Andrew Hill gets the Listening to CD's treatment

[brownie]

From The New York Times toay:

February 24, 2006

LISTENING TO CD'S WITH ANDREW HILL

One Man's Lifelong Search for the Melody in Rhythm

By Ben Ratliff

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."

[porcy62]

Thanks, Brownie, Very Interesting.

[Soul Stream]

I wasn't aware he had lung cancer until I picked up Downbeat yesterday. Wow, sad to hear. Nice article, thanks.

[Hardbopjazz]

Thanks for this. It gets me ready for his shows at Birdland next week. I'll be there.

[Soul Stream]

Thanks for this. It gets me ready for his shows at Birdland next week. I'll be there.

The guy's doing shows while in the middle of a battle with lung cancer?! Well, I guess that tells you something about the man and his music.

Reminds me (hopefully the ending will be different) of the time I saw Etta Jones at the Vanguard right before her death from cancer. At that point she knew her days were limited and when I talked with her she basically said she was going to go out with dignity singing all the while, which she did.