Art Tatum – O génio pianista do Jazz

Arthur “Art” Tatum Jr. (pianist) was born in Toledo, Ohio, on October 13, 1909 in Toledo, Ohio and passed away on Novemeber 15, 1956 in Los Angeles, California.

From infancy he suffered from cataracts, which left him blind in one eye and with only very limited vision in the other. Tatum learned to play by ear, picking out church hymns by the age of three, learning tunes from the radio and copying piano roll recordings his mother owned. He developed an incredibly fast playing style, without losing accuracy.

When Leonard Feather was compiling his Encyclopedia of Jazz in the mid-1950s, he polled a number of musicians about the players they themselves most admired on their respective instruments. More than two-thirds of the pianists surveyed put Tatum at the top of the list. Gene Lees conducted a similar poll thirty years later, and again Tatum dominated the results.