Earl Hines

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Earl Kenneth Hines, universally known as Earl "Fatha" Hines, (28 December, 1903 near Pittsburgh – 22 April, 1983 in Oakland, California) was a prominent jazz pianist.

Earl Hines was born in the Pittsburgh suburb of Duquesne, Pennsylvania. His father was a brass band cornetist and his mother a church organist. 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.

At the start of the 1920s - when the word "jazz" was just beginning to be known - Hines was playing piano professionally around Pittsburgh. About 1923 he moved to Chicago, Illinois, then the world's "jazz" capital. He played piano with the bands of Carroll Dickerson, Erskine Tate and Jimmie Noone, then in 1927 began playing with Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was astounded by Hines's avant-garde "trumpet-style" piano-playing. Hines often used dazzlingly fast octaves so that on none-too-perfect upright pianos "they could hear me out front" - and indeed they could. 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 recorded what are regarded as some of the most important jazz records of the 1920s, most famously and spectacularly the 1928 "Weatherbird" duet which showed the two at what some consider the very height of their powers.

In 1928 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". From the Grand Terrace, The Earl Hines Orchestra (or "Organization" as he referred to it informally) 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 US live-broadcasting time-zone problem. Hines's band became the most broadcast band in America. Sometimes Nat "King" Cole was Hines' relief pianist (though Cliff Smalls was his favourite) 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's 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".)

At the start of 1949 Hines rejoined Armstrong in the latter's "All Stars" "small band", where Hines stayed through 1951. He then led his own "small band" around the States and Europe. At the start of the lean 1960s he settled 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". 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". From then till he died he recorded endlessly, most often solo, which showed him at his very best, toured Europe again regularly, and added Asia, Australia and the Soviet Union to his list of State Department–funded destinations. He played solo in The White House and played solo for the Pope - and played his last job a few days before he died in Oakland quite possibly even rather older than he had always maintained.

References

Dempsey, Peter (2001). Naxos Jazz Legends [Earl Hines]
Feather, Leonard. Encyclopedia of Jazz, The (Horizon Press, 1960)
The Red Hot Jazz Archive [Earl "Fatha" Hines]
Simon, George T. The Big Bands (Macmillan, 1974)
World Book encyclopedia [Earl Hines]

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