The New Earl Hines Trio – Fatha | Gestern lief bei mir spät noch zweimal am Stück dieses verblüffende, erfrischende Album, aufgenommen einen Monat vor „A Love Supreme“, am 9. und 10. November 1964. Das neue Trio besteht aus Ahmed Abdul-Malik und Oliver Jackson und war zu dem Zeitpunkt schon über ein halbes Jahr unterwegs. Los geht es mit einem Romp durch „Frankie and Johnny“, später singt Hines auch zwei Stücke („St. James Infirmary“ und „Trav’lin All Alone“), aber hauptsächlich geht’s hier sowas von zur Sache. Klar sind die Rollen verteilt, das ist kein Trio, in dem dialogisches Interplay stattfindet. Die Begleiter tragen den formidabel aufgelegten Pianisten durch die zwölf Stücke, es gibt ein wenig Zeitkolorit mit „The Girl from Ipanema“ (wär eher nicht nötig gewesen) und zahlreiche alte Favoriten, darunter „Frenesi“ (auch mit Latin-Einschlag), „Avalon“, „Broadway“ oder als Closer „Runnin‘ Wild“. Doch was Hines mit den Stücken anstellt, ist halt wirklich super, er überrascht ständig, es kommt keine Sekunde Langeweile oder Routineverdacht auf. Der „Fatha“ ist zurück.
Die ersten Auftritte (drei Konzerte im Little Theatre am Broadway im März – die Begleiter traf Hines kurz vor dem Auftritt zum ersten Mal) wurden bejubelt, unter anderem gibt es eine Rezension von Whitney Balliett für den New Yorker, die das alles ins richtige Licht rückt und Hines‘ Verdienste, Rolle und Können so gut beschreiben, wie ich das nichts könnte. Er ordnet Hines auch nochmal im grossen Ganzen ein. Bis zum Album sind dann nochmal acht Monate vergangen und das Trio ist weiter zusammengewachsen – eine wirklich tolle Gruppe.
Musical Events
Jazz Concerts
Triumph
By Whitney Balliett
March 7, 1964THE curse of the originator is adulation. His inventions, diffused and sullied by admiring hands, disappear behind a skein of imitations. But some originators, through sheer inventiveness, outwit their apostles; no matter how often their work is emulated, it remains simon-pure. One such immutable figure is the pianist Earl Hines, who, visible in New York just once in the past decade, held forth with stunning results last Friday at the Little Theatre in the third of the “Jazz on Broadway” concerts.
Hines founded one of the three schools of jazz piano playing. The earliest, made up mainly of blues pianists, flourished under Jimmy Yancey and his disciples Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons. The second, an outgrowth of ragtime, was established by James P. Johnson and others, and it produced such marvels as Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. Hines, drawing in small part from these traditions and in large part from himself, came to prominence in 1928. The effect was startling; no one had ever before played the piano that way. Like Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden and Louis Armstrong, Hines seemed to spring up unique and fully grown. In time, his followers included Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Mary Lou Williams, Jess Stacy, Billy Kyle, Eddie Heywood, Nat Cole, and Erroll Garner. Before Hines, jazz pianists had been orchestral and baroque (the stride men), or one-track primitive (the blues men). The ground between was bare. Hines retained the orchestral quality and skimmed the cream from the blues, but he subordinated these to remarkable innovations. His style, which has changed little, is marked by enormous rhythmic impetus, rich harmonies, total unpredictability, and a singular joyousness. (Fats Waller’s bounding spirit was deceptive; more often than not, it merely mocked ebullience. And Tatum’s energies were monolithic.) Hines did not—despite the critical cliche—invent the single-note melodic line in the right hand. He did, however, compound usually incidental methods of earlier pianists with knifelike arpeggios, on-time and double-time runs that disregarded bar measures, and octave doublings. He frequently added tremolos to the last in an attempt to shake a vibrato from a vibratoless instrument. (He is celebrated for his hornlike approach, and in this sense he should be.) At the same time, he set off his single-note patterns with chords played a little behind the beat or in rapid staccato ladders. In his equally important left hand, he occasionally commemorates the stride pianists’ oompah bass, but more frequently he uses tenths, trills, isolated chords placed everywhere around the beat, and percussive single notes. His hands seem at war. A right-hand run races ahead of a fragment of stride bass; a left-hand trill rumbles while the right hand rallies irregular octave doublings; staccato right-hand chords are poised, like an inverted pyramid, on a simple legato left-hand melody; sustained right-hand tremolos cascade toward ascending left-hand block chords. These devices constantly advance and retreat, and now and then dissolve into brief arhythmic interludes, in which the beat gives way to a whirling, suspended mass of chords and single notes. (This exciting, treading-water invention was carried to Cloud Cuckoo lengths by Art Tatum, and, possibly as a result, has been abandoned by modern pianists, which is too bad. It vibrates the mind and stirs the blood.) Hines was the first pianist to make full use of dynamics. With an infallible sense of emphasis, his volume may swell in mid-phrase or at the outset of a new idea and then fall away to a mutter, before abruptly cresting again a few measures later. He makes sound flash. The epitome of the solo pianist, Hines is freest without a rhythm section. He is, though, a masterly accompanist, who, with a discreet tremolo or seemingly wandering melodic figure, immeasurably heightens both the greatest and the meanest soloists. Hines has sporadically let down in the past decade or so, and in slow tempos he may even turn rhapsodic, as if all that muscle were going to fat. But these lapses are pardonable; the boldest can afford self-indulgence.
Hines — tall and quick-moving, with a square, noble face — is a hypnotic performer. His almost steady smile is an unconscious, transparent mask. When he is most affected, the smile freezes—indeed, his whole face clenches. Then the smile falters, revealing a desolate, piercing expression, which melts into another smile. He tosses his head back and opens his mouth, hunches over, sways from side to side, and, rumbling to himself, clenches his face again, tears of sweat pouring down his cheeks. His face and his manner are his music—the sort of naked, perfect, non-showman showmanship that stops the heart. And time and again last Friday, Hines did just that. Each of his thirty-odd numbers—about half were liquid medleys devoted to such as Fats Waller and Duke Ellington—was done as if nothing had come before and nothing would come after. Brilliance topped brilliance. He exhibited arpeggios that made Tatum sound electronic and Monk scraggly; shocking dynamic shifts; odd, melancholy, turned-in chords; an unbelievable rhythmic drive; lyricism upon lyricism; and a juxtaposition of moods that made one laugh with delight. “Love Is Just Around the Corner,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” and “Rosetta” were done without his fine but expendable accompanists—Ahmed Abdul-Malik (bass) and Oliver Jackson (drums)—and they were awash with roaring stride passages, staccato chords, hide-and-seek runs, quick double-time accelerations, and arhythmic interludes, one of them (in “Love Is Just”) done in the upper registers, and giving the impression of tremors chiming crystal. “Tea for Two,” a tune surely beyond rescue, was converted into an impressionistic lullaby, as well as an extraordinary display of dynamics; after several measures of soft, floating half-time chords that appeared to be leading up to a brassy stride or block-chords passage, Hines, pausing a split second, slid into an even softer roundabout, on-the-beat run. Its timing and taste and delicacy took the breath away. Similar wonders occurred in “Stealin’ Apples;” “Sweet Lorraine,” in which he sang in a way reminiscent of Jelly Roll Morton; and “St. Louis Blues,” a marvellous bravura performance topped with a right-hand, two-note tremolo that he held for six choruses (a muscular feat no weight lifter could match) while his left hand played casual middle-register melodies and accompaniment for bass and drum solos. Poised on the lip of melodrama, he never slipped. He was joined in three numbers by Budd Johnson, a tenor saxophonist, former colleague, and sturdy eclectic who admires Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Stan Getz. Hines, whose face was a study in pleased concentration, provided backing that unwittingly shaded Johnson at nearly every turn. Early in the evening, Hines suggested that he was not giving a concert but was simply playing in his living room for friends. Concert or musical soiree, its likes won’t happen again. ♦
Published in the print edition of the March 14, 1964, issue. As part of an effort to make The New Yorker’s archive more accessible to readers, this story was digitized by an automated process and may contain transcription errors.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/03/14/jazz-concerts
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #169 – 13.01.2026, 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba