Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger (October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007), was a Pulitzer Prize recipient and American historian and social critic whose work explored the liberalism of American political leaders including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. He served as special assistant and "court historian"[1] to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy Administration, from the transition period to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days. In 1968, he actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy until Kennedy's assassination in the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, and wrote the biography Robert Kennedy and His Times several years later.
He popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration by writing the book The Imperial Presidency.
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If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.
„
Early life and career
Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888 – 1965), who was an influential social historian at Ohio State University and Harvard University.[2] He attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and received his first degree at the age of twenty from Harvard, where he would graduate summa cum laude. In 1940, at the age of twenty-three, he was appointed to a three-year fellowship at Harvard. His fellowship was interrupted by the United States' entry into World War II. After failing his military medical examination Schlesinger joined the Office of War Information. From 1943-1945 he served in a spy ring operated by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA; In Garry Wills's 1970 book, "Nixon Agonistes", he mentions Schlesinger's background in the OSS.[3] Dr. Schlesinger's full involvement was very openly and publicly discussed in the media in 2008, along with other well known personalities such as chef Julia Child.[4][5]
Schlesinger's service in the OSS allowed him time to complete his first Pulitzer prizewinning book, The Age of Jackson, in 1945. From 1946-1954 he was an Associate Professor at Harvard, becoming a full professor in 1954.
Political Activities Prior to 1960
In 1947 Schlesinger became a founding member of the Americans for Democratic Action organization along with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, future Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and economist and long-time friend John Kenneth Galbraith, acting as National Chairman from 1953-1954. After President Harry S. Truman announced he would not run for a second term in 1952, Schlesinger became the primary speechwriter and ardent supporter of Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson for President of the United States. In 1956 he served on Stevenson's campaign staff (along with 26-year-old Robert Kennedy) and supported the nomination of Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) as Stevenson's vice-president, which eventually went to Senator Estes Kefauver. Schlesinger had known John Kennedy since attending Harvard and increasingly socialized with Kennedy and his wife in the 1950s. Kennedy had also protested against Schlesinger being falsely accused as a "Harvard Communist" by Boston reporter John Fox in 1954. During the 1960 campaign Schlesinger supported Kennedy, causing much consternation to Stevenson loyalists. At the time, however, Kennedy was an active candidate while Stevenson refused to run unless he was drafted by the Democratic National Convention. After Kennedy won the nomination, Schlesinger helped the campaign as a (sometime) speechwriter, speaker, and member of the ADA. He also wrote the book Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? in which he lauded Kennedy's abilities and scorned Vice-President Richard Nixon as having "no ideas, only methods...He cares about winning." [6]
Kennedy Administration
After the election, the president-elect offered Schlesinger an ambassadorship and Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Relations before Robert Kennedy proposed that he serve as a "sort of roving reporter and troubleshooter." Schlesinger quickly accepted, and on January 30, 1961 he resigned from Harvard and was appointed Special Assistant to the President. He worked primarily on Latin American Affairs and as a speechwriter during his tenure in the White House.
In February 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation" that would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the President, stating that "at one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions."[7] During the Cabinet deliberations he "shrank into a chair at the far end of the table and listened in silence" as the Joint Chiefs and CIA representatives lobbied the president for an invasion. Along with his friend, Senator William Fulbright, Schlesinger sent several memos to the President opposing the strike[8]; however, during the meetings he held back his opinion, reluctant to undermine the President's desire for a unanimous decision. Following the overt failure of the invasion, Schlesinger later lamented "In the months after the Bay of Pigs, I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room . . . I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion."[9] After the furor died down, Kennedy joked that Schlesinger "wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I'm still alive!"[7] During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Schlesinger was not a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) but helped UN Ambassador Stevenson draft his presentation of the crisis to the UN Security Council.
After President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Schlesinger resigned his position in January 1964. He wrote a memoir/history of the Kennedy Administration called A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1965.
Later career
Schlesinger returned to teaching in 1966 as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He retired in 1994, but remained an active member of the Graduate Center community as an emeritus professor until his death. He continued to be a Kennedy loyalist for the rest of his life, campaigning for Robert Kennedy's tragic presidential campaign in 1968 and for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1980. Upon the request of Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy, he wrote the biography Robert Kennedy And His Times. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he greatly criticized Richard Nixon as both a candidate and president. His outspoken disdain of Nixon and prominent status as a liberal Democrat led to his placement on the "master list" of Nixon's Enemies List. Ironically, Nixon would become his next-door neighbor in the years following the Watergate scandal. He retired from teaching in 1994 but remained involved in politics for the rest of his life through his books and public speaking tours.
Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as ee cummings (in the style of some of his poems), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular.
Early years
Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, elder of two children to Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke.His younger sister, Elizabeth, was born in 1901.
He was named after his father but his family called him by his middle name, Estlin.His father was a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University and later a Unitarian minister.Cummings described his father as a person who could accomplish anything that he wanted to. Edward was well skilled and was always working on repairing things.e and his son were close, and Edward was one of Estlin's most ardent supporters.
His mother never partook in stereotypically "feminine" things, and enjoyed reading poetry to her children. Raised in a well-educated family, Cummings was a precocious boy and his mother encouraged Estlin to write poetry every day. He wrote his first poem when he was only three: "Oh,the pretty birdie,O;/with his little toe,toe,toe!"
His boyhood home, the E. E. Cummings House, is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Education
Cummings enrolled at Harvard University in September 1911, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1915, graduating magna cum laude, and in the next year completed his Master's degree in English and Classical Studies also at Harvard.While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos, at one time rooming in Thayer Hall, named after the family of one of his Harvard acquaintances, Scofield Thayer, and not yet a freshman-only dormitory.Several of Cummings' poems were published in the Harvard Monthly as early as his sophomore year. Cummings himself labored on the school newspaper alongside fellow Harvard AesthetesJohn Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon. In 1915, his poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.
In his final year at Harvard, Cummings was influenced by writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He delivered a controversial commencement address to his graduating class entitled "The New Art". This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety, as he managed to give the false impression that the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell, whom he himself admired, was "abnormal". For this, Cummings was chastised in the newspapers. In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.
Career
In 1917 Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. He fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.
During their service in the ambulance corp, they had sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors and preferred the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans On September 21, 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. They were held for 3½ months in a concentration camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.
They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings' father failed to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels and in December 1917 finally wrote a letter to President Wilson. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, and Brown was released two months later. Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives—The Enormous Room by e e cummings....Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."
Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New York. During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s he returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico and worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924 to 1927).
Cummings' papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Personal life
In 1926, Cummings' father was killed in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings' mother survived. Cummings detailed the accident in the following passage from his i: six nonlectures series given at Harvard (as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) in 1952–1953:
... a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.
His father's death had a profound impact on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life. Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father's memory in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love"
Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life. As he grew in maturity and age, Cummings moved more toward an "I, Thou" relationship with God. His journals are replete with references to “le bon Dieu” as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as “Bon Dieu! may I some day do something truly great. amen.”). Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')."
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
Marriages
Cummings was married briefly twice. Cummings' first marriage, to Elaine Orr, began as a love affair in 1918 while she was married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings' friends from Harvard. The affair produced a daughter, Nancy, born on December 20, 1919. Nancy was Cummings' only child. After divorcing Thayer, Elaine married Cummings on March 19, 1924. However, the marriage ended after two months and they were divorced less than nine months later. Elaine left Cummings for a wealthy Irish banker, moved to Ireland, and took Nancy with her. Under the terms of the divorce Cummings was granted custody of Nancy for three months each year, but Elaine refused to abide by the agreement. Cummings did not see his daughter again until 1946.
He married his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton on May 1, 1929, and they separated three years later in 1932. That same year, Anne obtained a Mexican divorce that was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934.
The year Cummings and Anne separated, he met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever legally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings in a common-law marriage until his death in 1962. Morehouse died on May 18, 1969,while living at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York City, where Cummings had resided since September 8, 1924.
Political views
A liberal in his early youth, Cummings' disillusion upon his trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, documented in Eimi, led him to shift rightward on many political and social issues.Despite his radical and bohemian public image, he was a Republican and, later, an ardent supporter of Joseph McCarthy.
Final years and death
In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1955 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.
Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire.
He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire at the Memorial Hospital.His cremated remains were buried in Lot 748 Althaeas Path, in Section 6, Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory in Boston. In 1969, his third wife, Marion Morehouse Cummings, died and was buried in an adjoining plot.
Awards
During his lifetime, Cummings received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:
Arthur "Art" Tatum, Jr. (October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazzpianist and virtuoso. He was nearly blind.
Tatum is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time.[1] Critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Tatum's quick reflexes and boundless imagination kept his improvisations filled with fresh (and sometimes futuristic) ideas that put him way ahead of his contemporaries ... Art Tatum's recordings still have the ability to scare modern pianists."
For a musician of such stature, there is very little published information available about Tatum's life. Only one full-length biography of Tatum has been published, Too Marvelous for Words, by James Lester. Lester interviewed many Tatum contemporaries for the book and drew from many articles published about Tatum.
Tatum was born in Toledo, Ohio. His father, Arthur Tatum, Sr., was a guitarist and an elder at Grace Presbyterian Church, where his mother, Mildred Hoskins, played piano.He had two siblings, Karl and Arlene.[6] From infancy he suffered from cataracts of disputed cause which left him blind in one eye and with only very limited vision in the other. A number of surgical procedures improved his eye condition to a degree but some of the benefits were reversed when he was assaulted in 1930 at age 20.
A child prodigy with perfect pitch, 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. As a child he was also very sensitive to the piano's intonation and insisted it be tuned often. While playing piano was the most obvious application of his skills, he also had an encyclopedic memory for Major League Baseball statistics.
In 1925, Tatum moved to the Columbus School for the Blind, where he studied music and learned braille. Subsequently he studied piano with Overton G. Rainey at either the Jefferson School or the Toledo School of Music. Rainey, who too was visually impaired, likely taught Tatum in the classical tradition, as Rainey did not improvise and discouraged his students from playing jazz.In 1927, Tatum began playing on Toledo radio station WSPD as 'Arthur Tatum, Toledo's Blind Pianist', during interludes in Ellen Kay's shopping chat program and soon had his own program. By the age of 19, Tatum was playing with singer Jon Hendricks, also an Ohioan, at the local Waiters' and Bellmens' Club. As word of Tatum spread, national performers, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Joe Turner and Fletcher Henderson, passing through Toledo would make it a point to drop in to hear the piano phenomenon.
Tatum drew inspiration from the pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, who exemplified the stride piano style, and from the more 'modern' Earl Hines,six years Tatum's senior. A major event in his meteoric rise to success was his appearance at a cutting contest in 1933 at Morgan's bar in New York City that included Waller, Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith. Standard contest pieces included Johnson's "Harlem Strut" and "Carolina Shout" and Fats Waller's "Handful of Keys." Tatum triumphed with his arrangements of "Tea for Two" and "Tiger Rag", in a performance that was considered to be the last word in stride piano.Tatum's debut was historic because he outplayed the elite competition and heralded the demise of the stride era. He was not challenged further until stride specialist Donald Lambert initiated a half-serious rivalry with him.
Tatum worked in New York at the Onyx Club for a few months and recorded his first four solo sides on the Brunswick label in March, 1933. He returned to Ohio and played around the midwest in the mid-1930s and played on the Fleischman Hour radio program hosted by Rudy Vallee in 1935. He also played stints at the Three Deuces in Chicago and in Los Angeles played at the Trocadero, the Paramount and the Club Alabam. In 1937 he returned to New York where he appeared at clubs and played on national radio programs.The following year he embarked on the Queen Mary for England where he toured, playing for three months at Ciro's Club owned by bandleader Ambrose. In the late 1930s he returned to play and record in Los Angeles and New York.
In 1941, Tatum recorded two sessions for Decca Records with singer, Big Joe Turner, the first of which included "Wee Wee Baby Blues", which attained national popularity. Two years later Tatum won Esquire Magazine's first jazz popularity poll. Perhaps believing there was a limited audience for solo piano, Tatum formed a trio in 1943 with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart, whose perfect pitch enabled him to follow Tatum's excursions. Tatum recorded exclusively with the trio for almost two years, but abandoned the trio format in 1945 and returned to solo piano work. Although Tatum was idolized by many jazz musicians, his popularity faded in the mid to late forties with the advent of bebop - a movement which Tatum did not embrace.
Style
Tatum built upon stride and classical piano influences to develop a novel and unique piano style. He introduced a strong, swinging pulse to jazz piano, highlighted with spectacular cadenzas that swept across the entire keyboard. His interpretations of popular songs were exuberant, sophisticated, grandiose and intricate. He sometimes improvised lines that presaged bebop and later jazz genres but generally he did not venture far from the original melodic lines of songs. Jazz soloing in the 1930s had not yet evolved into the free-ranging extended improvisations that flowered in the bebop era of the 1940s and 1950s and beyond. But Tatum embellished those melodic lines with an array of signature devices and runs that appeared throughout his repertoire. As he matured, Tatum became more adventurous in abandoning the melodies and elongating those improvisations.
Tatum was an innovator in reharmonizing melodies by changing the supporting chord progressions or by altering the root movements of a tune. This technique casts a familiar theme in a fresh light and gives the music an unexpected quality. Many of his harmonic concepts and larger chord voicings (e.g., 13th chords with various flat or sharp intervals) were well ahead of their time in the 1930s (except for their partial emergence in popular songs of the jazz age) and they would be explored by bebop-era musicians a decade later. He worked some of the upper extensions of chords into his lines, a practice which was further developed by Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, which in turn was an influence on the development of 'modern jazz'. Tatum also pioneered the use of dissonance in jazz piano, as can be heard, for example, on his recording of "Aunt Hagar's Blues", which uses extensive dissonance to achieve a bluesy effect. In addition to using major and minor seconds, dissonance was inherent in the complex chords that Tatum frequently used.
Tatum could also play the blues with authority, but his repertoire was predominantly Broadway and popular standards, whose chord progressions and variety better suited his talents. His approach was prolix, pyrotechnic, dramatic and joyous. His protean style combined stride, jazz, swing, boogie-woogie and classical elements, while the musical ideas flowed in rapid-fire fashion. He was playful, spontaneous and often inserted quotes from other songs into his improvisations. Tatum was not inclined toward understatement or expansive use of space. He seldom played in a simplified way, preferring interpretations that displayed his great technique and clever harmonizations.A handful of critics have complained that Tatum played too many notes or was too ornamental or was even 'unjazzlike'.
From the foundation of stride, Tatum made great leaps forward in technique and harmony and he honed a groundbreaking improvisational style that extended the limits of what was possible in jazz piano. His innovations were to greatly influence later jazz pianists, such as Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, Bill Evans and Chick Corea. One of Tatum's innovations was his extensive use of the pentatonic scale, which may have inspired later pianists to further mine its possibilities as a device for soloing. Herbie Hancock described Tatum's unique tone as "majestic" and devoted some time to unlocking this sound and to noting Tatum's harmonic arsenal.
The sounds that Tatum produced with the piano were also distinctive. It was said that he could make a bad piano sound good. Generally playing at mezzoforte volume, he employed the entire keyboard from deep bass tones to sonorous mid-register chords to sparkling upper register runs. He used the sustain pedal sparingly so that each note was clearly articulated and chords were cleanly sounded. Tatum's harmonic invention produced tonal colors that identified his musical palette. He played with boundless energy and occasionally his speedy and precise delivery produced an almost mechanical effect not unlike the sound of a player piano.
Technique
Critic Gunther Schuller declared "On one point there is universal agreement: Tatum's awesome technique."That technique was marked by a calm physical demeanor and efficiency. He did not indulge in theatrical physical or facial expression. The effortless gliding of his hands over difficult passages puzzled most who witnessed the phenomenon. He especially mystified other pianists to whom Tatum appeared to be "playing the impossible." Even when playing scintillating runs at high velocity, it appeared that his fingers hardly moved. Using self-taught fingering, including an array of two-fingered runs, he executed the pyrotechnics with meticulous accuracy and timing. His execution was all the more remarkable considering that he drank prodigious amounts of alcohol when performing, yet his recordings are never sloppy. Tatum also displayed phenomenal independence of the hands and ambidexterity, which was particularly evident while improvising counterpoint. Ira Gitler declared that Tatum's "left hand was the equal of his right." Around 1950 when Bud Powell was opening for Tatum at Birdland, Powell reportedly said to Tatum: "Man, I'm going to really show you about tempo and playing fast. Anytime you're ready." Tatum laughed and replied: "Look, you come in here tomorrow, and anything you do with your right hand, I'll do with my left." Powell never took up the challenge.
Tatum played chords with a relatively flat-fingered technique compared to the curvature taught in classical training.Jimmy Rowles said "Most of the stuff he played was clear over my head. There was too much going on — both hands were impossible to believe. You couldn't pick out what he was doing because his fingers were so smooth and soft, and the way he did it — it was like camouflage."When his fastest tracks of "Tiger Rag" are slowed down, they still reveal a coherent, syncopated rhythm.
After hours
After regular club dates, Tatum would decamp to after-hours clubs to hang out with other musicians who would play for each other. Biographer James Lester notes that Tatum enjoyed listening to other pianists and preferred to play last when several pianists played. He frequently played for hours on end into the dawn, to the detriment of his marriages. Tatum was said to be more spontaneous and creative in those free-form nocturnal sessions than in his scheduled performances. Evidence of this can be found in the set entitled 20th Century Piano Genius which consists of 40 tunes recorded at private parties at the home of Hollywood music director Ray Heindorf in 1950 and 1955. According to the review by Marc Greilsamer, "All of the trademark Tatum elements are here: the grand melodic flourishes, the harmonic magic tricks, the flirtations with various tempos and musical styles. But what also emerges is Tatum's effervescence, his joy, and his humor. He seems to celebrate and mock these timeless melodies all at once."
Group work
Tatum tended to work and to record unaccompanied, partly because relatively few musicians could keep pace with his fast tempos and advanced harmonic vocabulary. Other musicians expressed amazed bewilderment at performing with Tatum. Drummer Jo Jones, who recorded a 1956 trio session with Tatum and bassist Red Callender is quoted as quipping, "I didn't even play on that session [...] all I did was listen. I mean, what could I add? [...] I felt like setting my damn drums on fire."Buddy DeFranco said that playing with Tatum was "like chasing a train."Tatum said of himself: "A band hampers me."
Tatum did not readily adapt or defer to other musicians in ensemble settings. Early in his career he was required to restrain himself when he worked as accompanist for vocalist Adelaide Hall in 1932-33. Perhaps because Tatum believed there was a limited audience for solo piano, he formed a trio in 1943 with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart, whose perfect pitch enabled him to follow Tatum's excursions. He later recorded with other musicians, including a notable session with the 1944 Esquire Jazz All-Stars, which included Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and other jazz greats, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. He also recorded memorable group sessions for Norman Granz in the mid-1950s.
Repertoire
Tatum's repertoire consisted mainly of music from the Great American Songbook — Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and other popular music of the 20's, 30's and 40's. He played his own arrangements of a few classical piano pieces as well, most famously Dvořák's Humoresque no. 7. Although Tatum was not known as a composer, his versions of popular numbers were so original as to border on composition.
Emulators
Mainstream jazz piano has gone in a different direction than that pioneered by Tatum. Nevertheless, transcriptions of Tatum are popular and are often practiced assiduously.But perhaps because his playing was so difficult to copy, only a handful of musicians — such as Oscar Peterson, Johnny Costa, Johnny Guarnieri, Adam Makowicz, Luther G. Williams, Steven Mayer and Christopher Jordan — have attempted to seriously emulate or challenge Tatum. Although Bud Powell was of the bebop movement, his prolific and exciting style showed Tatum influence.
Recordings
Tatum recorded commercially from 1932 until near his death. Although recording opportunities were somewhat intermittent for most of his career due to his solo style, he left copious recordings. He recorded for Decca (1934–41), Capitol (1949, 1952) and for the labels associated with Norman Granz (1953–56). Tatum demonstrated remarkable memory when he recorded 68 solo tracks for Norman Granz in two days, all but three of the tracks in one take. He also recorded a series of group recordings for Granz with, among others, Ben Webster, Jo Jones, Buddy DeFranco, Benny Carter, Harry Sweets Edison , Roy Eldridge and Lionel Hampton.
Film
Although only a small amount of film showing Tatum playing exists today, several minutes of professionally-shot archival footage can be found in Martin Scorsese's documentary The Blues. Footage also appears in Ken Burns' documentary Jazz, which includes a short passage on Tatum's life and work, including comments from Jimmy Rowles and Gary Giddins. Tatum appeared in the 1947 movie The Fabulous Dorseys, first playing a solo and then accompanying Dorsey's band in an impromptu song.
Tatum appeared on Steve Allen's Tonight Show in the early 1950s, and on other television shows from this era. Unfortunately, all of the kinescopes of the Allen shows, which were stored in a warehouse along with other now defunct shows, were thrown into a local rubbish dump to make room for new studios. However, the soundtracks were recorded off-air by Tatum enthusiasts at the time, and many are included in Storyville Records extensive series of rare Tatum recordings.
Tatum is portrayed briefly (by actor Johnny O'Neill) in Ray, a 2004 biopic about R&B artist Ray Charles. When Charles enters a nightclub he remarks "Are my ears deceiving me or is that Art Tatum?" O'Neill captures Tatum's cool and collected presence at the keyboard.
Death
Art Tatum died at Queen of Angels Medical Center in Los Angeles, California from the complications of uremia (as a result of kidney failure). He was originally interred at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, but was moved to the Great Mausoleum of Glendale's Forest Lawn Cemetery in 1991. He was survived by his wife, Geraldine Tatum. Geraldine died on May 4, 2010 in Los Angeles, and was interred beside Art at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
From the Gumbasia project, Art Clokey and his wife Ruth invented Gumby. Since then Gumby and his horse Pokey have been a familiar presence on television, appearing in several series beginning with the "Howdy Doody Show" and later "The Adventures of Gumby." The characters enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s when American actor and comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Gumby in a skit on Saturday Night Live. In the 1990s Gumby: The Movie was released, sparking even more interest.
Clokey's second most famous production is the duo of Davey and Goliath, funded by the Lutheran Church in America.
Born in Detroit, Michigan on October 12, 1921. His birthname was Arthur C. Farrington. When Clokey was 9 years old, his parents divorced and he stayed with his father. After his father died in a car accident, he went to live with his mother in California, but was placed in a half-way houseorphanage after one year because his stepfather did not want him around. At age 12, he was adopted by Joseph W. Clokey, a classical musiccomposer and organist who taught music at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and who encouraged young Arthur's artistic inclinations. The aesthetic environment later became the home of Clokey's most famous character, Gumby, whose name derives from his childhood experiences during summer visits to his grandfather's farm, when he enjoyed playing with the clay and mud mixture called "gumbo".
At Webb School in Claremont, young Clokey came under the influence of teacher Ray Alf, who took students on expeditions digging for fossils and learning about the world around them. Clokey later studied geology at Pomona College, before leaving Pomona in 1943 to enter World War II. He graduated from his adoptive father's alma mater, Miami University, in 1948.
Art Clokey also made a few highly experimental and visually inventive short clay animation films for adults, including his first film Gumbasia, the visually rich Mandala — described by Clokey as a metaphor for evolving human consciousness — and the equally bizarre The Clay Peacock, an elaboration on the animated NBC logo of the time. These films have only recently become available and are included in the Rhino box-set release of Gumby's television shorts.
His student film Gumbasia (1955), consisting of animated clay shapes contorting to a jazz score, so intrigued Samuel G. Engel, then president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association, that he financed the pilot film for what became Art Clokey's The Gumby Show (1957). The title Gumbasia is an homage to Walt Disney's Fantasia.
Emily Wilding Davison (11 October 1872 — 8 June 1913) was a militant women's suffrage activist in the United Kingdom. She was struck by King George V's horse Anmer at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, and died four days later.
Davison was born in Blackheath, London, the daughter of Charles Davison (of Morpeth, Northumberland) and Margaret Davison (of Longhorsley, Northumberland), with two sisters and a brother, and many half-siblings (from her father's first marriage) including a half-brother, retired naval captain Henry Jocelyn Davison, who gave evidence at her inquest.[1]
She was a good performer at school and had a university education, having studied first at Royal Holloway College in London; unfortunately, she was forced to drop out because her recently widowed mother could not afford the fees of £20 a term. She then became a school teacher in Edgbaston and Worthing,[2] raising enough money to study English Language and Literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and obtained first-class honours in her final exams, though women were not at that time admitted to degrees at Oxford. She then obtained a post teaching the children of a family in Berkshire and joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1906, and immediately involved herself in their more militant activities.[citation needed]
She was arrested and imprisoned for various offences, including a violent attack on a man she mistook for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. She went on hunger strike in Strangeways Prison and was force-fed. In Holloway prison, she threw herself down an iron staircase as a protest. She landed on wire netting 30 feet (10 m) below, which saved her; however, she suffered some severe spinal damage.[citation needed]
Commemorative plaque in the Palace of Westminster
On 2 April 1911, the night of the 1911 census, Davison hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster overnight so that on the census form she could legitimately give her place of residence that night as the "House of Commons".[3]Tony BennMP placed a plaque there to commemorate the event.[4] The 1911 census documents that were uncovered state that Emily Wilding Davison was found 'hiding in the crypt' in the Houses of Parliament.[5]
In 1913, she planted a bomb at Lloyd George's newly built house in Surrey, damaging it severely.
Fatal injury at the Epsom Derby, 1913
Davison falling to the ground unconscious after being struck by Anmer.
Davison's purpose in attending the Derby of 4 June 1913 is unclear. Most say that she was trying to put a suffragette poster on a horse, but misjudged it and was hit full on. Much has been made of the fact that she purchased a return rail ticket and also a ticket to a suffragette dance later that day, suggesting that martyrdom wasn't her intention.[7] A possibility of her reason for entering the race track was that she was trying to attach a flag to the King's horse, so when the horse crossed the finishing line it would quite literally be flying the suffragette flag. Evidence for this was that she had supposedly been seen in the weeks before stopping horses in the park near her house. However, this is only one of many theories.[citation needed] Pathe News captured the incident on film, showing her stepping out in front of the horse, Anmer, as it rounded Tattenham Corner, with Davison carrying the banner of the WSPU. But instead of stopping, Anmer knocked her to the ground unconscious. Eyewitnesses at the time were divided as to her motivation, with many believing that she had simply intended to cross the track, believing that all horses had passed; while others reported that she had attempted to pull down the King's horse.[citation needed]
She died four days later in Epsom Cottage Hospital, due to a fractured skull and internal injuries caused by the incident. Herbert Jones, the jockey who was riding the horse, suffered a mild concussion in the incident, but was "haunted by that woman's face" for much longer. In 1928, at the funeral of Emmeline Pankhurst, Jones laid a wreath "to do honour to the memory of Mrs Pankhurst and Miss Emily Davison". In 1951, Jones was found dead by his son in a gas- filled kitchen.[8] Anmer returned to racing.[9]
Commemoration
Davison is buried in the church yard of St Mary the Virgin, Morpeth in a family plot, her father having died in 1893. The cemetery is close to Longhorsley, where she had lived with her mother. The funeral attracted a large crowd. Her gravestone bears the WSPU slogan, "Deeds not words". A funeral was held in London on 14 June 1913 and her coffin was brought by train to Morpeth for burial on 15 June.
It is possible that in attempting to advance the cause of women's suffrage, Davison damaged it. By some accounts, Davison's act at the Derby so horrified those in charge that they were even more against giving women the right to vote: if a highly educated woman was willing to do what she did, what could society expect of less-educated women? Giving the vote to women might plunge Britain into bedlam.[10]
She is the subject of a song by American rock singer Greg Kihn, whose elegy "Emily Davison" is included on his first album, 1976's Greg Kihn.
