Searching for Tatro's name among the standard jazz reference books produces slim reward; his name is only mentioned once, in the 1955 edition of The New Encyclopedia of Jazz. Yet Tatro was a challenging and imaginative composer and arranger who took advantage of the GI Bill to study classical composition at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. Jazz For Moderns is a tantalising insight into his rich musical imagination capable of blending advanced classical compositional techniques and the expressiveness of jazz and is truly an overlooked masterpiece. With an octet of some of the finest West Coast jazz musicians comprising three brass, three saxes and bass and drums, the music's ‘modernistic’ character was reflected by the album's cover-art of a futuristic Firebird II sports car Batman would have been proud of. It's Tatro's departure from conventional jazz writing that makes this album special – take ‘Easy Terms’, for example, an exercise in polyphonic writing where every voice has a destiny of its own, which is in sharp contrast to homophonic ‘Dollar Day’, where the harmonic voicings are subservient to the dominant melody line. ‘Backlash, recorded at the 1954 date, is among the first experiments with modes, while ‘Turbulence’ is based on 12-tone row with the underlying harmonies based on tonal centres. ‘Low Clearance’ evokes memories of the Birth of the Cool band with its smooth contrapuntal writing that almost disguises a polytonal middle eight. ‘Folly’ takes this idea further – the whole piece is written over a polychordal structure – while ‘Outpost’ initially appears to be a duet between Williamson and Giuffre, but is an exercise on contrary motion; they both start on the same note, but the trumpet goes up a certain interval while the baritone goes down the same interval and so on. ‘Conversation Piece’ makes extensive use of the interval of a fourth, then an unusual interval in jazz, while the theme of ‘Multiplicity’ is developed and juxtaposed and restated in different keys before returning to the tonic. That Tatro's writing achieves its ends free from pretension and with real jazz feeling, integrating excellent solo work, marks this album as something special and well worth hunting out.