Earl Hines by John S. Wilson

Remembering John S. Wilson

© Introduction. Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The musical career of Earl Hines—pianist, bandleader, singer, and master showman—has spanned five decades. In 1928 Hines made a revolutionizing impact on jazz history with a series of astonishing piano solos recorded for QRS and OKeh records, and his no less amazing contributions to the small-band recordings made by Louis Armstrong in that same year provided incalculable inspiration for jazz pianists at the time and in the years following.

Paradoxically, 1928 was also the year in which Hines took a crucial step in a direction that de-emphasized his stature as a virtuoso pianist but brought into play his abilities as an organizer, teacher, and talent spotter. On his twenty-fifth birthday—December 28, 1928—Hines took his first big band into Chicago’s Grand Terrace Ballroom.

For the next twenty years, Hines nursed and nurtured his band. It became one of the best large jazz groups in the business (and make no mistake, bands were a business in those years), one of the first to broadcast on a regular basis, and one of the great talent incubators in jazz history.

A legion of brilliant instrumentalists, arrangers, and singers came up through the ranks of Fatha Hines’s school. Among them were trumpeters Walter Fuller, Ray Nance, Freddie Webster, Benny Harris, Dizzy Gillespie, and Willie Cook; trombonists Trummy Young and Bennie Green; saxophonists Charlie Parker, Budd Johnson, Bob Crowder, Franz Jackson, and Wardell Gray; clarinetists Omer Simeon and Darnell Howard; drummer Alvin Burroughs; arrangers Cecil Irwin (an unsung early talent) and Jimmy Mundy—and last but not least, singers Ivie Anderson, Herb Jeffries, Billy Eckstine, and Sarah Vaughan.

In 1943, when Parker, Gillespie, Green, Eckstine, and Harris were in the band, it became the first reasonably stable laboratory for bebop. A bit later, it was a veritable traveling revue, complete with strings, exotic instrumental doubles like oboe and French horn, and dancers and singers galore.

Throughout these two decades, Hines gave only occasional glimpses of his own instrumental brilliance. For while his unmistakable keyboard accents gave the band its pace and stamp, an occasional chorus or two of piano was the general limit the leader set himself.

• Dan Morgenstern, Living with Jazz: A Reader [2004]

“Hines’ view of himself as reluctant soloist was surprising, for although he has spent a good part of his career as a leader of big and small bands, he is valued chiefly as a pianist. When he came to the fore in Louis Armstrong’s celebrated 1928 recordings, the effect he created was stunning. No one had ever played the piano like that. Most jazz pianists were either blues performers, whose techniques were shaped by their materials, or stride pianists, whose oompah basses and florid right hands reflected the hothouse luxury of ragtime. Hines filled the space between these approaches with an almost hornlike style. He fashioned complex, irregular single-note patterns in the right hand, octave chords with brief tremolos that suggested a vibrato, stark single notes, and big flatted chords. His left hand, ignoring the stride pianists’ catapult action, cushioned his right hand. He used floating tenths and offsetting, offbeat single notes, and he sometimes played counter-melodies. Now and then he slipped into urgent arhythmic passages full of broken melodic lines and heavy offbeat chords. Hines and Louis Armstrong became the first jazz soloists to sustain the tension that is the secret of improvisation. Each of Hines’ solos—particularly any that lasted several choruses—had a unity that was heightened by his pioneering use of dynamics. He italicized his most felicitous phrases by quickly increasing his volume and then as quickly letting it fall away. At the same time, he retained the emotional substance of the blues pianists and the head-on rhythms of the stride men. His earliest recordings still sound modern, and they must have been as shocking then as the atonal musings of Ornette Coleman first were.”

• Whitney Balliett, American Musicians II, [1996]

At the time of this writing in 1957, John S. Wilson was the Jazz critic of The New York Times and was also on the staff of Downbeat.

© Copyright ® John S. Wilson, copyright protected; all rights reserved, the author claims no right of copyright usage.

“The factual mistiness surrounding the early days of jazz has left in some doubt the identification of the errant geniuses who first gave a positive jazz voice to most of the basic instruments used today. Two instruments were brought into jazz focus late enough in the game, however, so that the act was performed before an admiring audience which has left no doubt where the credit should lie. Both events happened at approximately the same time —the middle ‘twenties. That was when Coleman Hawkins gave the tenor saxophone its first real jazz voice and Earl Hines changed the piano from a sort of solo-centered fellow traveler of jazz to a full-fledged member of the jazz ensemble with all the rights, privileges and responsibilities that this implies.

Hines found the piano working its way out of the ragtime phase. Before he came along, only two pianists had managed to make a strong and lasting impression in the gestating jazz world. One was James P. Johnson, a ragtime man with aspirations as a serious pianist and composer whose feeling for jazz helped him to bring the stride piano style to its peak. But his ragtime roots remained strong and continually colored his work.

The other pre-Hines master was the illustrious Jelly Roll Morton. Like Johnson, Morton also came out of ragtime but its effect on his playing was less lasting. The bouillabaisse of musical sounds that billowed out of New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century streamed through Morton. All of these sounds, including ragtime, were strained through Morton’s often dogmatic personal notions to become his style. Both Johnson and Morton, like any pianist of solo pretensions in the first quarter of this century, worked largely on their own. Johnson was the dominant figure in the Harlem rent party picture, strictly a solo situation, while Morton for most of his life was an itinerant (i.e., moving from place to place without benefit of booking agency) musician who worked alone as a matter of convenience.

There is a line that flows from each of these men to Hines, but the one connecting him with Morton is by far the stronger. Hines grew up in the ragtime era and acquired some of its feeling, which quickly faded as he found his own musical personality. However, the often stark, solid, beat-conscious and quirkful playing of Jelly Roll Morton glows warmly in the work of even the mature Hines,

Hines made a place for the piano in the jazz ensemble by turning his back on one of the primary concepts of these earlier pianists—the idea, natural in a performer playing alone, that the piano had to be used as though it were a full orchestra, constantly creating an ensemble sound. This served a purpose when the pianist was playing alone, but it was of little help when the piano was already surrounded by an ensemble. Piano solos played within an ensemble in this style (Lil Armstrong’s with Louis’s Hot Five, for instance) are pale and diffuse in comparison to the other solo instruments. By phrasing in the manner of the horns with which he had to compete in a band, Hines created a new approach to the jazz piano. [Emphasis mine.]

He was, as the saying now has it, “phrasing like a horn” but, unlike more recent pianists who phrase so much like horns that they seem to forget the piano has potentialities a horn lacks, Hines has always been a two-handed pianist. His left hand has never been anything that could be taken for granted—suddenly breaking up the rhythm, roaring into a turbulent bass passage while the melodic line is momentarily suspended or impulsively reversing the roles of the two hands. His tone—bright, brassy and fully formed—has a compelling quality in solos and slices keenly through a full band ensemble.

The handy appellation for Hines’s playing has always been “trumpet style.” It fits neatly because there is a trumpet quality about his best work, and he first came to attention during his association with one of jazz’s greatest trumpets, Louis Armstrong. Many of Hines’s solos have been described as virtually piano transcriptions of what Armstrong might have done.

Actually, the trumpetlike parallel of Hines’s playing probably has a much more natural origin. His father was a trumpeter in the Eureka Brass Band in Pittsburgh and Hines’s first interest was the trumpet.

“But I had no system and my father couldn’t teach me,” Hines has said. “I didn’t know those systems of breath control they have now, so I blew wrong and it used to hurt behind the ears. I’d get lumps back there and so I put the horn down. Then I decided to use the same ideas on piano—that was the reason for my ‘trumpet style.’ The ideas I had wanted heard through the band could only be done like that.”

Hines’s transfer to the piano was helped along by his mother, an organist and pianist, who preferred to see her son playing piano rather than trumpet. He was born in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, on December 28, 1905 [1903?], but the family soon moved into Pittsburgh and when Earl was nine he was started on piano lessons. He moved along so fast with his first teacher that she gave him up and he was transferred to a German, who put him to work on the Czerny books of piano exercises. These exercises, Hines feels, formed the foundation of his technique.

The first influences in forming his jazz style came from a pair of Pittsburgh pianists, Jim Fellman and Johnny Walters. Hines admired Fellman’s left hand and Watters’s right, and he tried to make use of what he considered the best features of both. When he fell under the spell of Fellman and Watters, he had just quit high school and was on his first job at the Liederhouse, playing with Lois Deppe and making fifteen dollars a week. Besides trying to live on this munificent sum, Hines used part of it as informal payment for his equally informal lessons from Fellman and Watters.

“They both liked different types of drink and tobacco,” he has recalled. “Fellman liked chewing tobacco and beer and Watters liked gin and Camel cigarettes. So out of my fifteen dollars a week I had to buy for both of them. I’d get them up in a hotel room, one every other day, buy them what they liked and have them show me how to do it.”

Deppe moved on to Chicago and when he got set there in 1923, he sent for the eighteen-year-old Hines. Hines’s first job was at the Club Elite, No. 2, one of a chain of Elite night clubs. During the year that he worked there, the basic inspiration offered by Fellman and Watters was implemented by a new idol, Teddy Weatherford. Weatherford was the twenty-year-old piano sensation of the day in Chicago. He was playing then at the Red Mill Cafe in a six-piece band that also included Tommy Ladnier on trumpet and Roy Palmer on trombone. His powerful left hand and generally straightforward style were being copied assiduously by the young pianists in Chicago when Hines got there and he enthusiastically followed suit. Weatherford subsequently had one of the most exotic careers in jazz. He left Chicago in 1926 and settled in Asia. Except for a brief visit to Europe in 1937, he spent the rest of his life playing in China, Japan, India and the East Indies. He died in Calcutta in 1945.

Hines’s next stop after the Elite was the Entertainers’ Cabaret where he played a miniature piano on wheels and evolved a trick of winding up a chorus with an involved break, giving the piano a shove to the next table and picking up where he had left off. Carroll Dickerson’s orchestra was also playing at the Entertainers’ and Hines joined the band on a forty-two-week tour of the Pantages vaudeville circuit which took them to California and back.

The band returned to Chicago in the spring of 1926 and went into the Sunset Cafe, right across Thirty-fifth Street from the Plantation Cafe where King Oliver was playing. Louis Armstrong joined the Dickerson band then and, with Hines on piano, Darnell Howard on clarinet and alto, Honoré Dutrey on trombone and Tubby Hall drumming, it won quick recognition as the best band in Chicago.

Dickerson bowed out as leader in 1927 and Armstrong took over, installing Hines as musical director. This was the band that the young Chicagoans who were about to launch “Chicago style” jazz came to worship admiringly and to sit in with whenever they had the slightest opportunity. Jess Stacy, whose playing is strongly marked by the Hines influence, was allowed to fill in for Hines whenever Earl wanted a rest. Muggsy Spanier, Frank Teschemacher and George Wettling rushed over to the Sunset regularly whenever their night’s work was done.

While Armstrong’s band was playing at the Sunset, he started using Hines on his small-group recording sessions. Hines made his first appearance with them on a Johnny Dodds’s Black Bottom Stampers date for Vocation in April, 1927, a session which produced Wild Man Blues and Melancholy. A month later he made a single side with Armstrong’s Hot Seven, Chicago Breakdown, Except for some 1924 Gennett sides as accompanist to Lois Deppe, these were Hines’s first records.

A new spot, the Savoy Ballroom, opened in Chicago on Thanksgiving night, 1927, and Armstrong, Hines and drummer Zutty Singleton, who had become something of a musical triumvirate and were unashamedly impressed with themselves, decided to go into business on their own with the immediate objective of knocking off the Savoy. They rented Warwick Hall on Forty-seventh Street and opened up in December with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Six. The triumvirate had become accustomed to the admiring crowds at the Sunset. But the crowds didn’t follow them to the Warwick and, after a hungry winter, the three operator-musicians threw in the towel.

Armstrong and Singleton caught on with Carroll Dickerson once again. Dickerson, ironically, was playing at the Savoy. Hines went back to Thirty-fifth Street to an after-hours musicians’ hangout across the street from the Sunset, which had once been called The Nest but was now known as the Apex Club. Hines took the piano chair in Jimmie Noone’s band there and during his nine-month stay the Noone band cut a dozen sides which remain among the most exhilarating small group works on disks. At the same time, Armstrong began using Hines again in his own small-group records which were released under a variety of titles—Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven, Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five and Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra. This series produced disks that are unquestioned classics of their type—the gloriously full-toned West End Blues and the brooding Maggies are among the best—but the only really unique performance was a duet between Armstrong and Hines on the King Oliver tune, Weather Bird Rag, a kaleidoscopic display by two masterful musicians in close rapport.

Hines eventually tired of the hours and the work with Noone, so he quit and started rehearsing a small group at his hotel. They had worked out twenty-five or thirty numbers when the QRS Piano Roll Company asked him to go to New York to record some piano solos. QRS, astutely observing the way the wind was blowing in the matter of reproduced music, had decided to hedge on its piano rolls by going into the record business. Unfortunately, aside from recognizing the latent possibilities for records of a talent like Hines’s, QRS was neither informed nor instinctive about the operation of a record business. After Hines had cut eight solos, all his own compositions, QRS threw them all on the market in a solid batch on the same day—tantamount to throwing them away,

“Oh, it was a panic!” Earl recalls. The disks quickly shriveled and died. QRS promptly followed suit and the Hines solos became collectors’ items almost as soon as they were issued. (They are now readily available on LP on Atlantic 120, thereby proving that watchful waiting can even be a good policy for a record collector.)

While Hines was in New York, Lucky Millinder, who had not yet achieved his later status of band leader, was desperately trying to organize a show to open a new Chicago night club, the Grand Terrace. He needed a band with plenty of name and plenty of talent, but he hadn’t been able to get one. He wired Hines, asking if he could come back to Chicago and put together a band. Hines wired back that he already had a band, a not unreasonably exaggerated reference to his little rehearsal group. However, by the time the Grand Terrace opened—on December 28, 1928, Hines’s twenty-third birthday—he really had a full band.

The band had been signed for the opening production only. But it stayed on and stayed on for more than a decade. During these years, the nightly broadcasts from the Terrace, introduced by the pulsingly exotic Deep Forest and shouts of “Father Hines! Father Hines!”, gave the pianist a nationwide reputation. It was on one of these broadcasts that Hines acquired his paternal title. Ralph J. Gleason of Down Beat got the details from Hines:

“One night an announcer—let his name be forgotten, Earl says—was given a fatherly talking to by Hines. He’d been drinking too much on the job and Hines was asked to talk to him and did. Later that night he opened the show, sprawling on the table and leaning over the mike lushed to the gills. He said, ‘Here comes Father Hines through the deep forest with his children.’ And the tag stuck.”

The Grand Terrace was controlled by the Capone mob, but Hines found that working for gangsters could sometimes have its points. During one of his Southern tours, Hines heard a singer named Arthur Lee Simpkins in Atlanta and invited him to come to Chicago. Simpkins was working as a handyman in a white bank at the time. After the Hines band got back to the Grand Terrace, Simpkins turned up one night, asking for a chance with the band. He auditioned and was given a job. A little later Simpkins’s ex-boss arrived from Atlanta to demand that his “colored boy” be returned. When Hines warned the Grand Terrace’s owners that they were about to lose their popular new tenor, a couple of tough bouncers were assigned to get the banker started on a fast trip back to Georgia.

Several years later Hines was impressed by the singing of a thirty-five-dollar-a-week crooner at the Club DeLisa and asked him to join the band. The singer was Billy Eckstine. When Eckstine opened with Hines at the Grand Terrace, the DeLisa sent over some emissaries armed with badly concealed revolvers to bring Eckstine back. The Terrace’s bravos had their own ideas, however, and after a discussion of comparative arsenals, the DeLisa’s representatives went home and Eckstine stayed with Hines.

Along with Simpkins and Eckstine, Hines also unearthed Herb Jeffries while Hines was leading his band at the Grand Terrace. His first band there included George Mitchell and Shirley Clay on trumpets and Hayes Alvis on bass. In 1932 he picked up three men who were to be his mainstays for many years—clarinetists Darnell Howard (six years) and Omer Simeon (seven years) and trumpeter-vocalist Walter Fuller (eight years). The next year Trummy Young was added to the Hines trombone section, and Jimmy Mundy arrived to play tenor saxophone and write arrangements. Budd Johnson, Hines’s right-hand man for ten years, came in 1934 and in 1938 Ray Nance, now a long-time veteran of the Ellington band, had a brief fling with Hines as a trumpet man and singer.

The Hines band made its first records for Victor in 1929— nine none-too-remarkable sides. However, the series of disks it turned out for Brunswick between 1932 and 1934 represents one of the high points of Hines’s recording career. It includes Harlem Laments, Blue Drag, Cavernism, Rosetta and Madhouse. Subsequently the Hines band recorded for Decca and Vocalion, but on neither label did it generate the gutty, swinging drive that came through on the Brunswicks.

As a band leader, Hines was able to dramatize his playing in a way that could only be suggested when he was working as a single (the rolling piano bit, for instance) and was practically out of the question in a sideman. For stage presentations, a baby spotlight played on his right hand as the curtains parted, and his purposely large and multi-faceted ring gleamed and glistened as his fingers roved caressingly over the keys. He liked to wind up a solo by lifting his hands slowly and dramatically from the keyboard as he turned to the audience with a gleaming and assured smile. He was an imposing figure at the piano, erect, solid, his hands seemingly covering most of the keyboard.

For many years a story circulated that Hines was able to play as he did because he had had the webbing between his fingers cut to give his hands a wider stretch. Hines dismisses this as nonsense.

“My normal reach is a tenth,” he says, “though I can make elevenths and sometimes twelfths. But I really have to slip over them. The way I invert the chords makes them sound bigger.”

Hines worked steadily during the years when he was centered at the Grand Terrace, but for a successful band leader he made remarkably little money—at times he was getting $150 a week. He was under contract all through this period to Ed Fox who managed the Grand Terrace. Toward the end of the ‘thirties, Hines began to find it tough going. New bands had come up since he had started —Jimmy Lunceford, Benny Goodman, Count Basie—and they were getting all the play while he seemed to be getting none. After a particularly disastrous tour to Los Angeles and back to Chicago, Hines found himself laying off with no work in sight.

In October, 1940, Benny Goodman offered Earl a job with his band. Hines was tempted to accept although he hated to backtrack from his status as a leader to become a sideman again. While he was thinking about Goodman’s offer, he took his contract with Fox to the Musicians Union to find out if he had really been getting all the money he should have. The union looked over the contract, told Hines it was unfair and illegal and Hines suddenly and unexpectedly found himself freed of Fox’s management.

That was all the stimulant he needed to turn down Goodman’s offer. Budd Johnson started revitalizing the Hines band, bringing in new men and whipping them into shape. Hines signed with the William Morris office and made Charlie Carpenter, his onetime valet, his manager. Soon the new Hines band was booked solid for five months ahead. It was recording for Victor’s Bluebird label and had a strong hit in Boogie Woogie on the St. Louis Blues.

During 1941 and 1942, the Hines band began to show the first signs of the pre-bop incubator that it was about to become. Billy Eckstine was already with the band by then, singing and playing a little trumpet. Little Benny Harris came in on trumpet in April, 1941, and Freddy Webster recorded with the band the following August. The next year Dizzy Gillespie and trombonist Benny Green joined up. Charlie Parker replaced Budd Johnson, playing tenor (Parker, of course, was an alto player, so Hines bought a tenor for him). Shadow Wilson took over on drums. At the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, Hines heard one of the Apollo’s Amateur Night winners, Sarah Vaughan, and immediately took her on as second pianist and vocalist.

This was a band that holds a unique transitional place in jazz history, almost documenting within itself the shift from swing to bop. But although it stayed together at its peak for almost a year, it left no records behind. Its entire existence coincided with the Musicians Union ban on recording that lasted from 1942 until 1944. Long before the ban had been lifted, the band was falling apart. It had been booked on a long series of unprofitable and dispiriting Army camp shows and, without disks to back it up, it remained virtually unknown. One by one the potential stars that Hines had assembled dropped out. The biggest blow came when Eckstine decided to build a big band of his own in 1944, using the heart of the Hines band—Gillespie, Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Shorty McConnell and Gail Brockman.

Undaunted, Hines kept on going. In 1945 he had Wardell Gray on tenor, but he was moving toward an odd goal.

“I’ve always had a funny ambition to do something like Waring and Whiteman along jazz lines,” he once said. “Groups of singers, large bands, every kind of instrumentation and scoring possible.”

Soon he had just that kind of band, a band with French horns and eight girls sawing away in a string section (”Man, those women like to run me crazy!”) This unlikely gambit, combined with the trend of the times against big bands, foreshadowed the end of the Hines band. In 1948, Earl gave up as a band leader and joined Louis Armstrong’s small group which, briefly, was an amazing collection of jazz masters while Jack Teagarden, Cozy Cole, Hines and Armstrong were all working together. But Hines chafed under the tedious and repetitious musical strait jacket within which Armstrong has sheltered himself in the past decade, and he dropped out of the group in 1951. Since then he has spent most of his time on the West Coast and, in 1956, settled in San Francisco.

Today Hines’s once hard and brilliant manner has softened noticeably. The strutting, dazzling displays which have been characterized (by Hugues Panassie) as “the best example of the errant, audacious, inventive genius, as opposed to the comfortable, solid style of someone like Fats Waller or James P. Johnson,” have become, on the evidence of his most recent recordings (Fantasy 3217), rather comfortable and solid themselves. The daring innovator of the late ‘twenties is now, quite understandably, a viewer-with-alarm.

“The modern piano has just about changed the whole system as far as the public is concerned,” the man who changed the whole system thirty years ago said recently. “They’re getting to the place where they’re disinterested . . . it’s getting so farfetched that the general public actually doesn’t know what’s happening when it comes to playing a tune that they’re used to listening to for some time, such as Body and Soul. The way some of the fellows are playing it now, after the first four bars you don’t know what it is. So the average pianist nowadays I think is just getting too far out and is not actually playing from the heart. Looks like it’s a challenge now . . . every new guy is trying to find a new sound and is just getting completely away from the good feeling.”

This point of view neatly fills out a jazz piano cycle. For when young Earl Hines started breaking up the rhythm, interpolating sudden fantastic passages and going out on venturesome limbs which seemed to have no relationship to the basic tune and tempo, he was accused by the conservatives of the ‘twenties of “getting too far out,” of “not actually playing from the heart.” It is probably one of the most meaningful compliments that modern jazz pianists could receive, coming—as it does—from the man who is, at the very least, the stylistic and philosophical father of them all.”

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY-EARL HINES

PIANO SOLOS:

Earl Hines, Atlantic 120 (the original QRS solos).

The Art of Jazz Piano, Epic LN 3295 (with Art Tatum, James P. Johnson, Joe Sullivan).

Earl Hines, Piano Solos, “X” LVA-3023.

Fats Waller Songs, Brunswick BL 58034 (with Nat Jaffe).

“Fatha” Plays “Fats,” Fantasy 3217.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG SMALL GROUPS:

The Louis Armstrong Story, Vol. 3, Columbia CL 853.

Satchmo on Stage, Decca 8330.

New Orleans Days, Decca 5279.

OTHER SMALL GROUPS:

Jazz Royalty, EmArcy 26023 (with Count Basie).

Earl “Fatha” Hines and His New Sounds, Nocturne 5.

BIG BAND:

Oh, Father!, Epic LN 3223.