I found Hines s ideas bizarre, his edgy virtuosity relentless, and his steadfast refusal to complete a chorus without messing up the time rather irritating. I returned the record the next day. Today I smile when recalling this episode, not just because I have spent a good part of my professional career studying, writing about, and playing Fatha Hines s music, but because those very traits of his artistry that so upset me are now what I treasure most. There is something deeply moving about a musician who attacks each performance, regardless of the context, as if the Bomb were about to drop. And though he tested the ears of his audience, I suspect he always challenged himself even more.
Transcription is both a maddening and exhilarating task.
Once one has dealt with the troubling ideological implications of a process that, among other things, must merge a distinctive African American art with Eurocentric conceptions of a musical score, the simple fact that jazz cannot be fully represented on the printed page is always a gnawing presence. Hines s solos mocked my attempts to capture them in notation, and it was not unusual for me to spend an entire afternoon wrestling with a single eight-bar phrase. Yet, though the best transcription can be but a pale shadow of the original, I am now struck by the wonders these twelve scores have helped unlock. Yet both have shown me facets of Hines only partially perceived by the listening experience. And when I consider that Hines himself was strongly influenced by written music in his early years, from classical piano repertory to the many popular styles available in sheet music in the 1910s and 20s, returning his improvisations to one of their sources the notated score has a strange logic.