Collection: Earl Hines

Before Earl Hines, jazz piano was largely a rhythm instrument. Hines changed that in 1928, the year he recorded solo sides for OKeh, worked nightly with Jimmie Noone's Apex Club Orchestra in Chicago, and cut a series of sessions with Louis Armstrong's Hot Five that remain among the most recorded and studied performances in the music's history. The "Weather Bird" duet with Armstrong, recorded that December, is the obvious landmark, but the solo recordings from that same year, especially "A Monday Date" and "57 Varieties", show a pianist already playing in a way that wouldn't sound out of place two decades later. His technique of carrying the melody in ringing right-hand octaves, bypassing stride conventions, gave jazz piano a new assertiveness that Dizzy Gillespie later said was the root of everything that followed. The 1928 legacy tends to overshadow what came after: twelve years leading the house band at Chicago's Grand Terrace, an early-1940s orchestra that incubated Charlie Parker, Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, and Billy Eckstine before the musicians' recording strike silenced the whole experiment, and a late-career resurgence from 1964 onward that produced dozens of albums and confirmed the playing hadn't diminished at all.