Editor's note: This is the second of three installments from Bill's memoir-in-progress, "The Inherited Heart."
Erroll Garner was a different story than the other musicians I'd been studiously listening to, but just as richly appreciated. The liner notes on his "Piano Moods" album pointed out his "wandering, extraordinarily romantic style" (what had once been characterized as "waterfall music") offset by "more extrovert… forthright and bouncing… unexpected but apposite variations on the main theme," his "tantalizing delayed beat in the right hand."
Some of these were big words for me at the time, but I could sense what was being talked about — I could hear it, and play alongside it too! Garner, also, strung tunes together handsomely, moving easily it seemed, with finesse and ingenuity, from one to another: tunes such as "Spring Is Here," "When You're Smiling," "It Could Happen to You," and "I Don't Know Why (I Just Do)."
The Tatum album was, as they say, "Something else." And how! Art Tatum performed solo on "Yesterdays," "Willow Weep for Me," "The Man I Love," "How High the Moon," and "Someone to Watch Over Me" — the sound so luscious, so lovely, or as these liner notes stated, so full of "cheerfully inventive playing,"flirting" with all of the musical options "joyously throughout a series of choruses," always adding "an extra dimension" to standards while paying full homage to them, that I lifted my hands from the drums I had made, crossed my arms, and just sat there and listened (in awe!) to the harmonies and rhythms he was creating of his own accord.
The album referred to Tatum as a "giant" of jazz and I could recognize him as such immediately — someone with a "distinct style and a long, long line of disciples," one of which I then and there swore to become, even though I was attempting to play drums not piano. Later on, when I read about Bud Powell suddenly ceasing to play at a gig that was his own when Art Tatum walked through the door, Powell remarking "God is in the house," I understood how he felt, exactly, for God had entered my house (or basement!) and I had instantly become an acolyte in his church, converted on the spot — having found both secular (which I thought I had given up on) and divine love combined.
I fleshed out my enthusiasm, my love of these three great artists by purchasing other 10" Lps of theirs: Teddy Wilson offering "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "These Foolish Things," "I Can't Get Started," "and "Rosetta" on a second Columbia recording; as did Garner on their "Garnerland" and "Erroll Garner Plays for Dancing" — and then I found the albums he made for Savoy. I couldn't get enough of Art Tatum, so I added his Capitol recordings "Art Tatum" and "Art Tatum Encores" to my rapidly expanding collection, and also the trio records (with Tiny Grimes on guitar and Slam Stewart on bass), which were great fun to try to keep up with on drums — my favorite tunes being "Topsy," "I Got Rhythm," "Moonglow," and "If I Had You."
I added the "Daddy" of them all to my stash, "Fats" Waller Favorites; dug Eddie Heywood (whose father once led the pit band in a Atlanta vaudeville theater, Heywood himself forming a successful quartet that included trumpeter Doc Cheatham and trombonist Vic Dickenson, and contributing classic solos to a Coleman Hawkins quartet date; a pianist who one day found his hands paralyzed and had to stop playing at the height of his success, only to go on to compose the "hit" tune "Canadian Sunset" after).
I revered the power and poise of Earl "Father" Hines. I fell in love with the Nat "King" Cole Trio ("Sweet Lorraine," "Embraceable You," "It's Only a Paper Moon," " Body and Soul," "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby," "Little Girl," "For All We Know," "If I Had You"). My mother owned a 10-inch LP called "Frankie Carl Dance Parade"; I admired Joe Bushkin's "Piano Moods" offerings (and especially the group he formed later with Buck Clayton and Jo Jones), was stunned by Freddie Slack's boogie-woogie, and intrigued by Bernie Leighton's sophisticated "East Side Rendezvous."
By this time I had more than enough music to "play along with," hour after hour, day after day. I may be wrong but I don't think official "Play Along Records" were on the scene yet, or if they were, not all that popular. But why, at that time, would I have been interested in them anyway, performing as I was, day after day, joyously, in my own basement, with my new found friends: the very best jazz pianists on the planet?
Finally, the inevitable happened. The top of my Quaker Oats box snare — repeatedly massaged, punched, stroked — finally gave way. It just caved in. I decided I was ripe for bigger and better things.
I combed the hock shops on Michigan Avenue in Detroit and came back with an old wooden snare — no bargain really (I think, later, when I would buy a complete set of Slingerland red pearl drums at Grinnell Bros. Music Store in my home town of Birmingham, I may have paid no more for the snare than I did for that wooden hock shop acquisition), but I didn't care, for I'd seen my first bums up close (I even gave one the proverbial dime for a cup of coffee) and that made the excursion worthwhile. I felt like a genuine down-and-out died-for-love broken hearted jazz man (In 1950, I saw Kirk Douglas in "Young Man with a Horn"), even though I knew, basically "square" as I still was, I more than likely didn't qualify.
I continued woodshedding to piano music on my new wooden snare—hours and hours of swish ta-da swish ta-da swish ta-da swish: quarter note, dotted eighth, sixteenth note, quarter note, etc. —or what, some forty-seven years later, when I interviewed him for a book I'd been asked to write on the Monterey Jazz Festival, Percy Heath of The Modern Jazz Quarter told me drummer Connie Kay said Lester "Pres" Young used to call that rhythm: tut-ty boom tut-ty boom tut-ty boom…
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