Earl Hines

Ask Hines where his “trumpet style” piano came from and he corrected the record himself: not Louis Armstrong, but Joe Smith, bandleader Fletcher Henderson’s lead cornetist and the horn blues singer Bessie Smith preferred for its “smooth,” vocal-shadowing tone. “There were such guys as Joe Smith, Gus Aikens — very good trumpet players at that time that I decided to copy some of my style off of them,” Hines said. “This is where I actually got my style.” No specific Smith solo survives as one Hines named by title; what he described is a habit — translating a cornetist’s phrasing into octaves, years before he met Armstrong in Chicago.

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1925

At the Christmas BallJoe Smith

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1928

A Monday DateEarl Hines

listen forThere’s no titled Joe Smith solo Hines pointed to, so listen for the habit, not a quotation. On Bessie Smith’s “At the Christmas Ball,” Smith’s cornet answers her voice in short, reserved, melodic phrases — he holds back, letting single notes carry the emotion rather than filling every bar. On “A Monday Date,” Hines’s right hand does the same restrained, vocal-like phrasing, but doubled in octaves and freed from a singer to answer — the piano playing lead the way a horn would, exactly the transfer Hines described making as a teenager.

Hines named two pianists, not one, as the players who first showed him a way out of ragtime’s stiff oom-pah: “Luckey Roberts and Eubie Blake actually were the first two guys that I heard that actually didn’t play ragtime — they played it, but then they concentrated on ballad style, because Luckey Roberts wrote music and so did Eubie Blake.” Roberts barely recorded; Blake did, cutting his first piano rolls in 1917. What Hines credits them with isn’t a lick but a whole idea — a pianist could write a through-composed melody instead of keeping ragtime time — absorbed as a teenager in Pittsburgh, before his own recording career began.

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1917

Charleston RagEubie Blake

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1933

RosettaEarl Hines

listen forBlake’s 1917 “Charleston Rag” still has ragtime’s bounce, but listen to how often the tune breaks from strict oom-pah to let a melodic phrase simply sing across the bar line — the “ballad style” Hines meant. Hines’s 1933 “Rosetta,” his own composition, takes that further: the left hand steps back from stride’s heavy downbeats and the melody floats on top, through-composed rather than vamped. The sixteen-year gap covers Hines’s whole formative period — the debt is in the shared instinct to write a tune, not a shared lick.

The most famous name in Hines’s story is the one he pushed back on hardest. “So many people think that I’ve got it from Armstrong but I didn’t! I was playing this way before I met Louis,” he said — a claim the dated recordings back up. What the two men had instead was a working partnership: roughly three dozen sides cut in Chicago in 1927–28, its high point the improvised duet “Weather Bird.” “We had no music,” Hines said of that session. “It was all improvised, and I just followed him.” The real, directional moment isn’t Armstrong shaping Hines’s style — it’s him leading Hines through one unrepeatable take.

listen: upstream & heresource: Mosaic Records — excerpt from Terry Teachout, "Pops ↗share

1926

Cornet Chop SueyLouis Armstrong

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1928

Weather BirdEarl Hines

listen forThis pair isn’t a straightforward before-and-after so much as two players in the same room. “Cornet Chop Suey” shows the Armstrong who walked into that partnership — brash, syncopated cornet runs pushing hard against the beat. “Weather Bird,” cut two years later as a duet with Hines alone, is the sound of Hines meeting that energy in real time: his piano trades phrases with Armstrong’s horn bar for bar, chasing the same rhythmic surprises rather than laying a steady accompaniment underneath them. It’s a conversation captured on one improvised take, not one artist teaching the other.