Avid Jazz presents four classic Earl “Fatha” Hines albums plus, including original liner notes on a finely re-mastered and low priced double CD. “A Monday Date”; “Paris One Night Stand” “Earl’s Pearls” and “The Incomparable Earl “Fatha” Hines”.
One of the truly great elder statesmen of jazz, Earl “Fatha” Hines was born in 1905 in Duquesne, Pa and inherited a love of music from his father who was a member of the famous Eureka brass band of New Orleans and his mother who was a fine organist. Moving to Chicago in 1922 he soon fell in with another jazz legend Louis Armstrong, with whom he had a long musical and personal relationship…
The close of 1949 is a rich era for french jazz lovers. One after the other, Sidney Bechet, Buck Clayton, Louis Armstrong, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Coleman Hawkins tour de France. After years of privacy, ther's lots to be heard again. The one everybody is expecting is obviously Louis Armstrong, who had been in Europe the year before, and whose reputation reaches further than the circle of the happy few. At salle Pleyel, on November 3, the "King of Jazz" plays with the same sextet as the year before, with the exception of Cozy Cole on drums, who replaces Big Sid Catlett.
In 1975, when Bluebird brought out a double-LP reissue of vintage Earl Hines big-band recordings, the producers included a chain of beefy instrumentals from 1941. The Classics Chronological series zeroed in and fleshed out an important part of the picture by compiling all of Hines' 1941 material onto one CD 16 years later. What you get are eight terrific instrumentals interspersed with ten vocal tracks and a pair of fine piano solos. Since the vocal performances were aimed at the general record-buying public, they deviate noticeably from the powerhouse home base of big-band swing infused with intimations of the approaching bebop revolution. Eight instrumentals, then, form the backbone of this volume in the complete recordings of Earl Hines…