Earl Hines - Style

Style

'The Oxford Companion to Jazz' says of Hines’ early style:-

... The most important pianist in the transition from stride to swing was Earl “Fatha” Hines. As he matured through the 1920s, he simplified the stride “orchestral piano”, eventually arriving at a prototypical swing style. The right hand no longer developed syncopated patterns around pivot notes (as in ragtime) or between-the-hands figuration (as in stride) but instead focused on a more directed melodic line, often doubled at the octave with phrase-ending tremolos. This line was called the “trumpet” right hand because of its markedly hornlike character but in fact the general trend toward a more linear style can be traced back through stride and Jelly Roll Morton to late ragtime from 1915 to 1920.

Hines himself said of his early style when, at 21, he first met Louis Armstrong, “Louis looked at me so peculiar. So I said, “Am I making the wrong chords?” And he said, “No, but your style is like mine”. So I said, “Well, I wanted to play trumpet but it used to hurt me behind my ears so I played on the piano what I wanted to play on the trumpet”. And he said, “No, no, that’s my style, that’s what I like”'. Hines went on to say, “I was curious and wanted to know what the chords were made of. I would begin to play like the other instruments. But in those days we didn’t have amplification, so the singers used to use megaphones and they didn’t have grand-pianos for us to use at the time - it was an upright. So when they gave me a solo, playing single fingers like I was doing, in those great big halls they could hardly hear me. So I had to think of something so I could cut through the big-band. So I started to use what they call ‘trumpet-style’ - which was octaves. Then they could hear me out front and that’s what changed the style of piano playing at that particular time”.

'The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz' says of Hines’ 1965 style

... uses his left hand sometimes for accents and figures that would only come from a full trumpet section. Sometimes he will play chords that would have been written and played by five saxophones in harmony. But he is always the virtuoso pianist with his arpeggios, his percussive attack and his fantastic ability to modulate from one song to another as if they were all one song and he just created all those melodies during his own improvisation.

Later, then in his seventies and after a flood of recent solo recordings, Hines said, “I’m an explorer if I might us that expression. I’m looking for something all the time. And oft-times I get lost. And people that are around me a lot know that when they see me smiling, they know I’m lost and I'm trying to get back. But it makes it much more interesting because then you do things that surprise yourself. And after you hear the recording, it makes you a little bit happy too because you say, “Oh, I didn’t know I could do THAT!”