How to Sound Like Art Tatum [Jazz Piano Tutorial]

[Music] you [Music] hey what's up guys so I am super excited today because we are going to be talking about one of my personal favorite pianists of all time the great Art Tatum so art datum is a really tough person to try to analyze in a YouTube video because his technique was absolutely off the charts his harmonic sense and his ear were absolutely insane so what I'm gonna try to do here is break down some of his techniques and how harmonic tricks and also some of his stride piano techniques and stylistic characteristics so that us mere mortals can have some ways of emulating him understanding how he plays his style and so that you guys can more or less do what I did in the beginning of this video so without further ado let's dive right into how to sound like Art Tatum alright guys so stay tuned because we're gonna be talking about some of those crazy runs very soon but first I want to dive into some basics here some really important aspects of his playing and that is mastering the 10th in the left hand so if you've seen any of my stride videos I've talked a bit about this I'll be sure to link those but what we want to do here is we want to be able to either stretch a tenth if our hand is big enough and I can do it on the white notes but my hand is not big enough to stretch a ten on the black notes so what you can do is hop you can hop that tenth okay [Music] right and sometimes you don't have to do a full tenth you could also do a seventh so it's a little cheap that you can do so to give your hand a break from those big stretches now what we want to be able to do is walk our tents because our Tatum walked tents all the time while he was playing and I think that's one of the really great things about how he played stride it wasn't always just to it a down up right bass note chord all the time he actually played bass lines in the form of tents okay now another thing we can do to spice those tents up is do a little okay so of course as some of you may already know you can embellish a walking bass line like this to make it swing a little harder [Music] now we can do the same exact thing when we're walking a tent so what we do is we play the tent with our pinky and thumb and then this frees up our index finger to play the fifth right [Music] now we don't want to do this every time like I was just doing it we want to do it a bit sparingly right now again it's tough for me so sometimes off to roll the tents practice walking tents what I would recommend is turn on a metronome and pick up a song that you already know pretty well and start trying to play stride with tents okay when you play a bass note try to play a tent if you have to roll it that's fine and then to get through a two five one try to practice walking up like that all right all right next up stylistically we've got a rhythm ik trick okay so you might have noticed this and some of what I was doing before but a lot of the time rather than landing on the strong beat so one and three we're actually going to land on the ends okay so one and two and three and four we're landing on the offbeat's on the eighth notes [Music] so that's something Tatum would do a lot it's a really great way of accentuating the feel in the swing and not sounding stiff when you're playing the groove so how do you practice this right well what I'd recommend is once you've got whatever song you're working on down with tense in your left hand and you got the stride going start with just normal octaves and work on playing them on the offbeat's right so now a really quick guys before we go on if you guys want to dive way deeper into this stuff one a bunch of these runs written out a bunch of different awesome stride exercises that will really help you build up this technique in a very coherent and focused way be sure to go to jazz piano concepts dot-com slash store I've got some products available that'll really really help you focus in on this stuff and master these skills alright skill number three is going to be chords at the octave so I've explained this as well and some my other stride videos but really quickly here what I recommend doing is working on see if you can move a chord like this it's just a triad surrounded with an octave okay so we got a try and then the top notice again down at the octave let's say we have F minor here F Dorian let's move this chord up that scale see if we can [Music] I always have the corn fit that's still a 10 so practice this practice moving this up a scale same way you would just take a C major scale and move your cord up [Music] instead do it with an octave like this [Music] and then you can start changing the triad right so just to add on to this what you can do is sometimes only change the top and bottom notes oh so sometimes that means you don't have to always switch the chord but I would recommend starting by moving up the scale and then adding in the skill of not always changing the middle notes [Music] alright guys so next up let's start getting into some of those crazy runs that Tatum does so I think the single most important thing here guys is going to be fingering now these sounds super difficult because they're so fast and obviously you do have to develop some technique to do them but in some ways not always there so pretty hard but in some ways they're easier than you think and you can actually do runs like this fairly easily without them being quite as crazy complex as some of the runs that paid a bit so the most important thing here is going to be fingering we want to take a fairly simple run and finger it really well so that our hand is moving very aerodynamically up or down the keyboard okay so let's start with a simple one here let's do a C altered run so here's going to be our our arpeggio we're gonna do e G b-flat C then D flat event ok and here's our fingering 5 3 2 1 3 one and then this is when it really starts we do 1 3 2 1 3 2 1 3 2 1 3 2 ok now another thing that he often does is he'll actually do an arpeggio and then catch it with the right hand and let the right hand finish it so what we're gonna do with the right hand is 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 easy-peasy so taking it very slow [Music] switch see if you can get that switch to be very smooth so you can't even tell the hands switch and now if we do it fast it's actually again easier than it seems but now we do a fast end so we just have a C dominant chord right and maybe hit a chord on that last note in your left hand but this could also work great for a diminished chord like D flat diminished and Tatum often does runs on the diminished chords in between other chords so they're really acting as passing chords all right so let's say we're going from C major to D flat diminish and that works really really well so let's say we're going from C major to D flat diminished to D minor okay which is something I did in the intro to this video [Music] then we just did the same thing for a flat diminished right and we moved our patio up so it worked over a flat all right guys so what we've done so far is a single linear run right so we did it with the left hand first and switched to right hand but now I'm going to show you some two-handed runs because Tatom sometimes does runs with both hands at once that just sound crazy amazing right so I'm going to show you a couple different variations one is going to be where we actually repeat the same thing in both hands and move up the keyboard all right so let's do a fairly simple one here we're gonna do C to D flat and then F to G flat and it's in the end it's gonna sound like this okay so here's how we do it it's actually a lot easier than it sounds I'm gonna do two three in the right hand then three two in the left hand and then same thing with the A through G flat well we're just going a little faster and we could also go up and down as well all right so all right so I got a pride to set a little too guys but that's a great one you can do and you can copy that same technique over other runs right so that time I was just doing after the G same fingerings and everything so that's a really awesome fun one that you guys can work on all right guys next up we've got the two-handed run so this is going to be a run that is not alternating at all this is actually just both hands moving at once so what we're doing here is literally just being able to do an arpeggio in both hands at once this to me is probably the hardest of all the runs we've worked on today but once you get it down it sounds really really awesome so the arpeggio that we're going to work on today is gonna be simple half diminished it works over a d half diminished or sync or an F minor six voicing right so the left hand is just going to play 1 flat 3 flat 5 and flat 7 and then the right hand is going to do a different inversion it's going to do flat 7 1 flat 3 and flat 5 so practice each hand alone first so left hand is [Music] and so it's tricky you want to work on really getting that transition smooth but I'm just doing five three two one five three two one five three two one okay then the right hand I'm doing one two three four one two three four one two three four okay and together okay and that's what we get and then eventually we try to do it really fast [Music] so what it's going to come down to is practicing one hand at a time and then putting them together and even if you don't nail it perfectly I didn't just know it perfectly you can still get a great sound as long as you don't adding any weird sounding problem problem notes on the way up alright guys finally I'm going to teach you a little harmonic trick that Tatum sometimes does a little reham that you guys can do okay so let's say we just have a simple two five one and E flat okay F minor nine to be flat thirteen to so we're gonna do here is instead of having the to be a minor we're gonna make it a dominant and we're just gonna go up and force through the cycle of [Music] when we land back on one okay so it's F seven twenty five seven you flat seven a flat seven D flat seven G flat seven and then two or five so in the context of stride let's say we were doing [Music] something like that now we could also make it twice as fast so we could do it like this and go further through the cycle [Music] something like that so what I did there just to bring it down I went f7 for B flat 7 E flat 7 E flat 7 D flat 7 G flat 7 B 7 to East 77th d7 to g7 to c7 to F minor 7 to 3 flat 7 back to E flat major ok so that's quite a sub there but experiment with that it's a really fun thing to do and Tatum throws these little types of substitutions into his stride every once in a while if you go back and listen to some of his recordings alright guys thanks so much for watching I hope some of these tips are helpful and also guys again one quick reminder check out jazz piano concepts comm slash store if you want to dive further into this stuff with a good cohesive lesson plan full of exercises alright guys thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this video please be sure to give it a thumbs up and if you are new to the channel please consider clicking subscribe and clicking a little belt to turn on notifications so you don't miss any more lessons just like this one that you've seen here today alright guys thanks so much and I will see you next time

Channel: Noah Kellman

Views: 54,863

Keywords: jazz piano tutorial, art tatum, noah kellman, art tatum tea for two, jazz piano chords, jazz tutorial, stride piano, fats waller, james p johnson, how to sound like art tatum, art tatum runs, arpeggios piano, arpeggio, how to play jazz piano, arpeggios, jazz chords, stride piano synthesia

Id: s-luywVWbaU

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020