"Say, Earl Hines, why don't you let us in on some of that good music, Pops?" Louis Armstrong asks at the start of the 1928 classic "A Monday Date," and Hines answers "C'mon here! Let's get together then."
Lately, the world has been sadly slow to get in on some of that good music. Maybe it's just that we've been over-centennial'ed, so to speak, or perhaps we're too busy becoming mentally acclimated for the four big jazz centennials coming in 2004 - Count Basie, Fats Waller, Glenn Miller and Coleman Hawkins. I can think of no other reason that the 100th anniversary of a man so important to jazz as Earl "Fatha" Hines is being all but ignored. I know of no memorial concerts, no comprehensive box set reissue packages (The major release commemorating this event is "Fatha's Day: An Earl Hines Songbook," by the fine modern jazz pianist John Hicks, High Note 7110).
Yet it's impossible to imagine the evolution of jazz piano without the influence of Earl Hines (1903-1983). Before Hines, there was stride piano, ragtime piano and blues piano, but Hines was among the first to play in a style which resonates in contemporary ears as unhyphenated jazz piano. Earlier masters like Jelly Roll Morton viewed the piano as a microcosm for an entire jazz orchestra, and they replicated a whole set of brass, reeds and rhythm with their fingertips. Hines, contrastingly, figured out how the piano would fit in with the other instruments in the modern jazz ensemble, and developed an approach with which the keyboard could hold its own against any horn soloist. He called it "trumpet style piano," and when we listen to Hines today, he sounds less like his predecessors, like James P. Johnson, and more like his successors, like Teddy Wilson or Art Tatum.
Hines himself may have helped prevent a proper centennial celebration by messing around with his birth date. He claimed December 28, 1905, although all other references state 1903. There is no formal biography of Hines, however, the late Stanley Dance put together a collection of interviews with Hines and his key associates and called it "The World Of Earl Hines," and this stands as the key reference source on the great pianist. He was born in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, a small suburb of Pennsylvania, his mother and then his stepmother played keyboards, and his father was an amateur trumpeter, which might have pre-ordained him to come up with a style that combined piano and brass traditions. His early experience was playing light classics on the piano, accompanying a slightly older singer who sang arias and lieder. When he first discovered jazz in his late teens, his first impulse was to learn to play the new music on trumpet, but, he said, "then the idea came to me to do on the piano what I wanted to do on the cornet."
Hines would spend most of his career in Chicago, and in the '20s established his reputation via collaborations with two pioneers from New Orleans, clarinetist Jimmie Noone and trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Hines and Noone he co-led the Apex Club Band, where the under-aged Nat (not yet "King") Cole hovered outside the window, soaking up every note - when Cole later played and sang his hit "Sweet Lorraine," it was in tribute to Hines and Noone.
Hines's work with Armstrong was even more memorable: together, they created the 20 sides that climax the legendary "Hot Five" series, and changed the course of Western Civilization. Hines played a key role in such masterpieces as "West End Blues," which did more than any other to establish the primacy of the improvising soloist in jazz. Their duo, "Weatherbird" is easily the most famous pairing of a horn and a keyboard in all of the music, a meeting of the minds that is rife with humor, energy and swing - camaraderie and musical one-upmanship. "When we were playing together, it was like a continuous jam session," Hines later said. "When people talk about my 'trumpet style,' they usually mean when I play in octaves like a trumpet player. But I used tremolo to give an effect like Louis's vibrato too."
Throughout the '30s and '40s, Hines led one of the greatest of all jazz big bands, holding forth at Chicago's most prominent black nightclub, The Grand Terrace. Thanks to a virtually uninterrupted series of recordings and radio broadcasts which reached the entire country, Hines was a national celebrity and a role model for the black community. His early big bands anticipate the coming of the swing era, and his '40s bands foreshadow both the rise of bebop (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Wardell Gray were all in his orchestra) and of singers, as he launched the careers of Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan and Johnny Hartman.
Hines led a dual life in the recording studio in these years. Apart from his great big band series, he also guest-starred with Sidney Bechet and created a brilliant run of solo sides (which have been gathered on a much recommended Danish CD, "The Earl Hines Collection," Collector's Classics 11). Hines's solos, with their rhythmic complexity and remarkable swing, seem to belong to a different era: the more harmonically dense passages foreshadow Tatum or Erroll Garner, his use of space and silence points to Thelonious Monk.
With the decline of the big bands, Hines became a founding member of Louis Armstrong's well-named All Stars. However, conflicting egos - it was too late for him to go back to being a sideman - led Hines to resume leading his own groups. After holing up in San Francisco for most of the next decade, he re-emerged as a major presence on the national and international jazz circuit in the mid-'60s, working in the solo format as well as the leader of a strong quartet that co-starred the underappreciated tenor giant Budd Johnson. No other elder statesman of jazz was as active as Hines, who toured and recorded constantly and usually brilliantly in his '60s and '70s. He recorded dozens of albums, including team ups with all manner of musicians and songbooks representing the whole spectrum of the American songbook.
Of his many later recordings, two of my personal favorites are "Once Upon A Time" (A-9108, 1966), and "Grand Reunion" (Verve 3145281372, 1965). The first is the result of the Fatha's fondness for Ellingtonia and his long relationship with Johnny Hodges, which throws a couple of ringers into the mix in Pee Wee Russell and Elvin Jones. The second, a double disc set, offers copious amounts of Hines's Trio live at the Village Vanguard, and also samples of interplay with two of his fellow colossi, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge.
Over the year's, Hines's best-remembered showpiece was his oft-performed "Boogie Woogie On The St. Louis Blues." This was ironic, since by his own admission, Hines was less of an authentic blues player than the Southern and South-Western pianists who specialized in the form. Yet by superimposing two subgenres of the blues on top of each other, he thus crafted a wildly-entertaining setpiece that the crowds cried for, night after night. In the end, it was gloriously typical of an artist who embraced everything that jazz had to offer.