Word: tatum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...keyboard, playing a Beethoven sonata, one hand at a time, while little Alex's fingers followed an octave away. Perhaps because of his blindness, "I always improvised and made up little pieces." so when he began to listen to records of Erroll Garner. Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum, he was ready for jazz...
...Trotters to the top and still keeps them there. For spectator purposes, the real heroes are the famed hams of the hardwood themselves: Marques Haynes, who proves with his incredible dachshund dribble that if the modern basketball giant cannot be passed over he can be passed under, and Goose Tatum, who at one point, standing flat on his feet, wiggles so disconcertingly that an opponent stumbles and almost falls down. Best shot: Haynes, after dribbling right around the entire opposing five while his own teammates doze on the floor, passes to the reclining Tatum, who looks up superciliously from...
...Tatum for Fancies. Such mastery of the keyboard did not come easily to Oscar Peterson. His father, a music-loving porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway, sat him on a piano stool when he was five and told him to start practicing. From then on, whenever Papa Peterson left on his railroad trips, he laid out practice schedules. If the practicing was not done on his return, Oscar "caught hell." Oscar began to get professional engagements in his mid-teens, but his father never let applause and paychecks go to his son's head: "You're not going...
Peterson found his own style only after studying others'. His first hero was Teddy Powell. Then he focused on Nat "King" Cole. Eventually, in 1939, he heard Art Tatum, the man Oscar calls "the greatest living instrumentalist of them all." Tatum's flying keyboard fancies knocked the budding Peterson completely off balance: "I couldn't play a note after hearing Art that first time. I gave up the piano for three weeks...
Chopin for Reach. Now thoroughly recovered from his temporary paralysis, he has gone a long way toward outdoing Tatum. One of his particular fancies is to blend in phrases from a completely different piece-such as snatches of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata in the middle of My Funny Valentine. "I like to venture out," he says. "Like with Funny Valentine, it came to me that there was a similarity between those chords and Beethoven's. I ventured out. It worked...