As someone who took years of piano instruction, I can only sit in awe when I listen to Art Tatum. Somehow this blind lover of baseball and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer ran his thick fingers as light and fast over the keyboard as a feather. He never seemed to miss a downbeat, play off-key, or take the music out of whatever mood it was supposed to inhabit. While many seem content to dwell on his technical ability, he combined that with a sense both of rhythm and melody that was unmatched until Charlie Parker emerged in the post-war years.
Here he is doing Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me"
Another standard, Rogers & Hart's "Isn't It Romantic"
One of my favorite songs of all time, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"
The nice thing about these clips is there is no "video" of him playing, so you can get lost in his playing.
