Tatum had a calm physical demeanor at the keyboard, not attempting crowd-pleasing theatrical gestures. This increased his playing's impact, as did his seemingly effortless technique, as pianist Hank Jones observed: the apparently horizontal gliding of his hands across the keys stunned his contemporaries. Tatum's relatively straight-fingered technique, compared to the curvature taught in classical training, contributed to this visual impression: a critic wrote in 1935 that, when playing, "Tatum's hand is almost perfectly horizontal, and his fingers seem to actuate around a horizontal line drawn from wrist to finger tip."
