Another great jazz piano artist: Earl Hines
November 23rd, 2008 | by Tom |The other most significant jazz-piano soloist of the 1920’s shared Fats Waller’s ability to blend what was essentially a solo style with an ensemble. This was Earl Hines, who developed his mature “trumpet style” in Chicago.
Earl Hines in action at the piano together with Jackie Byard
Some elements of Hines’s playing reflect the accentuated right-hand technique of other Chicagoan pianist such as Zinky Cohn and Cassino Simpson, neither of whom approached Hines’s virtuoso flair.
His fellow pianist Teddy Wilson aptly summed up Hines’s brilliance both as a soloist and as a band player.
Earl Hines was born, in a suburb of Pittsburgh, into a musical family. His father, Joseph, was cornetist, his mother played the organ, and his sister Nancy was a pianist who went on to lead her own bands. Hines started serious study of the piano when he was only nine, and he left high school to go straight into the band of a local baritone singer called Lois Deppe, who recognized Hines’s talent and organized jobs for him that involved bandleading and directing as well as simply accompanying at the piano.
After a tour with Deppe in 1923, Hines moved to Chicago late the following year. He quickly found work with some of the city’s leading bandleaders, including Carroll Dickerson and Erskine Tate, who provided backing for Louis Armstrong. Consequently, Hines became a regular accompanist for Louis Armstrong, joining his studio recording bands whenever possible and cutting several influential discs with Armstrong’s Hot Five.
His playing was nicknamed the “trumpet” piano style, because his right-hand phrases to some extent mimicked the melodies of the trumpet in early jazz bands, and, to emphasize their melodic content, he played them in octaves.
It seems that Hines was physically well equipped for the piano, with extremely flexible hands and wrists, and he was naturally able to achieve a level of playing that took considerable practice and long experience for others.
Earl Hines reached his mature approach by the late 1920’s, and although he followed the general trend of the 1930’s and 1940’s by adopting a more relaxed approach to rhythm, and playing less on top of the beat, the main change in his work was that its characteristics became more pronounced.
He was also to become a figure of admiration among the musicians who developed the modern jazz of the 1940’s, many of whom passed through the ranks of the big band he began leading in 1928, and which came to full flower in the late 1930’s.
Tags: earl hines, louis armstrong, piano jazz