‘Sound Beat’ radio show revives forgotten art
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Nearly blind, Black swing pianist Art Tatum played the piano with unshakeable passion, grace and soul. Accompanied by fellow musicians in performances, Tatum’s left hand jumped across a scale of black and white keys, mastering a thunderous rhythm section, while his right supported the melody’s florid notes.
“He’s so all over the piano, he’s kind of pushing jazz along in there,” Syracuse University’s Music & Performing Arts Librarian Amanda DuBose said. “Tatum was known for, in the ‘40s, taking musical standards of the 1920s and putting his own twist on it.”
Tatum’s music-filled story is the focus of “Begin the Beguine,” a December 12, 2023, episode of Sound Beat, a 90-second, daily show spotlighting the collection of the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive next to Bird Library. Alum Ryan Lu, an SU student at the time, and his classmates in the Sound Beat Class Partnership helped produce the episode about Tatum. The best stories from the partnership, which helps students hone their podcast skills, become episodes for the program, said Sound Beat producer Jim O’Connor.
“Part of what’s wonderful that Sound Beat does is it brings out historical recordings, ones that are increasingly more and more distant from us, and brings them to people’s awareness of this really important period in American music,” said Theo Cateforis, the university’s undergraduate director of music history and cultures.
Sound Beat first aired on WAER in March 2011. Since then, they’ve expanded their presence to roughly 375 local stations across North America. Approximately 4 million people listen to the show daily, according to a pamphlet regarding the program.
O’Connor produces the shows and works with students to research and write episode scripts. From there, Sound Beat host Brett Barry, who graduated from SU in 1998, records the voiceovers from Silver Hollow Audio, his studio in the Catskill Mountains. Barry sends the voiceovers back to O’Connor, who then mixes them together.
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Amanda DuBose is SU’s Music & Performing Arts Librarian. They provide background into jazz during the 1940s.
Beyond music, Sound Beat features speeches and spoken word pieces by notable historical figures. In the episode about Tatum, Lu describes a real interaction between stride pianist Fats Waller and Tatum as he enters a jazz club. The scene sets up a discussion of Tatum’s skills and the context of the episode’s focus, an element found in Sound Beat’s other episodes.
The episode’s title comes from Tatum’s talent in creating his own interpretation of popular songs like “Begin the Beguine,” originally composed by Cole Porter and the inspiration he found through Fats Waller and Lee Sims.
“This was an era in which jazz soloists, people like Art Tatum, were venerated and honored in terms of their virtuosity, technique and their ability to hold a crowd,” Cateforis said. “Jazz was seen as very much an urban art form. So places like New York City were the epicenters of jazz during the 1940s.”
Jazz music had a different style between what was acceptable in the “white mainstream” versus what was acceptable in Black clubs, DuBose said. Tatum persevered even through the culture of the time and his disability as a musician.
“The differences in jazz styles between white and Black musicians is based on institutional racism,” DuBose said. “Black musicians were oftentimes not allowed to play for white audiences until they got to be these really big names.”
Outside of the episode on Tatum, Sound Beat covers topics ranging from popular sounds and classical music performances to distinctly American musical forms like,bebop, country and bluegrass. The show is a mix of old favorites and never before heard gems.
“For Sound Beat to remind us of these artists and the circumstances in which these artists, like Art Tatum, were performing and recording is a nice window into the past of American musical history,” Cateforis said.
