Art Tatum:
Piano Starts Here
Live at The Shrine
Imagine sitting in the room and hearing Art Tatum play in person.
Jazz pianist Art Tatum was recorded live in Los Angeles
on April 2, 1949.
That recording is available today on a Sony CD
Piano Starts Here.
“He was the greatest soloist in jazz history, regardless of instrument,”
jazz critic Leonard Feather wrote in the liner notes.
It is one of the best loved jazz albums ever,
and has been in print for more than fifty years.
But, Tatum's playing was locked in the rough
monaural sound of its time, until now.
Sony BMG recorded a new
re-performance®
of the entire "Piano Starts Here" album, before a live audience
at the original venue, the
Shrine Auditorium
in Los Angeles on September 23, 2007.
The Team
A world-class team created the new audio master recordings
of the album during the live concert:
- Steve
Epstein: producer for Sony BMG,
has 11 Grammy awards and 27 Grammy nominations for his classical and jazz recordings.
These include five Classical Producer of the Year Grammy awards.
- Richard King:
recording engineer and founder of RK Recording.
He has long been associated with Sony Music Studios in New York.
King has been the engineer with Yo-Yo Ma, the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
the Philadelphia Orchestra and many revered classical pianists,
such as Yefim Bronfman, Emanuel Ax, Murray Perahia, and Andre Previn.
He has won
seven Grammy Awards, including two for Best Engineered Classical Album, and one Latin Grammy Award.
- Gus Skinas:
one of the world's foremost digital experts, coordinated our make-shift
control room in the green room of the Shrine, along with Steve and Richard.
(You can't imagine how much computer equipment and wiring were
in this one backstage room.)
Gus was the engineer behind the high-resolution surround-sound masters for
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, as well as Elton John,
the Rolling Stones, Diana Krall, and John Hiatt.
- Marc Wienert:
piano voicer, brought his specialized skills in precisely adjusting
piano acoustic behavior. His task for this new recording is unique;
coordinating one piano’s timbre to pianos
from more than 50 years earlier,
to invoke a gorgeous sound – yet
one Tatum would appreciate.
-
Yamaha Artist Services:
supplied a nine-foot Disklavier Pro, as did Zenph®.
These are superb concert grands outfitted with
uniquely-engineered computer hardware.
Click
here
for our overview of the differences between the typical
MIDI you may be familiar with
and a high-resolution Disklavier Pro.
Mark Hullibarger from the Yamaha Piano Division headquarters
devoted a week to
seeing the two Pros through the concert and recordings.
- Our hosts for the live show were both crazy about Art Tatum:
Doug McIntyre,
host of KABC radio's McIntyre in the Morning
Gordon Goodwin,
leader of Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band
The Super Audio Recording
This Zenph recording for Sony BMG Masterworks will be an audiophile
dream come true, much like the recent re-performance of
Glenn Gould's 1955 Goldberg Variations.
Sony BMG will release the new album as a
"hybrid multichannel SACD" disc.
This type of compact disc has three layers and plays perfectly on any
traditional CD player,
but sounds magnificent on the newer
Super Audio CD (SACD)
players. It is especially involving in surround sound.
Richard King and Gus Skinas,
both renowned for their surround-sound expertise, used the latest
Sonoma workstation
for this DSD recording.
Sony also recorded a
binaural
version of the playing.
In this technique,
two microphones are positioned in the ears of a
dummy head,
so that headphone playback sounds quite immersive. The new recording will let you
hear what Tatum heard as he sat at the piano bench in the Shrine, an amazing experience!
Both the binaural and the surround-sound versions will be on the new
hybrid SACD/CD.
These multiple new recordings
show the ability to take a re-performance and hear
it from different perspectives.
The Music
Today's "Piano Starts Here" album has 13 tracks,
played by Tatum at two different times.
Sony recorded re-performances of the four New York studio sessions,
first recorded on March 21, 1933.
As studio recordings, they were made in an acoustically small room,
and Tatum uses lots of pedal throughout.
These four tracks were originally made on 78 rpm masters for Brunswick.
- Tea for Two (3:11)
- St. Louis Blues (2:30)
- Tiger Rag (2:17)
- Sophisticated Lady (3:14)
Sony recorded re-performances of the nine live tracks from the "Just Jazz" concert on
April 2, 1949 at The Shrine Auditorium. The Shrine is an enormous hall
built in 1926, seating 6,300. Tatum, playing to audience in the room,
plays "big," with sparing use of the pedal.
Here's the new order of these nine live tracks.
- Humoresque (3:48)
- Tatum-Pole Boogie (2:28)
- Someone to Watch over Me (3:08)
- How High the Moon (2:28)
- Yesterdays (3:23)
- Willow Weep for Me (3:13)
- The Kerry Dance (1:04)
- Gershwin Medley (3:53)
- I Know That You Know (2:30)
We corrected a number of flaws that have crept in over the years.
- We restored Tatum's authentic tempi from the
night of the concert. Our research showed that during the transfer
made for the current album,
the tape playback speed was slower than it was while recording the concert.
As a result, not only is the pitch of the current album slightly flat,
but its tempi are too slow by the same ratio.
(Remarkably, Tatum actually played even
faster than you may be used to hearing!)
- We fixed problems with tape glitches. For example,
in one spot, 80ms of time was lost in the midst of "Humoresque,"
disturbing the natural sense of pulse in the performance.
Recognizing tape glitches and adjusting the code
accordingly allows us to maintain the integrity of Tatum's
playing.
- We restored what is believed to be the original concert order
of the nine Shrine tracks, as shown above.
Clues were provided by the original Columbia LP record GL 101,
"Gene Norman presents an ART TATUM concert," which is a continuous
recording of the entire concert, with no gaps
between the tracks; it has all the audience noise.
- We restored lost material.
The current album contains a track titled "The Man I Love,"
but that track had been spliced already by 1952, excising
excerpts from Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" played
in the original concert.
We restored the omitted material (with
thanks to Tatum discographer Arnold Laubich) -- you will hear
two additional minutes of Tatum's remarkable playing.
