Andrew Hill, 1931-2007

Andrew Hill, one of the most visionary and intellectual jazz pianists of the post-bop generation, lost a long battle with lung cancer on Friday morning. He was 75 years old, just two months shy of his 76th birthday.
Hill, best known for his 1964 recording Point of Departure (Blue Note), was an incredibly prolific and, in recent years, highly acclaimed composer and performer.

Though for decades undervalued and obscure, Hill's angular but richly melodic compositions and improvisations always had a sizable following among knowledgeable critics and listeners. Apparently by osmosis, however, his incredible harmonic and rhythmic innovations have been assimilated into the jazz mainstream, finally gaining Hill the respect of his peers and followers in the last decade or so of his life.
Though often reported to have been born in Haiti in 1937 (a rumor that he himself liked to spread), Hill was actually born in Chicago on June 30, 1931.

Growing up in the place where jazz developed into an art form (Chicago was where New Orleans musicians migrated after World War I, and where Louis Armstrong became jazz's first auteur), Hill absorbed the brilliant evolution of the American idiom from his childhood. At 13, encouraged by jazz alpha-pianist Earl Hines, Hill began playing piano; soon he was sitting in with the all of the great jazz masters of the 1940s (from Charlie Parker to Miles Davis when they passed through Chicago. Perhaps his most significant association in jazz, however, was with composer/arranger Bill Russo (a staple of the Stan Kenton orchestra), who introduced young Hill to the immigrant German composer Paul Hindemith.

Hill would study with Hindemith from 1950-52.
First recording in 1954 as a sideman for bassist David Shipp, Hill's first session as a leader came one year later when he recorded the album So in Love for the Warwick Records label (accompanied by great Chicago bassist Malachi Favors). The first record was fairly conventional, and forgettable, hard bop, and Hill quickly forsook that sound, forming a pop-friendly big band known as the De'bonairs and playing as a reliable Chicago sideman before moving to New York in 1961 to play in the bands of Dinah Washington and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Always an avid disciple of bebop piano titan Bud Powell, Hill, like most jazz musicians of his generation, was shaken and reinvented by the radical music of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taylor, especially, moved young Andrew Hill, who began a synthesis of Powell and Thelonious Monk's bop, Horace Silver's hard bop, and Taylor's dense avant-garde explorations, meshing those disparate sounds into something quite new and original, even iconoclastic: Hill, perhaps more than any other musician of his day, understood that one need not completely embrace the radicalism of the "New Thing" in order to develop the bop-rooted jazz traditions in those same directions. His was an advanced version of hard bop, one that was unafraid to incorporate the thick, dissonant chords and oblong modal work of Taylor and his contemporaries.

Signing to Blue Note Records in 1963, Hill began one of the most consistently high-quality and forward-thinking recording streaks in jazz history with the November sessions that produced his album Black Fire. The streak continued the next month with Smoke Stack, then into the new year with Judgment!, Point of Departure, and Andrew!

!!.

On these records, Hill not only began broadening the harmonic canvas of jazz, but found his niche with the most advanced players of the era - peaking with Point of Departure, on which he led an ensemble featuring Joe Henderson, Eric Dolphy, Kenny Dorham, Richard Davis, and Tony Williams. If Horace Silver had represented Blue Note's hard-bop sound in the 1950s, Andrew Hill embodied the progressive Blue Note of the '60s, lending a vision of harmonically and melodically complex musical palettes to the label that now epitomizes jazz recording.
Unfortunately, Hill's tremendous contributions to jazz's artistic development in the 1960s were largely overlooked in the jazz universe (even by the many who bought Point of Departure).

Undaunted, he built a cult following of jazzheads and critics, continued an exhaustive and exhausting run of performing and recording, and proceeded to write a new harmonic language and a new conception of time. His influence wasn't the explosive one of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, or Miles Davis; rather, it was a slow seepage, as like-minded pianists (and other musicians) heard his unique stylistic approach, incorporated it into their own, then let other musicians do the same to them in a long chain of unknowing followers. Among his musical followers and sympathizers were Mal Waldron, Herbie Hancock, Muhal Richard Abrams, Don Pullen, Danilo Perez, and Jason Moran.

It took a new century for the bulk of the jazz world to finally catch onto, and marvel at, Hill's innovations; in 2001, when he released Dusk (Palmetto), he was raised up as though he were the newest and hippest sensation, not a 50-year journeyman and musical beacon. It won Album of the year in both major jazz publications, Down Beat and JazzTimes. Two years later, Hill won the Jazzpar, the Danish award that is perhaps the most selective and prestigious in the international jazz community.

By 2006, after touring America and the world and returning to Blue Note Records for the release of the Time Lines album, he had four times been named by the Jazz Journalists Association as Jazz Composer of the Year; been one of the earliest recipients of a Doris Duke Foundation Award for Jazz Composers; won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America; and had Time Lines, his last recording, once again named Jazz Album of the Year by Down Beat, the New York Times, and numerous other publications and critics (including this writer).
Hill learned in 2004 that he had lung cancer; fighting it every step of the way, he continued making his fantastic and ever-forward-charging music, causing NPR to note that "Hill still creates music as if his best work is ahead of him." Despite his conviction and his deep progress with records such as Time Lines and transcendent live performances, Hill played his last live date in New York City on March 29, 2007.

Less than two weeks later, the prestigious Berklee College of Music announced that it would award Hill an honorary doctorate in music at its May 12 commencement ceremony; sadly, Hill would survive only nine more days after that announcement.
I, personally, feel great loss at the departure of one of the greatest pianists and composer/arrangers of the past several decades, and will forever kick myself for having passed up an opportunity to see Hill perform in Baltimore last December. And yet I know that I will cherish his music, and continue to find more delights and surprises in it, for at least another several decades.

This, I hope, is the greatest testimony to Hill's genius, and one can only hope that effusive thanks - and hope that Andrew Hill now finds himself in a better place - can cover his enormous contribution to music.