Pittsburgh jazz legend Earl 'Fatha' Hines to receive historical marker in Duquesne
James Johnson, who runs the Afro-American Institute of Music in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood, said it would be tough for any jazz piano player to go through life without being influenced — consciously or not — by the legacy of Earl “Fatha” Hines.
Born in 1903 in Duquesne, PA, Earl Kenneth Hines went on to become one of the most influential jazz pianists of the genre. He will be formally recognized by the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission with a historical marker in his hometown.
“It would be tough to get around him, period, as a piano player,” Johnson said. “Piano was a lot more of the ragtime type of tradition when he started. Earl was with Louis Armstrong for a long time in Chicago, and eventually he began imitating trumpet lines on the piano. He’s one of the original jazz legends from Pittsburgh,” said Nelson Harrison, a Pittsburgh native, jazz musician, composer and clinical psychologist. “Every time a Pittsburgher hit the scene, their particular style formed a whole new approach to the music. And their dependents became very famous.”
Hines’s bands in the 1940s helped launch the careers of jazz mainstays like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and he worked extensively with other Pittsburgh jazz luminaries like Billy Eckstine and Billy Strayhorn. Jazz legend Duke Ellington once said that “the seeds of bop were in Earl Hines’s piano style.” Hines even fronted Ellington’s orchestra briefly, when Ellington became ill in 1944.
https://triblive.com/aande/music/pittsburgh-jazz-legend-earl-fatha-hines-to-receive-historical-marker-in-duquesne/