1983/01/01 by Martin Williams · 1 citation
Computer Science · Arts and Humanities · #Music Technology and Sound Studies #Music History and Culture #Musicology and Musical Analysis #Hobby #Musical #Art #Visual arts #History #Aesthetics
paper · doi:10.2307/3051572
openalex publication_date 1983/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
When Louis Armstrong first arrived in the early 1920s, the reaction of his fellow musicians was generally positive. His elders, most of them, and particularly if they were from New Orleans, heard him as a fulfillment of what they had been working on. And younger players seem to have felt that here was someone who could serve as an inspiration and guide, from whom they could take at least a part, if not all, and develop something of their own. When Art Tatum arrived about a decade later, the first reaction of many musicians seems to have been one of delight and despair. If that is where it's going, they seemed to say, we can't follow. And some of them decided, perhaps temporarily, to hang up their horns. What they heard in Tatum was, first, an exceptional musical ear, and beyond that, an unequalled capacity for speed and for musical embroidery. And those things remained for years a source of frustration to many a musician. But not so (one learns with gratification) to Coleman Hawkins, who heard something more, perhaps even something else, and found inspiration in it. The speed and the embroidery were dazzling, of course. Tatum played with an array of ascending and descending arpeggio runs, octave slides and leaps, sudden modulations, double-third glissandos-a keyboard vocabulary in which swift, interpolated triplets were a small matter. His left hand could walk and it could stride; he also liked to use a kind of reverse stride, the chord at the bottom, the note on top. And he could execute all these at tempos that most players could not reach, much less sustain. Indeed, his early Tea for Two seemed to be a textbook summary of what one could learn from Earl Hines; Tiger Rag all one could get from Fats Waller; and by Get Happy in 1940, more than Waller was ever likely to get to.