Although not born blind, Tatum had poor eyesight from an early age, which corrective surgery only slightly improved. His sight was further damaged by a beating in his teens. He learned music in a school in Toledo, and before he was 20 he was a regular in the city's nightlife, playing piano for tips at first but soon enough turning professional, and performing on the radio before the 20s were over. He went to New York in 1932 and made his first solo recordings a year later; his tumultuous version of Tiger Rag must have caused a sensation straight away, but it was only the beginning of Tatum's achievements. He worked in Cleveland, Chicago and Hollywood during the rest of the decade, visited England in 1938, and then founded a trio with Tiny Grimes and Slam Stewart in 1943, embarking on a series of recordings for Capitol (who also had Nat Cole's trio, probably the model for Tatum's own set-up). Thereafter he worked primarily in club engagements, principally in New York and Los Angeles. While his recording regimen slowed around 1950 for a time, in 1953 he was signed by Norman Granz, who recorded him at great length as a soloist – in a series of LPs called The Genius Of Art Tatum – and in group contexts, where he performed alongside such musicians as Lionel Hampton, Buddy DeFranco, Ben Webster, Benny Carter and Roy Eldridge. By then, Tatum's almost off-hand genius was nearly taken for granted, and Granz's albums restored the idea of the pianist as the master player on his instrument. His command of the piano was so comprehensive and intense that the reaction of many listeners was simply to gape at his abilities. He suggested Fats Waller as his primary influence (Waller returned the favour by exclaiming 'God is in the house!' whenever Tatum walked in), and his early work does suggest a superhuman elaboration on the principles of stride piano; but Tatum integrated every kind of jazz piano technique into a delivery which simply blew past the sum of his influences. While he rarely composed pieces and worked from a lexicon of standard material which he returned to constantly over many years, he managed to introduce the subtlest variations into performances which became, in some ways, a kind of elevated routine: he would regularly offer audiences interpretations which sounded much as he had previously recorded them, and it was down to connoisseurship among his followers to discern how his art continued to develop. Although he seldom chose hectic tempos, every piece would teem with so much decoration that it appeared as if he was always playing fast; and into the scheme of each performance he would cram harmonic subtleties – substitute chords, unusual intervals – so deftly that an inattentive audience would hardly know what they had been hearing. It was a style which impressed and compelled every other virtuoso in the music, which brought Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker and practically every jazz piano player into the fold of Tatum's close admirers.

Granz's recordings effectively summarized and celebrated Tatum's art. While he never took the chance to stretch out, even in the new long-playing era – most of the individual tracks are still only three or four minutes in length – many of the solos are definitive statements on a large number of his favourite pieces. The group sessions also include almost numberless wonderful moments, the sessions with Carter, Webster and DeFranco in particular rising to almost unbelievable peaks of creativity. In the end, the sessions turned out to be Tatum's swansong. He continued an innocuous round of touring in modest venues, but his health, including a probable diabetic condition, was suffering, not helped by his enormous daily intake of alcohol. He died as a result of kidney disease a few weeks before his 47th birthday. One tragic aspect of his art is that, even in his later recordings, he was never particularly well recorded as a pianist. What would Tatum sound like, on a fine piano, in today's impeccable studio conditions?

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.