In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

I RememberJazz • 185 town. Once I called him from Chicago where I was doing a concert in partnership with Dave Garroway at the Chicago Civic Opera House. I offered him $500 and transportation for one night. (This was, at that time, more than twice what big name jazz attractions were getting.) He was apologetic but he refused. Then I offered him a thousand. "Gee, that's nice of you, Al—but I can't leave here," he told me. Then, just to establish a principle, I offered him $2000. No go. I tried $5000 ("You don't make that much in a year!" I reminded him). Nothing. So we left it at that. He never did leave town, except once when he played with a band on the Mississippi Queen for one trip to Memphis and back. The other musicians told me, though, that during the few free hours they had in Memphis, Armand had chosen to stay aboard the boat, so he never set foot in Tennessee. His lovely wife Linda conspired with me to get him away somewhere just once, and I think we were makingsome progress just at the time he died. Like so many New Orleans musicians, Armand overate consistently . By St. Joseph's Day of 1977 (St. Joseph's Day is an Italian festival in the city during which overeating is part of the fun), when he went to visit one of his friends who had a holiday shrine laden with great New Orleans food, Armand overdid it and expired on the spot. That same night my wife Diana and I, along with Bob Greene, went down to the Royal Orleans Hotel where Armand worked regularlyin the Esplanade Lounge. Normally, we dropped in on him there once or twice a week. The maitre d' told us what had happened. Only weeks before I had recorded a solo session with him playing the pieces identified with Bix. I'm glad we weren't too late. Earl "Fatha" Hines Anybody who knew him didn't call him "Fatha." That was PR stuff. His friends and other musicians called him Earl, though he, himself, called his own close associates by various nicknames, many of which he made up. He called Louis Armstrong"Homey" because, he alleged , Satch was so naive and ill-equipped to deal with the phenomena of the nonmusical world. He teased Louis about his tastes ("I keep tellin' him they don't serve red beans and rice in the Waldorf"), his uncertainty about the social graces ("Tell him he doesn't have to take 186 •/ Remember ]azz his hat off in the men's room"), and his speech ("I played with him for years before I realized its no act. Homey really talks like that"). Its true that by contrast with Satch, whom Earl really thought should have been president of the United States, Hines was an urbane, witty man-of-the-world who exuded genuine confidence. His confidence never failed him, except when he was called upon to play an unaccompanied piano. Everybody else in the jazz world recognized him from the beginning as a consummate master of piano playing techniques, but Earl always felt he was pulling the wool over their eyes and misleading the public with a musical trickery that had little to do with the art of piano. He wasconstantly concerned that he might be called upon to perform before an audience that would see through his legerdemain. Collectors, of course, have his early recorded piano solos, and his talent and taste in the twenties and early thirties are not controversial. There are those people who seem, from the outset, to fuse their own consciousness with the principles of music, and it all seems so simple to them that they find it hard to grasp the fact that not everybody can play. Earl was one of those who could never understand why anybody would come to hear him. During the mid-1940s, I persuaded Frank Palumbo to book Earl into Giro's in Philadelphia as a solo act. I thought his name would be big enough to draw customers, and I personally would have enjoyed spending the week listening to him. You never could really get to hear all of Earl Hines so long as his sound was going to be complicated by bass, guitar, and drums. If he could have them, he wanted saxophones , too. The more the better. He always felt that the bigger the band the less his...

Share