SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER TWO
ERIC DOLPHY
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
BOBBY HUTCHERSON
September 10-16
GEORGE E. LEWIS
September 17-23
JAMES BLOOD ULMER
September 24-30
RACHELLE FERRELL
October 1-7
ANDREW HILL
October 8-14
CARMEN McRAE
(October 15-21)
PRINCE
(October 22-28)
LIANNE LA HAVAS
(October 29-November 4)
ANDRA DAY
(November 5-November 11)
ARCHIE SHEPP
(November 12-18)
WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET
(November 19-25)
ART BLAKEY
(November 26-December 2)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/andrew-hill-mn0000034617/biography
Andrew Hill
(1931-2007)
Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey
Andrew Hill was a great and even groundbreaking composer and pianist, yet the relatively circumscribed scale of his innovations might have originally caused him to get lost in the shuffle of the '60s free jazz revolution. While many of his contemporaries were totally jettisoning the rhythmic and harmonic techniques of bop and hard bop, Hill worked to extend their possibilities; his was a revolution from within. Much of the most compelling '60s jazz was nearly aleatoric; Hill, on the other hand, exhibited a determined command of his materials, however abstract they might sometimes be. His composed melodies were labyrinthine, and rhythmically and harmonically complex tunes like "New Monastery" from his Point of Departure album exhibit a sophistication born of mastery, not chance or contingency. As a pianist, Hill had a flowing melodicism and an elastic sense of time. Like his composing, Hill's playing had an ever-present air of spontaneity and was almost completely devoid of cliché.
He began playing the piano at about the age of 13. As a youngster in Chicago, Hill was encouraged by pianist Earl Hines. Jazz composer Bill Russo also took an interest, and introduced Hill to the renowned classical composer Paul Hindemith, with whom Hill studied from 1950-1952. While in his teens, he gigged with prominent jazz musicians passing through the Midwest, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker among them. In 1955, he recorded So in Love with the Sound of Andrew Hill for the Warwick label. He moved to New York in 1961 to work with singer Dinah Washington. After a brief foray to Los Angeles with Rahsaan Roland Kirk's band in 1962, Hill moved back to New York, where he began his recording career in earnest. He made several records for Blue Note from 1963-1969, both as leader and sideman. Hill's Blue Note work featured some of the best and brightest post-bop musicians of the day, including Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, Tony Williams, and Freddie Hubbard. Like many jazz musicians, Hill eventually turned to academia to make a living. He relocated to the West Coast, teaching in public schools and prisons in California. He eventually landed a teaching position at Portland State University, where he established the school's Summer Jazz Intensive. In addition to his teaching, Hill continued to perform and record in the '70s and '80s, making records for the Arista/Freedom and Black Saint/Soul Note labels. In 1989 and 1990, Hill recorded twice more for Blue Note, Eternal Spirit and But Not Farewell.
Hill moved back to the New York area in the '90s; a series of performances and new recordings helped place him back in the jazz spotlight. Hill formed a new Point of Departure Sextet for the Knitting Factory's 1998 Texaco Jazz Festival. The band included saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Greg Tardy, trumpeter Ron Horton, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Billy Drummond. The band went on to play New York club engagements to much acclaim. In 2000, Palmetto Records released Dusk, which was named the best album of 2001 by Down Beat and Jazz Times magazines. It was followed by A Beautiful Day in 2002, Passing Ships in 2003, and Black Fire in 2004, as well as a solid series of Blue Note reissues of his '60s work that included bonus tracks and new liner notes. His 2006 album, Time Lines, reunited him with both trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the Blue Note label. Hill also participated in a 17-piece big band, and a January 2002 engagement at New York's Birdland was filmed and recorded by Palmetto for future broadcast. After battling lung cancer for many years, Hill succumbed to the disease on April 20, 2007, leaving behind a stunning legacy of work.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/apr/2
/guardianobituaries.obituaries2
Whenever the thumbnail sketch of the 1960s American jazz avant-garde is drawn, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra appear in the foreground - and even a half-dozen other faces might materialise before that of Andrew Hill, who has died aged 75 of lung cancer. A uniquely gifted composer, pianist and educator, his status remained largely inside knowledge in the jazz world for most of his career.
By his 20s, Hill had played piano with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. In the early 1960s, Blue Note Records' Alfred Lion considered Hill his last great protege and "the next Thelonious Monk". As a pianist-composer, Hill's Point of Departure (1964) brought awed reactions across the jazz scene, for its dazzling exploration of jolting time-shifts and searing colours, and the eliciting of exceptional performances from stars such as Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson and Davis drummer Tony Williams.
Yet Hill had no single breakthrough, as Coleman had for jettisoning song-based harmonies, or Coltrane for inventing the multi-voiced "sheets of sound" saxophone technique. Hill's work, which is difficult to categorise, stretched between American jazz, Caribbean, Latin and 20th-century classical music. Nor was Hill so single-minded an experimenter that he couldn't comprehend the commercial tricks of jazz - he once wrote a catchy funk pop hit for trumpeter Lee Morgan. Hill was a rounded, erudite, endlessly curious creator with a vision of how jazz's many tributaries might flow into one river.
Yet it was not until his mid-60s that the non-specialist world began to fully appreciate these qualities. In 1997, the Jazz Foundation of America awarded him for lifetime achievement and in 2003 he received Denmark's Jazzpar Prize, with its judges saying that he stood as "a genuine original".
With the new millennium (though from 2004 seriously ill), he released a stream of bold albums, and toured Britain with an Anglo-American big band that remains a glowing memory for those who heard it or played in it. Hill unleashed music full of ducking, diving melodies against riptides of cross-rhythms, Gil Evans-like harmonies, sax-choir clamourings, and exultant, Latin-tinged ensemble dances. British trumpeter Byron Wallen considers the experience of meeting and working with Hill as a turning point in his musical life. For his part, the receptive, selfless Hill heard in Wallen's world-music sensibilities qualities close to his own.
Hill was born to Haitian parents, and raised on Chicago's largely black South Side. He played piano, accordion and tap-danced at first - "I could play the piano as long as I've been talking" he told an interviewer - and in his early teens came to the notice of pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines. Hines and Stan Kenton arranger Bill Russo heard Hill's potential, and introduced him to the expatriate German composer Paul Hindemith, a crucial educational process for the young artist. At 21, Hill began playing bop-piano gigs around Chicago clubs, and accompanied Parker, Davis and Coleman Hawkins.
In 1961, he moved to New York, performing with Dinah Washington, and with the charismatic multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the latter a significant influence, as a resourceful player and a campaigner for what he called "black classical music". In 1963, Hill began his association with Blue Note. The label's glamorous regulars included reed-players Joe Henderson and Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and pianist Herbie Hancock. In 1965 Hill became music coordinator for Amiri Baraka's (then LeRoi Jones's) Black Arts Repertory Theatre. During this period, Hill recorded extensively for Blue Note (material that mostly went out of circulation, but has now been rescued on a Mosaic label seven-disc set).
Hill spent much of the next two decades teaching, but the last phase of his 60s Blue Note work mingled free-jazz, classical references - even the appearance of a cor anglais - the Latin music of Passing Ships and the vocal explorations of Lift Every Voice (both 1969). Passing Ships was shelved as "uncommercial", but finally released by Hill in 2004.
In the 1970s and 80s, he occasionally made spikily elegant, distantly Monkish solo-piano and small-group appearances. But he mostly avoided the recording studio, touring with the Smithsonian Heritage Programme, teaching in schools and prisons, and, in 1989, performing at New York's experimental hothouse, the Knitting Factory.
In 1990 Hill came to Britain to join a piano project featuring keyboardists Howard Riley, Joachim Kuhn and Jason Rebello. Hill's sophistication as a composer sometimes sidelined the critical reception for his piano-playing, but from roots in Bud Powell and Monk he had developed a unique signature, marked by dark, harmonically startling chords, jagged improvised lines, and an overlooked singing, joyous quality.
He made three exceptional albums between 1999 and 2006: Dusk, A Beautiful Day and Time Lines, the latter getting Down Beat's album of the year and a five-star Guardian review from this writer. Dusk used the same instrumentation as Point of Departure, and showed Hill looking a little unsteadily for new possibilities in favourite rhythmic ideas, but the live recording A Beautiful Day suggested a relish for his renaissance. Time Lines was a mix of tantalising repeated hoots and out-phase-rejoinders over odd, slowly bumping meters, mournful brass sounds and soaring clarinet melodies.
In his absence now, Berklee College of Music will present Hill with an honorary doctorate of music on May 12 - Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones have also been recipients.
He is survived by his wife Joanne Robinson Hill, a niece and a nephew.
· Andrew Hill, musician, born June 30 1931; died April 20 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/21/AR2007042101064.html
Andrew Hill; Jazz Composer Stretched Boundaries
Andrew Hill began recording in the 1950s but didn't achieve wide
recognition until he returned to the New York jazz scene in the '90s
after a long absence.
(Photo By Jimmy Katz -- Blue Note Records)
|
by Matt Schudel
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Andrew Hill, whose underground reputation as an innovative jazz composer
blossomed into wide acceptance late in his career, died of lung cancer
April 20 at his home in Jersey City, N.J. He was 75.
Mr. Hill made his mark in the 1960s with music that was alternately
earthy and ethereal, jagged and elegant, as he cultivated a reputation
as one of the most original composers of the era. Seen as an heir of
Thelonious Monk, he became a favorite of musicians and critics, but his
sometimes difficult music failed to gain a foothold with the broader
public.
Accepting his fate as an acquired musical taste, Mr. Hill retreated into academia for two decades, only to reemerge on the New York jazz stage in the late 1990s. By then, his music had influenced a generation of younger musicians who were eager to study with him or play in his groups. He recorded new music, his older albums were rediscovered and he suddenly found himself in wide demand as a composer and bandleader.
Four years ago, an album Mr. Hill had made in 1969, "Passing Ships," was released for the first time, prompting a New York Times critic to write, "The best jazz album of 2003 was recorded in 1969." Later recordings such as "Dusk" (2000), "A Beautiful Day" (2002) and "Time Lines" (2006), brought fresh acclaim, and Down Beat magazine named "Time Lines" album of the year.
More than most jazz composers, Mr. Hill combined elements from many musical sources, freely mixing gospel, blues and classical music to create a sound uniquely his own. His works stretched the boundaries of rhythm and harmony and blended careful composition with free improvisation.
Jazz critic John Murph described Mr. Hill's music as "captivating but not exactly catchy" last year in Down Beat. "Even during its most hushed moments, a restive sensibility permeates. Dissonant harmonies jolt unexpectedly, serrated melodies plummet atop of each other and rhythms shift at multiple directions."
A writer for the London Times said Mr. Hill "made it seem as if he had plucked a new jazz language from his imagination."
In 2003, Mr. Hill received Denmark's prestigious Jazzpar award, and the Jazz Journalists Association named him composer of the year four times, including in 2006. The National Endowment for the Arts had just named Mr. Hill a 2008 "Jazz Master," and he was to receive an honorary doctorate next month from the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
"One has to become curious," Mr. Hill told the Newark Star-Ledger last year, describing his eclectic approach to composition. "I'm a depository of good and bad music. I can walk down the street with all these old hits and jazz favorites rolling through my mind, a regular jukebox."
For years, Mr. Hill's early life was bathed in myth and, by his own admission, outright lies. To add an exotic touch to his background, he claimed to have been born in Haiti in 1937. After his death, his family confirmed that he was born June 30, 1931, in Chicago.
He began playing piano at a young age -- "To my memory, I could play the piano as long as I've been talking," he said.
He studied for two years with classical composer Paul Hindemith, supposedly after Hindemith encountered the young Mr. Hill playing accordion on a Chicago street corner. As a child, he became acquainted with jazz pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines and performed early in his career with jazz greats Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.
Mr. Hill made his first recordings in the 1950s and was the pianist for singer Dinah Washington in the early 1960s. Signed by Blue Note Records in 1963, he recorded several influential albums, including "Point of Departure," "Black Fire" and "Grass Roots," with such prominent musicians as Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, Tony Williams and Eric Dolphy.
When the records didn't sell, Mr. Hill moved in the 1970s to upstate New York, where he taught at Colgate University for two years. He then went to California, teaching in prisons and public schools, before becoming a professor at Oregon's Portland State University in 1990.
Mr. Hill occasionally performed in Europe and Asia and in small venues in the United States, but for years he worked outside the jazz mainstream, writing choral music and string quartets in addition to his jazz compositions. When he moved back to New York in 1996, he was welcomed like a prophet returning from the desert.
"The thing about having been on the fringe of fame and fortune for so long," he said in 2000, "is that I continued to create without the constant glare of society, so I didn't have to stick to any formula."
His first wife, organist LaVerne Gillette, died in 1989.
Survivors include his wife, Janice Robinson Hill, whom he married in 1992.
Accepting his fate as an acquired musical taste, Mr. Hill retreated into academia for two decades, only to reemerge on the New York jazz stage in the late 1990s. By then, his music had influenced a generation of younger musicians who were eager to study with him or play in his groups. He recorded new music, his older albums were rediscovered and he suddenly found himself in wide demand as a composer and bandleader.
Four years ago, an album Mr. Hill had made in 1969, "Passing Ships," was released for the first time, prompting a New York Times critic to write, "The best jazz album of 2003 was recorded in 1969." Later recordings such as "Dusk" (2000), "A Beautiful Day" (2002) and "Time Lines" (2006), brought fresh acclaim, and Down Beat magazine named "Time Lines" album of the year.
More than most jazz composers, Mr. Hill combined elements from many musical sources, freely mixing gospel, blues and classical music to create a sound uniquely his own. His works stretched the boundaries of rhythm and harmony and blended careful composition with free improvisation.
Jazz critic John Murph described Mr. Hill's music as "captivating but not exactly catchy" last year in Down Beat. "Even during its most hushed moments, a restive sensibility permeates. Dissonant harmonies jolt unexpectedly, serrated melodies plummet atop of each other and rhythms shift at multiple directions."
A writer for the London Times said Mr. Hill "made it seem as if he had plucked a new jazz language from his imagination."
In 2003, Mr. Hill received Denmark's prestigious Jazzpar award, and the Jazz Journalists Association named him composer of the year four times, including in 2006. The National Endowment for the Arts had just named Mr. Hill a 2008 "Jazz Master," and he was to receive an honorary doctorate next month from the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
"One has to become curious," Mr. Hill told the Newark Star-Ledger last year, describing his eclectic approach to composition. "I'm a depository of good and bad music. I can walk down the street with all these old hits and jazz favorites rolling through my mind, a regular jukebox."
For years, Mr. Hill's early life was bathed in myth and, by his own admission, outright lies. To add an exotic touch to his background, he claimed to have been born in Haiti in 1937. After his death, his family confirmed that he was born June 30, 1931, in Chicago.
He began playing piano at a young age -- "To my memory, I could play the piano as long as I've been talking," he said.
He studied for two years with classical composer Paul Hindemith, supposedly after Hindemith encountered the young Mr. Hill playing accordion on a Chicago street corner. As a child, he became acquainted with jazz pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines and performed early in his career with jazz greats Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.
Mr. Hill made his first recordings in the 1950s and was the pianist for singer Dinah Washington in the early 1960s. Signed by Blue Note Records in 1963, he recorded several influential albums, including "Point of Departure," "Black Fire" and "Grass Roots," with such prominent musicians as Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, Tony Williams and Eric Dolphy.
When the records didn't sell, Mr. Hill moved in the 1970s to upstate New York, where he taught at Colgate University for two years. He then went to California, teaching in prisons and public schools, before becoming a professor at Oregon's Portland State University in 1990.
Mr. Hill occasionally performed in Europe and Asia and in small venues in the United States, but for years he worked outside the jazz mainstream, writing choral music and string quartets in addition to his jazz compositions. When he moved back to New York in 1996, he was welcomed like a prophet returning from the desert.
"The thing about having been on the fringe of fame and fortune for so long," he said in 2000, "is that I continued to create without the constant glare of society, so I didn't have to stick to any formula."
His first wife, organist LaVerne Gillette, died in 1989.
Survivors include his wife, Janice Robinson Hill, whom he married in 1992.
Andrew Hill
by Frank Kimbrough
Andrew Hill (b. Chicago, Illinois, June 30, 1931 - d. Jersey City, NJ, April 20, 2007) was a prolific and enigmatic pianist and composer whose music has proved to be unfailingly unique, sensual, magical, and ever changing. His influence on succeeding generations of jazz musicians and composers is strongly felt - even at his most elliptical and puzzling, he was a communicator of the highest order. Andrew's methods of playing and composing were concentrated on being in the present; he didn't care for living in the past, or "retrospectively", as he would say.
by Frank Kimbrough
Andrew Hill (b. Chicago, Illinois, June 30, 1931 - d. Jersey City, NJ, April 20, 2007) was a prolific and enigmatic pianist and composer whose music has proved to be unfailingly unique, sensual, magical, and ever changing. His influence on succeeding generations of jazz musicians and composers is strongly felt - even at his most elliptical and puzzling, he was a communicator of the highest order. Andrew's methods of playing and composing were concentrated on being in the present; he didn't care for living in the past, or "retrospectively", as he would say.
At one of our first meetings, I told Andrew that I'd love to get my hands on some of his compositions. "So would I," was his reply. I didn't yet know him well, and figured he was just giving me the brush-off, but a few months later he was back in New York and called to ask if I had any transcriptions of his tunes, saying he'd lost them in various moves. Ron Horton and I had each transcribed a number of his compositions, so I met him a few hours later at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village and he got his hands on some of his tunes after all. He didn't hang on to things, even his own charts; written music, LPs and CDs were simply fodder for a creative musical life. For Andrew, music was a living, breathing thing, always in flux, and always resistant to codification, stagnation, or anything of the kind.
There were many lessons to be learned. Andrew thought that a good composition could be played at any tempo, and at a quartet performance I attended in the early 80's, with little time for rehearsal, he played the same tune four times over the course of two sets - first at a swinging tempo, then with a Latin feel, another time as a waltz, and once again as a ballad, proving his point by example.
He didn't hang on to things, even his own charts; written music, LPs and CDs were simply fodder for a creative musical life.When Andrew moved back to the New York area in the 90's after many years on the west coast, a new generation of musicians were waiting; they appreciated and understood his music, were eager to learn and excited at the prospect of working with him. We spoke often, and on several occasions he asked me to recommend musicians for his bands. Once, as he rehearsed his quartet a few years ago, I looked over his shoulder at the chart they were playing. What I heard seemed to have little relation to what was on paper, so I went to the bassist, John Hebert, and looked at his music stand, only to see the blank side of the sheet facing out. Seeing my look of surprise, John said that he didn't want to be distracted by the music - he was listening. I'd recommended him to Andrew; telling him that John could "hear around the corner", and there he was, doing exactly that.
Andrew's music has an air of mystery, and each listening reveals new layers of ideas and meaning. Hearing his music for the first time literally changed my life and the way I think about music. After meeting for the first time in 1980, we began a correspondence, and his mentorship gradually developed into a true and lasting friendship for which I am most grateful. Among my most cherished memories are his New Year's Day parties, with Andrew and Joanne in the kitchen with the pots on, their home filled with warmth, and on the menu: salmon, chit'lins, black-eyed peas, collard greens and lots more, lovingly prepared for all the musicians, writers, painters, friends, neighbors, and kids in attendance. Everyone always had a great time, engaged in conversation, food and drink, and the making of new friends. How better could one begin the year? Andrew Hill was a kind and generous man, thoughtful, with old-school manners. He was real folk, quick with a smile, who also just happened to have been a genius. He was the personification of congeniality, dignity, and integrity, and those of us fortunate enough to have known him are all the better for it.:
Ron Horton, Jason Moran and I transcribed these pieces because we wanted to understand them - we wanted to play them. They represent a broad range of Andrew's compositions, and may be found on recordings made for various labels in the US, Europe, and Japan over the past four decades.
The hallmark of a great composer is the ability to give each composition its own personality, and it's an ability Andrew possessed in abundance. There's nothing static about Andrew's music, though. Each time he played, he improvised from the first note - rhythms were reordered, time stretched, harmonies changed, so that everything was always new. In spite of his incredible discipline, he was one of the "freest" musicians with whom I've ever come into contact. Having experienced his thinking about music, its composition and performance, I think he'd want musicians playing the music presented here to approach it with a similar attitude. After all, the written music is only a map - the route taken, and ultimately, the journey itself - is up to you. Enjoy!
Some notes on the compositions:
"From California With Love" first appeared on the LP of the same name, recorded in 1978, and released on Artists House (AH9). Reissued on CD, Mosaic Select 23: "Andrew Hill - Solo", it appears with two alternate takes with alternate titles: "Napa Valley Twilight" and "Above Big Sur". Andrew's original lead sheet is reproduced in the booklet accompanying the LP and CD set. It's in 3/4 time, with a one section, 20 bar form. On the recordings Andrew plays an E pedal under the changes indicated for the first 4 bars, though the lead sheet appears here as he wrote it.
"Clayton Gone" was recorded in 1975, and appears on "Hommage" (East Wind), a solo recording released in Japan in 1975 and reissued on CD in 2000. It was released in the US by Test Of Time Records in 2005. After the briefest hint of the melody, just a couple of cadences, the piece continues with a rhythmic improvisation, based on an F suspended dominant vamp, moving to F minor, and then finally to F major, lessening in rhythmic intensity before moving into the main body of the tune, which has an open form consisting of three (deceptive) cadences, then a chord to move it up a half-step, then three more cadences. It's a ruminative piece, played out of time, peacefully, but with forward motion.
"Gone" was first recorded in 1990, and appears as one of two solo performances on "But Not Farewell" (Blue Note). It also appears in a group performance on Reggie Workman's "Summit Conference" (Postcards), recorded in 1993. This transcription is from the Blue Note recording, on which it's played expansively, in a loose, stream-of consciousness style. The improvisation is based on the second part of the tune, with an occasional allusion to the beginning few bars, returning to the written melody and playing it through once more to end the piece.
"Nefertiti" is from the album of the same name, originally issued on LP in 1978 by East Wind (Japan), and released in the US the following year by Inner City Records. It was reissued on CD by East Wind in 2002, and in the US by Test Of Time Records in 2005. With a slightly different title ("Nefertisis"), and played in a different key (D minor), it appears on Andrew Hill's first solo album, "Live at Montreux", recorded in July of 1975, and released on LP by Arista/Freedom. It was later reissued on CD by Freedom. It has an AABA, 32 bar form, and sounds like a processional - very regal and stately, slow and steady.
"Hattie" also appears on "Nefertiti", and is named for Andrew's mother. It's one of his many waltzes, a simple, well-constructed 20 bar form, with plenty of room to play around with the written rhythms. It's a rollicking, playful, joyous tune.
"Domani" ("tomorrow", in Italian) was recorded in Italy in 1986 for a trio and quartet album ("Shades", on Soul Note). It's played extremely up tempo - somewhere around 300 beats a minute. It's a two section, 32 bar form, but is divided 14+18 instead of 16+16. The first section is two bars less than expected, which propels it into the second section, which has two extra bars more than expected, giving a slight breather before the succeeding chorus.
"Tripping", also from "Shades", is played with a Latin "2" feel. It's a 32 bar, AABA form, and the melody is played with loose rhythm. It also appears in a solo version on "Hommage" (East Wind/Test Of Time) with an alternate title (Naked Spirit), played in a different key (Bb minor), with a slower feel somewhat similar to a tango.
"Westbury" was recorded in 1990, and appears on "But Not Farewell"(Blue Note). It's a waltz, with an AAB (8+8+16 bars) form, scored for a front line of soprano saxophone and trombone. Named for Andrew's favorite hotel in New York, it has a breezy, elegant feel.
"Nicodemus" also appears on "But Not Farewell", and is essentially a blues form with altered chord changes, repeated to make a 24 bar form with first and second endings. It's in 5/4 meter, and the chord changes in the last 4 bars of each 12 bar section vary significantly from the changes one usually associates with the blues. Andrew's lead sheet is in G, and doesn't indicate first and second endings. The transcription presented here is in the key in which it was recorded (F), and indicates first and second endings, as well as a few notes that are played differently on the CD than indicated on Andrew's lead sheet.
"Tough Love" is in two parts - when Ron Horton and I discussed this tune, we were confused before realizing that we were thinking about two different tunes. This is not unusual given Andrew's penchant for re-titling pieces, or for giving two pieces the same title. Then I remembered a conversation in which Andrew had referred to the "Tough Love Suite", so perhaps that that explains the confusion. This transcription is from Greg Osby's "Invisible Hand"(Blue Note), recorded in 1999, and one of Andrew's few recorded sideman appearances. A solo piano version also appears on "Dusk" (Palmetto), also from 1999, where it's played in a much looser fashion. It's a 2 part, 16+16 bar form, but with irregular phrasing (each section is 5+5+6 bars).
"Ashes" also appears on "The Invisible Hand", and is one of only a few tunes we have in Andrew's distinctive hand. It's a 19 bar form (4+5+6+4 bars) in medium tempo.
"Mist Flower "was recorded in 1975, and appears on "Blue Black", first released on LP in Japan by East Wind, and later issued in the US on CD by Test of Time Records. This tune has a one section, 15 bar form, with a straight-eighth note feel in medium tempo, with flute playing the melody. This tune should not be confused with an entirely different tune, also called "Mist Flower", that appears on Andrew's trio recording "Strange Serenade" (on Soul Note).
"Ball Square" has been recorded twice, the first in a trio setting on Shades (Soul Note), in a brisk swinging tempo that makes the triplets in bars 5 and 6 almost impossible to play (with one hand). On its subsequent recording by the sextet on "Dusk" (Palmetto), it's played as a march at a much slower tempo. The B section always has a 12/8 blues feel for 6 bars before snapping back to the original tempo for 2 bars, and the 8 bar drum solo that ends the AAB (16+16+16 bar) form. During solos, the harmony on the A sections may be treated as the first 8 bars of a 12 bar blues. The 8 bar drum solos at the end of each section are built into the form, and are included in solos.
Related Articles:
Jason Moran remembers the life and work of Andrew Hill
Houston jazz musician Jason Moran remembers the life and work of his friend and mentor Andrew Hill
May 6, 2007
Andrew Hill, the renown pianist, died last month of cancer. He was 75.
Andrew Hill, a daring and dazzling jazz pianist, died of cancer April 20. Hill was an iconoclastic stylist, capable of playing sweet, soothing melodies or ridiculously difficult compositions. He wasn't as radical as jazz's freest players, but he also wasn't any sort of retro-minded traditionalist.
His '60s output was deep and enduring, with 1964's Point of Departure widely regarded as an out-and-out modern jazz classic. Hill continued to record through the '70s and '80s and into the '90s, though eventually his relationship with the Blue Note label ended. But Dusk, a 1999 release, was an incredible sextet recording worthy of comparison to the work of Hill's hot years. An even better recording was A Beautiful Day, a live recording from 2002 that found Hill fronting a huge ensemble.
Hill was a friend of and mentor to Houston's Jason Moran, who is one of jazz's best young pianists. Moran shares some thoughts about Hill's life and work with the Chronicle's Andrew Dansby.
First exposure
"I was still in high school, at (Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts). I was 16. A kid who was a senior — I was a junior — wanted to play music from (Hill's 1964 classic) Point of Departure . He wanted to play the first song for his recital. I remember hearing Andrew take that first solo on that record and thinking, 'Wow, this was the next step after Thelonious Monk.' It's where the language moved to. I was just enamored and confused about what I was hearing. It was so new and so loose."
Meeting his hero
"After I graduated from college, I started working with Greg Osby . When Andrew would play in New York, sometimes Greg would be in that band. I had bootlegs of him performing. I remember Andrew playing at the Village Vanguard for a week. I bootlegged each night. Greg sent Andrew some of my music, and he put me in touch with him. When we first met, Andrew said, 'I had a dream about you a couple of years ago. I had a dream I would meet a student like you.' Well, that meant a lot to me. The first time I actually had contact with him, he played in Harlem. I showed up with 15 of his LPs in my hand. After the concert I walked up and had him sign all my records."
Learning from a legend
"After Greg put us in touch, we started hanging out, he started giving me lessons. He'd come see me perform. The next morning at 9 a.m. he'd call and give me his thoughts. He was always extremely forthright. He made sure I understood he didn't offer these lessons to everybody. "We had a lot of interaction after Jaki Byard died. Jaki was my first teacher in New York. After he died, I needed some guidance still. Andrew was perfect to keep me in line. When I recorded with Sam Rivers, he had advice to deal with Sam Rivers. Those were things I could rely on him for. Pointers on what to do in piano compositions. What kind of band I would hire. What to do financially. He would teach me about the entire life spectrum. He urged me to get out of hotels when I was in town to perform. Get some experiences to work into the way you play."
Hill's compositions
"I remember somebody saying something ignorant about making melodies that are singable. All melodies are singable. But Andrew was in touch with how to write melodies. Some were singsongy, and some were more textural. He was able to really blend clearly contemporary lines and improvised lines. It was fluid. You never felt once the head was over that, OK, now he's taking a solo."
His playing style
"He did kind of that Ornette Coleman thing where the solos bleed into the melodies. His piano-playing ability was astounding. I was out of town when he passed. A couple of days later, a radio station did 24 hours of Andrew Hill. They played some of his really early work, in the late 1950s. He was playing kind of straight. You knew he was in touch with some Bud Powelly material. He was in a bebop mind but already deciding where to take that language."
Best lesson learned
"It's the first one. 'A record company can never tell you what to do, Jason. You always control your mind and your direction. Don't ever let anybody at a record company tell you you can't do something.' It was a huge lesson. One that has helped me produce seven records of varying degrees that are all over place. Of the hundreds of lessons, that's the one. The Andrew commandment No. 1."
Hill's legacy
"Most people from his generation don't take any freedom they have for granted. A black man, 69 years old, he'd seen America shift. From not being able to go somewhere to being able to go somewhere. But I always remember him talking about his pursuit for the higher, the next plateau. I wouldn't say he focused on satisfaction. He focused on — not the pursuit of excellence — but the pursuit of improvement in all facets of life. Financially. On the piano. His relationships with his wife and friends and family. It was a pursuit of improvement. He took many of us under his wing. We watched him fly — up, up, up — and he never talked about going down."
andrew.dansby@chron.com
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-HillAndrew Hill
American musician
by The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
Last Updated:
3-22-2016
Andrew Hill
American musician
born
June 30, 1931
Chicago, Illinois
died
April 20, 2007
Jersey City, New Jersey
Andrew Hill, (born June 30, 1931 , Chicago, Ill.—died April 20, 2007, Jersey City, N.J.) American jazz musician who composed vivid experimental works with asymmetrical structures and improvised complex piano solos that featured far-reaching harmonic and rhythmic sensitivity. His disparate influences included bebop, Thelonious Monk, and classical composer Paul Hindemith. Hill became noted as a 1960s avant-gardist, leading major albums, including Black Fire, Judgment, and Point of Departure. He went on to perform as a piano soloist and to teach in New York, California, and Oregon. While based in the New York City area from 1996, he led a series of large and small ensembles. Other outstanding albums included Dusk, A Beautiful Day, and Time Lines, which were released between 1999 and 2006.
https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/andrew-hill
Home » NEA Jazz Masters » 2008
NEA Jazz Masters
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/andrewhill
Andrew Hill
Over nearly half a century, composer-pianist-ensemble leader Andrew Hill gained international jazz renown for his uniquely original music and recorded ouevre, which is by turns dark, fragile, funny, stark, unforgettably tuneful, percussive, insightful, oblique, transparent and mysterious. With the release of Dusk (Palmetto Records), his first album in ten years, Hill reaches another peak, equaling high points of composition and collaboration he achieved in the 1960s with such innovators as Eric Dolphy, Kenny Dorham, John Gilmore, Roy Haynes, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Elvin Jones, Sam Rivers, Tony Williams and Reggie Workman, most often commissioned by Blue Note Records.
A folio of songs for sextet loosely inspired by Cane, Jean Toomer's classic volume of stories and poems published during the Harlem Renaissance, Dusk features Hill's New Point of Departure Sextet of virtuosi and the mature vision of an artist who has always flourished just beyond fame's spotlight, the better to see, hear, feel and create without its insistent glare. At age 63, Hill is especially gratified that there's plentiful new interest in his impeccable, elusive music -- his teasing, just-beyond-grasp lyricism, his improvisations that simulate processes of thought, his themes that come together as naturally as night falls towards the end of a long day.
Hill was born in Chicago (despite mistaken information which prevailed for years that he arrived there in early childhood with his parents from Port au Prince, Haiti), raised in the heart of that city's black South Side, and discovered playing accordion and tapdancing outside his neighborhood's nightclubs and theaters by the great Earl “Fatha” Hines, who liked what he heard and told young Andrew, “I should be your master.” Stan Kenton's arranger- trombonist Bill Russo also encouraged Hill, and introduced him to German composer-music theorist-in-exile Paul Hindemith, who corrected the notation of the youth's nascent yet intriguing compositional style.
Hill began gigging in 1952, and in the summer of '53 accompanied alto saxophonist Charlie Parker at the Greystone Ballroom, in Detroit. In the mid '50s he rehearsed with Miles Davis, worked with Dinah Washington and Coleman Hawkins, then organized his own trio and recorded So In Love, his debut (featuring bassist Malachi Favors, a founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and drummer James Slaughter) in 1955.
Upon moving to New York in 1961, Hill performed with Rahsaan Roland Kirk before being contracted as a leader by Alfred Lyons, the founder of Blue Note Records who proclaimed Hill his “last great protegé” at the 1986 Mount Fuji Festival celebrating Blue Note's legacy. Hill's Blue Note sessions from November, 1963 through March '66 were released as the albums Black Fire, Smokestack, Judgement, Point of Departure, Andrew!, Compulsion, One For One and Involution and are compiled in the seven-CD boxed set The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions (1963-66) on Mosaic Records. Hill returned to Blue Note in 1989 and '90 to record Eternal Spirit and But Not Farewell, both of which featured saxophonist Greg Osby, and again late in '99 as a guest on Osby's album The Invisible Hand. He also released albums on the Arista-Freedom and Black Saint/Soul Note labels during the '70s and '80s, but spent most of those years (until the death of his wife Laverne in 1989) on the West Coast, offering solo concerts, classes and workshops in prisons, social service and academic settings, also playing occasionally at international fests.
Hill was a tenure-track associate professor of music at Portland State University, established its successful Summer Jazz Intensive, and has performed, conducted workshops and/or attended residencies at Wesleyan University, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Harvard University and Bennington College. But in the past five years, since re-marrying and relocating (”for love,” as he says) to New York City environs, he has been rediscovered by a new generation of reverent musicians, jazz aficionados and general yet generously appreciative audiences.
Hill's New Point of Departure Sextet, named for one of his best-known Blue Note albums, was convened for the Texaco Jazz Festival of 1998 at the suggestion of Michael Dorf of the Knitting Factory, with advice from James Brown of the club Sweet Basil; the New York Times, calling Hill “one of the 1960's jazz heroes,” said the sextet's first concert was “a triumphant return.” The sextet has since held weeklong engagements at New York's Jazz Standard and Birdland, and performed memorably at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in summer 1999. Besides Hill at the piano, its members include saxophonists Marty Ehrlich (a veteran “downtowner” and musical associate of Muhal Richard Abrams, Julius Hemphill, Wayne Horvitz and John Zorn, among others) and Greg Tardy (a new but already much-in- demand tenor soloist), trumpeter Rod Horton (a stalwart of the Jazz Composers Alliance), backbone bassist Scott Colley and drummer Billy Drummond, one of the most imaginative of post-bop swingers.
Hill has performed at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, opening the World Music Institute's Interpretations series, and also concertized at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Columbia University's WKCR-FM has broadcast Hill's entire discography (lasting more than 50 hours), and in 1997, for his 60th birthday, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America.
Source: Howard Mandel
http://jazztimes.com/articles/16692-andrew-hill-once-more-jazz-with-feeling
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-HillAndrew Hill
American musician
by The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
Last Updated:
3-22-2016
Andrew Hill
American musician
born
June 30, 1931
Chicago, Illinois
died
April 20, 2007
Jersey City, New Jersey
Andrew Hill, (born June 30, 1931 , Chicago, Ill.—died April 20, 2007, Jersey City, N.J.) American jazz musician who composed vivid experimental works with asymmetrical structures and improvised complex piano solos that featured far-reaching harmonic and rhythmic sensitivity. His disparate influences included bebop, Thelonious Monk, and classical composer Paul Hindemith. Hill became noted as a 1960s avant-gardist, leading major albums, including Black Fire, Judgment, and Point of Departure. He went on to perform as a piano soloist and to teach in New York, California, and Oregon. While based in the New York City area from 1996, he led a series of large and small ensembles. Other outstanding albums included Dusk, A Beautiful Day, and Time Lines, which were released between 1999 and 2006.
https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/andrew-hill
Home » NEA Jazz Masters » 2008
NEA Jazz Masters
NEA Jazz Masters
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/andrewhill
Andrew Hill
Over nearly half a century, composer-pianist-ensemble leader Andrew Hill gained international jazz renown for his uniquely original music and recorded ouevre, which is by turns dark, fragile, funny, stark, unforgettably tuneful, percussive, insightful, oblique, transparent and mysterious. With the release of Dusk (Palmetto Records), his first album in ten years, Hill reaches another peak, equaling high points of composition and collaboration he achieved in the 1960s with such innovators as Eric Dolphy, Kenny Dorham, John Gilmore, Roy Haynes, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Elvin Jones, Sam Rivers, Tony Williams and Reggie Workman, most often commissioned by Blue Note Records.
A folio of songs for sextet loosely inspired by Cane, Jean Toomer's classic volume of stories and poems published during the Harlem Renaissance, Dusk features Hill's New Point of Departure Sextet of virtuosi and the mature vision of an artist who has always flourished just beyond fame's spotlight, the better to see, hear, feel and create without its insistent glare. At age 63, Hill is especially gratified that there's plentiful new interest in his impeccable, elusive music -- his teasing, just-beyond-grasp lyricism, his improvisations that simulate processes of thought, his themes that come together as naturally as night falls towards the end of a long day.
Hill was born in Chicago (despite mistaken information which prevailed for years that he arrived there in early childhood with his parents from Port au Prince, Haiti), raised in the heart of that city's black South Side, and discovered playing accordion and tapdancing outside his neighborhood's nightclubs and theaters by the great Earl “Fatha” Hines, who liked what he heard and told young Andrew, “I should be your master.” Stan Kenton's arranger- trombonist Bill Russo also encouraged Hill, and introduced him to German composer-music theorist-in-exile Paul Hindemith, who corrected the notation of the youth's nascent yet intriguing compositional style.
Hill began gigging in 1952, and in the summer of '53 accompanied alto saxophonist Charlie Parker at the Greystone Ballroom, in Detroit. In the mid '50s he rehearsed with Miles Davis, worked with Dinah Washington and Coleman Hawkins, then organized his own trio and recorded So In Love, his debut (featuring bassist Malachi Favors, a founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and drummer James Slaughter) in 1955.
Upon moving to New York in 1961, Hill performed with Rahsaan Roland Kirk before being contracted as a leader by Alfred Lyons, the founder of Blue Note Records who proclaimed Hill his “last great protegé” at the 1986 Mount Fuji Festival celebrating Blue Note's legacy. Hill's Blue Note sessions from November, 1963 through March '66 were released as the albums Black Fire, Smokestack, Judgement, Point of Departure, Andrew!, Compulsion, One For One and Involution and are compiled in the seven-CD boxed set The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions (1963-66) on Mosaic Records. Hill returned to Blue Note in 1989 and '90 to record Eternal Spirit and But Not Farewell, both of which featured saxophonist Greg Osby, and again late in '99 as a guest on Osby's album The Invisible Hand. He also released albums on the Arista-Freedom and Black Saint/Soul Note labels during the '70s and '80s, but spent most of those years (until the death of his wife Laverne in 1989) on the West Coast, offering solo concerts, classes and workshops in prisons, social service and academic settings, also playing occasionally at international fests.
Hill was a tenure-track associate professor of music at Portland State University, established its successful Summer Jazz Intensive, and has performed, conducted workshops and/or attended residencies at Wesleyan University, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Harvard University and Bennington College. But in the past five years, since re-marrying and relocating (”for love,” as he says) to New York City environs, he has been rediscovered by a new generation of reverent musicians, jazz aficionados and general yet generously appreciative audiences.
Hill's New Point of Departure Sextet, named for one of his best-known Blue Note albums, was convened for the Texaco Jazz Festival of 1998 at the suggestion of Michael Dorf of the Knitting Factory, with advice from James Brown of the club Sweet Basil; the New York Times, calling Hill “one of the 1960's jazz heroes,” said the sextet's first concert was “a triumphant return.” The sextet has since held weeklong engagements at New York's Jazz Standard and Birdland, and performed memorably at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in summer 1999. Besides Hill at the piano, its members include saxophonists Marty Ehrlich (a veteran “downtowner” and musical associate of Muhal Richard Abrams, Julius Hemphill, Wayne Horvitz and John Zorn, among others) and Greg Tardy (a new but already much-in- demand tenor soloist), trumpeter Rod Horton (a stalwart of the Jazz Composers Alliance), backbone bassist Scott Colley and drummer Billy Drummond, one of the most imaginative of post-bop swingers.
Hill has performed at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, opening the World Music Institute's Interpretations series, and also concertized at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Columbia University's WKCR-FM has broadcast Hill's entire discography (lasting more than 50 hours), and in 1997, for his 60th birthday, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America.
Source: Howard Mandel
http://jazztimes.com/articles/16692-andrew-hill-once-more-jazz-with-feeling
Andrew Hill: Once More, Jazz With Feeling
April 2006
"You're not trapped in that room, you know," Andrew Hill called
out from his kitchen as he heated brandy and cider on the stovetop. It
was a cold day in Jersey City, N.J., but Hill's welcome could hardly
have been warmer. Granted, reports of his gnomic, roundabout style of
conversation are true. His mild stammer and bouts of coughing--a sign of
his struggle with lung cancer--make him all the more difficult to
follow. But he is also empathic and generous. His endearing,
high-pitched laugh is spontaneous and nothing short of musical. Though
frail, he is positive, full of fun. "I was talented but crazy,
semiautistic and eccentric," he has said of his youth. This may be the
stuff of genius, but in Hill's case it is not in the least forbidding.
At the age of 26, Hill altered jazz history, recording five visionary albums for Blue Note in just eight months in 1963 and 1964. In the pace and uniqueness of his achievements, he rivaled more famous labelmates such as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Among his collaborators were Eric Dolphy, Kenny Dorham, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Richard Davis, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams. Hill made several more records for Blue Note as the '60s progressed, but much of the music remained in the vaults. He left New York in 1970 and recorded sporadically for other labels over the next two decades, becoming, in Gary Giddins' words, an "outlying cult figure." Anthony Braxton, in the liner notes to his Nine Compositions (Hill) 2000, wrote: "This is a private musical universe that is not always appreciated by the greater jazz business complex."
In 1989, Hill grew a bit more visible, reuniting with Blue Note to release Eternal Spirit, followed by But Not Farewell. Aficionados greeted his rare New York concerts as major events. In 1995, after years of low-profile playing and teaching in California and Oregon, Hill (who is originally from Chicago) returned to the East Coast and began "participating again," as he puts it. He now shares a modest three-story house across the river from Manhattan with his third wife, Joanne. His second wife, organist Laverne Gillette, died in 1989. (He lightheartedly declines to name his first wife.)
Frank Kimbrough, a fellow pianist and longtime friend, remembers: "When [Andrew] told me he was coming back to New York, it excited me a great deal, because at that point there were young musicians who had grown up listening to his music. I knew he'd find lots of people to play with. I knew he would have a resurgence." Mosaic Records' seven-disc box set, comprising Hill's 1963-66 Blue Note work, helped lay the foundation.
Later in the '90s, Kimbrough visited Hill in the hospital after minor surgery. "I peeked into his room and saw him lying there. I knocked quietly and he sprang out of bed--I couldn't believe it. He said, 'Hey, come on, let's go to the lounge. I'm going to put together a new band.'" Hill envisioned a sextet with the same instrumentation as his 1964 landmark Point of Departure. "We sat in the hospital lounge and discussed who should be in that band," Kimbrough recalls. Hill soon formed the group that would record Dusk for Palmetto in 2000.
After Dusk came Hill's big-band offering A Beautiful Day (musically directed by trumpeter Ron Horton). Gigs became more frequent. Hill appeared overseas with his Anglo-American Big Band, featuring Horton and the sextet with such top British players as Denys Baptiste, Jason Yardey and Byron Wallen. (A recording is planned for 2006.) In 2003 Hill won Denmark's JAZZPAR Prize and recorded The Day the World Stood Still with an American-Scandinavian ensemble. Blue Note began reissuing Hill's early albums in earnest, including the priceless and long-lost Passing Ships and Dance With Death. In 2005 Mosaic brought out its 16th "Select" edition, a three-disc box containing yet more of Hill's Blue Note sessions: astonishing, polyglot work that spanned the years 1967 to 1970, most of it previously unheard. And Test of Time Records reissued Hill's three mid-'70s titles for East Wind (Hommage, Blue Black and Nefertiti).
Conditions were ripe for Hill to ink his third Blue Note contract. Time Lines, the resulting album, can leave you speechless. It features trumpeter Charles Tolliver, himself an underrated master, a presence on Dance With Death and two of Hill's Mosaic Select sessions from January 1970. Joining Tolliver and Hill on Time Lines are three younger musicians well established on the New York scene: Gregory Tardy on reeds, John Hebert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums. Hill lauds their ability to play "three or four different ways. Whenever you hit a musical mood, they can enter it." He casts doubt on the alleged creativity deficit among younger players: "I hear about everything that they're not. Very few people talk about everything they are. There are so many flowers on the scene, it's utterly amazing."
Younger musicians also forestall what Hill calls "chronological disengagement," which is simpler than it sounds: "[Young] people might look at the bandstand and say, 'Well, he looks like my uncle.' When they see someone their age participating, that gives them a different type of visual reference."
Listening to Time Lines, there's no mistaking what Nat Hentoff, in the liner notes to Shades (1986), meant by "the time-within-time-within-time of Andrew Hill." Richard Cook and Brian Morton, discussing Hill's earlier work in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, refer to tempos that are "too subliminal to be strictly counted," harmonic language "that isn't so much minor-key as surpassingly ambiguous...." These elements are present on Time Lines, although the tone colors of the title track are disarmingly bright. Tardy festoons the album with ravishing clarinet and bass clarinet. The piano sound is vast. "I've made it a project to figure out how to record the piano," Hill says. "The key is not to approach it as an accompanying instrument. Instead of instruments accompanying each other, have equal volume on all, so they all can stand on their own. Otherwise it throws off the quality of the performance." Michael Cuscuna, who produced Time Lines and the Mosaic sets and also recorded Hill for the Freedom label in the mid-'70s, had no trouble harmonizing with Hill's intentions.
Bob Blumenthal, in the reissue liners to Judgment!, sheds light on a disagreement between Leonard Feather and A.B. Spellman over the categorization of Hill's music. Spellman, in his Black Fire notes, placed Hill within the second wave of the avant-garde. Feather, in his original Judgment! essay, cautioned listeners against this term, making a case for Hill as part of the mainstream postbop continuum. Classifying Hill is no less contentious today. In The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Blumenthal aptly describes Hill's approach as "a way of opening up jazz through an exploration of complex chorus structures rather than the obliteration of formal signposts." Hill, in a typically offhanded but suggestive aside, volunteers his own description: "It's jazz with a feeling."
Hill's 1967 Mosaic Select sessions with Robin Kenyatta are decidedly "out." The same can be said for his 1980 trio date with Alan Silva and Freddie Waits, Strange Serenade, or his 1966 Involution tracks with Sam Rivers. But Hill has written expressively in an "inside" vein ("Laverne," "East 9th Street," "Samba Rasta"); delved deep into the blues ("Yokada Yokada," "Chilly Mac," "Today," "Tail Feather," "The Rumproller"); crafted simple groove-based tunes like "Ocho Rios," "Soul Special" and "Diddy Wah"; and burned over fast but abstract 4/4 swing on pieces like "Interfusion" and "Chained" (see sidebar). He has made use of multipercussion (Compulsion), two basses (Smoke Stack), choral voices (Lift Every Voice) and strings (the Mosaic Select "B" sessions). In Hill's world, moreover, strings are not a sweetener; on the contrary, they heighten dissonance and otherworldliness.
At the time of this interview, Hill was working on a string quartet he plans to premiere at New York's Merkin Hall in spring 2006. Booting up his computer, he let roughly 80 bars play through headphones. The music--spare, harmonically dense and texturally engrossing--brought Hill's decades-ago studies with Paul Hindemith rushing to mind. "He was a nice man," Hill recalls. "I could do certain things naturally. One of his things was like G7 with F, G, A and B together--cluster tones. I could hit things like that and understand them. But what we talked about was musical shapes and spaces more than harmony."
There are certain Hill-like shapes and spaces in the "Entombment" movement from Mathis der Maler (hear Hill's "Ode to Infinity"), or in Glenn Gould's rendering of the Hindemith piano sonatas. (Incidentally, Hill uses two violas in his 1969 string writing. Hindemith was a violist.)
"In Chicago they expected you to be good at everything," Hill remarked in the liner notes to The Day the World Stood Still. He met that challenge handily, backing Charlie Parker and Miles Davis on their respective jaunts through the Midwest and later accompanying the singers Dinah Washington, Johnny Hartman and Al Hibbler. He debuted as a leader in the mid-'50s with two singles (four songs in all) for Ping Records, followed by a Warwick LP with Malachi Favors and James Slaughter called So in Love, reissued by Fresh Sound in 2001. Soon thereafter he made notable sideman appearances with Rahsaan Roland Kirk (Domino), Walt Dickerson (To My Queen), Hank Mobley (No Room for Squares) and Joe Henderson (Our Thing).
Blue Note's Alfred Lion saw Hill as a successor to Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Hill's roots in the "percussive school" of jazz piano, reaching back to stride, are especially clear on his solo discs: Hommage, Live at Montreux, From California With Love, Faces of Hope, Verona Rag and Les Trinitaires. Given his emphasis on original material now and in the '60s, it is easy to underestimate his versatility, as Gary Giddins did in a 1996 review reprinted in Weather Bird: "[Hill's] opening set at Iridium...settled any fears that he might actually have learned a standard over the years...." In fact, Hill has performed a number of standards on recordings from 1974 to 1998, including "Darn That Dream," "Come Sunday," "Afternoon in Paris," "Invitation," "Sophisticated Lady," "What's New" and "I'll Be Seeing You." On his first album, So in Love, he plays only two originals and is positively Red Garland-esque on "Body and Soul," "Old Devil Moon" and several others.
It made sense some years ago for Blumenthal to conclude that Hill, thanks to extended absences from the performing circuit, has had "little impact on fellow musicians." But evidence is beginning to indicate otherwise. Along with percussive-school peers like Jaki Byard, Muhal Richard Abrams and Randy Weston, Hill has energized today's young modernists, in particular Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran. In a recent issue of Down Beat, Iyer cited Hill's Smoke Stack as an example of "the perfect record"; in Signal to Noise he credited Hill as "a major influence on my own playing and composing, as well as a friend and frequent advisor." Moran, who performed piano duos with Hill at Merkin Hall in 2004, based his "Gangsterism on Canvas" partly on a melodic fragment from Hill's "Erato."
"The incredible thing about Andrew," says bassist Scott Colley, "is the way he writes for horns, and can imply so much harmony, sometimes over a very simple chord base. I've tried to emulate that in my own writing." Ron Horton, a bandmate of Colley's in the Dusk sextet and the big band, had been transcribing Hill's music for years when Hill decided to hire him. (His transcription of "Erato" can be heard on Ben Allison's Buzz.) Another Hill devotee, Greg Osby, took part in the pianist's late-'80s renaissance and then featured him on The Invisible Hand in 2000--the same year that Anthony Braxton recorded Hill's compositions on two discs for CIMP.
Examples of Hill's influence continue to mount. Nels Cline, the West Coast avant-gardist and guitarist for Wilco, has just recorded an album of Hill's compositions for Cryptogramo-phone, with a sextet featuring clarinetist Ben Goldberg and trumpet veteran Bobby Bradford. "When I was discovering jazz in my late teens," Cline recalls, "my brother [drummer] Alex and I listened to Point of Departure, and we developed a great love of Judgment! I'm also quite enamored of Compulsion. But I wanted to do our own version of this music. It's not going to be a slavish Blue Note tribute."
Independent thinking of this kind is precisely what Hill expects from his own band members. After a run-through at his first rehearsal with the Dusk sextet, Scott Colley asked Hill, "Was that the direction you had in mind?" Hill replied, "I don't play the bass. You play the bass." To work with Hill, then, is to trust one's own instincts and not look to the leader for direction. Even Hill's charts might offer minimal guidance. Standing near John Hebert at a rehearsal for the Time Lines recording, Frank Kimbrough noticed that the bassist had turned over his sheet music. "I don't want to get distracted," Hebert explained. Better to look at a blank page, perhaps, than to try to account for Hill's innumerable points of departure.
According to Ron Horton, Hill would stop tunes short in rehearsal rather than go through solo rotations. "He didn't want to work on improvising," Horton says. "He preferred to keep it fresh for the gig. But he never said as much. He's not the type of person who tells you things." When called upon, Hill would reluctantly clarify chord voicings, only to play something entirely different on the bandstand.
His approach to big-band work is just as intriguing. In lieu of set lists, he devises cut-and-paste instructions for the band to follow--"the sketchier the framework, the better," says Horton. "For a while he had a road map where he would go from a section of one song to a section of another one. Or he might ask the saxes to go to bar 18 of one arrangement and the brass to bar two of something else." Horton often led the band through these transitions with a system of cue cards. "Andrew would give you the directions about five minutes before you went onstage," he adds. "One time at the Jazz Standard he had me hand out a photocopy [of instructions] and everybody was thinking, 'What, we're not playing every chart down from top to bottom?' And the next thing you heard was, 'Ladies and gentlemen....'"
As Colley puts it, "In the true sense of the word, Andrew is an improviser, more than any other musician I've ever met." To keep one's audience guessing, Hill seems to suggest, it helps to keep one's musicians guessing too. It's a seat-of-pants methodology he might use in any situation, including duo. Several years ago, he and Colley waited in the wings at the Caramoor Jazz Festival in suburban New York. Colley remembers: "I said, 'Andrew, you have any idea what you want to play today?' He answered, 'I thought we'd play the "Tough Love Suite."' This is while they're announcing our names. Now, I had never heard of the 'Tough Love Suite,' nor did I have any music for it. But we went out and made a 70-minute live recording that felt great to me. The last thing he said before we walked onstage was, 'Well, I thought it was a good title.'"
Much like his speech, Hill's titles are cryptic, comic, sui generis: "Snake Hip Waltz," "New Pinnochio," "New Monastery," "Blue Black," "For Blue People Only," "Black Sabbath," "Insanity Riff," "Flea Flop," "Kin'ler," "Ry Round," "Violence," "Lust," "Nine at the Bottom," "Six at the Top." He has drawn upon Spanish ("Mira," "Enamorado," "Siete Ocho," "Cantarnos"), French ("Le Serpent Qui Danse") and even both ("Hermano Frere"). Sometimes confusion can arise: "Laverne" and "La Verne" are two different pieces, while "Verne" and "La Verne" are the same, but in different keys. "Nefertiti" and "Nefertisis" are the same piece a whole step apart. But one would search in vain for a link between "Not Sa No Sa" and "Not So." In Ron Horton's experience, Hill swapped and altered titles fairly routinely, for no apparent reason.
Whatever Hill chooses to call them, as Anthony Braxton has written, "These compositions are sonic gold and can be mined for musical secrets forever." As a measure of their expressive purity, consider the halting repetitions of Hill's speaking voice and the tone parallels to be found in his music. In "Refuge," at the end of the form, an oddly placed counter-rhythm (articulated mainly by Richard Davis) interrupts the tune's brisk 6/8. A similar but more subdued effect can be heard shortly before Tony Williams' solo on "Spectrum." In Hill's current work as well, a "stammering" motif will occasionally surface: at the beginning of his piano solo on "Divine Revelation" from A Beautiful Day, or in the main melody of the title track from Time Lines.
An unconscious impulse? Almost certainly, but one that underscores the genuine and searingly individual quality of Hill's output. His art may be a perpetual work in progress, premised on instability and a willingness to experiment in public, but Hill is always after something specific: "These magic moments," he says, "when the rhythms and harmonies extend themselves and jell together and the people become another instrument. These are things that are priceless and can't be learned; they can only be felt."
A Day in the Life
Andrew Hill's Mosaic Select "C" session, a trio date with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Teddy Robinson, was shelved until 1982, when it was prepared for release as Chained. Instead, it remained buried in the Blue Note vaults until 2005. Comprising seven tracks (including an alternate take of "Nine at the Bottom"), the hard-hitting session is notable for its surprises: Hill plays soprano sax on "Six at the Top" and organ on "Resolution" and "Nine at the Bottom." The recording date is listed as May 17, 1967. Location: Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
At this time, of course, Ron Carter was at the peak of his tenure with the Miles Davis Quintet. Incredibly, the discography in The Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings (Columbia/Legacy) contains an entry for May 17, 1967, when Davis was in the midst of recording Sorcerer. On this particular day, at 30th Street Studios in Manhattan, the quintet recorded the master takes of "The Sorcerer" and "Masqualero" and an alternate of the latter. On the previous day they recorded "Limbo" and "Vonetta." The following week they waxed "Prince of Darkness" and "Pee Wee."
It's something to imagine: Ron Carter rushing from an Andrew Hill session in New Jersey to a Miles Davis session in New York (or vice versa). In a brief phone interview, however, the bassist was skeptical. Most Miles Davis sessions began in the early afternoon, he recalled. But Hill's session, he estimated, would have started around 10 a.m. and kept him busy until about 4 p.m. "The process was we'd go to a place called Len Oliver's and rehearse for two days--and then go to Rudy's the following day," Carter says. "Alfred [Lion] would bring sandwich supplies: bread, knives, cold cuts and stuff, and we'd do the date until it got done."
Additional research revealed Carter's skepticism to be warranted. Michael Cuscuna contacted Van Gelder, who consulted his studio log and found that the Chained session took place on May 19, not May 17. "Apparently, Alfred entered the wrong date," Cuscuna says.
Still, it is striking that Carter helped create these extraordinary documents in the space of three days. Listening to Sorcerer and Chained with this in mind is a new and revelatory experience. Both albums transcend the mainstream jazz conception of the time yet can't be pigeonholed as avant-garde. In the ferocity of Hill's "Interfusion," or the darkly drawn mysteries of his "MOMA," there are hints of the compositional economy and improvisational abandon of Miles' second quintet.
"What sticks in my mind," Carter recalls, "was I wondered why Andrew didn't play more trio, since he did it very well. I also wish I had played with him more outside the studio, to see what kind of development we could bring to these tunes."
Carter went on to record with Hill on Grass Roots, Passing Ships, the Mosaic Select "A" and "B2" sessions, and the six 1970 bonus tracks to be found on Lift Every Voice. Hill returned to the trio format in subsequent years with Invitation, Nefertiti and Strange Serenade.
At the age of 26, Hill altered jazz history, recording five visionary albums for Blue Note in just eight months in 1963 and 1964. In the pace and uniqueness of his achievements, he rivaled more famous labelmates such as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Among his collaborators were Eric Dolphy, Kenny Dorham, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Richard Davis, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams. Hill made several more records for Blue Note as the '60s progressed, but much of the music remained in the vaults. He left New York in 1970 and recorded sporadically for other labels over the next two decades, becoming, in Gary Giddins' words, an "outlying cult figure." Anthony Braxton, in the liner notes to his Nine Compositions (Hill) 2000, wrote: "This is a private musical universe that is not always appreciated by the greater jazz business complex."
In 1989, Hill grew a bit more visible, reuniting with Blue Note to release Eternal Spirit, followed by But Not Farewell. Aficionados greeted his rare New York concerts as major events. In 1995, after years of low-profile playing and teaching in California and Oregon, Hill (who is originally from Chicago) returned to the East Coast and began "participating again," as he puts it. He now shares a modest three-story house across the river from Manhattan with his third wife, Joanne. His second wife, organist Laverne Gillette, died in 1989. (He lightheartedly declines to name his first wife.)
Frank Kimbrough, a fellow pianist and longtime friend, remembers: "When [Andrew] told me he was coming back to New York, it excited me a great deal, because at that point there were young musicians who had grown up listening to his music. I knew he'd find lots of people to play with. I knew he would have a resurgence." Mosaic Records' seven-disc box set, comprising Hill's 1963-66 Blue Note work, helped lay the foundation.
Later in the '90s, Kimbrough visited Hill in the hospital after minor surgery. "I peeked into his room and saw him lying there. I knocked quietly and he sprang out of bed--I couldn't believe it. He said, 'Hey, come on, let's go to the lounge. I'm going to put together a new band.'" Hill envisioned a sextet with the same instrumentation as his 1964 landmark Point of Departure. "We sat in the hospital lounge and discussed who should be in that band," Kimbrough recalls. Hill soon formed the group that would record Dusk for Palmetto in 2000.
After Dusk came Hill's big-band offering A Beautiful Day (musically directed by trumpeter Ron Horton). Gigs became more frequent. Hill appeared overseas with his Anglo-American Big Band, featuring Horton and the sextet with such top British players as Denys Baptiste, Jason Yardey and Byron Wallen. (A recording is planned for 2006.) In 2003 Hill won Denmark's JAZZPAR Prize and recorded The Day the World Stood Still with an American-Scandinavian ensemble. Blue Note began reissuing Hill's early albums in earnest, including the priceless and long-lost Passing Ships and Dance With Death. In 2005 Mosaic brought out its 16th "Select" edition, a three-disc box containing yet more of Hill's Blue Note sessions: astonishing, polyglot work that spanned the years 1967 to 1970, most of it previously unheard. And Test of Time Records reissued Hill's three mid-'70s titles for East Wind (Hommage, Blue Black and Nefertiti).
Conditions were ripe for Hill to ink his third Blue Note contract. Time Lines, the resulting album, can leave you speechless. It features trumpeter Charles Tolliver, himself an underrated master, a presence on Dance With Death and two of Hill's Mosaic Select sessions from January 1970. Joining Tolliver and Hill on Time Lines are three younger musicians well established on the New York scene: Gregory Tardy on reeds, John Hebert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums. Hill lauds their ability to play "three or four different ways. Whenever you hit a musical mood, they can enter it." He casts doubt on the alleged creativity deficit among younger players: "I hear about everything that they're not. Very few people talk about everything they are. There are so many flowers on the scene, it's utterly amazing."
Younger musicians also forestall what Hill calls "chronological disengagement," which is simpler than it sounds: "[Young] people might look at the bandstand and say, 'Well, he looks like my uncle.' When they see someone their age participating, that gives them a different type of visual reference."
Listening to Time Lines, there's no mistaking what Nat Hentoff, in the liner notes to Shades (1986), meant by "the time-within-time-within-time of Andrew Hill." Richard Cook and Brian Morton, discussing Hill's earlier work in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, refer to tempos that are "too subliminal to be strictly counted," harmonic language "that isn't so much minor-key as surpassingly ambiguous...." These elements are present on Time Lines, although the tone colors of the title track are disarmingly bright. Tardy festoons the album with ravishing clarinet and bass clarinet. The piano sound is vast. "I've made it a project to figure out how to record the piano," Hill says. "The key is not to approach it as an accompanying instrument. Instead of instruments accompanying each other, have equal volume on all, so they all can stand on their own. Otherwise it throws off the quality of the performance." Michael Cuscuna, who produced Time Lines and the Mosaic sets and also recorded Hill for the Freedom label in the mid-'70s, had no trouble harmonizing with Hill's intentions.
Bob Blumenthal, in the reissue liners to Judgment!, sheds light on a disagreement between Leonard Feather and A.B. Spellman over the categorization of Hill's music. Spellman, in his Black Fire notes, placed Hill within the second wave of the avant-garde. Feather, in his original Judgment! essay, cautioned listeners against this term, making a case for Hill as part of the mainstream postbop continuum. Classifying Hill is no less contentious today. In The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Blumenthal aptly describes Hill's approach as "a way of opening up jazz through an exploration of complex chorus structures rather than the obliteration of formal signposts." Hill, in a typically offhanded but suggestive aside, volunteers his own description: "It's jazz with a feeling."
Hill's 1967 Mosaic Select sessions with Robin Kenyatta are decidedly "out." The same can be said for his 1980 trio date with Alan Silva and Freddie Waits, Strange Serenade, or his 1966 Involution tracks with Sam Rivers. But Hill has written expressively in an "inside" vein ("Laverne," "East 9th Street," "Samba Rasta"); delved deep into the blues ("Yokada Yokada," "Chilly Mac," "Today," "Tail Feather," "The Rumproller"); crafted simple groove-based tunes like "Ocho Rios," "Soul Special" and "Diddy Wah"; and burned over fast but abstract 4/4 swing on pieces like "Interfusion" and "Chained" (see sidebar). He has made use of multipercussion (Compulsion), two basses (Smoke Stack), choral voices (Lift Every Voice) and strings (the Mosaic Select "B" sessions). In Hill's world, moreover, strings are not a sweetener; on the contrary, they heighten dissonance and otherworldliness.
At the time of this interview, Hill was working on a string quartet he plans to premiere at New York's Merkin Hall in spring 2006. Booting up his computer, he let roughly 80 bars play through headphones. The music--spare, harmonically dense and texturally engrossing--brought Hill's decades-ago studies with Paul Hindemith rushing to mind. "He was a nice man," Hill recalls. "I could do certain things naturally. One of his things was like G7 with F, G, A and B together--cluster tones. I could hit things like that and understand them. But what we talked about was musical shapes and spaces more than harmony."
There are certain Hill-like shapes and spaces in the "Entombment" movement from Mathis der Maler (hear Hill's "Ode to Infinity"), or in Glenn Gould's rendering of the Hindemith piano sonatas. (Incidentally, Hill uses two violas in his 1969 string writing. Hindemith was a violist.)
"In Chicago they expected you to be good at everything," Hill remarked in the liner notes to The Day the World Stood Still. He met that challenge handily, backing Charlie Parker and Miles Davis on their respective jaunts through the Midwest and later accompanying the singers Dinah Washington, Johnny Hartman and Al Hibbler. He debuted as a leader in the mid-'50s with two singles (four songs in all) for Ping Records, followed by a Warwick LP with Malachi Favors and James Slaughter called So in Love, reissued by Fresh Sound in 2001. Soon thereafter he made notable sideman appearances with Rahsaan Roland Kirk (Domino), Walt Dickerson (To My Queen), Hank Mobley (No Room for Squares) and Joe Henderson (Our Thing).
Blue Note's Alfred Lion saw Hill as a successor to Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Hill's roots in the "percussive school" of jazz piano, reaching back to stride, are especially clear on his solo discs: Hommage, Live at Montreux, From California With Love, Faces of Hope, Verona Rag and Les Trinitaires. Given his emphasis on original material now and in the '60s, it is easy to underestimate his versatility, as Gary Giddins did in a 1996 review reprinted in Weather Bird: "[Hill's] opening set at Iridium...settled any fears that he might actually have learned a standard over the years...." In fact, Hill has performed a number of standards on recordings from 1974 to 1998, including "Darn That Dream," "Come Sunday," "Afternoon in Paris," "Invitation," "Sophisticated Lady," "What's New" and "I'll Be Seeing You." On his first album, So in Love, he plays only two originals and is positively Red Garland-esque on "Body and Soul," "Old Devil Moon" and several others.
It made sense some years ago for Blumenthal to conclude that Hill, thanks to extended absences from the performing circuit, has had "little impact on fellow musicians." But evidence is beginning to indicate otherwise. Along with percussive-school peers like Jaki Byard, Muhal Richard Abrams and Randy Weston, Hill has energized today's young modernists, in particular Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran. In a recent issue of Down Beat, Iyer cited Hill's Smoke Stack as an example of "the perfect record"; in Signal to Noise he credited Hill as "a major influence on my own playing and composing, as well as a friend and frequent advisor." Moran, who performed piano duos with Hill at Merkin Hall in 2004, based his "Gangsterism on Canvas" partly on a melodic fragment from Hill's "Erato."
"The incredible thing about Andrew," says bassist Scott Colley, "is the way he writes for horns, and can imply so much harmony, sometimes over a very simple chord base. I've tried to emulate that in my own writing." Ron Horton, a bandmate of Colley's in the Dusk sextet and the big band, had been transcribing Hill's music for years when Hill decided to hire him. (His transcription of "Erato" can be heard on Ben Allison's Buzz.) Another Hill devotee, Greg Osby, took part in the pianist's late-'80s renaissance and then featured him on The Invisible Hand in 2000--the same year that Anthony Braxton recorded Hill's compositions on two discs for CIMP.
Examples of Hill's influence continue to mount. Nels Cline, the West Coast avant-gardist and guitarist for Wilco, has just recorded an album of Hill's compositions for Cryptogramo-phone, with a sextet featuring clarinetist Ben Goldberg and trumpet veteran Bobby Bradford. "When I was discovering jazz in my late teens," Cline recalls, "my brother [drummer] Alex and I listened to Point of Departure, and we developed a great love of Judgment! I'm also quite enamored of Compulsion. But I wanted to do our own version of this music. It's not going to be a slavish Blue Note tribute."
Independent thinking of this kind is precisely what Hill expects from his own band members. After a run-through at his first rehearsal with the Dusk sextet, Scott Colley asked Hill, "Was that the direction you had in mind?" Hill replied, "I don't play the bass. You play the bass." To work with Hill, then, is to trust one's own instincts and not look to the leader for direction. Even Hill's charts might offer minimal guidance. Standing near John Hebert at a rehearsal for the Time Lines recording, Frank Kimbrough noticed that the bassist had turned over his sheet music. "I don't want to get distracted," Hebert explained. Better to look at a blank page, perhaps, than to try to account for Hill's innumerable points of departure.
According to Ron Horton, Hill would stop tunes short in rehearsal rather than go through solo rotations. "He didn't want to work on improvising," Horton says. "He preferred to keep it fresh for the gig. But he never said as much. He's not the type of person who tells you things." When called upon, Hill would reluctantly clarify chord voicings, only to play something entirely different on the bandstand.
His approach to big-band work is just as intriguing. In lieu of set lists, he devises cut-and-paste instructions for the band to follow--"the sketchier the framework, the better," says Horton. "For a while he had a road map where he would go from a section of one song to a section of another one. Or he might ask the saxes to go to bar 18 of one arrangement and the brass to bar two of something else." Horton often led the band through these transitions with a system of cue cards. "Andrew would give you the directions about five minutes before you went onstage," he adds. "One time at the Jazz Standard he had me hand out a photocopy [of instructions] and everybody was thinking, 'What, we're not playing every chart down from top to bottom?' And the next thing you heard was, 'Ladies and gentlemen....'"
As Colley puts it, "In the true sense of the word, Andrew is an improviser, more than any other musician I've ever met." To keep one's audience guessing, Hill seems to suggest, it helps to keep one's musicians guessing too. It's a seat-of-pants methodology he might use in any situation, including duo. Several years ago, he and Colley waited in the wings at the Caramoor Jazz Festival in suburban New York. Colley remembers: "I said, 'Andrew, you have any idea what you want to play today?' He answered, 'I thought we'd play the "Tough Love Suite."' This is while they're announcing our names. Now, I had never heard of the 'Tough Love Suite,' nor did I have any music for it. But we went out and made a 70-minute live recording that felt great to me. The last thing he said before we walked onstage was, 'Well, I thought it was a good title.'"
Much like his speech, Hill's titles are cryptic, comic, sui generis: "Snake Hip Waltz," "New Pinnochio," "New Monastery," "Blue Black," "For Blue People Only," "Black Sabbath," "Insanity Riff," "Flea Flop," "Kin'ler," "Ry Round," "Violence," "Lust," "Nine at the Bottom," "Six at the Top." He has drawn upon Spanish ("Mira," "Enamorado," "Siete Ocho," "Cantarnos"), French ("Le Serpent Qui Danse") and even both ("Hermano Frere"). Sometimes confusion can arise: "Laverne" and "La Verne" are two different pieces, while "Verne" and "La Verne" are the same, but in different keys. "Nefertiti" and "Nefertisis" are the same piece a whole step apart. But one would search in vain for a link between "Not Sa No Sa" and "Not So." In Ron Horton's experience, Hill swapped and altered titles fairly routinely, for no apparent reason.
Whatever Hill chooses to call them, as Anthony Braxton has written, "These compositions are sonic gold and can be mined for musical secrets forever." As a measure of their expressive purity, consider the halting repetitions of Hill's speaking voice and the tone parallels to be found in his music. In "Refuge," at the end of the form, an oddly placed counter-rhythm (articulated mainly by Richard Davis) interrupts the tune's brisk 6/8. A similar but more subdued effect can be heard shortly before Tony Williams' solo on "Spectrum." In Hill's current work as well, a "stammering" motif will occasionally surface: at the beginning of his piano solo on "Divine Revelation" from A Beautiful Day, or in the main melody of the title track from Time Lines.
An unconscious impulse? Almost certainly, but one that underscores the genuine and searingly individual quality of Hill's output. His art may be a perpetual work in progress, premised on instability and a willingness to experiment in public, but Hill is always after something specific: "These magic moments," he says, "when the rhythms and harmonies extend themselves and jell together and the people become another instrument. These are things that are priceless and can't be learned; they can only be felt."
A Day in the Life
Andrew Hill's Mosaic Select "C" session, a trio date with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Teddy Robinson, was shelved until 1982, when it was prepared for release as Chained. Instead, it remained buried in the Blue Note vaults until 2005. Comprising seven tracks (including an alternate take of "Nine at the Bottom"), the hard-hitting session is notable for its surprises: Hill plays soprano sax on "Six at the Top" and organ on "Resolution" and "Nine at the Bottom." The recording date is listed as May 17, 1967. Location: Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
At this time, of course, Ron Carter was at the peak of his tenure with the Miles Davis Quintet. Incredibly, the discography in The Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings (Columbia/Legacy) contains an entry for May 17, 1967, when Davis was in the midst of recording Sorcerer. On this particular day, at 30th Street Studios in Manhattan, the quintet recorded the master takes of "The Sorcerer" and "Masqualero" and an alternate of the latter. On the previous day they recorded "Limbo" and "Vonetta." The following week they waxed "Prince of Darkness" and "Pee Wee."
It's something to imagine: Ron Carter rushing from an Andrew Hill session in New Jersey to a Miles Davis session in New York (or vice versa). In a brief phone interview, however, the bassist was skeptical. Most Miles Davis sessions began in the early afternoon, he recalled. But Hill's session, he estimated, would have started around 10 a.m. and kept him busy until about 4 p.m. "The process was we'd go to a place called Len Oliver's and rehearse for two days--and then go to Rudy's the following day," Carter says. "Alfred [Lion] would bring sandwich supplies: bread, knives, cold cuts and stuff, and we'd do the date until it got done."
Additional research revealed Carter's skepticism to be warranted. Michael Cuscuna contacted Van Gelder, who consulted his studio log and found that the Chained session took place on May 19, not May 17. "Apparently, Alfred entered the wrong date," Cuscuna says.
Still, it is striking that Carter helped create these extraordinary documents in the space of three days. Listening to Sorcerer and Chained with this in mind is a new and revelatory experience. Both albums transcend the mainstream jazz conception of the time yet can't be pigeonholed as avant-garde. In the ferocity of Hill's "Interfusion," or the darkly drawn mysteries of his "MOMA," there are hints of the compositional economy and improvisational abandon of Miles' second quintet.
"What sticks in my mind," Carter recalls, "was I wondered why Andrew didn't play more trio, since he did it very well. I also wish I had played with him more outside the studio, to see what kind of development we could bring to these tunes."
Carter went on to record with Hill on Grass Roots, Passing Ships, the Mosaic Select "A" and "B2" sessions, and the six 1970 bonus tracks to be found on Lift Every Voice. Hill returned to the trio format in subsequent years with Invitation, Nefertiti and Strange Serenade.
Originally published in April 2006
https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2475
Against the Current
Dave Brubeck "Blue Rondo à la Turk," from "Time Out" (Sony Legacy, $11.98).
Andrew Hill by Francis Wolff
Photograph by Francis Wolff
Signed by Blue Note's legendary founder and producer Alfred Lion-who called him "my last great protege"
Andrew Hill was born to Hattie and William Robert Hill, Sr. on June 30, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois. He was preceded in death by his parents and his only sibling William Robert Hill, Jr. Andrew was in person as magical and complex as the music he composed and performed. He was at once shy and outgoing, with a slight build, sometimes hesitant speech, and with a ready smile and penetrating gaze that could embrace the whole of a person. Andrew brought an easy elegance and grace to all that he did with an ability to laugh at life's situations. "No tears," he said in responding to his three year life with illness, lived with passion and hope.
A legendary jazz pianist and composer, his music defied categorization for over four decades with its enigmatic and sophisticated musical style. He was hailed by The New York Times as "one of the 1960's jazz heroes" and was alternately referred to as a genius and a master by critics and colleagues alike. He was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America (1997), received the JAZZPAR Award, the world's largest international jazz award (2003), and was named Jazz Composer of the Year five times by the Jazz Journalists Association, receiving the Pianist of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. A champion of Hill's music, the late Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion proclaimed Hill his "last great protege. With over 40 recordings over just as many years, Hill consistently astounded listeners with his unorthodox compositions.
His nonet, Passing Ships, written in 1969 for mixed winds, brass, and a rhythm section, enjoyed much attention and acclaim when it was rediscovered, released, and performed live for the first time in 2006. His last release, Time Lines (Blue Note 2006), was voted Best Jazz Album by Down Beat magazine. He was named to down Beat's Hall of Fame in 2007 and joined the ranks of such lauded composers as Stravinsky, Copland, Elliott Carter, as well as jazz luminaries David Benoit and Chick Corea by signing with music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee School of Music on May 12, 2007. His final concert was at Trinity Church, Wall Street on March 29th, 2007. Andrew was named a 2008 NEA Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, the country's highest award for jazz.
2008 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Master
2007 Downbeat Hall of Fame
Jazz Journalist Association 2007, Pianist of the Year, Composer of the Year
Jazz Journalist Association 2007, Lifetime Achievement Award
2007 Honorary Doctorate of Music-Berklee College of Music
Jazz Journalist Composer of Year Awards for 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006
"Time Lines" Down Beat Album of the Year 2006
Playboy Jazz Artist of the Year 2006
"Dusk" Down Beat Album of the Year 2001
Down Beat Winner Critics Poll Jazz for 2000 & 2001
First Doris Duke Foundation Award for Jazz Composers
http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/andrew-hill-legacy-at-jazz-standard-2016.html
Photography by Jimmy Katz
Jazz Standard is located at 116 E. 27th Street (between Lexington and Park) Train 6 to E. 28th Street
www.jazzstandard.com
ALL SHOW TIMES: 7:30 & 9:30PM + 11:30PM
For reservations call Jazz Standard at 212.576.2232 or visit www.ticketweb.com
Artists and schedules are subject to change
JAZZ STANDARD PRESENTS
This special two - night engagement
celebrates the life and music of Andrew Hill (1931 - 2007) celebrating
what would have been the pianist/composer's 85th year, with music by a
host of Hill disciples and former sidemen.
Ron Horton - trumpet
J.D. Parran - woodwinds
Marty Ehrlich - woodwinds
Mark Helias - bass
Nasheet Waits - drums
https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2475
Radical Rhythms: Andrew Hill's Blue Note Sessions
by W. Kim Heron
Against the Current
Issue #60
January-February 1996
SAXOPHONIST ANTHONY BRAXTON, in a recently published interview,
listed jazz composers he'd like to devote recording projects to. One of
our most discerning reinterperters of the jazz past, Braxton so far has
done Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano and Charlie Parker. In the future:
Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and . . . Andrew Hill.
Andrew Hill?
At 58, pianist Hill is hardly a forgotten figure in jazz, but then again, he hasn't led a record date since 1991, and the closest thing to a hit he's written, "The Rumproller," came out thirty years ago as a record for trumpeter Lee Morgan. Hill's name rarely shows up in lists with Monk and Ellington.
Yet, at its best, his music is singularly intriguing. If he casts only a small shadow in the world of jazz, the shade is unmistakably his own. That is established anew with the re-release of seven pivotal Hill-led sessions as "The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions (1963-66)" on the Mosaic label.
Hill had knocked around the Chicago jazz scene and gone on the road with Dinah Washington and Roland Kirk before falling in with the young modernist crowd in New York.
He landed studio work with upstart saxophonist Joe Henderson, which led Blue Note honcho Alfred Lion to ask whether the iconoclastic sideman might have a cache of likewise distinctive tunes. It was like first hearing the compositions of Monk or Herbie Nichols (a legendary, tragically underrecorded composer-pianist--ed.), Lion later said.
Jazz in those years was increasingly seen as "the art of the improviser" to borrow a phrase from the influential saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Composition often became a stripped-down affair, musical aphorisms or even haikus (think of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme") that musicians could then expand as desired in performance.
By comparison, Hill, at least for his early sessions, was still typing out musical novellas where contrasting moods, meters and other musical ideas meet in unexpected places. A loose-limbed lope across wide intervals may give way to a tight boppish flurry of notes.
Elements of Latin jazz might be reshuffled. Melody notes may jump surprisingly enough to suggest a flea on the make in "Flea Flop," dedicated to the hotel hells of travelling musicians. Drum solos are often integrated into the selections by the backing of piano and bass.
And as an improviser-interpreter, Hill was no slouch either, taking as heroes Monk, Bud Powell and Art Tatum, and arriving at a style often described as crystalline. Yet, when fitting, the clusters of notes he favored could grow and rumble as a sort of pianistic earthquake.
Some of the most dynamic young musicians in jazz of the time joined Hill to record these pieces. On two sessions, Bobby Hutcherson's vibes mesh in shimmering textures with Hill's crystalline piano lines. Saxophonists Joe Henderson, Eric Dolphy and Sam Rivers are present, as is the recently deceased John Gilmore in three of his rare recording sessions outside of Sun Ra's arkestra.
Hill's drummers included Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, his main bassist was the redoubtable Richard Davis. Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham played trumpet.
The musicians found something unique in these sessions. With all its complexities, Hill's music traced musical spaces that could only be filled by musicians who gave their imaginations to it; his individuality as a composer called for the same from his interpreters.
There seemed to a shift in his direction, though, over the time span of these sessions. The last two tend to trade nuance for denser, more fiery textures and somewhat looser structures. The suite that made up the album "Compulsion" adds extra percussion to recall the roots of African American music and Hill's Haitian heritage (an invention to add a bit of the exotic to his biography, the Chicago-born Hill admits).
The final session seems more about the volcanic eruptions of saxophonist Sam Rivers than about Hill, and it was fitting that these tracks initially were released as part of a Sam Rivers collection. This is powerful music, but Hill seems resigned to leaving fewer of his marks on the compositional trail.
Some of his later Blue Note material remains unissued to this day. Some other releases recorded through 1970 had interesting moments but failed to be so consistently compelling as the releases gathered for this Mosaic set.
Material recorded since has found Hill returning to form though rarely if ever leading ensembles as inspired as the best of these. On the other hand, his participation on last year's Reggie Workman record, "Summit Conference," recalled the old glory.
Now what will Braxton make of the Hill songbook?
And perhaps more important, when will Hill get to record again as a leader and add to it?
Mosaic Records--all limited edition, numbered projects--are available from 35 Melrose Place, Stamford, Conn. 06902. Or call 1-203-327-7111. Their catalog is one of the best free reads in jazz.
ATC 60, January-February 1996
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/arts/music/andrew-hill-one-mans-lifelong-search-for-the-melody-in-rhythm.html?_r=1
Andrew Hill?
At 58, pianist Hill is hardly a forgotten figure in jazz, but then again, he hasn't led a record date since 1991, and the closest thing to a hit he's written, "The Rumproller," came out thirty years ago as a record for trumpeter Lee Morgan. Hill's name rarely shows up in lists with Monk and Ellington.
Yet, at its best, his music is singularly intriguing. If he casts only a small shadow in the world of jazz, the shade is unmistakably his own. That is established anew with the re-release of seven pivotal Hill-led sessions as "The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions (1963-66)" on the Mosaic label.
Hill had knocked around the Chicago jazz scene and gone on the road with Dinah Washington and Roland Kirk before falling in with the young modernist crowd in New York.
He landed studio work with upstart saxophonist Joe Henderson, which led Blue Note honcho Alfred Lion to ask whether the iconoclastic sideman might have a cache of likewise distinctive tunes. It was like first hearing the compositions of Monk or Herbie Nichols (a legendary, tragically underrecorded composer-pianist--ed.), Lion later said.
Jazz in those years was increasingly seen as "the art of the improviser" to borrow a phrase from the influential saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Composition often became a stripped-down affair, musical aphorisms or even haikus (think of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme") that musicians could then expand as desired in performance.
By comparison, Hill, at least for his early sessions, was still typing out musical novellas where contrasting moods, meters and other musical ideas meet in unexpected places. A loose-limbed lope across wide intervals may give way to a tight boppish flurry of notes.
Elements of Latin jazz might be reshuffled. Melody notes may jump surprisingly enough to suggest a flea on the make in "Flea Flop," dedicated to the hotel hells of travelling musicians. Drum solos are often integrated into the selections by the backing of piano and bass.
And as an improviser-interpreter, Hill was no slouch either, taking as heroes Monk, Bud Powell and Art Tatum, and arriving at a style often described as crystalline. Yet, when fitting, the clusters of notes he favored could grow and rumble as a sort of pianistic earthquake.
Some of the most dynamic young musicians in jazz of the time joined Hill to record these pieces. On two sessions, Bobby Hutcherson's vibes mesh in shimmering textures with Hill's crystalline piano lines. Saxophonists Joe Henderson, Eric Dolphy and Sam Rivers are present, as is the recently deceased John Gilmore in three of his rare recording sessions outside of Sun Ra's arkestra.
Hill's drummers included Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, his main bassist was the redoubtable Richard Davis. Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham played trumpet.
The musicians found something unique in these sessions. With all its complexities, Hill's music traced musical spaces that could only be filled by musicians who gave their imaginations to it; his individuality as a composer called for the same from his interpreters.
There seemed to a shift in his direction, though, over the time span of these sessions. The last two tend to trade nuance for denser, more fiery textures and somewhat looser structures. The suite that made up the album "Compulsion" adds extra percussion to recall the roots of African American music and Hill's Haitian heritage (an invention to add a bit of the exotic to his biography, the Chicago-born Hill admits).
The final session seems more about the volcanic eruptions of saxophonist Sam Rivers than about Hill, and it was fitting that these tracks initially were released as part of a Sam Rivers collection. This is powerful music, but Hill seems resigned to leaving fewer of his marks on the compositional trail.
Some of his later Blue Note material remains unissued to this day. Some other releases recorded through 1970 had interesting moments but failed to be so consistently compelling as the releases gathered for this Mosaic set.
Material recorded since has found Hill returning to form though rarely if ever leading ensembles as inspired as the best of these. On the other hand, his participation on last year's Reggie Workman record, "Summit Conference," recalled the old glory.
Now what will Braxton make of the Hill songbook?
And perhaps more important, when will Hill get to record again as a leader and add to it?
Mosaic Records--all limited edition, numbered projects--are available from 35 Melrose Place, Stamford, Conn. 06902. Or call 1-203-327-7111. Their catalog is one of the best free reads in jazz.
ATC 60, January-February 1996
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/arts/music/andrew-hill-one-mans-lifelong-search-for-the-melody-in-rhythm.html?_r=1
Music | LISTENING WITH: ANDREW HILL
Andrew Hill: One Man's Lifelong Search for the Melody in Rhythm
IN
his precocious early days, the jazz pianist Andrew Hill traveled to
Detroit from Chicago to play with Charlie Parker. It was a gig with a
pickup band; Parker had called the players to back him up for a dance
job at the Greystone Ballroom. From that first encounter with Parker,
Mr. Hill ended up with more than a line on his résumé.
Mr.
Hill's memory has been spotty about when this happened -- in the past
he has said 1948, or 1952. But Parker's movements are roughly trackable,
and there are eyewitnesses; the pianist Barry Harris was there that
night. All seem to agree that it was probably April 1954. Mr. Hill would
have been 16.
In
any case, he and Parker spoke a little, and Parker told him this: "I
look at melody as rhythm." It was a stray comment, but for Mr. Hill it
led to a long preoccupation.
As
a jazz composer, Andrew Hill is as original as they come. From the
start he has had only a modest following. He arrived in New York in
1960, to join Roland Kirk's group. When he started making his own
records for Blue Note a few years later, he didn't make a great public
splash, as Ornette Coleman had in 1959, or even keep a working band to
establish a presence in the clubs. Instead, he played the college
circuit, taught and applied for arts grants. At one point, in a 1966
interview in Down Beat, he encouraged each of his listeners to send him a
dollar.
His
work is dense and knotty and difficult to play, but much of it is
beautiful, aerated with song. In "Time Lines," his new record for Blue
Note, commanding rhythms keep rising out of the stop-start melodic
phrases; with pecking repetitions at the piano, Mr. Hill elongates the
phrases at will. Like Thelonious Monk, he can make his music sound as if
its composed parts are improvised and its improvised sections are
composed. And like Monk's, his music is a balanced equation, with melody
embedded in harmony and overlapping rhythms swimming in agreement. It
has a mysteriously powerful internal integrity.
Slight
and kindly, with soft eyes and Old World manners, Mr. Hill delivers his
ideas in bursts of information, often ending in a rising tone, like a
question. He has a stutter -- it is in his style of playing piano as
well -- and the way he phrases stories about his life, or his responses
to music, leaves them open to interpretation.
"Am
I confusing you?" he asked during a recent afternoon of listening to
music and talking about what he heard. "Is the truth confusing?"
We
met at his well-kept Victorian brownstone in Jersey City, with elegant
old furniture in a front living room and a baby grand piano in the back;
a book of sheet music for Bach's preludes and fugues lay open on it. He
and his wife, Joanne Robinson Hill, director of education at the Joyce
Theater for dance in New York, have been there since 2000, a little
while after he returned from a long sojourn on the West Coast. His first
wife, Laverne, died in California in 1989; after that, until 1996, he
taught at Portland State University in Oregon, where he met Joanne.
Mr.
Hill has been undergoing treatments for lung cancer recently. He looked
tired but peaceful. ("You're normally only as good as you think,
anyway," he said. "That's all there is.") We sat in his front room,
listening to and talking about some of the music he knows best. He kept
coming around to his gratitude that people have cared about his own work
for so long.
Born
in 1937, Mr. Hill grew up on Chicago's South Side. He is reluctant to
say more about his parents than that they were "part of the struggling
environment for their generation" and did not block his path as a
musician. From ages 3 to 7, he said, he was in a state he describes as
semi-autistic: he did not respond adequately in social situations. "I
wasn't ready to accept my socio-economic position," he explained.
He
evolved, he said, by playing music. He started on a child's accordion,
graduating to a proper button accordion at 7, and taught himself piano
at 10 from the player piano in his home. He balanced his high school
work with extra classes for gifted students at the University of
Chicago's lab school and played accordion on the street for extra money;
he positioned himself at the center of black Chicago night life, 47th
Street and South Parkway, near the Regal Theater and the Savoy Ballroom.
Mr.
Hill grew up when bebop was popular, and he played it in the company of
the best. Then, in the 60's, he stood on the periphery of a
self-conscious vanguard that pushed jazz toward art music and social
reform. When he first arrived in New York, he was not identifiable as
either inside or outside the jazz mainstream. He still isn't. That
worked against him for at least 30 years, but now history is on his
side. Jazz musicians have been bending the loose ends of history toward
each other, making sense of the fractures between tradition and
innovation or coming to understand that they may be illusory.
"Time
Lines" marks the third time Mr. Hill has been signed to Blue Note in 42
years (the first two were 1963-70 and 1989-90). He recorded five albums
in his first eight months with the label (including "Black Fire,"
"Smokestack" and "Point of Departure," three of the great records of
1960's jazz) and 19 in all from 1963 to 1970, too much for the market to
bear; only eight were released at the time. Over the past five years,
every last scrap of it has been issued. In all, Mr. Hill seems to have
won.
His
first choice of music to listen to during my visit was Charlie Parker's
most famous blues, "Now's the Time," from 1945. He calls it "the
perfect record."
Mr.
Hill understood Parker's comment about melody as rhythm as a refutation
of the "Eurocentric" music education he had grown up with -- where
melody is paramount, harmony accompanies it and rhythm is the last part
to worry about. "It opened my mind up to many possibilities," he said.
"If everything is rhythm, then you just have these rhythms on top of
each other. But they're not polyrhythms or pyramids of rhythm: they're
crossing rhythms."
"Now's
the Time" is driven by a short, syncopated melody with a strong rhythm,
putting down a bounce in almost every beat. "In that period, one could
pretend that one could hear," Mr. Hill said. "You didn't have to read it
to understand it. It was all around you. And I guess because it had a
blues sensibility, it was inclusive of more people."
I
said that given his interest in this idea of melody as rhythm, I
thought he would have suggested a bebop tune with a more complicatedly
rhythmic line, like Miles Davis's "Donna Lee."
"There
was something lovely about hearing those fast tempos," he replied,
"like 'Donna Lee' or '52nd Street Theme.' But with the blues, one
doesn't have to be a space scientist to get the harmony. 'Donna Lee' has
more changes -- bringing you in more than letting you out."
"And
then there are the parts between the drums and the saxophones," he said
as an afterthought. "Through the years, I've always said to myself that
when the drums and the saxophone play together, that's a dance, which
is an aspect of melody as rhythm. Mm?"
Next
on his list was "Blue Rondo à la Turk," from Dave Brubeck's fluke-hit
1959 album, "Time Out." The song is famous for its meter shifts: it
flicks between a fast 9/8 and an easy, midtempo 4/4 swing, though it
doesn't try to make them flow into each other.
"I
keep hearing the different rhythm-melodies," Mr. Hill said as the song
played. "The rhythm-melody that the drummer plays, for example. But this
also represents when people weren't as comfortable playing rhythms like
that" -- he meant the 9/8 -- "all the way through numbers, as they are
now."
With
pieces like this, Brubeck made jazz seem sensible for many who came to
it cold; it's a playful piece of music, and very schematic. He phrased
almost right on the beat, and kept swing roped off in the song's
four-four section. When Mr. Hill plays, on the other hand, he moves
around the beat, never playing on it, and not consistently behind it or
ahead of it, either.
"Yes, peaceful coexistence," Mr. Hill said when I brought up his relation to the beat. "It's always been like that."
The
next piece was "As Long as You're Living," by the Max Roach Plus Four
group. Recorded in 1959, it is a blues in 5/4 time, like Brubeck's "Take
Five." (Playing jazz in five was new then. Mr. Roach was said to be
irritated at Mercury, his label, for withholding the release of "As Long
as You're Living" until after "Take Five" became a hit.)
It's
a little masterpiece, sleek and grooving, with all the solemn bravado
of Mr. Roach's music in that period. And the Roach band demonstrates
that a five-beat rhythm can be swung as fluidly as the usual 4/4. "It
shows the progression of how people become more comfortable with this
rhythm," Mr. Hill said. "With 'Blue Rondo à la Turk,' one is
disappointed that they don't continue the rhythm through the number. But
here they do, and they have it down like a four."
For
the last piece of the afternoon, Mr. Hill got away from time signatures
and back to his youth. He picked a solo piano piece by Earl Hines, the
standard "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams," recorded in 1974 at a private
party in California.
"He
was a very nice man," Mr. Hill said of Hines. "When I met him, I was 8
or 9. He played at this club, the Grand Terrace Ballroom, and he had a
penthouse in the hotel where the lounge was on the bottom floor."
"I was his paperboy," Mr. Hill said with a high-pitched laugh. "The Chicago Tribune."
Hines
thought fast and broadly through a performance like this. He keeps
inserting new rhythms and rubato sections; the performance becomes
free-associative. It has sweeping two-handed runs in it, the kind of
thing Art Tatum liked to do, and it also rewrites the song in real time.
This
was an example, Mr. Hill noted, of what jazz virtuosos like Hines
called "concertizing" -- making concert-hall fantasias of tunes, often
by themselves in nightclubs. "You know," he said, "Benny Goodman took
his band to Carnegie Hall. But black musicians at the time started
consciously elaborating on melodies in a different way. They'd take it
over the bar lines, or do whatever."
It's
not so much that Hines is implying "this is the straight part" and
"this is where I'm stretching it" and "now I go back to the straight
part," I said. It's all mixed together, all the way through.
"What
impressed me about him the most was that he enjoyed himself," Mr. Hill
responded. "He was successful, and the people were with him. When a
person has a message for the people, he's usually heard and well taken
care of. The rest is what they think of themselves. You know, like
Charlie Parker -- people loved him. They treated him so much better than
he treated himself. I mean, it's such a big honor to have people
support you. That's quite a bit."
Hearing It
Andrew
Hill and his quintet (Charles Tolliver, trumpet; Greg Tardy, saxophone
and clarinet; John Hebert, bass; Eric McPherson, drums) play at 9 and 11
p.m. Wednesday through March 4 at Birdland, 315 West 44th Street,
Clinton, (212) 581-3080; cover, $30, with a $10 minimum.
Recordings that Mr. Hill chose to listen to for this article:
Dave Brubeck "Blue Rondo à la Turk," from "Time Out" (Sony Legacy, $11.98).
Earl Hines "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and Dream Your Troubles Away)," from "Solo Piano" (LaserLight, $5.98).
Charlie Parker "Now's the Time," from "The Genius of Charlie Parker" (Savoy Jazz, $18.98).
Max Roach Plus Four "As Long as You're Living," from "The Complete Mercury Max Roach Plus Four Sessions" (Mosaic, $112).
Recordings by Andrew Hill recommended by Ben Ratliff:
'Black Fire' (Blue Note) Mr. Hill's first recording for Blue Note, from 1963, with Joe Henderson, Richard Davis and Roy Haynes.
'Point
of Departure' (Blue Note) The most imposing of Mr. Hill's records, from
1964, right on the knife edge of older and newer models of jazz; with
Kenny Dorham, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Richard Davis and Anthony
Williams.
'Time
Lines' (Blue Note) Mr. Hill's new album, with a cross-generational band
(including his late-60's band mate Charles Tolliver) and his best in
decades.
http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/bio.html
Short Biography
http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/bio.html
Short Biography
Andrew Hill by Francis Wolff
Photograph by Francis Wolff
Signed by Blue Note's legendary founder and producer Alfred Lion-who called him "my last great protege"
Photograph by Francis Wolff
Signed by Blue Note's legendary founder and producer Alfred Lion-who called him "my last great protege"
Andrew Hill was born to Hattie and William Robert Hill, Sr. on June 30, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois. He was preceded in death by his parents and his only sibling William Robert Hill, Jr. Andrew was in person as magical and complex as the music he composed and performed. He was at once shy and outgoing, with a slight build, sometimes hesitant speech, and with a ready smile and penetrating gaze that could embrace the whole of a person. Andrew brought an easy elegance and grace to all that he did with an ability to laugh at life's situations. "No tears," he said in responding to his three year life with illness, lived with passion and hope.
A legendary jazz pianist and composer, his music defied categorization for over four decades with its enigmatic and sophisticated musical style. He was hailed by The New York Times as "one of the 1960's jazz heroes" and was alternately referred to as a genius and a master by critics and colleagues alike. He was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America (1997), received the JAZZPAR Award, the world's largest international jazz award (2003), and was named Jazz Composer of the Year five times by the Jazz Journalists Association, receiving the Pianist of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. A champion of Hill's music, the late Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion proclaimed Hill his "last great protege. With over 40 recordings over just as many years, Hill consistently astounded listeners with his unorthodox compositions.
His nonet, Passing Ships, written in 1969 for mixed winds, brass, and a rhythm section, enjoyed much attention and acclaim when it was rediscovered, released, and performed live for the first time in 2006. His last release, Time Lines (Blue Note 2006), was voted Best Jazz Album by Down Beat magazine. He was named to down Beat's Hall of Fame in 2007 and joined the ranks of such lauded composers as Stravinsky, Copland, Elliott Carter, as well as jazz luminaries David Benoit and Chick Corea by signing with music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee School of Music on May 12, 2007. His final concert was at Trinity Church, Wall Street on March 29th, 2007. Andrew was named a 2008 NEA Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, the country's highest award for jazz.
2008 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Master
2007 Downbeat Hall of Fame
Jazz Journalist Association 2007, Pianist of the Year, Composer of the Year
Jazz Journalist Association 2007, Lifetime Achievement Award
2007 Honorary Doctorate of Music-Berklee College of Music
Jazz Journalist Composer of Year Awards for 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006
"Time Lines" Down Beat Album of the Year 2006
Playboy Jazz Artist of the Year 2006
"Dusk" Down Beat Album of the Year 2001
Down Beat Winner Critics Poll Jazz for 2000 & 2001
First Doris Duke Foundation Award for Jazz Composers
http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/andrew-hill-legacy-at-jazz-standard-2016.html
Andrew Hill
Photography by Jimmy Katz
Jazz Standard is located at 116 E. 27th Street (between Lexington and Park) Train 6 to E. 28th Street
www.jazzstandard.com
ALL SHOW TIMES: 7:30 & 9:30PM + 11:30PM
For reservations call Jazz Standard at 212.576.2232 or visit www.ticketweb.com
Artists and schedules are subject to change
JAZZ STANDARD PRESENTS
THE ANDREW HILL LEGACY PROJECT 2016
This special two - night engagement
celebrates the life and music of Andrew Hill (1931 - 2007) celebrating
what would have been the pianist/composer's 85th year, with music by a
host of Hill disciples and former sidemen.
"While many of his contemporaries were totally jettisoning the
rhythmic and harmonic techniques of bop and hard bop, Hill worked to
extend their possibilities; his was a revolution from within...As a
pianist, Hill had a flowing melodicism and an elastic sense of time.
Like his composing, Hill's playing had an ever - present air of
spontaneity and was almost completely devoid of cliche." (AllMusic)
John Hebert - bass
Mark Helias - bass
Eric McPherson - drums
9/20 ANDREW HILL'S SMOKE STACK
Vijay Iyer - pianoJohn Hebert - bass
Mark Helias - bass
Eric McPherson - drums
The award - winning pianist Vijay Iyer leads a two - bass quartet in a
performance of songs from Andrew Hill's Blue Note album Smokestack,
which was a major influence on Iyer himself. "A dense, cerebral set of
adventurous post - bop...Comprised entirely of original Hill
compositions, Smokestack is in the middle ground between hard bop and
free jazz." (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic)
9/21 THE MUSIC OF ANDREW HILL
Frank Kimbrough - pianoRon Horton - trumpet
J.D. Parran - woodwinds
Marty Ehrlich - woodwinds
Mark Helias - bass
Nasheet Waits - drums
Frank Kimbrough, on piano, will be joined by many former Andrew Hill
sidemen including reeds master Marty Erlich and drummer Nasheet Waits to
range freely over the artist's wonderfully imaginative songbook from
his late period music, including the landmark recordings Dusk and Time
Lines. The music of Andrew Hill "is an eloquent example of how jazz can
combine traditional and original elements, notation and pure
improvisation, playing both outside and inside strict time and harmony."
(The New YorkTimes)
Selection: One for One (Numark tt rip)
Audio Player:
Artists
1965 sessions: Andrew Hill (piano) Freddie Hubbard (cornet) Joe Henderson (tenor saxophone ) Richard Davis (bass) Joe Chambers (drums) recorded February 10, 1965 at Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
1969 sessions: Bennie Maupin (tenor saxophone, flute) Sanford Allen (violin) Al Brown, Selwart Clarke (viola) Kermit Moore (cello) Andrew Hill (piano) Ron Carter (bass) Mickey Roker (drums) August 1, 1969 Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
1970 sessions: Andrew Hill (Piano) Bennie Maupin (tenor, flute & bass clarinet) Pat Patrick (alto, flute & baritone saxophone) Charles Tolliver (trumpet) Ben Riley – not Freddy Waits as listed – (drums) 16 & 23 January 1970, Rudy Van Gelder Studio Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Music
Hill’s compositions are highly original and rewarding, and the choice of musicians for these sessions is just perfect for such intelligent music. In addition to Joe Henderson and Charles Tolliver, Pat Patrick drops in from the planet Saturn, Bennie Maupin – prior to his stint with electric Miles and Hancock’s Headhunters – brings in a favourite instrument, the bass clarinet along with flute (Dolphy!), all enhancing the tonal textures around Andrew Hill’s unique ventures in rhythmic and harmonic complexity. He shifts from Hancock percussiveness to melodic airy flights of abstraction, but they are ensemble pieces not just Hill solo showcases. The rhythm section is on a mission, and Andrew Hill is firmly grounded, and personally I think at his best.
Leonard Feathers liner notes capture Hill’s summation (in 1975):
Vinyl: United Artists BN-LA 459 H2
Blue /white b “Reissue Series” misnomer. In the past I reckoned these as poor audio quality, but this one upsets all my predictions, great recording. If the recording engineer gets it right in the first place, as long as no-one mucks it up subsequently, chances are you will have a fine listening experience at the other end.
Bright in-the-room presence, no top-end rolloff, drums and symbols slap you, and intelligent stereo placement, this is a collection of excellent vinyl presentations of outstanding music that excite, and stand out from the crowd.
No runout-engravings of any interest, except the “UA” on every disk.
Liner Notes (continue inside the gatefold)
Andrew Hill—"Yellow Violet”
(Composition by Andrew Hill)
from the album 'Dance With Dance'—Blue Note label; recorded in 1968 and released in 1980:
Trumpet: Charles Tolliver
Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone: Joe Farrell
Bass: Victor Sproles
Piano: Andrew Hill
Drums: Billy Higgins
ANDREW HILL-- “Refuge" (Pt.1 of 2)
From the album Point of Departure (Blue Note, 1964)
Part 1 of the opening track from Hill's "Point Of Departure" album. Andrew Hill (piano); Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet); Joe Henderson (tenor saxophone); Kenny Dorham (trumpet); Richard Davis (bass); Tony Williams (drums).
Recorded at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on March 21, 1964. Originally released on Blue Note (4167).
Andrew Hill - 1964 - 'Point of Departure'- (full album)
benopus111
1/6 videos:
Andrew Hill--"Blue Black”-- (Full Album):
'Blue Black' is the sixteenth album by American jazz pianist and composer Andrew Hill recorded in 1975 and released on the Japanese East Wind label.
The album features:
PIANO – ANDREW HILL BASS – RICHARD DAVIS DRUMS – ROGER BLANK A1. BLUE BLACK A2. RELATIVITY B1. NEFERTITI B2. HATTIE B3.
Andrew Hill—“Pumpkin” from the album 'Black Fire' (1963) on the Blue Note label
Andrew Hill - 1963 - Black Fire (full album)
benopus111
1/7 videos:
Andrew Hill - “Illusion”
(Composition and arrangement by Andrew Hill)
From the album “One For One”—Blue Note label: recorded on August 1, 1969 released in 1975:
Andrew Hill - “Dusk”-- (2001):
Andrew Hill: piano
Ron Horton: trumpet
Greg Tardy: tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute
Marty Ehrlich: lto saxophone
Scott Colley: bass
Billy Drummond: drums.
Reggie Workman bass
From Andrew Hill's release "Time Lines" on Blue Note Records (2006)
This was Mr. Hill’s last recording before his death at 75 in 2007:
Andrew Hill: piano
Charles Tolliver: trumpet
Greg Tardy: saxophone, clarinet
John Herbert: bass
Eric McPherson: drums.
http://www.bluenote.com/http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Hill
Andrew Hill (June 30, 1931[1] – April 20, 2007) was an American jazz pianist and composer.
Jazz critic John Fordham described Hill as a "uniquely gifted composer, pianist and educator" although "his status remained largely inside knowledge in the jazz world for most of his career."[2] His most-lauded work was recorded for Blue Note Records, spanning nearly a decade and a dozen albums.
Hill first recorded as a sideman in 1954, but his reputation was made by his Blue Note recordings as leader from 1963 to 1970, which featured several other important post-bop musicians including Joe Chambers, Richard Davis, Eric Dolphy, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Woody Shaw, Tony Williams, and John Gilmore. Hill also played on albums by Henderson, Hutcherson, and Hank Mobley. His distinctive compositions accounted for three of the five pieces on Bobby Hutcherson's classic Dialogue album.[6]
Hill rarely worked as a sideman after the 1960s, preferring to play his own compositions. This may have limited his public exposure. He later taught in California and was an associate professor on a tenure track at Portland State University. During his time at PSU, he established a Summer Jazz Intensive program, in addition to performing, conducting workshops and attending residencies at other universities such as Wesleyan University, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Harvard University and Bennington College.[7] He married dancer/educator Joanne Robinson Hill in Portland in 1992. They moved to New York City in 1995.
Hill's album Dusk was selected as the best album of 2001 by both Down Beat and JazzTimes; and in 2003, Hill received the Jazzpar Prize.[2] Hill's earlier work also received renewed attention as a result of the belated release of several unissued sessions made in the 1960s for Blue Note, notably the ambitious large-group date Passing Ships. In 2004 he appeared on SOLOS: The Jazz Sessions.[8] As a consequence of his renewed prominence, a new Blue Note album titled Time Lines was released on February 21, 2006.
His final public performance was on March 29, 2007 at Trinity Church in New York City. Andrew Hill suffered from lung cancer during the last years of his life. He died at his home in Jersey City.[9]
In May 2007, he became the first person to receive a posthumous honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.
Hill created a unique idiom that utilized chromatic, modal, and occasionally "free" improvisation. Although usually categorized as "avant-garde", Hill's music bears little resemblance to the free atonality and extended improvisations of Cecil Taylor and others. Like his contemporaries Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, and Eric Dolphy, Hill was considered to be a cusp figure: too "out" to be "in", but too "in" to be "out". His earlier work, particularly the album Point of Departure, featuring fellow innovator Eric Dolphy, exhibits Hill's desire to advance while remaining grounded in the traditions of his predecessors. Throughout, his skill as both composer and leader can be sensed as the band ventures into unknown territory while still remaining precise and controlled. Hill's compositions sometimes have a contemplative mood. He was known for the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of his performances and compositions.
As a pianist, Hill's style was marked by extreme chromaticism, complex, dense chords, flowing, legato phrasing, and frequent rubato. He would often play against the rhythmic pulse, or move into different time signatures.
Mandel, Howard (April 20, 2007) "Andrew Hill: 1931–2007" All About Jazz. Retrieved April 20, 2007. During his lifetime, Hill's year of birth was always given as 1937.
Fordham, John (April 23, 2007) "Andrew Hill: A great jazz original, he was a pianist, teacher and composer" The Guardian. Retrieved January 1, 2011.
Feather, Leonard. Original liner notes to Judgment!
Spellman, A. B. Original liner notes to Black Fire.
Original liner notes to Smokestack.
Litweiler, John (1984), The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958. Da Capo, pp. 116–118.
"Andrew Hill: Biography" Boosey & Hawkes Retrieved August 14, 2008.
solosjazz.com
THE MUSIC OF ANDREW HILL: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. HILL:
LondonJazzCollector
Adventures in collecting "modern jazz": the classical music of America from the Fifties and Sixties, on original vinyl, on a budget, from England. And writing about it.
Andrew Hill: One for One (1965-70) Blue Note/UA
Selection: One for One (Numark tt rip)
Audio Player:
00:00
Artists
1965 sessions: Andrew Hill (piano) Freddie Hubbard (cornet) Joe Henderson (tenor saxophone ) Richard Davis (bass) Joe Chambers (drums) recorded February 10, 1965 at Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
1969 sessions: Bennie Maupin (tenor saxophone, flute) Sanford Allen (violin) Al Brown, Selwart Clarke (viola) Kermit Moore (cello) Andrew Hill (piano) Ron Carter (bass) Mickey Roker (drums) August 1, 1969 Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
1970 sessions: Andrew Hill (Piano) Bennie Maupin (tenor, flute & bass clarinet) Pat Patrick (alto, flute & baritone saxophone) Charles Tolliver (trumpet) Ben Riley – not Freddy Waits as listed – (drums) 16 & 23 January 1970, Rudy Van Gelder Studio Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Music
Hill’s compositions are highly original and rewarding, and the choice of musicians for these sessions is just perfect for such intelligent music. In addition to Joe Henderson and Charles Tolliver, Pat Patrick drops in from the planet Saturn, Bennie Maupin – prior to his stint with electric Miles and Hancock’s Headhunters – brings in a favourite instrument, the bass clarinet along with flute (Dolphy!), all enhancing the tonal textures around Andrew Hill’s unique ventures in rhythmic and harmonic complexity. He shifts from Hancock percussiveness to melodic airy flights of abstraction, but they are ensemble pieces not just Hill solo showcases. The rhythm section is on a mission, and Andrew Hill is firmly grounded, and personally I think at his best.
Leonard Feathers liner notes capture Hill’s summation (in 1975):
“The music sounds as fresh as anything that is happening today. In fact, in my opinion, it sounds fresher.”I think that still holds good forty years later.
Vinyl: United Artists BN-LA 459 H2Blue /white b “Reissue Series” misnomer. In the past I reckoned these as poor audio quality, but this one upsets all my predictions, great recording. If the recording engineer gets it right in the first place, as long as no-one mucks it up subsequently, chances are you will have a fine listening experience at the other end.
Bright in-the-room presence, no top-end rolloff, drums and symbols slap you, and intelligent stereo placement, this is a collection of excellent vinyl presentations of outstanding music that excite, and stand out from the crowd.
No runout-engravings of any interest, except the “UA” on every disk.
Liner Notes (continue inside the gatefold)
Andrew Hill—"Yellow Violet”
(Composition by Andrew Hill)
from the album 'Dance With Dance'—Blue Note label; recorded in 1968 and released in 1980:
Trumpet: Charles Tolliver
Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone: Joe Farrell
Bass: Victor Sproles
Piano: Andrew Hill
Drums: Billy Higgins
ANDREW HILL-- “Refuge" (Pt.1 of 2)
From the album Point of Departure (Blue Note, 1964)
Part 1 of the opening track from Hill's "Point Of Departure" album. Andrew Hill (piano); Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet); Joe Henderson (tenor saxophone); Kenny Dorham (trumpet); Richard Davis (bass); Tony Williams (drums).
Recorded at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on March 21, 1964. Originally released on Blue Note (4167).
ANDREW HILL--"Siete Ocho"
Opening track from magnificent Andrew Hill's "Judgment!" album, recorded on january 8, 1964 at the Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Musicians: Andrew Hill, piano; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Richard Davis, bass; Elvin Jones, drums. Blue Note 63842 (cd).Andrew Hill - 1964 - 'Point of Departure'- (full album)
benopus111
1/6 videos:
Andrew Hill--"Blue Black”-- (Full Album):
'Blue Black' is the sixteenth album by American jazz pianist and composer Andrew Hill recorded in 1975 and released on the Japanese East Wind label.
The album features:
PIANO – ANDREW HILL BASS – RICHARD DAVIS DRUMS – ROGER BLANK A1. BLUE BLACK A2. RELATIVITY B1. NEFERTITI B2. HATTIE B3.
Andrew Hill—“Pumpkin” from the album 'Black Fire' (1963) on the Blue Note label
Andrew Hill - 1963 - Black Fire (full album)
benopus111
1/7 videos:
Andrew Hill - “Illusion”
(Composition and arrangement by Andrew Hill)
From the album “One For One”—Blue Note label: recorded on August 1, 1969 released in 1975:
Andrew Hill - “Dusk”-- (2001):
Andrew Hill: piano
Ron Horton: trumpet
Greg Tardy: tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute
Marty Ehrlich: lto saxophone
Scott Colley: bass
Billy Drummond: drums.
Summit Conference-Reggie Workman's Band with Sam Rivers and Andrew Hill --1995--Live performance:
Reggie Workman bass
Sam Rivers sax & flute
Andrew Hill piano
Julian Priester tb
Pheroan AkLaff dms
From Andrew Hill's release "Time Lines" on Blue Note Records (2006)
This was Mr. Hill’s last recording before his death at 75 in 2007:
Andrew Hill: piano
Charles Tolliver: trumpet
Greg Tardy: saxophone, clarinet
John Herbert: bass
Eric McPherson: drums.
http://www.bluenote.com/http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Hill
Andrew Hill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Andrew Hill | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Born | June 30, 1931 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Died | April 20, 2007 (aged 75) Jersey City, New Jersey, United States |
| Genres | Jazz, avant-garde jazz, bebop, hard bop |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, bandleader, composer |
| Instruments | Piano, celeste, harpsichord |
| Years active | 1954–2007 |
| Labels | Blue Note, SteepleChase, Soul Note, Palmetto |
| Website | andrewhilljazz.com |
Jazz critic John Fordham described Hill as a "uniquely gifted composer, pianist and educator" although "his status remained largely inside knowledge in the jazz world for most of his career."[2] His most-lauded work was recorded for Blue Note Records, spanning nearly a decade and a dozen albums.
Contents
Early life
Andrew Hill was born in Chicago, Illinois (not Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as was reported by many earlier jazz reference books), to William and Hattie Hille. He had a brother, Robert, who was a singer and classical violin player.[3] Hill took up the piano at the age of thirteen, and was encouraged by Earl Hines. As a child, he attended the University of Chicago Experimental School.[4] He was referred by jazz composer Bill Russo to Paul Hindemith, with whom he studied informally until 1952. While a teenager he performed in rhythm and blues bands and with touring jazz musicians, including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Hill recalls some of his experience as a youngster, during a 1964 interview with Leonard Feather: "I started out in music as a boy soprano, singing and playing the accordion, and tap dancing. I had a little act and made quite a few of the talent shows around town from 1943 until 1947. I won turkeys at two Thanksgiving parties at the Regal Theatre," parties sponsored by the newspaper Chicago Defender, which Hill coincidentally used to sell on the streets.[3]
Later life and career
In 1950, Hill learned his first blues changes on the piano from the saxophonist Pat Patrick and in 1953, he played his first professional job as a musician, with Paul Williams' band. "At that time", he recalls, "I was playing baritone sax as well as piano." During the next few years, the piano gigs brought him into contact with many musicians, some of whom became relevant influences: Joe Segal and Barry Harris, among others. In 1961, after travelling as an accompanist for Dinah Washington, the young pianist settled in New York City, where he worked for Johnny Hartman and Al Hibbler, then briefly moved to Los Angeles County, where he worked with Roland Kirk's quartet and at the jazz club Lighthouse Café, in Hermosa Beach. It was then that he met his bride-to-be, Laverne Gillette,[5] at the time an organist at the Red Carpet. They married in 1963 and moved to New York. She died following a long illness in California, where the couple had moved.[3]
Hill first recorded as a sideman in 1954, but his reputation was made by his Blue Note recordings as leader from 1963 to 1970, which featured several other important post-bop musicians including Joe Chambers, Richard Davis, Eric Dolphy, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Woody Shaw, Tony Williams, and John Gilmore. Hill also played on albums by Henderson, Hutcherson, and Hank Mobley. His distinctive compositions accounted for three of the five pieces on Bobby Hutcherson's classic Dialogue album.[6]
Hill rarely worked as a sideman after the 1960s, preferring to play his own compositions. This may have limited his public exposure. He later taught in California and was an associate professor on a tenure track at Portland State University. During his time at PSU, he established a Summer Jazz Intensive program, in addition to performing, conducting workshops and attending residencies at other universities such as Wesleyan University, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Harvard University and Bennington College.[7] He married dancer/educator Joanne Robinson Hill in Portland in 1992. They moved to New York City in 1995.
Hill's album Dusk was selected as the best album of 2001 by both Down Beat and JazzTimes; and in 2003, Hill received the Jazzpar Prize.[2] Hill's earlier work also received renewed attention as a result of the belated release of several unissued sessions made in the 1960s for Blue Note, notably the ambitious large-group date Passing Ships. In 2004 he appeared on SOLOS: The Jazz Sessions.[8] As a consequence of his renewed prominence, a new Blue Note album titled Time Lines was released on February 21, 2006.
His final public performance was on March 29, 2007 at Trinity Church in New York City. Andrew Hill suffered from lung cancer during the last years of his life. He died at his home in Jersey City.[9]
In May 2007, he became the first person to receive a posthumous honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.
Playing style
Hill's main influences were pianists Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Art Tatum. "Monk's like Ravel and Debussy to me, in that he put a lot of personality into his playing [...] it's the personality of music which makes it, finally," he said in a 1963 interview with A. B. Spellman. Powell was an even greater influence, but Hill thought that his music was a dead end: "If you stay with Bud too much, you'll always sound like him, even if you're doing something he never did." Hill referred to Tatum as the epitome of "all modern piano playing".[4]
Hill created a unique idiom that utilized chromatic, modal, and occasionally "free" improvisation. Although usually categorized as "avant-garde", Hill's music bears little resemblance to the free atonality and extended improvisations of Cecil Taylor and others. Like his contemporaries Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, and Eric Dolphy, Hill was considered to be a cusp figure: too "out" to be "in", but too "in" to be "out". His earlier work, particularly the album Point of Departure, featuring fellow innovator Eric Dolphy, exhibits Hill's desire to advance while remaining grounded in the traditions of his predecessors. Throughout, his skill as both composer and leader can be sensed as the band ventures into unknown territory while still remaining precise and controlled. Hill's compositions sometimes have a contemplative mood. He was known for the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of his performances and compositions.
As a pianist, Hill's style was marked by extreme chromaticism, complex, dense chords, flowing, legato phrasing, and frequent rubato. He would often play against the rhythmic pulse, or move into different time signatures.
Discography
As leader
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|
|
As sideman
With Walt Dickerson
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With Bobby Hutcherson
|
References
- Ratliff, Ben (April 21, 2007) "Andrew Hill, 75, Jazz Artist Known for His Daring Style, Dies" New York Times. Accessed January 2, 2008. "Andrew Hill, a pianist and composer of highly original and sometimes opaquely inner-dwelling jazz whose work only recently found a wide audience, died yesterday at his home in Jersey City. He was 75."
External links
- Official Andrew Hill Website
- Andrew Hill @ Boosey & Hawkes
- Andrew Hill Discography at www.JazzDiscography.com
- Andrew Hill discography / sessionography
- Andrew Hill at Find a Grave
- Washington Post obituary
- Obituary and Biography by Garrick Feldman
- RBMA Radio On Demand - Sound Obsession - Volume 10 - Andrew Hill Tribute - Kirk Degiorgio (The Beauty Room, As One)
