“When I am at the piano, I close my eyes. I play clouds of notes, rivers of notes, notes that sound like skylarks singing and leaves rustling, like rain on a rooftop. I forget that my eyes aren’t good. I have everything I need.” Robert Andrew Parker blends facts and imaginative details to depict the life and music of pianist Art Tatum in a stirring picture book biography. Parker weaves family, music, and community into the melody of Tatum’s life, much like Tatum’s style of creating new music from many strands: “I can play one song and then weave another song in and out and through it.” The African American musician was born in Toledo and grew up in the first part of the twentieth century. Parker’s exquisite watercolor illustrations display a subtle shift in tone and feel as Tatum matures from a child eager to play and experiment into a brilliant adult musician in a book that concludes with additional information about Tatum, a bibliography, and best of all, Parker’s own reminiscence of hearing Tatum play live in 1946. (Ages 6–9)

Regardless of whether they’ve heard of jazz or Art Tatum, young readers will appreciate how Parker uses simple, lyrical storytelling and colorful, energetic ink-and-wash illustrations to show the world as young Art Tatum might have seen it. Tatum came from modest beginnings and was nearly blind, but his passion for the piano and his acute memory for any sound that he heard drove him to become a virtuoso who was revered by both classical and jazz pianists alike. Included in the back matter is a biography and bibliography.