Before Hines, jazz piano was mostly built on stride — left hand striding back and forth keeping time, right hand playing the melody on top. It worked fine, but it chained the piano to a rhythmic role. Hines blew that up somewhere around 1928, when he started running single-note melodic lines in the right hand that floated against the beat rather than riding it. It sounds like a small adjustment. It was not. Every pianist who came after him — Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson — was working in the space Hines opened.

The recording you want to start with is Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines (1928), specifically the sides the two of them cut together for OKeh Records. Armstrong was already extraordinary by then, but these tracks feel like a genuine conversation between two equals, which was rare. The interplay is loose and fearless and they both sound like they're enjoying themselves enormously. "Weather Bird" — just the two of them, no rhythm section — is twelve minutes that hold up better than most things recorded in the century since.

Hines led his own big band out of Chicago's Grand Terrace Ballroom for most of the 1930s and into the 1940s, and that band became something of a finishing school for future innovators. Charlie Parker passed through. Dizzy Gillespie was in the reed section for a stretch. Billy Eckstine sang with the band and eventually took most of those same players when he formed his own group. The Grand Terrace band never got the credit it deserved, partly because they were tied to a residency in Chicago while New York controlled the narrative, and partly because recordings from that era are patchy. But the people who were there knew what they were hearing.

There's a strange chapter in the 1950s where Hines more or less disappeared from the jazz conversation. Swing had fallen out of fashion, bebop had taken over, and Hines — despite having influenced the boppers directly — found himself playing Dixieland revival gigs, which was absurd. Then in 1964, Stanley Dance helped organize a solo concert at the Little Theater in New York, and the jazz world suddenly remembered what it had been ignoring. The reviews were stunned. Hines hadn't declined at all. He'd just been waiting somewhere nobody was looking.

What's striking about his playing, even late in his career, is how physical it sounds. There's a percussiveness to the attack, a willingness to leave space and then fill it with something unexpected. He plays like someone thinking out loud, changing his mind mid-phrase in ways that feel spontaneous rather than calculated. Some pianists sound better on record than they do in person. Hines sounds best when you imagine you're in the room with him — there's an energy in the playing that microphones only partially capture.