Tatum’s Tiger Rag is WILDLY hard to play
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2023
- Art Tatum's Tiger Rag is so intensely technical and harmonically complex that I nearly crumbled trying to study it.
Unlock Your Jazz Potential Today! 🎷 🎹
========================================
✅ Join 5,000+ jazz enthusiasts and get FREE weekly tips to take your playing to the next level. Subscribe here: lp.jazz-library.com/
🤝 Join the community of other musicians learning to play jazz. Join the FREE Jazz-Library online group: community.jazz-library.com/
🚀 Want to play your first jazz solo in just 7 days? Sign up for my FREE 7-day Soloing Challenge and learn step-by-step: courses.jazz-library.com/bund...
📈 Take your skills to the next level with my comprehensive Jazz Fundamentals course. Get an All-Access pass now and save 30% with code "ytsub": courses.jazz-library.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two recordings were used to produce this video.
- One which is an official recording from Tatum.
- I also used a few highlight clips from a performance by @EldarDjangirov to demonstrate the wild technique required to play this.
Don't miss Eldar's performance on his channel here: • Eldar Djangirov - "Tig...
Both of these recordings are copywrite of their respective owners. - บันเทิง
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 68 | คู่เอก "พระจันทร์ฉาย vs โจนาธาน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/F3IM3w-XchI/mqdefault.jpg)
Check out my Jazz Fundamentals course and get 30% off your first year/month with the coupon code below.
- courses.jazz-library.com/
- Coupon Code: ytsub
Tatum had huge hands. I never saw them. Tatum died in 1956 of renal failure. My father saw him play on the West Coast somewhere. Shook his hand. "It was fat and puffy, like a big warm pillow," he told me, many years later. "Tatum's long fingers completely wrapped around the back of my hand."
Ten years ago in April, Chucho Valdez, Jr., known as "Chuchito" gave a master class at DU's Lamont Music School. I was there and was introduced by a friend on the faculty. When we shook hands, he engulfed my regular-sized hand.
Since there were students waiting, I welcomed him to Colorado, and expressed my gratitude. Almost as an afterthought I asked his reach -- "A twelfth," I guessed? "No," he smiled, "a thirteenth!" That night as I settled in to sleep, I thought again of my father and what he told me about Tatum. "No one could cut him."
Arthur Tatum, born October 13, 1909, in Toledo, Ohio. Died before his 50th birthday. One of our greatest jazz pianists.
I studied at a music school in Toledo, right down the road from where he played! But I wasn’t here in 1956 to compare hand sizes.
@@JoshWalshMusic Well, I was in New Jersey then, but had not yet mastered the technique of tying my shoes, and could not go anywhere without my Mommy. Still, I think my hand would feel very small in Art Tatum's.
Toledo must have had its effect because you play those arpeggios much better than I ever could. Thanks for educating us about Mr. Tatum, and everything else here.
@@kwgm8578 thanks for the great comment!
@@JoshWalshMusic My pleasure, friend.
Thanks for doing this but always remember Art did it without hearing Art Tatum recordings.
😊
Of course!
His recordings also stand in contrast with the stories of him at the time. Most of his early recordings in the 30s and 40s that went to 78s, suffered from the 2:30 - 3:00 limit per side. There are stories of him in the early-mid 30s going to rent parties and running through 3-4 bassists in record time, or of him going into clubs (after tearing down other sttride pianists and establishing himself on the top), taking the stage and playing out of his mind for 12 minutes straight.
But he DID hear the piano rolls of Lee Sims.
Thank you 🙏🙏🙏🙏 for introducing me to this artist and helping me discover the depth of his playing. Fascinating!
Great video Josh. Perfect!
Thank you Josh! You willingness to break down harmonic characteristics and Art's unique filigree really gives an inner view into what Art thought and what he liked/revered.
man I really love seeing Art Tatum getting some love, he completely changed what I thought music was possible since a teenager, even when I played the piano I never managed to play his insane arpeggios, and yeah his harmonies and technique are just pure un-human godlike sound, that I never heard from anyone else
Great hook and set-up👍 I enjoyed following your journey
Thanks man.
Like your DUPE method Josh - wow what an insane pianist! Jaw dropping and he could stretch a 13th! Simply wow! Really enjoyed your post 😁🎹👍🏻
Playing like this does make me want to weep for reasons I can't quite explain. Thanks for taking the time to break it down. The three-hand business brought to mind, for some reason, the Sousa-Horowitz "Stars and Stripes Forever" which indulges in the same thing for no discernible reason other than the pure joy of virtuosity. (The Volodos performance here on youtube is great because of how angry Volodos looks. "Vlad, why are you doing this to me???) Meantime thanks for your videos -- so informative and fun. Keep up the good work!
I tried the Horowitz one in college. It wasn’t pretty 🤣
Just some more info on Tatum:
He could span a 13th making the jumps he had to execute smaller relative to the size of his handspan making his playing far more efficient and less taxing
He might've been visually impaired but not enough to not be able to play poker and pool I've read so he could clearly see well enough to tell where his hands were
And anyone with enough technical prowess can play those runs, lets face it, Tatum's runs can probably be played if you can play Flight Of The Bumblebee or something else with a LOT of arpeggios like that. You just have to have the technique down to do it :D
I have been able to play bumblebee for about a decade. I am barely able to hang on to some of these runs.
The technique is remarkable, but you are right, he’s far from the only one with that technique. What’s amazing is that he would improvise like this for hours and hours without stopping.
Thanks for the great comment!
@@JoshWalshMusic Good point about his improvisation! People say I can improvise but when I hear what a true master of the craft like Tatum or Teddy Wilson could do with a simple tune just makes me scratch my head and wonder how!
Art Tatum did NOT play ragtime, Tiger Rag was only called that but it isn't a rag. Art Tatum played SWING piano.
To label genres of Art Tatum is futile.
@@kzsotto7375 Nah, it isn't, if you actually understood the music well then you wouldn't say that.
He was a genius, yes, but he played *swing* and *classical jazz* for most of his career. Not stride piano.
Tatum played "Tatum". Something never heard before and therefore not to be stuffed into a "stylistic basket".
@@byronjohnson8844 Nah, you're overcomplicating things. Yes, he had his own style, but it falls into the swing genre.
The opening harmonies isn’t even Jazz but Impressionism, influences of Ravel and Debussy.
Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson are two of my favourite Jazz Pianists ever, RIP to them both.
Jeeezzzz - V. Horowitz
Have you heard the story about Horowitz playing this for Tatum? It’s a riot.
One recording I highly recommend you listen to is the Zenph Studios reperformance that is an EXACT replica of Tatum's playing but recorded on a Yamaha Disklavier, the amount of detail exposed is incredible!
What a nice analysis you did here. Basically we pianists have to agree the old adage, "You Can't ImiTATUM!!"
Great analysis! I'd love your take on Tatum's I Know That You Know. Or maybe even Tea for Two, but especially the 1953 version, not just the '33 version which has been done to death by now.
my method is always W.T.F. - which stands for what the fuck
Hi Josh, with all of this erudite, "otherworldly" playing, perhaps I'll just have to create my own, "Theme on A Snail Playing A Rag". Thanks for creating DUPE, so that I can understand a bit of what I'm hearing on the Tatum recording.🙃
Hey MaeRuth - you gotta send us a video of your snail rag! Sounds epic.
Their are people that are such geniuses that their just beyond category,I known classical pianists I've known that play all the Rachmaninov concertos,that have tried this piece,and failed ..their is one fine pianist who recorded this,he did great,but didn't come close to art.. because art was a freak of nature.. and technically at least,the greatest jazz pianist that ever lived..take it from me,some people can at times sound close,but believe me,their not close, knowone will equal him, because he had just to many levels of genius going for him...
Absolutely!
awesome video, few people analyze tatum including runs cheers
If you are interesting in learning Tatums runs, Dick Hyman has an interview on TH-cam in which he shows several of Art’s runs and the fingering
Seen it 500 times 😂
It is a crazy recording... awesome.
Hard to analyze...
The man famous for making old broken pianos sound good.
IMO stride piano and ragtime are kind of interchangable, in terms of vocabulary.
Watch Dick Hyman's analysis of Tatum - th-cam.com/video/h1BOP4wvPq4/w-d-xo.html
Could you make a video sometime about Barry Harris and wholetone scale. There's a lot of Barry materials these days, but I don't see much on Barry and wholetone scale.
I’ll consider it. I’m moving away from that directly instructional content on TH-cam , but I may add something to the course on it.
Something I've come across recently. Beboppers and Barry talk about diminish chord and how it's symmetrical made of all minor 3rds. There is a lot in that, but recently I heard someone talk about it as two tritones intervals put together. I've been thinking about that and it another cool way to view the dominants that come out of the diminished family of chords. Makes the dominants and tritone subs relationship standout in the diminished.
@@DojoOfCoolthere are several symmetries like this that Barry taught.
As you pointed out, the octave is split symmetrically by the tritone.
The diminished triads are also symmetrical, as are the augmented.
I have a video here showing how diminished chords give birth to dominants, and if you take that same logic further you also get major and minor 6th chords. That explains essentially all of Barry’s harmony.
In a documentary a pianist said some guy approached him which he thought he had gorilla hands based on what he put on his shoulder, and after he heard him he never wanted to play piano again, and yeah Art Tatum was almost blind lol, I think he would be surprised himself what he was doing if he saw what he was doing
Comparable to learning Liszt pieces it seems!
Imagine Shaquille O'Neal becoming a virtuoso pianist😮
There's a gospel organist/pianist that comes close, named Quenell Gaskin.
I know right! LOL.
Fun fact, Red Garland was a boxer before he became a jazz player.
He's partially blind in one eye, he actually even drove his car to his gigs...
Yup!
For the naysayers; Musical "styles" or analysis is applied AFTER the fact. That applies to Bach, Chopin, Matthias Hauer and Cage. Neither copied what came before. Jazz, in particular, is an art form that night by night extends the envelope. My fighters best friend, and therefore my godfather was the iconic progressive jazz musician Eric Dolphy. As with Art Tatum and many others, one cannot categorize his genius by musical style. It is simply "Dolphy". And Art's music in the early 20th Century is simply "Tatum".
* father's (not fighters)
True. Exactly.
Who's Art Tatum?
Who’s James Booker?
U mean The Bayou Maharajah😂😂😊😊
The most amazing thing I think about this tune is what a vast improvement it is over the original, a total piece of crap IMHO. 😄
Art is technically brilliant, musically he's just a car crash.
@@KalmAM those weren't quite as bad, but...
a fun exercise is taking tatum's tunes and slowing them down so you can hear that actually his runs were precursors to bebop language (enclosures, chromatic approaches, interpolating different modes and scales over a single chord nature)
To say Tatum was not a good musician is ridiculous and just wrong. His improvisations are very musically sophisticated.
@@jefolson6989 musicianship is not just about what you play, its just as much about when you play it, ragtime doubly so. He's playing a ragtime tune without any ragtime feel at all, fingers everywhere but ears totally absent.
Every top piano players ever would disagree vehemently with you!