[Dixielandjazz] Earl Hines reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

Fatha Played Well With Others
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2013
With his outsize helmet of hair, razor-sharp mustache, shieldlike spectacles and
confident grin, Earl Hines in the 1970s (and his 70s) commanded attention even before
he sat down at the piano. His playing showed boundless energy, invention and his
desire to entertain a crowd.
Although born in 1903, the Fatha, as he was always known, adapted to the modern era
without missing a beat. I don't only mean that he played superfast rhythms or the
more celestially boppish chord changes. He also adapted to a music that was primarily
played by soloists who toured on an international circuit of jazz clubs and concert
halls -- so effortlessly that you'd think he'd been working that way all of his life.
This Hines was easily reconcilable with the infamous egomaniac who had a hard time
playing sideman to anyone, even the almighty Louis Armstrong when he was a member
of Armstrong's All Stars.
Yet a recent seven-disc boxed set containing nearly all of the pianist-composer's
early work under his own name, "Classic Earl Hines Sessions 1928-1945," shows that
the early Hines was a very different animal. As Brian Priestley observes in the liner
notes, during these years Hines primarily "regarded himself as a group pianist rather
than a soloist," and "his concern was for the overall impact of the group." Back
then, Hines was primarily a bandleader rather than "just" a piano player; a purveyor
of dance music and a pop entertainer as much as a jazz musician.
The cover of the Mosaic box shows Hines in 1938, leaning over the piano, his smile
reflected in the polished lacquer. This conforms to the later Hines we remember,
but a better image might have been of him leading his band, where he's only one of
15 men in the picture. Around the time of his 25th birthday, Hines was asked to lead
a full-size dance band at the Grand Terrace, a new ballroom being launched in Chicago,
and there he would remain in residence (except for the occasional tour) until the
end of the big-band era in 1945.
Naturally, there are piano solos in many of the big-band arrangements, and there
are also 11 numbers here where Hines plays unaccompanied piano (including two on
an early electrified keyboard), but the piano is almost never in the foreground;
Hines is the leader but never the whole show.
The first thing one notices on the majority of the 171 tracks here is the way the
band swings as a whole, whether in the syncopated two-beat of the 1929-30 sessions,
which employ a banjo and tuba in the rhythm section, or in the more smoothed-out
solid-four grooves of the band in the war years, propelled by guitar and bass in
addition to Hines himself.
In both eras, Hines is all over the place -- his piano is a major factor in sparking
the band, driving the beat and shaping the overall phrasing. The Earl of Hines (as
Bugs Bunny referred to him in a 1955 cartoon) is a much more proactive pianist-leader
than his fellow royals Duke Ellington and Count Basie. And when Hines does place
his piano in the foreground, the results are often spectacular, as on "Piano Man"
and "Pianology."
Hines is playing more piano than most bandleaders, but he's also giving his sidemen
plenty of room to shine, particularly saxophonist and arranger Budd Johnson, who
first appears in the band's reed section in 1937, and would continue to work on and
off with Hines for the rest of Hines's life (Johnson died a year after Hines, in
1984). Johnson's inventive soloing is especially well-featured on "Honeysuckle Rose,"
done on a quartet session in 1937. Hines was also quite fortunate in his choice of
band vocalists: Valaida Snow, later known as a trumpeter, takes a memorable vocal
in the style of Ethel Waters on "Maybe I'm to Blame"; Herb Jeffries, who later became
famous with the Ellington band (and is still going strong at 99), is heard on three
tracks. Most effective are 10 excellent vocals by the young Billy Eckstine.
Mr. Priestley shows how several recordings, including Eckstine's "Jelly, Jelly,"
point to the burgeoning R&B movement, and Hines's employment of Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie was a key moment in the birth of bebop or modern jazz. The most surprising
musical movement that Hines foreshadowed, remarkably, was rap: In 1929, Hines himself
performed a monologue in minstrel-show ebonics that could easily be done by Mos Def
today. Even more surprising, in 1945 the band recorded Mary Lou Williams's catchy
novelty tune "Satchel Mouth Baby" -- a track being released for the first time in
the current package -- in which an unidentified entertainer delivers a full blown
rap, which includes lines like "I laid a sound on this little quail that busted her
nappy patch!"
In later years, on stage, Hines rarely spoke about his big band, instead preferring
to talk about what he called "trumpet-style piano," in which he followed the lines
of a horn soloist rather than approximating a full orchestra, as the ragtime and
stride pianists were then doing. Two of Hines's most prominent self-confessed devotees
were Teddy Wilson, who performed a marvelous two-piano duet with Hines in 1965 (available
on YouTube), and Nat King Cole, both of whom were nearly as influential as Hines
himself. Cole famously said, "Everything I am, I owe to that man, because I copied
him." Several generations of piano players could have easily said the same thing.
-30-


-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
916/ 806-9551

"My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.” 
Harry S. Truman, 33rd President B: 5/8/1884 – d: 12/26/1972.