![]() ![]() 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 last two tend to trade nuance for denser, more fiery textures and somewhat looser structures. There seemed to a shift in his direction, though, over the time span of 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. The musicians found something unique in these sessions. Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham played trumpet. Hill’s drummers included Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, his main bassist was the redoubtable Richard Davis. 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. On two sessions, Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes mesh in shimmering textures with Hill’s crystalline piano lines. Some of the most dynamic young musicians in jazz of the time joined Hill to record these pieces. Yet, when fitting, the clusters of notes he favored could grow and rumble as a sort of pianistic earthquake. Drum solos are often integrated into the selections by the backing of piano and bass.Īnd 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. Melody notes may jump surprisingly enough to suggest a flea on the make in "Flea Flop," dedicated to the hotel hells of travelling musicians. A loose-limbed lope across wide intervals may give way to a tight boppish flurry of notes.Įlements of Latin jazz might be reshuffled. 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.īy 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. Jazz in those years was increasingly seen as "the art of the improviser" to borrow a phrase from the influential saxophonist Ornette Coleman. It was like first hearing the compositions of Monk or Herbie Nichols (a legendary, tragically underrecorded composer-pianist-ed.), Lion later said. ![]() 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. 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. 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. If he casts only a small shadow in the world of jazz, the shade is unmistakably his own. Yet, at its best, his music is singularly intriguing. Hill’s name rarely shows up in lists with Monk and Ellington. Andrew Hill.Īt 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. In the future: Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and. One of our most discerning reinterperters of the jazz past, Braxton so far has done Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano and Charlie Parker. SAXOPHONIST ANTHONY BRAXTON, in a recently published interview, listed jazz composers he’d like to devote recording projects to. Radical Rhythms: Andrew Hill's Blue Note Sessions | Solidarity Radical Rhythms: Andrew Hill's Blue Note Sessions - W. ![]()
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