Earl Hines
Godfather of Modern Jazz Piano
EARL “FATHA” HINES
Keyboard Magazine, April 1982
When I found out that Earl Hines lived about an hour away from the Keyboard offices in Cupertino, I brought this to the attention of editor Tom Darter. Being an excellent pianist himself, Tom green-lighted my pitch to feature him on the cover and, having come up with the idea myself, assigned me to make it happen.
In those days, I was only beginning my metamorphosis as a player from garage rocker to jazz novice. But I already knew that modern jazz piano likely wouldn’t have evolved as it did without Hines’s handiwork. Put simply, it was Hines who broke beyond the neo-ragtime foundations of stride piano, with the left hand pounding steady rhythms over which the right, ideally, amped up the momentum with counter-rhythmic figurations. In its place, Hines conceived a more streamlined approach, repurposing the left hand from being a groove engine to a source of harmonic suggestions in support of long, single-line improvisation in the higher register.
The effects of this innovation endure, roughly a century after Hines began his explorations.
My recollection is that it was easy to set things up for our conversation. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think he had a publicist at the time, so I think I made arrangements through a friend of his at one of the local papers — possibly Phil Elwood, jazz critic at the San Francisco Examiner. What I do recall is my deep-dive research into Hines’s life and work. In those days, that meant driving to the Music Library at Stanford University and spending a full day, maybe two, calling up articles from the basement archive and scribbling notes once someone brought them to my carrel.
My goal was to over-prepare, to show up with pages of notes in hopes of impressing the interviewee and jostling some juicy stories from his memory. While preparation is admirable and to a degree essential, I learned from this assignment that there are other priorities — specifically, establishing rapport. After all, you’re not giving a book report; you’re speaking with another human being. There are better ways to connect.
I learned this early in our conversation, which took place in his high-rise flat overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland. Having scrutinized his discography all the way back to the mid Twenties, I asked him, “Earl, when you and Louis Armstrong recorded ‘Basin Street Blues’ at the Savoy Ballroom in 1928, you played celeste in some parts instead of piano. Why?”
Settled in his living room on an easy chair, he took a deep draw from his cigar and replied, “How the hell do I know? That was more than forty years ago!”
That’s when I decided to drop all my other microscopically detailed queries and just get to know the guy sitting in front of me, exhaling a cloud of bluish smoke in my direction. There was a beautiful, somewhat stylized Steinway grand piano a few feet away from us in his living room. so I asked about how long he’d owned it. Hines smiled and shared the story.
“Scott Newhall, a very close friend who was the executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, gave it to me. I was giving a concert down at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and he unveiled it for me, right there at the concert. I didn’t know anything like that was going to happen until he unveiled it. And, you know, I was rehearsing down there that afternoon too, so he must have had a heck of a time keeping me from seeing it all day.”
He gestured toward the piano. “Try it out, if you like,” he said. Then he stood up and began shuffling arthritically toward the kitchen for some water.
Not taking him up on that offer remains one of my more enduring regrets. Caught by surprise, I spent a second or two running through the changes of his composition “Rosetta,” to which I’d actually worked out a few alternate chord patterns. In retrospect, though, I’m glad I didn’t. I was in no way prepared to do this song any justice in front of its composer.
When he returned, dipping just one more time into my notes, I asked if this was the instrument on which he’d recorded one of his recent solo piano albums. He smiled; yes it was. With that, I turned on my recorder and decided to relax and chat for a while.
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Was it more comfortable to record at your own place than in a studio?
No, no, no, no. It’s a funny thing. I never play better in one place than I do somewhere else. I don’t care where I’m at, I just play the way I feel. Now, when I record in Japan, I think they like to hear more bass on the piano than they do over here, so there might be a difference. But that’s the way they feel. Whether it was my best playing, that’s up to the public to decide.
Now, I never did like any solo album that I recorded. I always thought I could do better than I did. Even now, when I record something, I say to myself, when I listen to it, “What the heck did I do that for?”
You took classical piano lessons as a kid. Did those lessons make it easier in some ways and harder in others when you began getting into jazz?
After you’ve studied classical music, you don’t realize what you can do. Some of the classical things I used to play, but I didn’t realize it. I didn’t know how I got through them. I might not have fingered them like other people, but I did it the easiest way for me to get by.
Your posture at the keyboard definitely looks like it came from that instruction.
When I look at pictures of myself, sometimes my wrists are straight up and sometimes they’re down, so I don’t know. When I’m emphasizing something, my wrists might get heavy, but it’s hard to say. It’s all according to what I feel and what kind of piano I have. Now, sometimes I get a new piano, and even if it’s a Steinway I’ll have to sit up straight and work hard. I don’t have a lot of strength in my hands now, but there was a time when I did. I remember when I played a brand new piano at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In the first set, before I finished the fourth number, I had already broken a key. The whole key flew right off the piano! I used to do that a lot when I was at the Grand Terrace [in Chicago, during the Thirties]. I don’t know where I got it from. Maybe it’s just the way I accent. There were always two or three broken strings each night there. And I used to stomp so hard while I was playing that I’d have to put pillows underneath my feet.
Did you ever think about going into classical music?
I didn’t know what I was going to be, to tell you the truth. I loved classical music because it was given to me by my mother and my dad. I was just surrounded by music, even though I didn’t know what I was going to do. But you know, when the music had syncopation, I sort of liked that. I heard that foot patting. I liked it and I kept going from there. But after you play the classics for a certain length of time, a lot of it sticks with you. There are some things you can’t get from them, like you'll very seldom find a classical musician who can memorize. Your symphonic musicians can’t remember anything. I don’t care how many times they’ve played their overtures, they still can’t memorize them. That happens with a lot of classical pianists. Classical music is good for things like learning to read. I was always a fast reader. I would always read four or five measures ahead, so I could see the chord structures before I got to them. I was always exploring, trying to find something new. A lot of times I played things I didn’t even know I could do myself, until I heard the record.
But now I’m much older. I don’t think as fast as I used to. Even my fingers don’t work the way they did then. Let’s face it.” [Hines lays his hands flat on the table; both show a slight tremor.] My hands aren’t that big, but I used to do stretching.You see that? [He fans his fingers wide apart.] That’s a tenth. I don’t need no more than that. Now, I can’t hardly do a tenth on a D chord or a B-flat chord. On a D-flat, A-flat and F, I can touch it. I’m getting stronger with them too, but in the old days I wasn’t doing that much playing in those keys. When I started playing tenths, I had to roll my wrist. I was only fifteen when I started, you know! So I’d simplify a lot of the time. In other words … I cheated [laughs].
”If you copy somebody, you’re only going to make that person popular.”
Were there pianists back then whose reach you envied?
There were two different pianists I was listening to then. I wasn’t making but fifteen dollars a week, but I would have paid fifteen dollars a day just to see those guys. One had a heck of a right hand and one had a heck of a left hand. Jim Fellman was the left hand and Johnny Watters was the right hand. He was a guy with a hell of a style. His left hand didn’t do much, but his right hand used to play tenths and the melody at the same time. Man, I couldn’t do that. He could stretch a B chord: B, F-sharp and D-flat. But you know, I didn’t use their style. What I did was put their styles together, then put my ideas with that. A lot of people wasn’t playing tenths then, but I was.
So you weren’t copying them …
That’s right. It’s not good when you copy a person. If you copy somebody, you’re only going to make that person popular. Now, I used a lot of other ideas from other pianists, but they didn’t know it because I put those ideas in other tunes. Now and then I’d be playing something, then all of a sudden one of those thingsI heard from somebody would just strike me and I’d think, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to put that thing in here!’”
Most of your colleagues in the Twenties were playing in a stride style, especially on solo gigs. Did your preference for leading a band pull you toward what’s now recognized as the more modern approach, with an emphasis on improvised solo lines in the right hand?
I got that trumpet style on the piano from playing in bands. See, I used to use regular fingering when I was playing at home, but then when I started working with big bands and they gave me a solo, nobody could hear me. Now, my father played the trumpet, so I started using his particular style, going back to the melody, and it cut through that way. Soon all the pianists began to use it.
Did you study how horn players improvised?
I never did copy nobody or use anybody’s ideas. Never! I had my own way of doing it. I never did sit down and rehearse. I might sit down and rehearse the first thing that I’d feel might be advantageous to the program I was going to use, but that’s all.
Fake It to Make It
How did you develop your own approach to improvisation?
My music teacher had a contest at the end of the season. I had to do a piece with about 45 pages to it. I was into it when my mind went blank. I just blacked out! I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I started faking it. The teacher was trying to figure out where I was! I could see her sitting right there by the piano with the music, looking all through it. Then it finally came back to me, so I got back to the right changes. At the end she said to me, “You did a hell of a job getting back there.” I said,”‘I know I did [laughs]!” And she said, “Yeah, but nobody knew — only me! I didn’t know where you was.” And I said, “Neither did I [laughs]!”
As you moved beyond stride piano, how did that affect the relationship between your hands as you improvised?
You see, I have to say that I have an unusual left hand, Sometimes it out-thinks my right hand! To cooperate with what it’s doing, I have to think about coordinating with it. I get stretched out there and I’ll think, ‘What the hell? I’ve got to do something.’ So here comes my right hand! That’s how I catch up, but nobody would understand that but me.
“It takes a good bass player and drummer to become accustomed to me.”
I can imagine that would confuse bassists and drummers trying to follow what you’re doing.
It takes a good bass player and drummer to become accustomed to me. I don’t have time to be explaining what I’m doing. It’s just like in sports: In baseball, you have a pitcher and a catcher. After they play together a while, the catcher starts to know what the pitcher will do even before he throws the ball. My bass players have to know when I’m going to make a change too. A good bass player will just keep on the melody when I take off. He knows that sooner or later I’ll get back in the same channel. Likewise with a drummer. It helps if they’re young. The old guys wouldn’t do it so well, except for the ones I played with years ago. But the young guys? You can break ‘em in easy. [Hines winks and smiles.]
What about transposition? Are you equally comfortable in every key?
Well, when I was younger, I had to play in all the keys because I was accompanying singers who sang in each one. I could go back to them, but I’d have to go in the woodshed a while. If I’m just fooling around, I play it in F or G or C, sometimes in B-flat, very seldom in D-flat; that’s as far as I go. But I don’t like to change keys from the original. If I get started on something of [Duke] Ellington’s in D-flat, I go on with it. [Hines pauses briefly.] My God! My personal friend Ellington, who wrote such beautiful compositions! Every one of them made sense too.
When you play one of Duke’s compositions, does the music lead you closer to his own style as a player?
You don’t play them like he played them with his band. Play ‘em the way you feel. That’s what I did with Ellington’s numbers. That’s the way I looked at the tunes Hoagy Carmichael wrote too. But they don’t write those kinds of tunes anymore. [Hines closes his eyes and hums a bit of “These Foolish Things.”] Beautiful tunes. I listen a lot to what the kids are writing now; they go to a place where they just run out of ideas and fade out the record at the end. That’s what discourages me so much. They write whatever comes into their heads, and a lot of it doesn’t make sense.
Where Is Love?
What specific differences do you see in how songs are being written today?
Years ago, the composers wrote about everyday life. That’s why songs like “Tea for Two” and “Body and Soul” still live: They’re about true life. Of course, one or two tunes might come nowadays that do the same thing, but just go back about ten years, after Dick Clark started rock, and find out how many tunes have come along the are still alive. There’s no comparison with what the guys did years ago. Everything has changed. You’ve got a new type of person nowadays. You don’t have the romantic type of feeling that people had years ago, when everybody danced together. I remember when they had those big ballrooms; they’d turn the lights down, put a screen down on the middle of the floor and put the lyrics you were dancing to on the screen. Some people met their girlfriends by a tune. Some people were married by a tune. Some people were even divorced by a tune! You don’t have that no more.
See, jazz is from the heart, but a lot of kids are going by what they see on the paper. As I said before, I used to look four or five measures ahead in my chord structures. Well, a lot of guys don’t do that now. They use a lot of chord structures and they read well, but sometimes the modern things have too many changes, so they can’t do much with it. When I’m playing these things, I can’t think through all those things at the same time. Not now. I was doing it when I was playing, but not now.
I’ll never forget this guy, George E. Lee, a blues singer out of Kansas City. One of his favorite songs was “You Go to My Head.” Man, he sang the hell out of it! Every time I hear that tune I think of him because he romanced the vocalist I had in my band to that tune. Those are the things that stick with you.
Still, you’ve recently done some intriguing collaborations with younger artists. I’m thinking about two albums [Paradise and Lunch and Jazz] that you recorded with Ry Cooder. How did you and he decide to work together?
I don’t know how I got into that myself! He contacted me; I didn’t do nothing about it. I didn’t realize what type of musician he was. He’s a very successful man, but I never heard of him. I went over and did the best I could. It was different from what I usually play, like the first time I ever played Dixieland, but it fit in with the ideas that he had.
You’ve been a vital artist for half a century. You’ve crossed paths with many significant musicians. Is there anyone you wish you had gigged or recorded with but never had the opportunity?
Well, I don’t think so. There were so many of them over the years. Everybody at that time used to help each other. When I was working in a club, they’d all come in after a show to jam. And the proprietor would charge to see it! When [saxophonist] Ben Webster would show up, they’d put his name up there on the marquee! There’d be maybe three or four thousand dollars worth of talent jamming inside, and nobody was making any money off of it but the man! But even though that wasn’t so good for the musicians, I’m glad I got to play with so many of those wonderful guys, like my good friend Bill Evans. Man, what a beautiful pianist he was, but his style was different. You had to understand what he was playing. Then there’s George Shearing. Shearing is a guy who thinks he’s doing jazz, because he wants to show his versatility. You know, when he first came over here from England, he was trying to play like me. But then he finally made it to a more commercial style. He’d say, “I won’t swing anything too hard,” and I’d laugh like hell and say, “Go ahead, man; the people will go for it anyway.”
Now that you’re more or less retired, do you take time to just play at home, for your own pleasure?
Oh, no, no, not at all! Man, I’ve been playing for 57 years but I don’t play much because I don’t think as fast as I used to. That gets disturbing to me. If I don’t feel like I’ve played the thing right, I just don’t want to play at all.
Are there any projects or goals you’d still like to tackle?
[Hines draws long in his cigar.] Oh, I’ve pretty much done everything I’ve wanted to. But there is one thing I’d like to do before I give up the business, and that would be to have one more nice band with a string section. We’d get use of a nice ballroom, right here in Oakland. Through the week we’d play waltzes and nice things like that. Then on Friday and Saturday we’d do Latin music and all the modern things, with the strings as background for me and the vocalists. Then I’d like to do a little classical music on Sunday. I’d like to do all that and charge the kids only a dollar to get in. I don’t know if we’d be able to draw as large an audience as Lawrence Welk, because he’s on TV all the time. But I’d like to try that.
But let’s face it. I’ve been everywhere a person can be. I’ve seen everything a person can see. So more than anything, I’d just like to relax now. If I get something I can handle, all right. If it’s too much hassle, I won’t bother with it. I don’t need that now.
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This is WONDERFUL.
Cool interview. I love his last answer.