Piano Starts Here

A note on what this album actually is

This is not a studio album in the usual sense – it's a compilation, assembled by Columbia in 1968, of two completely unrelated Art Tatum recordings made sixteen years apart. Tracks 1 through 4 are Tatum's first-ever commercial recordings, made for Brunswick Records in March 1933 in New York City. Every other track comes from a live performance at a Gene Norman-produced "Just Jazz" concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in May 1949. Columbia paired these two sources onto a single LP for the first time in 1968, titled Piano Starts Here – a reference to Tatum's beginnings, since the 1933 sides really were where his recorded career started. If you're expecting a coherent studio session with consistent recording quality throughout, this isn't that record; it's a historical anthology bridging the very start and a mid-career high point of Tatum's recording life.

Recording history and tape provenance

One archival note worth passing along with appropriate hedging: an Internet Archive uploader speculates that the closing track – originally a medley of "The Man I Love" into selections from Porgy and Bess with a reprise of "The Man I Love" – may have been edited on this release, possibly to reduce royalty costs, though this is a stated guess rather than a confirmed fact.

A genuinely important technical caveat applies to the original 1968 release: it's an "electronically simulated" stereo pressing of source recordings that were originally mono, both the 1933 studio sides and the 1949 live concert. Electronically reprocessed fake stereo, created by artificially splitting a mono signal across two channels, is generally considered a sonic compromise rather than an enhancement by collectors and audio engineers – it doesn't add real channel-separated information that wasn't in the original mono recording, and can introduce phasing artifacts. If a genuine mono pressing of this material exists, it would likely be preferable to the "two-eyed" electronically-simulated stereo version for listeners who care about hearing the recordings as close to their original form as possible – though whether Columbia issued a true mono pressing of this specific compilation alongside the stereo one could not be independently confirmed.

Buyer's guide by budget

Given the sourcing gaps and the fake-stereo caveat above, this guide isn't presenting confident dollar-sign price tiers for this title. Any copy of Columbia CS 9655, from the 1968 original through later repressings, likely carries the same electronically-simulated stereo characteristic described above – there's no clearly documented "better" reissue to steer toward instead. If owning this specific historical pairing of Tatum's earliest and a strong mid-career live set matters to you, condition and price are the main variables to weigh, rather than chasing a specific pressing year.

Pressing tier summary

References

• Wikipedia, "Art Tatum discography": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Tatum_discography
• Internet Archive, "Art Tatum - Piano Starts Here": https://archive.org/details/art-tatum-piano-starts-here

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