The feel of expensive fabric …

… Cy Walter’s Cocktail Piano, With a Twist - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Walter’s playing was a bit tricky to categorize. He wasn’t a jazz pianist, preferring to describe himself as “a specialist in show tunes.” Instead of going off on melodic tangents, he played a tune the way the songwriter wrote it, embedding its familiar contours in a richly wrought accompaniment from which it shone forth like a well-framed painting. Though his playing recalled the equally virtuosic style of Art Tatum, his good friend and favorite pianist, Walter rarely employed the chromatic substitute chords that Tatum loved to deploy, nor did his playing swing the way Tatum’s did. He liked smooth, danceable tempos, and his most staggering feats of prestidigitation, unlike Tatum’s watch-me-skip-on-the-high-wire stunts, were tossed off with the puma-footed stealth of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, who worked his own miracles of discretion without ever raising his voice.