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Earl Hines

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Earl Hines

Earl Kenneth Hines, universally known as Earl "Fatha" Hines, (28 December, 1903[1] Duquesne, Pennsylvania – 22 April, 1983 in Oakland, California) was one of the most important pianists in the history of jazz.

Early life

Earl Hines was born in the Pittsburgh suburb of Duquesne, Pennsylvania. His father was a brass band cornetist and his stepmother a church organist.[2] Hines at first intended to follow his father's example and play cornet but "blowing" hurt him behind the ears — while the piano didn't.[3][4] He took classical piano lessons but also developed an ear for popular show tunes and was able to remember and play songs he heard in theaters.[5] Hines claimed that he was playing piano around Pittsburgh "before the word 'jazz' was even invented"[citation needed].

Early career

At the age of 17, Hines moved away from home to take a job playing with Lois Deppe & his Serenaders in the Leader House, a Pittsburgh nightclub, for $15 a week.[6]. Deppe was a well-known baritone who had boasted a concert career. Hines' first recordings were with this band — four singles recorded with Gennett Records in 1923.[7] Only two of these were issued, and only one, "Congaine," "a keen snappy foxtrot"[8] composed by Hines featured any solo work by Hines. Hines entered the studio again with Deppe a month later, recording spirituals and popular songs. In 1925 he moved to Chicago, Illinois, then the world's "jazz" capital, home (at the time) to Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver. He played piano with Carroll Dickerson's band (including a nationwide tour on the Pantages circuit) and made his first acquaintance with Louis Armstrong.

Armstrong and Hines played together in Carroll Dickerson's band at the Sunset Cafe, which in 1927 became Louis Armstrong's band under the direction of Hines.[9] Armstrong had already been astounded by Hines's avant-garde "trumpet-style" piano-playing, often using dazzlingly fast octaves so that on none-too-perfect upright pianos (and with no amplification) "they could hear me out front" - and indeed they could[citation needed]. That year Armstrong revamped his Okeh Records recording band, "Louis Armstrong's Hot Five", and replaced his wife Lil Hardin Armstrong with Hines. Armstrong and Hines then recorded what are regarded as some of the most important jazz records of the 1920s, most famously the 1928 Weatherbird duet. From The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD:-[10]

...with Earl Hines arriving on piano, Armstrong was already approaching the stature of a concerto soloist, a role he would play more or less throughout the next decade, which makes these final small-group sessions something like a reluctant farewell to jazz's first golden age. Since Hines is also magnificent on these discs (and their insouciant exuberance is a marvel on the duet showstopper "Weather Bird") the results seem like eavesdropping on great men speaking almost quietly among themselves. There is nothing in jazz finer or more moving than the playing on "West End Blues", "Tight Like This", "Beau Koo Jack" & "Muggles".

Hines's solo recordings from that year, 57 Varieties (referring to Pittsburgh's H. J. Heinz Company's slogan) and his own composition My Monday Date (an inside joke between Hines, Armstrong, and Armstrong's wife) provided titles reused much later in Hines's career.[11] After the Sunset Club closed, Armstrong and drummer Zutty Singleton ended up at the Savoy Theatre while Hines was in New York, and when he returned to Chicago, Hines ended up in Jimmie Noone's band at the Apex Club.[12]

Chicago years

In 1928 (on his 25th birthday) Hines began leading his own big band. For over 10 years his was "The Band" in Al Capone's Grand Terrace Cafe — Hines was Capone's "Mr Piano Man". Hines recorded for Victor in 1929, then after a gap for Brunswick from 1932-1934, Decca from 1934-1935, then after another gap, Vocalion from 1937-1938 and Bluebird from 1939-1942 (nearly all among the best Black Jazz of the era). From the Grand Terrace, The Earl Hines Orchestra (or "Organization" as he more happily referred to it) broadcast on "open mikes", sometimes five nights a week and over many years, coast to coast across America — Chicago being well placed to deal with the U.S. live-broadcasting time-zone problem. Hines's band became the most broadcast band in America. Among his listeners was a young Jay McShann in Kansas City whose "...real education came from Earl Hines. When Fatha went off the air, I went to bed”. [13] Sometimes Nat "King" Cole was Hines's relief pianist (though Cliff Smalls was his favorite) and it was here with Hines that Charlie Parker got his first professional job...until he was fired for his time-keeping — by which Hines meant Parker's inability to show up on time despite Parker resorting to sleeping under the Grand Terrace stage in his attempts to do so. Hines led his big band until 1947, taking time out to front the Duke Ellington orchestra in 1944 while Duke was ill...but the big-band era was over. (Thirty years later, Hines's 20 solo "transformative versions" of his "Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington" recorded in the 1970s were described by Ben Ratliff in the "New York Times" as "as good an example of the jazz process as anything out there".)

Rediscovery

At the start of 1949 Hines rejoined Armstrong, but rather as a 'sideman' he came to feel, in Armstrong's "All Stars" "small band" and stayed, not now entirely happily, through 1951. Next, he led his own small combo around the States and Europe but, at the start of the jazz-lean 1960s, he settled 'home' in Oakland, California, opened a tobacconist's, and came close to giving up the profession. Then, in 1964 Hines was "suddenly rediscovered" following a series of concerts in New York. He was the 1965 "Critics' Choice" for Down Beat Magazine's "Hall of Fame". From then until he died he recorded endlessly both solo and with jazz notables like Cat Anderson, Barney Bigard, Teresa Brewer, Lawrence Brown, Jaki Byard, Benny Carter, Buck Clayton, Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Panama Francis, Dizzie Gillespie, Paul Gonsalves, Stephane Grappelli, Sonny Greer, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Budd Johnson, Jonah Jones, Ray Nance, Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Rushing, Stuff Smith, Rex Stewart, Maxine Sullivan, Buddy Tate, Jack Teagarden, Sarah Vaughan, Joe Venuti, Ben Webster, Jimmy Witherspoon and Lester Young. Possibly more surprising were Elvin Jones, Peggy Lee, Charles Mingus, Dinah Washington, The Inkspots — and Ry Cooder. But his most acclaimed recordings of this period were his dazzling and endlessly inventive solo performances, which could show him at his very best, "a whole orchestra by himself".[14] Whitney Balliett wrote of his solo recordings and performances of this time:-

"Hines will be sixty-seven this year and his style has become involuted, rococo, and subtle to the point of elusiveness. It unfolds in orchestral layers and it demands intense listening. Despite the sheer mass of notes he now uses, his playing is never fatty. Hines may go along like this in a medium tempo blues. He will play the first two choruses softly and out of tempo, unreeling placid chords that safely hold the kernel of the melody. By the third chorus, he will have slid into a steady but implied beat and raised his volume. Then, using steady tenths in his left hand, he will stamp out a whole chorus of right-hand chords inbetween beats. He will vault into the upper register in the next chorus and wind through irregularly placed notes, while his left hand plays descending, on-the-beat, chords that pass through a forest of harmonic changes. (There are so many push-me, pull-you contrasts going on in such a chorus that it is impossible to grasp it one time through.) In the next chorus - bang! - up goes the volume again and Hines breaks into a crazy-legged double-time-and-a-half run that may make several sweeps up and down the keyboard and that are punctuated by offbeat single notes in the left hand. Then he will throw in several fast descending two-fingered glissandos, go abruptly into an arrhythmic swirl of chords and short, broken, runs and, as abruptly as he began it all, ease into an interlude of relaxed chords and poling single notes. But these choruses, which may be followed by eight or ten more before Hines has finished what he has to say, are irresistible in other ways. Each is a complete creation in itself, and yet each is lashed tightly to the next. Hines' sudden changes in dynamics, tempo, and texture are dramatic but not melodramatic; the ham lurking in the middle distance never gets any closer. And Hines is a perfervid pianist; he gives the impression that he has shut himsef up completely within his instrument, that he is issuing chords and runs and glisses not merely through its keyboard and hammers and strings but directly from its soul".

[15]

Solo tributes to Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter were all put on record in the 1970s. Pianist Lennie Tristano said, "Earl Hines is the only one capable of creating real jazz and real swing when playing all alone." In 1974, at 71, Hines recorded sixteen LPs. He also toured Europe again regularly at this time, and added Asia, Australia and the Soviet Union to his list of State Department–funded destinations. At the top of his form, Hines displayed, too, his endearing quirks (not to say grunts) in these performances. Sometimes he sang as he played, especially his own "They Never Believed I Could Do It - Neither Did I". In 1975 he made an hour-long "solo" film for British TV out-of-hours in a Washington nightclub: the "New York Herald Tribune" described it as "The greatest jazz film ever made". He played solo in The White House and played solo for the Pope — and played (and sang) his last job a few days before he died in Oakland, quite likely somewhat older than he had always maintained.

Discography

  • Paris One Night Stand - 1957

Notes

  1. ^ In The World of Earl Hines by Stanley Dance (p. 7), Hines quotes his year of birth as 1905. Most sources agree 1903 is correct.
  2. ^ Dance, p. 9.
  3. ^ Dance, p. 20.
  4. ^ Palmer, The New York Times, 1981.
  5. ^ Dance, p. 10.
  6. ^ Dance, p. 133.
  7. ^ Dance, p. 293.
  8. ^ Starr Phonography Company ad. 10 November 1923
  9. ^ Dance, p. 47.
  10. ^ Cook, Richard and Brian Morton (2004). The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD: Seventh Edition, pp 46-47. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-101416-4.
  11. ^ Dance, pp. 52-53.
  12. ^ Dance, p. 55.
  13. ^ www.jaymcshann.com 'About Jay McShann'
  14. ^ In the words of commentator Donald Clarke, "Hines, Earl", MusicWeb Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
  15. ^ Whitney Balliett: Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954-2000: Granta Publications 2001 p.361

References

  • Clarke, Donald (1989, 2005). Hines, Earl. MusicWeb Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Retrieved August 1, 2006.
  • Dance, Stanley (1983). The World of Earl Hines. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80182-5.
  • Dempsey, Peter (2001). Earl Hines. Naxos Jazz Legends. Retrieved July 23, 2006.
  • Feather, Leonard (1960). Encyclopedia of Jazz, The. Horizon Press. ISBN 0-8180-1203-X.
  • Earl "Fatha" Hines. The Red Hot Jazz Archive. Retrieved July 23, 2006.
  • Palmer, Robert (1981). "Pop Jazz; Fatha Hines Stom[p]ing and Chomping on at 75", The New York Times, August 28, 1981. Retrieved from The New York Times July 30, 2006.
  • Schuller, Gunther (1991). The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945, pp 263-292. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507140-9.
  • Simon, George T. (1974). The Big Bands. Macmillan.
  • Taylor, Jeffrey (2005) Earl "Fatha" Hines: Selected Piano Solos, 1928-41. Volume 15 in Music of the United States of America. Madison, Wisconsin: American Musicological Society/A-R Editions, 2005 . ISBN 0895795809
  • Taylor, Jeffrey (2002) “Earl Hines and ‘Rosetta.’” Current Musicology: Special Issue, A Commemorative Festschrift in Honor of Mark Tucker. 71-73 (Spring 2001-Spring 2002).
  • Taylor, Jeffrey (2002) "Life With Fatha." I.S.A.M. Newsletter 30 (Fall 2000).
  • Taylor, Jeffrey (1998) "Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, and 'Weather Bird.'" The Musical Quarterly 82 (Spring 1998).
  • Earl Hines. World Book encyclopedia. Retrieved July 23, 2006.
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