(Thurman Barker, Roscoe Mitchell, Andrew Hill, Wilbur Ware.)
(Hill and Ware. Photos by Terry Martin taken in Chicago in the late 1960's. Very special thanks to Martin for allowing DTM to publish these rare photos.)
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While Andrew Hill possessed an authentic jazz beat, he never had "grooving jazz piano" on his agenda. The first Hill Blue Note record from 1963, Black Fire, features two deeply swinging players, Joe Henderson and Roy Haynes. Their solidity freed Hill and his soulmate Richard Davis to access everything mysterious residing in the cracks of the beat. This became the template for Hill's time at Blue Note, and one reason why most of these albums remain so fresh today is because they explore the tension of players who cook versus players who want to evade the rhythm.
For many, Point of Departure is the ultimate expression of this form, which also has some of Hill's most advanced tunes. However, serious consideration must also be given to the date unreleased in its day but now available as Pax, which has the ferocious, squalling playing of Henderson and Freddie Hubbard fighting against the surreal duo of Hill and Davis. Caught in the middle, Joe Chambers is forced to deliver one of his most exciting and swinging performances. The Blue Note catalog must have hundreds of examples of the medium-up 12-bar blues, but "Eris" from this album may well be the craziest.
Blue Note's owner, Alfred Lion, wanted to document so much Hill because he wrote so much music: on the 20 or so Hill Blue Notes, every piece is penned by Hill. They are among the most successful blend of modern classical music and the jazz tradition ever conceived. Most bios of Hill mention that he studied with Paul Hindemith for a while, perhaps in 1950-52. This is probably a red herring, since Hindemith (like Arnold Schoenberg or most 20th century composers) gave his students rigid instruction in basic tools like species counterpoint, fugue, and sonata form, not the advanced tools for modern harmony that inform the music of Hill.
Andrew Hill's fourth chord is an interesting sonority to ponder. In 1960, McCoy Tyner (seven years younger than Hill) gave modal fourth chords to the language of jazz piano. This soon became a major tributary: within just a year or two, Herbie Hancock adapted this sound to his own needs, and most other younger pianists followed suit. However, Andrew Hill's fourth chords (example: "Subterfuge" on Black Fire) do not sound like Tyner-Hancock fourth chords in the slightest. Interestingly, one classical composer that uses a lot of fourth chords was Paul Hindemith! No, Hill's fourth chords are not like Hindemith's, either, but the kind of imagination Hill invested in his harmonic language is closer to what a classical composer thinks about than the folkloric conception Tyner invented.
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After the Blue Note years, Hill made records for a variety of labels. (Here is the discography. Anyone have that live 1988 Paris hit with Joe Henderson playing standards?) Two of the best are on Soul Note and show his rhythmic yin and yang almost as set pieces: For 1980's astonishing Strange Serenade, he took Alan Silva and Freddie Waits and recorded almost completely free. On 1986's Shades, he took three straight-ahead groovers (Clifford Jordan, Rufus Reid, and Ben Riley) and plays pretty inside. Finally, his recordings from the last decade or so are great documents of talented younger players who were comfortable both inside and outside the beat. Hill's response to this security was to insist on curveballs. Every musician who worked with Andrew Hill in recent years confirms that he liked to keep it a little chaotic. For example, he would rehearse the music one way, and then, at the last second, change the arrangement or even the parts. This would guarantee mistakes but also freshness in the performance.
The determination to be open to the unexpected was the basis of his piano playing. He did a lot of solo recording over the years, and they are all documents of how tirelessly he worked to surprise himself. The 1978 album From California, With Love has lead sheets included in the liner notes. On paper, "Reverend Du Bop" looks like a mid-tempo swinger, like something a pro jazz composer like Benny Golson or Slide Hampton would write, even down to its punning title. However, the recording does not really follow the tune on the lead sheet except in cubist bits. Instead, it's a 19-minute, wandering, rubato search that verges on being infuriating to listen to.
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Did Andrew Hill ever play a gentle form of the Dozens with the listener? After owning the record for twenty years, I still don't really know whether Hill is having me on or not with "Reverend Du Bop." However, I am convinced that the title song of Grass Roots is at least partially an amused commentary on the Blue Note label, specifically on the policy of a having a funky number lead off the record.
Lee Morgan's 1963 album The Sidewinder started it. The title song was a simple but catchy 24-blues powered by an undulating Billy Higgins, and it (surprisingly) became a huge hit heard on jukeboxes everywhere and even featured on TV. Alfred Lion didn't enforce it in a strict or mean way, but his stable of artists soon understood that it was probably a good idea to start their record with a booty-shaker, no matter how straight-ahead or free the rest of the date was. (Blue Note discography here.) A good example is the first song on Herbie Hancock's 1964 disc Empyrean Isles, "Cantaloupe Island." The rest of the album is pretty abstract--in fact, "The Egg" is probably the most "out" piece Hancock ever wrote--but "Cantaloupe Island" is down-the-middle groove, with a piano part that Hancock never varies. It wasn't a hit like "The Sidewinder" when it first came out, but it was a big smash 30 years later remixed as "Cantaloop" by Us3.
On 1968's Grass Roots, Hill leads off with his first and greatest deconstruction of a booty-shaker. The band is strong: Lee Morgan, Booker Ervin, Ron Carter, and Freddie Waits. I can just see the gleam in Hill's eye: "A booty-shaker, huh? The Sidewinder himself on trumpet? Hmm…" What Hill came up with is absolutely the squarest rhythm ever recorded for Alfred Lion: 16 bars of quarter notes and half notes marching right on the beat. It is also purely diatonic, with none of the pitches leaving the F7 scale. While there are ways to make that scale funky, Hill turns in something that sounds almost Javanese. It's wonderful that Lee Morgan, the man who played and recorded countless tricky hard-bop heads perfectly, repeatedly splits notes while playing this ultra-simple head, like he can't understand what he's doing playing so many straight quarter-notes for the first time in his life. I have sympathy for Morgan's predicament, since this tune is so damned strange that I actually had to count to 16 on my fingers to determine how many bars it was. (I haven't needed my fingers to feel a 16 for a long time.) The rhythm section plays normally, and Hill even has a piano "part" featuring an offbeat (like an evaporated version of Hancock's "Cantaloupe"), but there's no way Us3 could remix this one.
Download grass_roots_melody.mp3
Because Andrew Hill was a melodic genius, "Grass Roots" succeeds not just in sending up its environment, but is also a wonderfully memorable tune. It's the tune that I immediately started humming when I heard that he had passed on.
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Like Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols, Hill's concept stemmed from deep knowledge of standard musical craft plus a determination to never use that craft for an end that wasn't flavored by the surreal. His final gig at a church (video here) shows that he was trying to surprise us and himself until the end. I don't know for sure, of course, but I can imagine him showing up for the hit, looking at his religious surroundings, and murmuring, "What can I do with this?" The hour-long performance begins with several minutes of abstract musings on gospel harmony.
