His mother, Charlotte Rachlin, of Russian Jewish descent, worked her way through law school playing gigs with her all-woman trio.
An aspiring writer and poet as well as a jazz fan, Pines traveled to San Francisco to meet the Beats, then returned to New York to take up residence in the East Village.
Pines' travels in Mexico and Central America in the 1980s shaped his second novel, Redemption (Editions du Rocher, 1997), set against the Guatemalan Mayan genocide.
Pines booked the acts, presenting jazz from the classics and standards to cutting edge avant-garde,[8][9] spoken word and Afro-Brazilian artists.
"Credit Brooklyn-born jazz impresario Paul Pines—curator for all 33 of those festivals—with maintaining a consistently high level of artistry throughout those years.
Former proprietor of Tin Palace, the renowned East Village jazz club he ran from 1970 to 1976, Pines is deeply invested in the music and is blessed with good ears and an open mind.
Morrow, 1983; Berkeley Books, 1995)[15] was published in the US and UK, in France as the L'Ange du Jazz[16] (Editions de Rocher) and in Germany as Der Blechengel[17] (Ullstein Krimi).
Redemption was translated by Paul Couturiau & Emmanuel Scavee and published in France (Editions du Rocher, 1997).
Editor of Dark Times Full of Light,[22] the Juan Gelman tribute issue of The Cafe Review (summer, 2009), and Dark Times Full of Light, The Selected Poetry of Juan Gelman by Open Letters Press; he has also worked as a translator including contributions to Small Hours of the Night, Selected Poems of Roque Dalton (Curbstone, 1996);[23] Pyramids of Glass, (Corona 95); Nicanor Parra, and Antipoems: New and Selected, (New Directions,1986).