Selected Piano Solos, 1928–1941 (review)

Abstract

Fatha Hines. Selected Piano Solos, 1928-1941. Edited by Jeffrey Taylor. Middleton, WI: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc., 2006. (Recent Researches in American Music, 56.) (Music of the United States of America, 15.) [Frontispiece (Earl Hines, 1928); foreword (Richard Crawford), p. xi; acknowledgments, p. xiii-xiv; essay Earl 'Fatha' Hines and the Art of the Jazz Piano Solo, p. xv-l; 4 plates; recording sessions, transcriptions, crit. commentary, p. 1-121; apparatus, p. 123-30; literature cited, p. 131-33. ISBN 978-0-89579-580-9; 0-89579-580-9. $96.] As early 1923, on a few scratchy recordings behind singer Lois Deppe, Fatha Hines (1903-1983), not quite eighteen, was already demonstrating an impressive mastery of early stride-piano style along the lines of James P. Johnson. On these early sides Hines was even exhibiting indisputable signs of the powerful right hand octaves that along with the rapid tremolos soon to follow came to be known the trumpet style. The left hand rhythmic surprises present on the occasional solo herald a jazz artist who would continue to surprise and delight listeners for the next sixty years. A few years later Hines's recorded legacy took flight when the still precocious pianist teamed with Louis Armstrong and His Hot Fives and Hot Sevens in Chicago for nineteen historic recordings in 1927 and 1928, among them West End and Muggles and the sui generis duet Weather Bird. Only days before the latter two sessions in December 1928, Hines traveled to Long Island, New York, to make his first solo recordings, eight performances on four 78 rpm discs for the QRS label, including two of the twelve performances transcribed in the volume under review, Blues in Thirds and Stowaway. At the new Grand Terrace on Chicago's South Side on his twenty-third birthday, Hines capped this amazing month when he launched the orchestra he would lead from the piano until 1939. During the Grand Terrace years, the man described by Gunther Schuller in The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (The History of Jazz, 2 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 292) as one of the two supreme pianists of our time would not record another solo side. In fact, for most of the period encompassed in volume 15 of the esteemed series Music in the United States of America (MUSA)-Earl Fatha Hines, Selected Piano Solos, 1928-1941, superbly edited, ably transcribed, and thoughtfully annotated by Jeffrey Taylor-Hines worked primarily a band leader. Although Hines had one of the finest bands of the thirties, a band that left representative recordings and is given respectful treatment in comprehensive surveys of big-band jazz, Hines and His Orchestra has been eclipsed by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basic, Benny Goodman, and Andy Kirk, bands that regularly featured outstanding name-brand soloists and arrangers. Hines's premier soloist, Budd Johnson, was lesser known in his day than soloists such Cootie Williams, Lester Young, or Goodman, and remains probably more obscure today. In addition, Hines's eclectic array of arrangers, led by Johnson, precluded the band from establishing the kind of personalized sonic identity enjoyed by other top bands. In the early 1940s, Hines briefly enjoyed the presence of Coleman Hawkins and vocalists Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan, but the 1943 band that introduced future bop icons Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker fell under the cloud of the 1942-44 recording ban brought about by a dispute between the American Federation of Musicians and the recording industry over radio and jukebox royalties. Consequently, the legacy of this band is silence. Although his influence on jazz pianists was profound and often acknowledged, Hines followed Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson proprietary inventors of jazz piano style. He never developed or cultivated the showmanship and reputation a singer to match Waller's high profile in the jazz world in the late 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, and his eclectic and unpredictable style contrasted markedly with both the steady, smooth, and easy swing of Teddy Wilson and the ubiquitous pyrotechnics of Art Tatum. …