Earl Hines

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 two 1957 sessions that make up this CD featuring Earl Hines with a pickup rhythm section in Paris were recorded originally for Phillips, with bassist Guy Pedersen and drummer Gus Wallez. The pianist is in top form, including just a little of the Dixieland repertoire ("Royal Garden Blues" and "Muskrat Ramble") that typically dominated most of his recordings made in the U.S. during this period, and spending more time exploring favorite warhorses like "Hallelujah" and "Makin' Whoopee," as well as already classic jazz compositions such as "If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight" and "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)." While the tracks are generally brief, the music is consistently swinging at a high level and four bonus tracks have been added to the CD reissue, so it should be considered an essential purchase for fans of Earl "Fatha" Hines.

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…

Earl Hines is in great form during this 1970 studio session with bassist Larry Richardson and drummer Richie Goldberg. Four of the six tracks are standards which the pianist played many times during his long career, including a lively "Them There Eyes," a rather wild "There Is No Greater Love," and a striding solo interpretation of "You're Driving Me Crazy" that showcases Hines' formidable technique. Don Redman's moody "If It's True" had long since become an obscurity by the time of this recording, but Hines' subtle performance is a masterpiece. His one original is the brisk, foot-tapping boogie-woogie "Snugly but Ugly."

Between his auspicious beginnings with Armstrong, Jimmie Noone, and Erskine Tate during the late '20s and his proto-bebop big band of the '40s, Earl Hines found his '30s stride with these fine recordings. Part of a clutch of Classics discs charting his solo and big-band sides from 1928-1947, this collection finds Hines in the stellar company of such top arrangers as Jimmy Mundy, Quinn Wilson, and Cecil Irwin. While Mundy was the only one to achieve fame beyond the group (with Count Basie), all these chart-makers flourished under Hines' watch. Mundy's work especially stands out: Four of his contributions here - "Fat Babes," "Copenhagen," "Rock and Rye," and "Cavernism" - count as pinnacles of the form, replete with inventive horn parts and streamlined yet driving rhythm tracks…

Some musicians are very closely associated with the name of Duke Ellington because they played in his orchestra for most of their career. Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney are obvious examples, and another is Ray Nance, whose violin lent the orchestra a touch of class. The tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves may only have been with Ellington for a relatively short time, but for the Duke, he and his mammoth solo in "Diminuendo And Crescendo in Blue" at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival were a fresh start after years of stagnation. Despite their close links with the Ellington orchestra, many of its musicians kept forming their own bands and cutting records with them. Paul Gonsalves and Ray Nance went into the studio with their sextet and played with the backing of a mainstream rhythm group and another wind player they knew from the Ellington orchestra…