August 4, 2007

A few years back, the Storyville label inaugurated a series of CDs devoted to Art Tatum featuring recordings listed in the Tatum discography, but hitherto unavailable to anyone but those in the innermost Tatum collector circles. The recordings originate from transcriptions, network broadcasts, Armed Forces Radio Services programs, location recordings, and private recordings that were made informally. The series was intended to run to eight volumes, but a ninth volume came out in 2005 of brand new discoveries going back to the mid-forties and including private recordings made well after hours at a Los Angeles night club in 1952. On this occasion, we spent some time with Volumes 7 and 8.

Owing to the different sources for the recordings, the quality will vary, and certain Tatum favorites do show up frequently over the entire series. I was a little astonished at the absence of any speed correction to some of the Steve Allen segments on Volume 7; a couple of tracks were way, way off. I corrected them by more than 8%! That kind of gaffe is uncharacteristic of the production values of this project. I think I came pretty close to the correct speed. (A lot of CD players and digital software allow you to make pitch corrections. The pros sometimes accomplish this by researching the keys in which songs were published and using a pitch pipe to determine the correct speed.)