The Tatum connection Stanley Cowell's piano artistry evokes legendary jazz virtuoso Archived article from Nov 10, 2000 By Douglas Frank   Veteran jazz musician Stanley Cowell joined the faculty of the Mason Gross School of the Arts in January. Photo by William Potts Back in Toledo in 1947, when he was 6, Stanley Cowell and his family were visited by the great jazz pianist Art Tatum. A friend of his dad's from earlier days, Tatum had come to the house while passing through his old hometown. "My dad plied him with drink and said, ‘C'mon, Art, play us a song.' Art said, ‘Let me hear your son first.' So I broke out John Thompson's Book III and played a couple of pieces, which everyone said was very nice. "Then Tatum sat down and he tore up the piano. One song he played was ‘You Took Advantage of Me' by Rodgers and Hart. He played so much piano that my mother had to leave the room. She looked visibly upset, and I heard her washing dishes in the kitchen. "When Art finished, I went into the kitchen and she was shaking, almost breaking the dishes. She was saying, ‘That man plays too much piano.' She was upset. It was just the power of his playing. "In 1969, my trio was on tour and the producer wanted to finish out a trio recording with a solo number. I didn't know what I would play, and I just sat down and this song just came out of my head: ‘You Took Advantage of Me.' I'd never played it before or anything. "I started playing, and I was recalling Tatum's performance. It was like he had stamped it into my head and then 22 years later it just came out. I played it in a different key than he played it. In later years, I went back and listened to his recorded performance of it and began to incorporate some of his ideas into my playing. That's my connection with Tatum." Those members of the Rutgers community who attended Stanley Cowell's solo faculty recital in the Nicholas Music Center in September can thank Tatum for the legacy he provided. Cowell played "Begin the Beguine" in a Tatum arrangement transcribed by pianist Dick Hyman. Later he tendered his own 1992 composition in honor of Tatum, Concerto No. 1, a "solo piano reduction," according to Cowell, a professor of music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and the newest addition to Rutgers' jazz faculty. The three-movement concerto pays tribute to Tatum's unique improvisational style; projects that style past his death into the modal, polymetric and third-stream predilections of such jazz artists as Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Max Roach and Charles Mingus; and offers Cowell's own projection of Tatum's music into the present. The entire program — including James P. Johnson's 1924 stride classic "Carolina Shout," bop exponent Bud Powell's "Celia," Duke Ellington's "Reflections in D" and Cowell's encore "Abscretions," which he described from the stage as mixture of blues, gospel, rock 'n' roll and jazz — could be perceived as a survey of jazz's evolution through the century. "I am the beneficiary of the knowledge of the 100 years that ‘the word' has been around," mused Cowell, referring to jazz in a recent interview. "The idea of doing a historical approach was not totally intentional, but in a way I did want to show that jazz does have a performance practice history and a compositional history, and has compositions that have stood the test of time and are classic in the repertoire." Just in case you're wondering, Cowell is a veteran jazz musician, a leading exponent of the art form in the latter 20th century, who has paid his dues not only in the smoky, noisy dens where jazz was played in almost every city in the country, but also in the classrooms of the Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Michigan, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in music. He has also studied at the Mozarteum Akademie in Salzburg, Austria (where they don't play jazz), and has taken additional graduate work at Wichita State University and the University of Southern California. Besides playing with such jazz artists as Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Herbie Mann, Miles Davis, Stan Getz and the Bobby Hutcherson–Harold Land groups (to name a few), this versatile scholar-musician has been a church organist/choir director and has performed as a featured soloist with several symphony orchestras. Cowell has been, since the age of 15, an accomplished musician, though he eschews the label "prodigy." "I just started young. I practiced hard and lived in a musical household," he says. As a jazzman, he has performed in many venues around the world and appears in dozens of discographies as a sideman and leader. For a glimpse of his recorded work, just search for his name on such Web sites as Amazon.com or Cdnow.com. Cowell joined the jazz faculty in January, succeeding noted jazz pianist Kenny Barron, who retired last year. For nearly two decades, Cowell was a professor at Herbert Lehman College of the City University of New York, and he briefly taught jazz piano at the New England Conservatory, Boston. In addition to recording for various labels, for several years he was part of trumpeter Charles Tolliver's Music Inc. With Tolliver, Cowell formed the innovative musician-owned record company Strata-East in 1971. The label has provided the professional vehicle by which many important artist-produced recordings have reached the marketplace. Among many notable "gigs," Cowell toured, recorded and conducted workshops from 1974 to 1984 throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan as the featured pianist with the Heath Brothers (Percy, Jimmy and Albert). Today, he avoids regular stints at the jazz clubs and chooses his shots mostly at concerts, "where I can really give my all." He has noticed, and he says this modestly, a gradual decline in the number of performances but an increase in the quality. In addition to performing, he and his wife, Sylvia, currently produce concerts in Prince George's County, Md., under The Piano Choir Inc., a nonprofit music and educational entity. At Mason Gross, Cowell teaches performance classes for piano students; an advanced improvisation course; and keyboard harmony for drummers, bassists and horn players so they understand the structure of the music. He also coaches several combos. "Teaching jazz at Rutgers," he adds, "is like preaching to the converted." Asked to provide a self-analysis of his artistry, Cowell responds with characteristic modesty. "I try to be a good craftsman and composer. I'm always trying to find new ways to express myself, always studying. "That's why I teach; I'm learning from my students," he continues. "They open up new doors. I'm not trying to be an innovator, but I think that I have done some innovative things in my recording and performance approaches. But all that has to be sorted out after I'm dead, I guess." For more on Stanley Cowell, check out the Web page at musicweb.rutgers.edu/info/fac-bio/cowell.htm for a short biography, a selected recent discography and audio cuts from his Sept. 17 faculty recital.

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