Earl Hines's Piano Style in the 1920s: A Historical and Analytical Perspective

Abstract

On November 10, 1923, the Starr Phonograph Company ran fullpage ad in the Pittsburgh Courier, announcing the issue, on the Gennett label, of the first recording by Lois Deppe's Serenaders. DEPPE'S GENNEIT RECORD IS HERE: A Real Treat by Pittsburgh's Only Recording Race Artists proclaims the ad, which goes on to describe Congaine, one of the tunes on the disc, as a keen, snappy fox trot composed by Earl Hines, piano soloist with the Serenaders (Deppe's Gennett Record 1923, 2). Both Deppe and Hines had already been local celebrities in Pittsburgh for several years, and no doubt they were considered hometown heroes by some on this particular day. But fans who visited the music stores on Wylie Avenue could not have known that these two modest sides would mark the beginning of one of the longest and most influential recording careers in jazz. Only handful of other jazz musicians-Duke Ellington was one-matched Hines in longevity and influence. Hines's work of the 1920s set jazz piano playing on new course that was to have profound implications for later developments in the music. Yet, as Gunther Schuller (1989, 264) has recently pointed out, perhaps too much emphasis is placed on the revolutionary aspect of his playing. Hines's style, however much it may have startled (or even baffled) his contemporaries, hardly sprang from nowhere. For all its stunning innovation, his work was nonetheless firmly grounded in long and rich tradition of American music making.1 To emphasize this fact is not to diminish Hines's genius in the least; on the contrary, the examination