the originality of his style and the marriage of technique to harmonic innovation, but it is not unusual also to find assessments that amount to a description of the complete musician. In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, for example, Felicity Howlett and J. Bradford Robinson (1988, 519) write that "Tatum's technical abilities, lightness of touch, and control of a full range of the instrument were unprecedented.... [H]e had an unerring sense of rhythm and swing, a seemingly unlimited capacity to expand and enrich a melody, and a profound and continually evolving grasp of substitute harmonies."

One of the problems with which jazz historiography has been faced is Tatum's evident lack of fit into established narratives and agreed values. Among musicians (where reverence for him was almost unanimous), some solved the problem by ceasing to consider him as a jazz musician. As fellow pianist and contemporary Teddy Wilson told an interviewer after Tatum's death, "Back in the old days, we put Tatum in a special category and did not discuss him as a jazz pianist--he was in a category by himself, and we then talked about the others; those who played in bands" (quoted in Young 1963, 23). In a similar vein, more recently, critic Gary Giddins (1998, 439) entitled an essay on Tatum, "Art Tatum (Sui Generis)."

Taken as a whole, jazz historiography seems to have resigned itself to a bemused ambivalence in regard to Tatum and to have postponed resolving the issue by consigning him to the special kind of marginality reserved for talented non sequiturs. As a consequence, not only is Tatum underrepresented in jazz criticism but his presence in jazz historiography seems largely to prompt no particular effort in historians beyond descriptive writing designed to summarize his pianistic approach. Had his biography been more dramatic, his behavior more unpredictable, his personality more charismatic--had he been one of those whom jazz historiography has seen as "spectacularly socially dysfunctional practitioners available for romanticisation" (Johnson 2002)wit is possible, given the way that these things work, that his music would be thought to have signification on other levels. Although evidently fiercely proud of his skills, Tatum was an easy-going generous spirit, whose lifestyle, tuned though it was to the demands of late-night (often all-night) music making, appeared to have absorbed little of its more "colorful" side beyond a fatal taste for drink.

The combination of disagreement over Tatum's status and the relative marginality of his position in much jazz historiography suggests that we are in the presence of processes of generic canonization. Gary Tomlinson (1991, 245) has described the jazz canon: "a strategy for exclusion, a closed and elite collection of `classic' works that together define what is and isn't jazz." The canon has been established through the intervention of what Tomlinson calls an "internalist ideology," which accords absolute priority to musical features and in the process distances the music, as he puts it, "from the complex and largely extramusical negotiations that made it and sustain it" (247-248).