This 7CD box with bonus DVD is a considerable improvement on the same label’s Billy Strayhorn collection, which missed several opportunities to be definitive, but it is still an oddly eclectic anthology of Hines material. The first CD is a valuable collection of all Hines’s piano solos from 1928 to 1940. This is material that was partly available on a fine Milestone LP of the 1928 tracks, on a French Chante Du Monde twofer CD, and (minus the very earliest sides) in the epic Mosaic box set of Classic Earl Hines Sessions(which I reviewed in Jazzwise in March 2014). Having the entire solo collection on one CD is maybe the best way to appreciate Hines’s development during his finest years as a player, and to note just how independent he was both of New York stride and of the innovations of Art Tatum. A solo piano set from 1974 and a DVD from the same era make up the more modern end of the collection, but here Hines – despite demonstrating tremendous technique as he entered his seventies – seems to be going through the motions. The music in between – with the exception of a 1948 Armstrong All Stars broadcast from 1948 which is also to be found on the same label’s 7CD Armstrong set – is, despite sleevenote writer Dan Morgenstern’s hyperbole, largely from the undistinguished end of Hines’s work, rather than drawn from the sparkling and original big band that occupies the bulk of the Mosaic box. So we have tracks by the succession of Dixieland bands Earl fronted on the West Coast after leaving Louis, and the quartet that he formed in the 1950s, which was essentially the same deal as the final group that he brought to the UK in the mid-1970s. The traditional sides with Muggsy Spanier and Marty Marsala from Chicago or the San Francisco Club Hangover have been out before on separate Storyville CDs of these broadcasts, but the discovery here is a swing set from the Hangover in 1954. Sadly – and maybe owing to Hines’s legendary reluctance to get down to serious preparation and rehearsal – almost all the band tracks included are 12-bar blues, interspersed with piano trios. But that said, Dicky Wells’ emotive trombone and Morris Lane’s gutsy tenor sax make this distillation of several airshots a good counterpart to the contemporaneous Felsted mainstream sessions (issued by Solar) that include yet another Hines quartet. For Hines completists, this Storyville box is essential, and the good material (just) outweighs the ordinary. But if you’re going to invest in just one Hines multi-CD set, then make it the Mosaic.