Cafe Society Concert

Nightclubs do not usually hire other people's halls to give public concerts, but last week one of them--Manhattan's "Cafe Society"--did exactly that. It hired Carnegie Hall. And it was the first time that nightclub entertainers had tried their hands so publicly on Bach, Beethoven, Schubert. The concert's label, "From Bach to Boogie-Woogie," accurately covered the efforts of the Negro Societarians.

The concert's most musicianly talent was half-blind Art Tatum, who long ago achieved a safe middle ground between Bach and boogie-woogie. He has had serious training, learns tunes from phonograph records or by using a magnifying glass and his one fairly good eye. Art Tatum's showers of notes in jazz rhythm--as in his workout with Dvorak's banal Humor-esque--pleased his Carnegie Hall audience. The evening ended in the loudest jam session ever heard in the hall, or perhaps anywhere. There were three bands--33 men in all, including six trumpeters, five drummers, nine pianists scrambling for places at three baby grands. The composition was announced as One O'Clock Jump, may well have been.

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