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Earl "Fatha" Hines.

Article Excerpt
Earl "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-1; 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 as 1923, on a few scratchy recordings behind singer Lois Deppe, Earl "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 as 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 Blues" 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 as 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...

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