David Yaffe on Andrew Hill in the Nation

[ghost of miles]

Brilliant Corners

Curious as to others' take on this article... it left me feeling slightly irked, for some reason.

[Uncle Skid]

Slightly irked... that's a good way to put it.

I was excited to see that article today -- three pages in the print edition, plus the 1966 photo that is on the Mosaic box set cover.

I need to read it again, but the thing that really remained with me was "You weren't exactly sure if that was how he [Hill] meant to hit those keys or if he missed them". I think the author was referring to has 1989-90 Blue Note dates (which I don't have have) but none of the Hill material I own has ever made me think that Andrew was doing anything accidentally.

[Guy Berger]

I'm not a subscriber but the first paragraph didn't seem too promising.

Guy

[JSngry]

I'm not a subscriber but the first paragraph didn't seem too promising.

Guy

Same here on all counts. Seems like yet another piece of "criticism" by some wanker who's not yet learned the difference between knowing some things and knowing something, and for whom the distinction bears no real significance.

[John L]

"Poundng away on an F major chord" my ass.

Edited June 27, 2006 by John L

[couw]

Brilliant Corners

by DAVID YAFFE

[from the July 10, 2006 issue]

At New York City's Birdland this past March, pianist Andrew Hill accepted Playboy's Artist of the Year Award, smiled for the cameras and then, without a single announcement, spent an hour filling the room with his distinctive, slightly deteriorating brand of pianistic alienation. On the title track from his recent Time Lines, Hill pounded away on an F major chord while drummer Eric McPherson thudded swirling rim shots with a meandering calypso backbeat. Hill's attack definitely swung, but in a perplexing direction: Unlike Herbie Nichols, Randy Weston and other Monk-inspired pianists, Hill left fewer rhythmic and harmonic signposts, striking when you'd least expect. Perhaps aware that he was leaving listeners adrift after accepting a plaque from Hefner's empire, Hill, who never plays anyone's standards but his own, began playing the opening motif from Meyer and Caeser's 1928 "Crazy Rhythm." The drums played against the piano and the bass repeated an off-kilter Latin beat, but Tin Pan Alley was somewhere buried in the subtext:

Crazy rhythm, here's the doorway.

I'll go my way, you'll go your way.

Crazy rhythm, from now on

We're through.

Hill's playing wasn't up to his 1960s peak--it was actually rougher than on the CD--but it was better to be honored belatedly than not at all. Many rapt audience members were trying hard to follow the clangor, nodding their heads and trying to take it in. It was a clever moment, a rare nod to accessibility in an extremely opaque evening.

In a break from critical orthodoxy, I pondered the fine line between complexity and incoherence. Sometimes Hill pounded the keys with purpose. Other times, he seemed to be fumbling for the right notes. Crazy rhythm, indeed. The announcement last year that Hill had signed with Blue Note for the third time was a major event in the jazz world, but it was also bittersweet: He was battling cancer without health insurance and needed the money only a major label could offer, composing and playing furiously through his illness and treatment. But the fuss and awards surrounding Hill's recent deal were really all because of what he did during his first stint on the label beginning in 1963.

Back then, Hill was 21 and telling everyone that he was a Haitian protégé of the neoclassical composer Paul Hindemith. In fact, he was a native Chicagoan whose studies with Hindemith were more like an ad hoc correspondence course; the fledgling Hill approached the eminent composer after a performance, the two men exchanged some letters and Hindemith died the year Hill got his record deal. Hill's biographical discrepancies continued. Various sources credit him with a PhD in musicology from Colgate, but it turned out that Colgate never offered that degree to anyone. Jazz musicologist Lewis Porter did some investigation on the matter a few years ago, and a Colgate professor sent Porter an e-mail from Hill, who said that he didn't want credit for something he didn't do and added that jazz critics don't do enough of their own research and should do everything possible to stop the lie. Of course, Hill's first few years of recording are worth more than a stack of doctorates, and even if he didn't write a dissertation of his own, he certainly provides enough material for someone else's.

Is Hill a genius, a trickster or a con artist? To ask the question is to answer it: all of the above. Tall tales have long been a part of the greatest jazz legends. Who really believed that Louis Armstrong was born on July 4, 1900, or that Jelly Roll Morton invented the music? Behind the self-mythology, though, the music is even harder to unravel. Following Hill's biographical claims may be tricky, but following the transcriptions of his compositions is even more baffling, and this is a difficulty he can own. In 1963 the Beatles hadn't yet conquered America; free jazz was still relatively new and divided the lines of the Blue Note roster. Saxophonist-composer Joe Henderson was still carrying the torch for accessible swing, digging into the Latin groove that took Stan Getz to the pop charts. Multi-reedist Eric Dolphy was arguing with his leader, Charles Mingus, on the bandstand through musical dialogues, and he pushed further into the harmonic stratosphere with every transgressive wail. Tony Williams, then a 17-year-old wunderkind who had picked up a seat in Miles Davis's quintet after seeming to memorize every beat thudded by Philly Joe Jones, was unable to ignore something freer rumbling from the harmolodic territory of Ornette Coleman and the rattle of Billy Higgins's high hat. Amazingly, Henderson, Dolphy, Williams and Hill, along with trumpeter-arranger Kenny Dorham and bassist Richard Davis, all came together on March 21, 1964, to record Point of Departure, and in a single day Hill made a jazz masterpiece. It was his fourth album for Blue Note, and the first three, Black Fire, Smokestack and Judgement, had also been recorded in single-day sessions in the previous four months of frenetic activity. The recording would also be Dolphy's last studio session; that June, he would be dead at 36, and everything that he recorded in those last few months would be scrutinized and pondered in search of a future jazz never quite had.

Point of Departure routinely makes critics' all-time-favorite jazz album lists, but Hill's compositions are rarely played on the bandstand or heard from conservatory practice rooms. A look at the chart for "Refuge," the first track on the album, explains why. On the recording, Dorham and Hill are playing the melody, while Henderson throws in an empathetic harmony and Dolphy offers an alto dissent. Somehow, Hill's composition unites these three divergent styles, with Henderson and Dorham playing the changes and Dolphy literally going off the charts. Hill's jagged comping and peripatetic lines are anchored in a Monkian percussive hiding place, a refuge of sorts. But the chart itself offers less of one. It's harder to play than anything by Wayne Shorter, who made his own Blue Note debut the same year. Shorter, who can be heard from conservatory to conservatory and bandstand to bandstand, may have earned the nickname Mr. Weird, but his madness made a kind of divine sense; no one else could have thought of tunes like "Juju" or "Speak No Evil," but once you learn them, they are indelible. Hill doesn't let you in nearly as easily. Look at the chart, lose your place, start over and marvel at those who can do it well; improving on the album is impossible anyway. The track that followed was named by Frank Wolff "New Monastery" as a nod to Thelonious Monk, but Monk's terrain is a much less difficult path to follow. You hear Monk in Hill's attack, but the harmonic stratosphere is something more dense and even more strange. "New Monastery" wasn't Hill's title anyway. He once said that everything he ever wrote came out of a Kenny Drew blues motif he heard once--but then, Hill has said many things.

Point of Departure is confounding, but it is a text, with heads and solos followed in bop protocol, something that Dolphy's Out to Lunch, recorded in the previous month, defected from more dramatically. Ornette Coleman's Live at the Golden Circle, John Coltrane's First Meditations and Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures would stray further from the written lines. ("Where are you Bud?" wrote Taylor in the liner notes, giving a stream of consciousness shout-out to Bud Powell. Many would have answered, "Far, far away.") Hill would become more accessible on other occasions. "Catta," the lead track from vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson's extraordinary 1965 album Dialogue, is a Hill composition that sounds like a cousin to Joe Henderson's "Recordame," a Latin soul jazz number with a centered groove and a catchy hook. "Catta" was recorded a year and a half after Blue Note artist Lee Morgan made a crossover score with a similarly infectious Latin composition, "The Sidewinder," which hit No. 25 on the Billboard chart and made it all the way to a Chrysler commercial in the 1965 World Series. If Hill had written more tunes like "Catta," maybe he wouldn't have asked each reader of Down Beat to send him a dollar the following year; it would be four decades before Playboy paid its respects.

Ironically, some of the most accessible Hill material from his first Blue Note run didn't make it out of the vault until recently. Blue Note realized it was sitting on collectors' items and belatedly released Hill's work from the end of his first run with the label. This, too, is a case of better late than never. Passing Ships topped many jazz critics' lists for 2003, even though it was deemed unreleaseable in 1969. The sessions that Hill recorded that year with strings are especially noteworthy: haunting, lovely, complex and without a trace of Third Stream preciousness. "Illusion," from the Mosaic Select box set, is driven by the slow, steady, swinging march of Mickey Roker's drums. Hill, who had jumped from chord to chord on the compositions that made his reputation, slowed down for a simpler progression. Bennie Maupin blows some tasteful tenor lines with a kind of Lester Young-inspired melodic economy, and the strings are arranged enough for chamber and loose enough for jazz; the cello tugs and takes you in deeply. The rest of the sessions are like a dream. They sound nothing like the commercially viable jazz of 1969--they might as well have been recorded in a different century from the one that produced Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, and it's certainly a better jazz session. But Hill never made the commercial crossover, just the counterintuitive, deft ones that spelled career suicide--until recently, that is.

Another pianist who made his Blue Note debut in the early 1960s, Herbie Hancock, was more of a playa. Like Hill, Hancock was a Chicago native who had a classical connection (he played with Rafael Kubelik and the Chicago Symphony when he was 11). But Hancock also had a Top 10 hit early on with "Watermelon Man" (not his own version, but still), and while honing an original, complex and deep pianism always had his eye on what the popular audience wanted. It would be hard to imagine Hill pitching Bose speakers or tinkling impressionistic lines behind Christina Aguilera on the Grammy Awards. Two roads diverged.

Hill spent the next three decades paying dues. In the liner notes to his From California With Love (Artists House, 1979), Hill wrote, "At the zenith of my Blue Note recordings, I found that fame and fortune were not my reward, but fame and poverty. This was hard to believe, for I had seen artists like Miles Davis, Maynard Ferguson, Oscar Peterson, etc., pass through Chicago. They weren't surviving but living." Yet Hill wouldn't make concessions to live a little better, and he preferred teaching in California prisons to playing on pop sessions. Even a second run for Blue Note in 1989 and 1990 didn't last beyond two albums, both regrettably out of print, and somewhere along the line his piano technique, never especially smooth, became less consistent. You weren't exactly sure if that was how he meant to hit those keys or if he missed them. But he achieved some triumphs late in his career, some wholly distinct from that initial burst of greatness from 1963 to 1967. Dusk (Palmetto, 2000) was originally conceived as a tribute to Point of Departure for a gig at New York's Knitting Factory. But the resulting CD sounded nothing like the album that inspired it. It was a musical interpretation of Jean Toomer's 1923 masterpiece Cane, with a title alluding to the opening stanza of Toomer's Harlem Renaissance classic:

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon.

O cant you see it, O cant you see it,

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon..

. When the sun goes down

The CD matched Cane for lyricism with a sharp edge, achieving a quiet beauty the younger trickster of the 1960s didn't quite reach when frantically jumping from chord to chord and interval to interval. The title track, which opens the CD, returns to a dominant groove plucked out on Scott Colley's bass, while the horn lines travel in odd directions and Hill's piano lines give contrapuntal retorts. A Beautiful Day (2002) lives up to its title, even more ambitious than Dusk in its orchestral scope, demanding, powerful and lyrical. Hill and an audience, albeit a specialized one, could finally meet.

Time Lines doesn't quite reach the heights of those two recordings, but it has quiet and subtle powers of its own, even if they didn't make the transition from the recording studio to the stage at Birdland in March. Hill's rough beauty has inspired a generation of younger pianists like Vijay Iyer and especially Jason Moran, who combines a Hill-inspired attack with a Hancock-inspired crossover savvy, and who has identified himself as a Hill disciple, performing in deferential duets with him. But Hill's recent impact has been in the jazz compositional landscape, and his twists and turns now seem less bewildering than they did in that frenetic period forty years ago. Altoist-composer Greg Osby, who performed beautifully on Hill's first reunion sessions with Blue Note, has cited Hill as his greatest influence, and when they played together on The Invisible Hand (2000), it was not only a signal of Hill's return to the label where it all began but a moment when Hill seemed less like an eccentric cult figure and more like an elder statesman. On Hill's "Ashes," that CD's lead track, the chord sequences are still hard to follow, but Hill's softened accompaniment and Osby's breathy alto, complemented by guitarist Jim Hall's lush lines, make it clear that the twenty-first century will finally be a time when Hill's challenging conceptions will go down a little easier, less cryptic but as fascinating as ever. As Hill is enjoying his third act, those rhythms don't sound quite so crazy anymore.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/yaffe

[Simon Weil]

Brilliant Corners

Curious as to others' take on this article... it left me feeling slightly irked, for some reason.

I got to this point and I couldn't read on.:

Is Hill a genius, a trickster or a con artist? To ask the question is to answer it: all of the above. Tall tales have long been a part of the greatest jazz legends.

Ah, glib. It's like a million of these articles you read, where the guy's got the gig, is not up to it and has to blather.

I recommended Point of Departure to a neophyte (Classical lover, likes Brad Meldau not Miles) recently.

Simon Weil

[Edit] I think what might be irksome is that it's patronising. I'm seeing quite a few of these articles, where the guy essentially says "because I don't get it, there's nothing to get". These articles don't serve Jazz well, tending to remove credibility from the form as a whole.

Edited June 27, 2006 by Simon Weil

[Stefan Wood]

Poor article, and typical of a reviewer who doesn't know how to listen, or thinks too much while listening. Damn faint praise indeed.

[Guest youmustbe]

Great article!! You all miss the point!!! read it again and don't prejudge it.

[relyles]

To offer some balance I did not think the article as a whole was that bad. I get the sense that overall the author is a fan - particularly of Hill's recordings from the early Blue Note period and the two discs on Palmetto. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with him questioning whether Hill's chops are what they used to be. I think that is a common concern of more listeners than we Hillaholics would believe.

[sal]

To offer some balance I did not think the article as a whole was that bad. I get the sense that overall the author is a fan - particularly of Hill's recordings from the early Blue Note period and the two discs on Palmetto. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with him questioning whether Hill's chops are what they used to be. I think that is a common concern of more listeners than we Hillaholics would believe.

[clifford_thornton]

Very interesting article, for sure. Hill's music is complex in the way that it's hard to put a finger on. I keep buying his records, though I have fallen in love with only one or two.

[JSngry]

To offer some balance I did not think the article as a whole was that bad. I get the sense that overall the author is a fan - particularly of Hill's recordings from the early Blue Note period and the two discs on Palmetto. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with him questioning whether Hill's chops are what they used to be. I think that is a common concern of more listeners than we Hillaholics would believe.

Yeah, the whole thing reads a lot differently than did that opening paragraph.

I still think that the guy's writing froma "Feed Me" type fan perspective, but to his credit, he seems to have good taste in what it is that he wants to be fed.

[Chuck Nessa]

To offer some balance I did not think the article as a whole was that bad. I get the sense that overall the author is a fan - particularly of Hill's recordings from the early Blue Note period and the two discs on Palmetto. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with him questioning whether Hill's chops are what they used to be. I think that is a common concern of more listeners than we Hillaholics would believe.

Yeah, the whole thing reads a lot differently than did that opening paragraph.

I still think that the guy's writing froma "Feed Me" type fan perspective, but to his credit, he seems to have good taste in what it is that he wants to be fed.

It sounds like he's spent some time around Andrew.

[Kalo]

I agree that the opening paragraphs, with their debunking tone, give a different impression than the article as a whole. Yet, despite the annoying turns the piece occasionally takes, it's interesting to read something that tries to make distinctions, rather than the usual puff piece. Let's face it, Hill is hard to get a grip on, and this writer has clearly tried, whether we agree with his particular conclusions or not. Still, there's a bit of a sour taste left in my mouth after reading it...

[erhodes]

Tone aside, the article raises a few other interesting issues, one being how Hill could have been 21 in 1963. It turns out that Hill was supposed to have been the pianist in Miles Davis' pre-Coltrane Chicago group along with John Gilmore and, if memory serves me, Wilbur Ware. This was circa 1955 which would have left Hill at a tender 13 years of age.

There are a couple of other...items.

Eric Dolphy was not having musical arguments with Mingus in 1963. This occured in 1960 at the Showboat. Dolphy did brief appearnaces with Mingus after that but the next time he and Mingus consistently engaged in anything approaching this kind of dialogue would have been in the European tour of 1964.

Tony Williams almost certainly was listening to Billy Higgins - he was listening to everyone back then, taking it all in - but his "free" thing was largely through the influence of Sunny Murray.

"Out to Lunch" was not Dolphy's last studio date. He recorded a couple of times in Europe after that.

Citing "Live at the Golder Circle", "First Meditations", and "Unit Structures" as examples of more radical approaches than what Hill was offering seems to be a form of name dropping. One could cite dozens of recordings from '63-'65 that were more radical than Hill's. Why those? And what's the point?

What struck me about the piece was that the author is not quite as hip as he is playing to be. He makes a few allusions which suggest that he knows a few things, then screws up the details as if he really doesn't. Maybe he needed more time or more space. But from here it's looking like someone else tackling a subject when he really didn't do his homework.

As for Hill's chops, I've heard it all before. I knew a guy in Boston in the 60's who was associated with Berkley (Berklee? Berkeley?) and Herb Pomeroy who use to rant all the time about how Andrew Hill couldn't play the piano, had not chops, blah blah. Another piece of hipness in the article that's pointless. I mean...IMO he leaves the reader hanging because he doesn't have a clear answer or point of view.

There's a little meat here but it's a bit like whipped butter...lightweight, lots of air.

Ed Rhodes

[Spontooneous]

What struck me about the piece was that the author is not quite as hip as he is playing to be. He makes a few allusions which suggest that he knows a few things, then screws up the details as if he really doesn't. Maybe he needed more time or more space. But from here it's looking like someone else tackling a subject when he really didn't do his homework.

Nailed it there, Ed.

[andybleaden]

Quote from Ed

As for Hill's chops, I've heard it all before. I knew a guy in Boston in the 60's who was associated with Berkley (Berklee? Berkeley?) and Herb Pomeroy who use to rant all the time about how Andrew Hill couldn't play the piano, had not chops, blah blah.

Yessir !

Same as that other non starter when people said John Coltrane...could not play a decent tune an all that other bull

Same with Ornette

Same with Don Cherry

Blah blah

Rubbish

'I do not understand' does not equal that this is rubbish

Save maybe Kenny G

Edited June 28, 2006 by andybleaden

[relyles]

I am neither trying to defend the opinions (and that is all they are) of the author in the piece, nor trying to generate a heated debate, but I wonder if to some extent we are being less than objective in evaluating the piece. I don't think it is fair to suggest that the author does not understand Hill. To the contrary, it seems to me that the author has listened to much of Hill's recorded output and genuinely appreciates the significance of Hill's artistry. also, other than the comments in the beginning about Hill "pounding" and a later statement that "somewhere along the line his piano technique, never especially smooth, became less consistent", I don't think anything in the article suggests the author believes Hill can't play the piano. At most, there is the suggestion that his technique has declined over the years. Why is that statement tantamount to heresy? Is it really impossible to think that over a career that exceeds forty years a pianists technique may not be as crisp as it once was? To be honest, I have heard Hill live at least ten times in the past 15 or so years and a devoted fan like me would have to at least admit that he does not play with as much technique as he did when I first heard him. Some of that may be by choice - his music has evolved to the point where he plays less piano. But maybe some of it really is just time.

Again, we are all entitled to disagree, but I did not think the article was poor as I sense some may feel.

[ghost of miles]

What bothers me is a between-the-lines suggestion (and actually it surfaces overtly in one instance), in spite of all the praise directed Hill's way, that Hill is a bit of a charlatan and a liar. The implication that his technique has declined didn't bother me at all; I'm sure it has, as it often does with aged musicians. The impugning of his character (which is how I read it) is what "irked" me--along with the backtrack attempt to say that, well, it's all part of jazz mythology. How many performers, jazz, rock, or otherwise, have sometimes fudged their age a bit or enhanced meaningful artistic associations as they tried to get ahead? I really didn't see the need for that crap at all, since it has little or nothing to do with Hill's music.

Honest, rigorous criticism of artists whom I love is fine, but patronising insinuation just rubs me the wrong way.

[relyles]

What bothers me is a between-the-lines suggestion (and actually it surfaces overtly in one instance), in spite of all the praise directed Hill's way, that Hill is a bit of a charlatan and a liar. The implication that his technique has declined didn't bother me at all; I'm sure it has, as it often does with aged musicians. The impugning of his character (which is how I read it) is what "irked" me--along with the backtrack attempt to say that, well, it's all part of jazz mythology. How many performers, jazz, rock, or otherwise, have sometimes fudged their age a bit or enhanced meaningful artistic associations as they tried to get ahead? I really didn't see the need for that crap at all, since it has little or nothing to do with Hill's music.

Honest, rigorous criticism of artists whom I love is fine, but patronising insinuation just rubs me the wrong way.

That is an entirely different issue and I was also a little perplexed by the insinuation.

[JSngry]

Well, maybe Andrew has been a bit of a "head case" in terms of how he's presented himself over the years.

Big whoop. Cat's still a genuine heavyweight. One of the heaviest, in fact. Noting/alluding to the possibility that he's not above playing mind games is something that doesn't alter that, but it might be worth noting for the "objective historical record".

[Lazaro Vega]

If Andrew isn't sitting on one chord in the title piece of the new album I don't know what is. He seems to have constructed the entire tune around his piano staying in one harmonic place while he varies the speed and dynamic of the "ostinato." Tolliver takes that furthest along in his improvisation, developed it more comfortably and imaginatively into something. Tardy (italics) plays on it, but isn't as melodically effective as Tolliver. But the "tune" isn't melodic in the traditional sense, and it doesn't set up easily for "blowing." Hill isn't "banging" to my ears, there's more variation to what he's doing then that...I'm not hearing much harmonic movement going on there, and if there's more than this writer implies, it still isn't central to the tune's construction. It would be good for a musician to chime in on that as there's no transcription level opinion here. Hill stays in place while the band swirls around him in a round, picking at whatever meat they find on the musical bone......

Edited July 5, 2006 by Lazaro Vega

[take5]

Just like some accuse the writer of feigning "hipness," so may one accuse someone who praises Hill to high heaven without reservation and complains that if someone doesn't "get it" that's his problem.

Musicality aside, Andrew Hill is this year's jazz re-discovery darling. At one point it was Hank Mobley, than Grant Green, Ahmad Jamal, etc. Because of a new record deal or an ambitious re-issue program or whatever, the "hip" latch on to some jazzer with the attitude that "how can you not have known about him!"

Just part of the insular jazz posturing.

Also, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be "fed," as another poster put it. If music is to be a communication from artist to audience, then yes, the audience has to understand it. Fortunately, because we're all in different places musically, this allows for every approach to music to happen.

I don't think I'm any less worthy a jazz fan because I gave up on the avant-garde.

As for Andrew Hill's music, a dive into his early Blue Note material gives me the impression of someone trying enough things and hoping for something to click at the end. It's restless and constantly moving forward, which makes for interesting study, but not always a coherent musical statement.