In the last twenty years or so, published transcriptions of jazz performances have proliferated at a gratifying rate. Thanks to the diligent labors of devoted and talented musical archaeologists, we now have access to a wealth of notated improvisations by almost every major soloist as well as transcriptions and reconstructions of composed pieces by the likes of Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Fletcher Henderson, Eddie Sauter, and many other important figures. Most of these documents are “performance scores” to be recreated by students or passionate aficionados, and as such they fill a pressing need. As yet, however, few are directed primarily at the serious scholar concerned with historical and musical analysis. A welcome exception is the present volume, a critical edition of transcribed piano solos by Earl “Fatha” Hines, scrupulously edited by Jeffrey Taylor. This book has already been recognized, having won the 2007 Claude V. Palisca Award from the American Musicological Society for best edition or translation. One hopes it will serve as a model for many similar projects in the future.

Taylor is not the first to make such an erudite offering in the name of source studies relating to jazz. His book appears as volume 15 in Music of the United States of America (MUSA), an excellent series of critical editions on American topics ranging from Ruth Crawford to Irving Berlin to In Dahomey. Indeed, Taylor's volume builds directly on an earlier contribution to the series, an outstanding edition of solos by Fats Waller edited by Paul Machlin (MUSA, vol. 10). Taken together, these works by Machlin and Taylor provide the best scholarly introduction to early jazz piano that is currently available.

The core of Taylor's edition is his transcription of twelve recordings for solo piano made by Hines between 1928 and 1941: “Blues in Thirds,” “Stowaway,” “Caution Blues,” “A Monday Date,” “I Ain't Got Nobody,” “Fifty-Seven Varieties,” “Glad Rag Doll,” “Love Me Tonight,” “Down among the Sheltering Palms,” “Rosetta” [Take 3], “Rosetta” [Take 4], and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” These recordings, made for the QRS, OKeh, Victor, Bluebird, and Brunswick companies, take Hines from the height of the Jazz Age in the late 1920s to his successful stint as a leader of big bands during the Swing Era, and thus mark a time of great achievement in his solo work. Taylor's transcriptions are exceptional and give a good sense of Hines's mischievous and freewheeling language without becoming bogged down in pedantic efforts to quantify every peep out of Hines's piano. To accomplish this balance, Taylor notates with fierce accuracy up to a point; when things become ambiguous (which is also when they often become the most interesting), he gives a fair approximation in notation and uses parentheses, brackets, and critical notes to identify the nature of the ambiguity and allow reader-listener-performers to judge for themselves.

When dealing with an improvised music, the task of transcription becomes partly one of guessing at the performer's intentions: Is this dissonance a “mistake” or mere artistic quirkiness—or possibly both? In the case of Hines, this process can be especially tricky in view of his well-known penchant for deliberately courting danger, particularly in the domain of rhythm. Taylor wisely errs on the side of chance, indicating to us in the critical notes to each piece when an anomaly may have been unintended. His annotations are filled with phrases like “accidentally struck,” “is probably a mistake,” and “chord unclear, solution conjectural.”

Throughout, Taylor acts as an expert companion and guide to the recordings. He introduces each recording session with a brief essay on the circumstances of the event, both in Hines's career and in the larger entertainment world of which he was a part. He then discusses each recording in turn, imparting information including historical data (e.g., composer and lyricist), musical form, the piece's role in Hines's career, and interpretive comments on the meaning of the music. He notes, for instance, that “Blues in Thirds” is really a blues in fourths, and that the discrepancy may reflect the casualness of such sessions in which record producers would often assign titles with little or no input from the musicians themselves. To take another example, Taylor helpfully informs us that “Stowaway” was a piece that Hines composed for Valaida Snow, a popular entertainer at Chicago's Sunset Café, where Hines worked with Louis Armstrong in 1926 and 1927. “Valaida would be singing in a boat as some guy towed her away on a rope,” Hines recalled (5).

One of the most valuable parts of the book is the lengthy essay at the beginning, in which Taylor introduces his subject, gives a brief overview of Hines's life, and situates his music in the culture of its time. Rather than restricting himself to the tradition commonly known as Harlem stride, he surveys ragtime, novelty, and blues piano styles as well, making clear that pianists in the 1920s absorbed elements from all of them and that “jazz piano” was thus a polyglot phenomenon. Most usefully, Taylor shows how Hines relates to other pianists of his time, notably Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton. In almost every case we see Hines complicating (which Taylor calls “signifying” or “troping”) conventions established by his predecessors. Thus, where Waller employed walking tenths in the left hand under a regular melody in the right hand, Hines created tension between the hands by layering irregular melodies over walking tenths that seemed oddly suspended: “Hines's attack is lighter, his hands seeming to get less deeply into the keys. Compared to Waller's playing, the effect is one of weightlessness, with attention directed toward the ringing melodic line of the right hand. A listener to Hines's performance often loses the sense of structural foundation that is provided by the firm bass lines of Waller and other stride players, and the effect further deemphasizes the two-beat feel of stride in favor of a more even four-to-the-bar flow” (xxxviii–xxxix). Taylor remarks that this light four-beat “flow” shows Hines anticipating the new swing style well before it became widespread in the playing of others.

Another forward-looking tendency of Hines can be seen in his approach to improvisation. Whereas other jazz pianists of the 1920s tended to work out more or less fixed routines for the solos they played, which then sounded largely the same from one performance to another, Hines was more likely to view each piece “as a relatively blank slate” (xxix) to be fleshed out spontaneously in the heat of performance. This openness to adventure made for exciting and unpredictable contours in his mode of expression, but it could also bring trouble if Hines neglected to watch the clock and ran out of time when his technological recording limit of approximately three minutes was up: “In ‘I Ain't Got Nobody’ (1928), we hear a serious miscalculation, followed by a miraculous save: Apparently unaware that time is running out, Hines launches into a third chorus, then deftly twists the first eight bars of the tune so that they sound like the last eight.” Far from regretting or going too far out of his way to avoid such risks, Hines seemed to “delight in postponing the end of a performance until the last possible moment” (xxix). This delight in spontaneity and its consequences would mesmerize the next generation of jazz musicians. Jeffrey Taylor's edition beautifully clarifies the role of one of their leading mentors.