For Harold Mabern’s 83rd Birthday, A Downbeat Feature From 2015 and an Uncut Blindfold Test from 2004

For Harold Mabern’s 83rd birthday, I’m augmenting a post that I put up in 2015 (it contained an uncut Blindfold Test that we did in 2004) with a “Director’s Cut” of a 2015 Downbeat feature. Here’s the intro I wrote to the post at the time:

Pianist Harold Mabern celebrates his 79th birthday today. I had a chance to hear him last night playing bassist Gregory Ryan’s weekly gig at at a midtown steakhouse (Joe Farnsworth on drums). The piano, which is decent but was shaky in the upper register, is placed between the stairway down from street level and the bar, and to call the room noisy would be an understatement. Still, Mabern played with customary focus, power, melodic invention and soulfulness — treated the gig with complete respect and commitment, revealing his encyclopedic knowledge of the American Songbook. A son of Memphis, Tennessee, who spent the second half of the ’50s in Chicago, Mabern has been a beacon and mentor for several generations of pianists, among them James Williams, Donald Brown, Mulgrew Miller and Geoff Keezer, with whom he played in a five-piano band twenty years ago. I had several opportunities to talk with HM during my WKCR years, and had an opportunity to do the DownBeat Blindfold Test with him in 2004. Here’s the uncut version.

Harold Mabern Downbeat Feature, 2015:

On March 19th, a day before he turned 79, Harold Mabern celebrated by taking a sideman gig with bassist Gregory Ryan. The venue was not a jazz club, but a cavernous mid-Manhattan branch of Hillstone, the steakhouse chain, where the “bandstand” is a narrow 15′ floor space from the piano, which sits at the base of the stairway to the street, to the drums, next to a corner door leading to a storage room. The trio faced a large oval bar, banquettes and perhaps a dozen circular tables, packed with raucous Thursday dinner hour patrons—corporate types cutting loose before the weekend, couples, well-heeled families with small children.

While waiting for tables, folks milled about the piano, among them a woman bouncing her harnessed baby to the beat of Mabern’s relentless vamp on “You Go To My Head.” Mabern smiled broadly as he reharmonized the melody, transitioned to a long chordal passage executed in parallel octaves, then, to conclude, switched to rhythmic dialogue with Joe Farnsworth. After stating the verse and melody of “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” as a surging waltz, he shifted to several choruses of block chords over a brisk swing section. An abstract rubato solo introduction morphed into “The Nearness Of You,” reharmonized with voicings evocative of Red Garland. Two little girls had sidled by the piano, transfixed by Mabern’s huge hands dancing across the keys; he smiled at them benignly while interpolating a long section from “Strangers In The Night” and a Bobby Timmons blues. After a rollicking stroll down John Coltrane’s “Straight Street,” on which he alternated fleet single-line movements with stirring passages of two-handed invention, he closed the set with his own soulfully boppish “Aon” which premiered on Mabern’s 1968 Prestige debut Rakin’ and Scrapin’.

A week or so after this grandmaster class in the art of the trio, suffused with high intellect, deep emotion and an abiding sense of musical adventure, Mabern recalled a piece of sage advice from his good friend, the long-deceased alto saxophonist Sylvester “Sonny Red” Kyner: “Mabern, a little bit of money beats no money any day; a small gig is better than no gig at all.” Mabern continued: “Nobody’s coming where I live to hear me play. The things I do for my friends, we do for each other. The gig pays $100, but on the bandstand you get a million dollars worth of experience, because you always find something you didn’t know before.”

A fortnight later, Mabern played three nights at Smoke to acknowledge a new release, Afro Blue, on SmokeSessions, the club’s imprint. Present from the recording on the opening set were Farnsworth, bassist John Webber and tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, his bandmates of choice for several decades. Vocalist Jean Baylor filled in on short notice for Alexis Cole, one of five singers on the date, along with Kurt Elling, Norah Jones, Jane Monheit and Gregory Porter. It’s the first of Mabern’s two dozen leader dates to showcase the context in which he worked frequently during the 1960s, often at Birdland but also on the road, with Betty Carter, Johnny Hartman, Irene Reid, Gloria Lynne, Dakota Station, Ernestine Anderson, Arthur Prysock, Joe Williams and Sarah Vaughan, in between consequential sideman stints of varying lengths with the Jazztet, Roy Haynes, J.J. Johnson, Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery and Lee Morgan.

The idea gestated when Mabern mentioned his experiences with “the singing thing” during an interview for the liner notes of Right On Time, a live trio engagement with Webber and Farnsworth that launched SmokeSessions. “We asked Harold if he’d made a record with singers,” Paul Stache, the club’s proprietor and label head, said. “He said, ‘No, but I always wanted to.’” Stache already had a notion to recruit Gregory Porter for a future project after Porter sang Johnny Hartman and other Coltrane repertoire with Mabern’s group during an end-of-2011 week at Smoke. He also knew that during a three-year period when Porter sang at Smoke every Thursday, Mabern, when in town, attended almost every single performance. When Stache later reminded Mabern of the singers idea, he replied, “If you get Gregory, I’m in; I wrote a song that’s perfect for him.’” Stache put together a six-singer wish-list. “Five of them confirmed,” Stache said. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, yeah, for Harold…’”

“Gregory reminded me of Joe Williams, who I played with for three years,” Mabern said. “Joe could sing anything—what Pavarotti sang, or ‘Over The Rainbow’ or ‘Go Down, Moses’—and Gregory is ubiquitous in his language and selection of songs. I went even when it was Chicago-cold and snowing.” As Mabern does not drive, this meant catching a bus from Spring Creek Towers, a cooperative apartment complex of 15,000 residents in the East New York district of Brooklyn, to catch the 3-train for a one-hour ride to Smoke’s 106th Street and Broadway location. He moved there from Crown Heights, from which, midway through a 12-day transit strike at the beginning of 1966, he hiked 10½ miles through the snow to the Empire Hotel by Lincoln Center to catch a ride to a Blue Mitchell session for Blue Note at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey. When the session was over, Mabern trekked back. “I did it six times that week,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to miss that record date. They said, ‘If you can get here…’ I made it.”

“Harold stayed two or three sets every week,” Porter confirmed over the phone. “I was very encouraged by that. He saw everything. One night he said, ‘Lou Rawls was like you.’ That’s cool coming from a master of the music. I don’t take it lightly. It means more to me than anything.”

Once all the singers signed on, Mabern conferred with each on repertoire, then worked out treatments during two days of recording. Both Porter and Elling confirm Mabern’s relaxed, collaborative attitude. “Unlike many sessions you enter as a hired gun, so to speak, Harold asked what he could do to shape the music around me—what tempo, what key,” said Porter, who sang Oscar Brown’s lyric of “Afro-Blue” and Mabern’s “The Man From Hyde Park.” The latter title references Herbie Hancock, four years Mabern’s junior, reflecting a friendship that developed during Mabern’s 1954-1959 residence in Chicago. “Before I went into the booth, I asked Harold to sing it to me at the piano—to give me the melody, the phrasing,” Porter said. “He sounded so beautiful and tender. It’s a letter to Herbie, and it was cool that he allowed me to sing this personal message.”

“It was super loose in the studio,” said Elling, who sings the blues ballad “Portrait Of Jennie,” scats on “Billie’s Bounce,” and draws on his church background in delivering the 1978 C&W hit “You Needed Me.” “Harold emailed me to ask for the key; when I arrived, I said, ‘OK, let’s just do this.’ Harold and the guys set up the arrangements on the spot, and we ran it down once. Harold, Webber and Farnsworth are top of the food chain; they have the real history in their sound.”

Mabern initially intended “You Needed Me” as a vehicle for Norah Jones, who he describes as “a modern-day Billie Holiday, without trying to be, the way she phrases and lays back.” Her counter-suggestion was “Don’t Misunderstand,” a ballad by Gordon Parks that O.C. Smith stamped as his own on the soundtrack for Shaft, and the Johnny Mercer song, “Fools Rush In,” a 1940 hit for Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey. “I’d played ‘Don’t Misunderstand’ once in the last twenty years,” Mabern said. “I said I’d think about it. Then Norah suggested we do it piano and voice. It was bold of her, but I thought we pulled it off. Key of A-flat. We couldn’t do ‘Fools Rush In’ like Sinatra, who is one of my top three vocalists along with Joe Williams and Nat Cole, so I told Farnsworth to lay down the Poinciana beat.”

He quoted Sinatra, “if you can’t sing in tune, you can’t sing,” in explaining his picks for Jane Monheit. “I’ve always liked the pureness and intonation of her voice, that she knows how to treat a ballad and something up-tempo,” Mabern said. “I figured ‘My One and Only Love’ would match her; later, she told me it was her wedding song. ‘I’ll Take Romance’ hasn’t been done much, and Eydie Gorme had a big hit with it.

For Alexis Cole, Mabern selected his stoic, bittersweet “Such Is Life.” “I learned to write lyrics from being around Bill Lee,” he said, referring to the distinguished bassist-composer to whom he dedicated Afro Blue, along with pianists Billy Wallace and Chris Anderson, also deep influences from Chicago years. Lee befriended Mabern soon after he arrived in town from Memphis, as testified by a Mabern waltz called “Brother Spike,” written to mark the birth of Lee’s son, the film director, and recorded on the eponymous 1959 VeeJay album MJT+3, by the in-vogue Chicago-based combo that exposed Mabern to the national jazz audience.s,

Like Muhal Richard Abrams, his predecessor in the first edition of MJT+3, Mabern is a self-taught pianist. Standing by an old upright at a party a few months before his fifteenth birthday, he watched a girl play a song on only black keys—the title, he learned later, was “I Stuck My Dollar In The Mud”—and then “sat down and played the same song; I just picked it up.” Soon thereafter, he learned “The Honeydripper” and “Perdido,” and started “doodling around.” Within six months, he was gigging with George Coleman and his brother, alto saxophonist Lucian Adams. Mabern’s father, who worked in lumber yard, “raked and scraped up” $60 to buy a piano, on which he applied lessons learned from close observation of pianists Charles Thomas, “who played like Bud Powell,” and told him, “If you think I can play, you’ve got to meet Phineas Newborn.” Newborn, a Tatumesque virtuoso, was then giving lessons in the back room of a local record store and playing in his father’s band at Mitchell’s Hotel, where the likes of B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, Johnny Ace, Coleman, Frank Strozier, Booker Little, Charles Lloyd and Mabern cut their teeth. He watched where Newborn placed his fingers, and emulated.

“He’d play like a big band; I watched him orchestrate,” Mabern said of his autodidactic learning process. “I had a small band with Charles called the Rhythm Bombers, and I’d pick and choose notes very carefully there. With George Coleman and his brother, I made a dollar a night, which was a lot of money. That was the standard, although B.B. King might have made $2-$2.50. You had to track down Sunbeam (Andrew Mitchell), the club-owner, to get that, because he had the money in the cigar box with his 22-caliber pistol.” In keeping with his glass-half-full philosophy, Mabern states, “They treated us good there, like family members. Sunbeam’s wife, Miss Ernestine, made the best chili you could find anywhere.”

Mabern declined a scholarship to Tennessee State University to join Strozier at the American Conservatory of Music, and moved north in August 1954. “The money got tight, but my sister said I should stay and see what I could do,” Mabern says, “It was the best thing that happened to me. I say I got mine from the university of the streets.” He joined trombonist Morris Ellis’ big band, where “I got my reading together,” had private lessons at the conservatory for six months, and embarked on five years of “playing and practicing 12 hours a day.”

“I met Bill Lee at the YMCA at 49th and Michigan,” Mabern reminisced. “From Bill I learned how to orchestrate, how to rearrange standard songs. I heard him play the most beautiful choruses on piano, which he plays as well as he does the bass. At first, he wouldn’t tell me anything, but when he finally gave me the time of day he said, ‘There’s another piano player named Chris Anderson who can show you what to do—and Billy Wallace.’ I couldn’t believe how many songs they knew. They were listening to Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations for Sinatra. When Charlie Parker played at the Beehive in January 1955, with Norman Simmons, Victor Sproles and Bruz Freeman, he was playing all these standards he learned from Big Nick Nicholas that other guys weren’t playing then, like ‘Dancing In The Dark’ and ‘Let’s Face The Music and Dance.’ Between sets, Bill and Billy and Chris would call out the changes for Norman that Bird might play next.

“Chris influenced Herbie Hancock, as did Andrew Hill. Chris and Herbie and Ahmad are geniuses in voicing chords, and Billy could play the same way, but he’d play a chord for every note of the melody. That’s where my harmonic concept comes from. Watching Billy, I learned to comp; same chords, more space, less busy.” For his overall attitude to piano expression, though, Mabern cites Jamal, who he became aware of through Booker Little. “I was as impressed with him as with Phineas,” he said. “I’d never heard anyone play with such command and or conceptualize sound like that. ‘Music, Music, Music’ was a corny song. Ahmad said, ‘Not the way I play it.’ Ahmad reintroduced it to us in a stylized, modern way. After ‘Poinciana,’ I knew I wanted to play like that. I tell students that if you approach the piano with anything less than an orchestrational mindset, you’re going to lose out.”

A faculty member at William Paterson University since 1981, Mabern has taught, among others, drummers Tyshawn Sorey and Bill Stewart, bassist Doug Weiss, and Alexander, who caught his ear on the first day of the 1987-88 academic year. Twenty-seven years and countless tours and recordings later, Alexander observed that Mabern’s close study of the arranging techniques of Riddle and Don Costa allowed him to “absorb and deeply understand the detailed inner voice movement and potential substitute ideas for all the Songbook tunes.” He continued: “Invariably, when we start playing through any tune I bring him, whatever I thought were the best possible changes, he’s got something better. He likes to comp more than solo, and he’s peerless at setting up the horn player to sound good no matter what they’re doing.”

Which is perhaps why so many singers kept Mabern so busy after the spring of 1961, when he came off the road after a year with Lionel Hampton, and joined Betty Carter. “I played with Betty at Birdland two-three weeks at a time, opposite Coltrane, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, or whoever,” he said. “She taught me the art of playing slow. I also worked opposite Coltrane with Johnny Hartman, who wouldn’t leave home without me. I’m proud to say that’s probably where Coltrane got the idea to record with him. Jimmy Jones and Jerome Richardson recommended me to Joe Williams, which I thought was quite a compliment.” So busy was Mabern that he subbed out singer gigs to then-aspirants Chick Corea and Hancock. “Once I paid Herbie $18, which was a lot,” Mabern said. “Scale was $15; I had a $25 gig.”

In the liner notes for Mabern’s 1993 CD, The Leading Man, the late Mulgrew Miller, a close friend, wrote that “under the hands of Mabern, the piano is challenged to ‘live up to’ its formal name—the piano-forte, for Harold dramatically plays the whole range of dynamics.” On Afro-Blue, as fifty years ago, Mabern recalibrates for singers. “I play from my shoulders, from my whole body, which is why I’m percussive,” Mabern said. “With singers I play with less force, less aggression. I use the soft pedal. You don’t voice the chord with the leading tone. You wait for them to sing a phrase, then fill in the space.”

For all the erudition he brings to any encounter with a piano, Mabern considers himself first and foremost “a blues pianist who understands the philosophy of jazz.” “Coming up in Memphis, we wanted to play bebop,” he said. “But the people had to dance. George Coleman and his brother and I would tell the drummer to keep a shuffle beat for ‘The Hucklebuck,’ and then we’d play the changes to ‘Perdido’ or ‘All The Things You Are.’ That’s how we got over. Gene Harris said, ‘I’m a blues player with chops,’ which is pretty much what I’m saying. I can play what Jamil Nasser called the ‘bone-chillin’ blues,’ I can play boogie-woogie, but I can still play the old ‘Milestones’ or ‘Moose The Mooche.’ I’m never going to stop being a blues pianist.”

“I played with Joe Williams at the Half Note. Jimmy Witherspoon came in first set, and said, ‘Hey, Joe, sing the blues.’ He said, ‘Spoon, it’s too early for the blues.’ Spoon said, ‘It ain’t never too early for the blues.’ Oh, no. I’m always blues first. As someone said, I am the blues.”
[—30—]

Harold Mabern Blindfold Test (10-1-04) – Raw Copy:

1.  Earl Hines, “Don’t You Know I Care” (from EARL HINES PLAYS DUKE ELLINGTON, New World, 1970/1997) (Hines, piano; Duke Ellington, composer) – (5 stars)

Duke Ellington’s “Don’t You Know I Care.” I can’t say that I right away recognize the pianist. I like what I’m hearing. It’s hard to tell if it’s a recent recording or something that was done a few years ago. Right now, Ted, I must say you’ve got me on this one so far, even though the sound… Right away, I know it’s not, but right now I can’t say who it is. Phineas recorded this, but I know it’s not Phineas, and Mulgrew Miller recorded this recently—I know it’s not him.  It’s not Ray Bryant, and it’s definitely not Hank Jones or Tommy Flanagan or any of those people. And it’s not Art Tatum.  It’s not Teddy Wilson. So if I had to take a wild guess (I don’t know if guessing is permitted), I would have to say someone like Jay McShann, or probably someone like Earl Hines. That’s just an educated guess. Of the two, I would say Earl Hines. I like the overlapping phrases with left hand and right hand. And the touch of the right hand. His touch seems to be a little heavier than Teddy Wilson’s, whose touch was a little more velvety, like Art Tatum’s was. 5 stars. [AFTER] What I’m accustomed to do, as I tell the students: Process of elimination. Eliminate who you know it’s not, and then you feel it can only be one or two people. I possibly could have said James P. Johnson, but I didn’t, or Fats Waller. When I first came to New York City, I worked at Smalls Paradise with the MJT+3, and a couple of the old-timers were there, and they looked at me and said, “Young man, you remind me a lot of Earl Hines.” To me, that was a compliment, because I didn’t know much about Earl Hines at that point. However, we all know that was Nat Cole’s hero in Chicago. He was doing everything he could to be around Earl Hines whenever he could be. I was told that he even dressed like Earl Hines—very impeccable. As they say, Earl Hines was like the Bud Powell of his time; he just opened up everything. I had a chance to work opposite him on a Newport Jazz Festival in San Remo, Italy. George Wein produced it.  I was with Wes Montgomery. We had a chance to talk. We had some pictures taken together, if I can ever find them—little small snapshots.

Reflecting back, I don’t know if you watch the Westerns channels, but they’ve been showing a lot of the black cowboys, and they mainly talk about Herb Jeffries, who was the first one to really get some prominence. He was singing with Earl Hines’ band in Chicago. Every time I hear his name, I think about Herbie Hancock. People don’t know this, but Herbie was named after Herb Jeffries—Herbert Jeffrey Hancock. A little bit of trivia.

2.  Uri Caine, “Stiletto” (from LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD, Winter & Winter, 2004) (Caine, piano, comp.; Drew Gress, bass; Ben Perowsky, drums) (3 stars)

Right now you really got me, because he could be anybody, blanket statement. I don’t hear enough of the concept to really say. We know it’s avant-garde, or controlled or uncontrolled freedom, whatever way you want to look at it, and I’m not really into it that much, even though I can appreciate some of the things I’ve listened to by Cecil Taylor over the years. Well, I can see at least it has some kind of form to it, even though I still don’t recognize the pianist. I don’t think it’s Cecil Taylor, because the form is a bit on the traditional side…whatever that means. It’s more of what I would call, as I said before, “controlled freedom,” because it has some kind of theme to it. But as to who it is, at this point it’s hard to say. Conceptually speaking, I think it’s probably somebody on the younger side, one of the younger generation guys. To take a guess (because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything by this pianist), Matthew Shipp. That’s just a guess. Or another pianist who I also don’t really know a lot about—Jason Moran. Again, that’s just a guess. It’s definitely somebody who’s been influenced by McCoy Tyner and Herbie, even though, as I said before, it’s a little bit on the free side.  But it swings. I like the sound of the drums. See, with this kind of music, at least if it swings, you can get some kind of musical enjoyment out of it. As I said, not to be redundant, I hear traces of McCoy and Herbie and them. Is it possible it could be a female? I don’t think Geri Allen, but perhaps someone like Rachel Z—even though I’m not that familiar with her playing. It’s definitely somebody younger than I am. One person comes to mind, but again I haven’t heard a lot of him—Eric Lewis. But I don’t think he’s recorded yet. Or possibly Marcus Roberts. That’s just a guess. 3 stars, because it swings. [AFTER] I know who he is, but I’m not familiar with his playing at all. Once they got into the form, I enjoyed it. It was swinging. It took on a theme of its own, so it was something I could grab onto.

3. Danilo Perez, “Overjoyed” (from …TILL THEN, Verve, 2003) (Perez, piano; Ben Street, bass; Adam Cruz, drums) (5 stars)

I like the song, Stevie Wonder, “Overjoyed.” But I have to figure out who the pianist is. So far, I like what I’m hearing. It reminds me a little bit of one of my favorite pianists, but I don’t think it’s him. I hear it in the left hand-right hand. Geoff Keezer comes to mind, but I don’t think it’s Geoff. I like the sound of the recording, too. The bass is in tune, good sound on the drums. Very interesting.  Here we go again; educated guess again. It’s not Geoff Keezer. It’s not Mulgrew Miller. Possibly somebody like Brad Mehldau.  That’s just an educated guess. I enjoyed it, so I’d say 4 stars for the performance, and another star for the genius of Stevie Wonder. So 5 stars. [AFTER] Isn’t that something. I should have known it, because I think I heard it recently on the radio. I’ve heard Danilo do some wonderful things with Roy Haynes.

4. Alice Coltrane, “Walk With Me” (from TRANSLINEAR LIGHT, Verve, 2004) (Coltrane, piano; James Genus, b; Jeff Watts, d) – (4 stars)

It’s a good sound coming out of the instrument. So far I haven’t heard enough to put my finger on anybody that I recognize. It has what you call a gospel type theme to it. Whoever the pianist is, they have a good sound out of the instrument, good technique, good chord voicings in the lower register. But right now, I don’t know who it is or who it could be. Something about the theme reminds me a little bit of Keith Jarrett, but I don’t think it’s Keith. Some parts of it remind me a little of Stanley Cowell, one of my dearest and closest friends and a true musical giant, but I don’t think it’s Stanley. 4 stars. [AFTER] I noticed the harp-like qualities in the right hand. Alice Coltrane, nice. Very, very well played.

5. Eric Reed, “La Berthe” (from E-BOP, Savant, 2003) (Reed, piano; Rodney Whitaker, bass; Rodney Green, drums; Elmo Hope, composer) (4 stars)

Nice little theme. It reminds me of something that maybe Thelonious would have written, theme-wise and the way it’s syncopated. I like the performance. I like the pianist.  Nice touch. The concept reminds me of the kind of stuff that Woody Shaw used to play. But I don’t have an idea who it could be. I like the piece. I like the concept. It’s a good touch from the pianist. It’s the kind of song I would enjoy playing. But I can only take a guess on who it might be. Like I said, I hear a lot of Monk influence in the performance and in the theme itself. Possibly someone like Jessica Williams, but that’s just a guess. I think it’s an original composition. That’s the feeling I get. What period? It sounds like something that could have been written within the last year or so, conceptually speaking. Both the piece and the performance sound very up-to-date. 4 stars. [AFTER] Sorry, Eric. But he’s one of my favorites. That just shows music is never dated. Because conceptually speaking, it sounds like it could have been written last week. Eric Reed is a tremendous young musician. I have a lot of respect for him. He understands all phases of the music. I told him he’s one of the few young pianists who understands the difference between blocked chords and locked hands, and he looked at me and said, “Oh, do I really?” and we laughed. But he’s a tremendous young man. Stride, boogie-woogie, everything. I have a lot of respect for him.

6. Don Pullen, “Warriors” (from NEW BEGINNINGS, Blue Note, 1988) (Pullen, piano; Gary Peacock, bass; Tony Williams, drums) (5 stars)

Right away, it sounds like a pianist I always enjoyed, because he proved he could play on the edge of being out, but he could play inside, he could play tradition. He was also a very good organ specialist. Just listening to the theme and the pianistic things he’s doing, it reminds me a lot of Don Pullen. Bingo!  At last! He was a tremendous musician. [Who do you think the drummer is?] I get a feeling it’s someone like Ed Blackwell. I don’t know if it’s him, but… The thing I like about Don Pullen… One night at the Vanguard years ago, before they got the new piano, and the upper register was a little bit out, I asked him, “Don, how did you hear up there without… You make it sound so…” He said, “I just play it.” The upper register can be a little tricky. He did wonderful things, and it didn’t seem to detract from his performance. I had a lot of respect for Don Pullen. Great musician. You can hear his classical training in his piano playing. I guess the obvious thing to say about the drummer, since they worked together, would be Dannie Richmond, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be him. Something about him reminds me a bit of Roy Haynes. I don’t hear enough of the snare sound and the cymbal, but rhythmically it reminds me a little taste of Roy Haynes. Or possibly Tony Williams. Ah, see, that’s that Massachusetts connection with Alan Dawson, Roy, Tony. Boy, could Tony play. I’ll give it 5 stars for the overall performance. To me, that’s what you call controlled freedom. The things he was doing on the piano made sense because you can hear the skills he had developed through his classical training coming through.

7. Geoff Keezer, “Gollum’s Song” (from WALK ON, Telarc, (Keezer, piano; Scott Colley, bass; Karriem Riggins, drums) (5 stars)

I like that. Geoff Keezer comes to mind. The concept of the song, the touch in the right hand, the ideas in the right hand. At first, a little bit, it reminded me of Mulgrew; they have a similar kind of thing at times.  But listening, it reminds me a lot of Geoff. But I need to listen a little bit more to the right hand. If I had to guess, I’d say Geoff Keezer. Give him 10 stars, if there’s such a thing. I mean, he’s that good. He’s a tremendous musician.  The one thing I love about him is that he’s really captured the essence of Phineas Newborn, Jr., more than any pianist that I can think of. Naturally, Mulgrew and Donald Brown. But Geoff has captured the little nuances. Not just the obvious stuff, which is hard enough, but Geoff has captured those little nuances that Phineas used to do. And consider the fact that Geoff never met Phineas, and all he had to go by was what he heard on records and the one video.  But I have tremendous respect for this young man. He never ceases to amaze me. I like the interplay with the bass and drums. I heard Scott Colley once with Herbie Hancock at the Blue Note; he’s a very good bassist. Geoffrey Keezer. Eau Claire. Wisconsin. 5 stars. He’s even found a way to get into his playing a lot of those Latin montuno rhythmic things. He’s been getting into that a lot.

8. Herbie Hancock, “Blue Otani” (from THE PIANO, Columbia/Legacy, 1978/2004) (Hancock, piano, composer) (4½ stars)

I like it. Naturally, it’s the blues. You can’t go wrong with the blues. Now I’ll try to figure out who it is! Oh, I like it. It’s a lot going on. When it first started out, the chord things reminded me a little bit of Herbie Hancock. Then it reminded me a little bit of Ray Bryant. But I’m sure it’s neither one. I enjoyed the performance, but I must say I’m stumped on that one. I have no idea. But 4½ stars. To play like that is very hard to do. That’s the thing that separated Art Tatum from all of us. To play fast or slow, and play it where the consistency of the time is still going on. He had some nice ideas, too. Good technique, good ideas—I liked the overall performance. But I have no idea. [AFTER] You’re kidding! See, I got half of it right! Years ago, we used to talk about solo piano and stride and stuff, and years ago he wasn’t really interested so much in the stride aspect.

9. Brad Mehldau, “Anything Goes” (from ANYTHING GOES, Warner, 2004) (Mehldau, piano; Larry Grenadier, bass; Jorge Rossy, drums) (5 stars)

Hmm, “Anything Goes,” huh?  Nicely done. Cole Porter. Yeah, I like that. I like the concept. I like the fact it’s odd-metered; it sounds like it’s in 5/4. It’s nice to take a song like that, which is unique in its own way. At this point, I don’t know who the pianist is, but I like what I’m hearing. Good right hand, good left hand. I’d guess Brad Mehldau because of the ideas in the right hand, and the way he uses his left hand. You can tell he has a good left hand also. And the overall concept of the piece. Good harmonic concept also. I’ll tell you, with the quality of the crop of pianists coming out within the last 5 to 10 years, if I had to start now, I wouldn’t choose the piano.  There are some rough guys out there, man. And ladies, too. 5 stars.

10. Denny Zeitlin, “E.S.P.” (from SLICK ROCK, MaxJazz, 2004) (Zeitlin, p.; Buster Williams, b; Matt Wilson, d) – (5 stars)

Right away, I know I like the composition. I don’t want to give the wrong composer credit, but I know it’s either Herbie’s tune or Wayne Shorter’s. Sometimes I get them a little mixed up. But that much I know. The tune is either Herbie’s or Wayne’s when they played with Miles.  There’s some stuff there chordally that reminds me of Ahmad. Another one of these two-handed pianists. It reminds me a little bit of a gentleman that I used to hang out with in Chicago, when he was studying at Johns Hopkins. Denny Zeitlin comes to mind because of the harmonic concept and the ability to use both hands equally well. But that’s just a guess. Again, process of elimination, I know who it’s not, but he comes to mind. The cymbal beat from the drummer reminds me a little bit of Tony Williams. I just heard something from the bassist that reminded me a little of Ron Carter, but it’s not Ron Carter. Oh, that’s Buster Williams. Tremendous musician. Unsung hero. Would that possibly be Matt Wilson? So it’s Denny Zeitlin. A couple of years ago, I saw that trio working at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase in Chicago 5 stars, mainly because of our Chicago connection and the love we both have for Chris Anderson, Ahmad Jamal and Billy Wallace. He had a lot of respect and still has a lot of respect for Billy Wallace, Dr. Denny Zeitlin.

11. Anthony Wonsey, “Darn That Reality” (from BLUES FOR HIROSHI, Sharp-9, 2004) (Wonsey, p; Richie Goods, b; Tony Reedus, d) – (5 stars)

Sounds like “Darn That Dream” but rearranged. I like it. The pianist sounds very familiar, but I can’t quite call him. David Hazeltine comes to mind because of the arrangement of the song, for some reason, but I’m not sure. The drums sound like it could be Joe Farnsworth, but again I’m not totally sure. It sounds like David Hazeltine to me, even though a lot of the stuff he’s doing in the right hand is a little out of character. By that I mean it’s not normally the way he would play.  But because of the arrangement, I would have to say David Hazeltine, possibly Farnsworth, maybe Peter Washington. 5 stars. It’s not? Well, I still give it 5 stars. I hear a lot of Phineas Newborn type of influence in the right hand with the triplets and things. Swinging. [AFTER] Oh, Mulgrew Miller’s ex-student. That’s why I could hear a little of the Phineas Newborn influence. Wonsey. I’ll still give him 5.

12. Bud Powell, “Tea For Two” (from BIRDLAND ‘53, Vol.1, FRESH SOUND, 1953/1991) (Powell, piano; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Roy Haynes, drums) (5 stars)

I know it’s an older recording. Just listening to the concept, I’d have to say Bud Powell, off the top. I’ll stand by Bud Powell, and give him all the stars you can muster up. “Tea For Two.” As an educated guess, I’d say the drummer is Max, and the bassist is either Mingus or George Duvivier. Possibly Arthur Taylor? Just an educated guess. Bud definitely opened stuff up. He and Nat Cole. Two different schools, but very influential. 5 stars.

Brad Mehldau’s Blindfold Test From 2000 (Uncut) — He Turned 41 Yesterday

Eleven years ago, I had an opportunity to do the DownBeat Blindfold Test with Brad Mehldau, then 30, and in residence at the Village Vanguard for a week-long engagement. It was conducted in Mehldau’s hotel room on the Upper West Side; if memory serves, he listened to the selections through headphones on a Sony Diskman…or maybe it was an Aiwa. In any event, here’s the pre-edit version.

Brad Mehldau (Blindfold Test) – (9-21-00):

1.    Art Tatum-Red Callendar-Jo Jones, “Just One Of Those Thing,”  THE COMPLETE ART TATUM GROUP RECORDINGS (#1) (1956/199_) (5 stars)

Tatum.  “Just One Of Those Things.”  I guess I know it’s Tatum from his melodic concept on here, because he’s not playing solo, which then you can really hear it in all his voice leading.  Just aesthetically, I prefer his solo playing.  With the rhythm section… I don’t know who this is.  Is this Slam Stewart? [No.] I’m hearing the drum solo now that he’s playing four-to-the-floor.  I have a feeling I should know this drummer from his style on the brushes.  I can’t put a name with it.  But he sounds great.  The bass player, too. [you’ve haven’t heard this before.] No. [Is Tatum someone you’ve listened to a lot?] More his solo stuff, like the Pablo reissue of his solo albums, where it’s just one standard after another and these incredible things.  But this is really something I want to check out. [AFTER] Jo Jones!  Unbelievable.  Definitely 5 stars.  His whole melodic approach to lines, the way he’s playing over changes is so much not-informed by bebop.  It’s so fresh to hear that.  But very unto itself, really dealing with the changes.  He’s also using the whole instrument.  Even though he’s not playing solo, he’s really getting down there.  Amazing.

2.    Chick Corea, “Monk’s Dream,”SOLO PIANO: STANDARDS (Concord, 2000). [solo piano] (4 stars)

I really don’t know that person’s style.  I wouldn’t even know who to guess.  It’s “Monk’s Dream.”  I would give it 4 stars, because it’s really creative and interesting harmonically.  This kind of feel for me is a little jagged.  As a performance, it left me feeling a little unsettled rhythmically, just for my own taste.  But really creative, interesting harmonic things he’s doing, using the upper register there and different melodies going on at the same time in some places. [AFTER] Really?  It’s a live performance, huh?  Nice recorded sound, too.  You can hear a lot of the room in there, which I also like.

3.    Christian McBride, “Lullaby For A Ladybug,”  SCI-FI (Verve 2000). [Herbie Hancock, piano; Diane Reeves, vocal.] (4 stars)

It’s a beautiful composition.  I don’t know the vocalist.  I don’t feel like I know anyone.  The piano player is somebody who’s been influenced by Herbie Hancock, but I’m not sure whether it’s Herbie himself.  It’s a tough call. [Why is it hard to tell?] That’s a good question.  There are some spots where the piano player is playing a lot, maybe more than sometimes Herbie does — but sometimes Herbie plays a lot, too.  That would probably be my only criticism, is that on the actual piano solo itself it’s a little out of context to what’s going on around the whole thing, and sometimes he’s jumping on the vocalist a little with some of the things that he’s reacting to.  But just my taste; that’s a taste thing.  But the track is beautiful.  The composition itself, and the recorded sound is great. [So do you think it’s Herbie or not?] I’d probably guess Herbie.  [LAUGHS] I got a couple of them right here.  Diane Reeves?  I don’t know who the composer was. [AFTER] No kidding?  I didn’t even recognize Christian, because he’s so unobtrusive.  Wow, I’m going to have to get this record.  Who is the drummer?  He’s great.  4 stars.

4.    Hank Jones-Dave Holland-Billy Higgins, “Yesterdays,” THE ORACLE (Emarcy, 1989). (4 stars)

That’s got to be Billy Higgins on drums.  It’s kind of tough to tell the piano player.  I’m not sure about the bassist.  Maybe Ron Carter?  The piano player, there’s a feel there that’s kind of like the feel I associate with Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, but I’m not sure whether it’s one of them.  I really don’t know.  It was a little aimless in some parts of the arrangement, but it felt great.  I liked how it started out in D-minor, I think, and then modulated down, and I liked that little bass thing.  4 stars.  Every record Billy Higgins is on is just going to feel great.  I’ve played with him a few times with Charles Lloyd.  The experience of playing with him is like nothing else; it’s like being taken for a ride.  I should have just guessed Hank!

5.    Geoff Keezer, “Maple Sugar Rays,”  ZERO ONE (GMN, 2000). [solo] (3-1/2 stars)

Maybe Mulgrew on some solo record I don’t know? [You’re warm.] I don’t want to make a generalization, but for me the style was a little too much of the same thing for the whole thing.  It’s kind of predictable after a while.  Really inside the harmony, and a certain kind of melodic vocabulary that sort of sounds like a vocabulary already.  So after a while I’m not too interested listening to this.  Also, dynamically it’s always pretty loud, which after a  while gets on my nerves.  There were some spots in the arrangement that were nice, where he was doing some harmonic stuff that made it interesting, but for the rest of it I felt like he was kind of running stuff.  It got to be a little of the same after a while.  3-1/2 stars. [AFTER] That’s interesting, because I have this but I’ve only listened to it once.  Was this an original?  Some of the pieces on here were really different, where he’s treating the piano.  That makes sense, because it’s a certain style… It’s more of an aesthetic thing than an actual qualitative thing, because that’s a whole school of piano playing that I haven’t gravitated towards too much, like Harold Mabern and some of those guys.  It’s not my taste.

6.    Bill Charlap, “All Through The Night,”  ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT (Criss-Cross, 1997). [Peter Washington, bass; Kenny Washington, drums] (4-1/2 stars)

I really enjoyed it.  It was tough, because the solo introduction was sort of in a different style than what it turned into with the trio.  I was thinking about the trio as it went along… Maybe Ahmad Jamal.  I don’t know who it is, then, but I really loved the performance.  I thought this arrangement where they kept going back to that theme reminded me of something Ahmad might do.  But the melodic concept was… You could hear some of a bebop kind of  thing in there.  Also, we were just listening to Tatum.  There are some triple-time things he was doing, but very original, though, in his or her own right, with the lines, doing some different, creative, fresh melodic things that really were fun to listen to.  I really liked it.  A great, swinging trio thing.  It was really locked-up.  Not 5 stars, because I could have done without the intro, a lot of flashy stuff.  4-1/2 stars.  Cole Porter really has a specific sound as a composer.  Sometimes it reminded me of “From This Moment On,” sort of the way his harmonic movement is.  But Bill put in some great changes on his own, too, that really were nice, the way they worked with the melody under it.

7.    Earl Hines, “Prelude To A Kiss,”  PLAYS DUKE ELLINGTON (New World, 1974/1997) [solo piano] (5 stars)

Wow!  I don’t know the performance, but I think it’s Monk.  It’s not Monk?  It’s “Prelude To A Kiss.”  Whoever it is, I’ll have to give it five stars.  It’s so deep harmonically, what he’s doing inside the chords, the way it builds up as an arrangement throughout.  He starts from something and just develops out of it organically, and it gets more and more dense.  The other thing that’s great is once the time starts it’s really right there.  You can always hear the quarter-note no matter what’s going on.  I don’t know Monk’s solo playing too much; that’s why I might have guessed him. [Monk would tend to be sparer.] A little more spare, yes.  Because I did hear, again, some of those Tatumesque runs in there.  That seems to be a theme of a lot of what we’re listening to. [Do you think it was a more contemporary player or an older player?] I’m going to guess older because of the nature of the recording quality and the piano horribly out of tune!  But I just don’t know.  I’m disappointed in myself. [AFTER] [In your learning process, were you into older piano players?] Not as much.  It’s more just because I haven’t gotten around to them yet.  But the ones that I really know are some Tatum and some Duke.

8.    Ahmad Jamal, “I Love You,”  BIG BYRD (Verve, 1996). [James Cammack, ass; Idris Muhammad, drums; Manolo Badrena, percussion] (4-1/2 stars)

I’m going to guess Ahmad again.  That’s a great arrangement.  Now it’s staying on this vamp and… I don’t know his later records too much, but I’ve had the chance to hear him live a lot, and there’s still that great way of taking “I Love You” and making these vamps throughout it which make it a different kind of compositional thing.  And he plays so compositionally, too.  He plays with that arrangement.  The tune is almost incidental a lot of the time, which is what’s so great about it.  I definitely checked out “Live At The Pershing” and “Awakening,” the one that he did “Dolphin Dance,” explored the oeuvre of Herbie and Bill Evans.  The drummer has a really fat groove.  4-1/2 stars.

9.    John Hicks, “Passing Through,” AN ERROLL GARNER SONGBOOK (High Note, 1997). [solo piano] (3-1/2 stars).

I have no guesses on this one.  I’m coming up short here.  [AFTER] Again, that’s sort of not my aesthetic.  My thought was that this is someone who probably plays more in groups regularly, and solo piano is sort of a departure for him.  What I noticed is that… Maybe it’s because I’m a piano player.  I feel that his rhythmic thing is almost reacting to an invisible band that’s not there.  So as a solo performance, I wanted a little more of what the bass and drums would typically supply somehow, no matter how abstractly that might be.  It felt like there was this hole.  The composition was kind of normal for my taste.  It didn’t particularly get me too much.  3-1/2 stars.  Nice recorded sound.

10.    Kenny Kirkland, “Ana Maria,” KENNY KIRKLAND (GRP, 1991) [Andy Gonzalez, bass; Jerry Gonzalez, congas; Steve Berrios, drums; Wayne Shorter, composer]

I love the composition, but I can’t pick out which one it is.  The shape of the melody sounds familiar.  Is it a Wayne tune?  I love the way the piano player states the melody, nice and rhapsodically through the bar-line, with a nice texture building up.  During the blowing the piano player has a nice, crisp technique in the right hand which I always enjoy hearing.  The kind of crispness I associate with Wynton Kelly, a really articulate thing which is nice in the double-time stuff.  I thought it could have been maybe a chorus shorter, because after a while you hear certain melodic shapes repeating themselves over and over again.  As a group performance, I felt like there was a piano player, then there was this percussion thing that was reacting with the piano a little rhythmically in the double-time stuff, and the bass and drums were sort of in the background.  It could have been the mix.  I have no clue who it would be.  4 stars. [AFTER] Kenny Kirkland is another one I haven’t gotten to.  I kind of missed him.  I was so involved in my own listening pattern in the early ’90s and late ’80s.  I was really into guys like Sonny Clark and Mal Waldron — a lot of compers.  I loved Mal Waldron, and the stuff he did with Steve Lacy; the minimalism he uses appealed to me.

11.    Denny Zeitlin, “Cousin Mary,”  AS LONG AS THERE’S MUSIC (32 Jazz, 1997/2000). [Buster Williams, bass; Al Foster, drums] (5 stars)

That got me off the most out of anything you’ve played thus far.  It felt great.  I don’t know the piano player, but I might know the bass and drums.  Maybe it’s not them, but it sounds a little like Ben Riley and Buster Williams, that kind of feel.  Oh, it is Buster.  The drummer has that great tipping feel; it feels so good.  I love the piano player.  I never hear any vocabulary.   First of all, the arrangement of “Cousin Mary” is really great.  You would think, “What can you do with that tune?”—but he finds another harmonic thing that really is also referring to the original, with the strange, different chords for the blues.  You get the feeling that he’s blowing on that, but at a certain point he’s just getting away from what roots should be, and he’s sort of making up different forms of the blues — one thing, one thing, one thing, and then… Again, these 12-bar things.  Which I love. [Does he remind you of anybody?] You can hear a lot of the history of piano playing in there.  I’m probably going to be really embarrassed that I should have known him.  5 stars. [AFTER] Denny Zeitlin!  Wow.  I’ve never heard him.  Charlie Haden always tells me to check this guy out.  Really inspiring.  A great trio performance.  For me the piano is a little high in the mix, but it still doesn’t detract.  It’s still really great.

12.    Martial Solal, “Round Midnight,”  BALLADE DU DIX MARS (Black Saint, 1998) [Paul Motian, drums; Marc Johnson, bass] (4 stars)

The tune is “Round Midnight,” but you’ve got me stumped on the player.  Because I just heard Paul Motian play duo with Frisell in Monterrey, some of the brushwork in this kind of approach where there’s not a leader was reminding me of Motian.  I could do a deductive thing and say maybe it’s Paul Bley.  No?  Now, when I just Paul with Bill, one thing I liked is that within a rhythmic context they were following each other a lot, phrasing together.  With this, one criticism would be that the piano player was going and the other guys were following his phrasing.  So after a while it got to be a little too much of that, and not so much interaction.  It gets kind of noodly, I guess — for me.  Within all that, there were flashes of harmonic things sticking out there in between.  So it might be the kind of thing I could listen to more and start to enjoy more.  It’s definitely a brilliant performance.  I like how the bass player, too, was finding certain notes in there to ground it.  4 stars

13.    Ornette Coleman-Joachim Kuhn, “Passion Cultures,” COLORS (Verve-Harmolodic, 1997) (5 stars)

It’s beautiful.  I think it’s Ornette and Joachim Kuhn.  Beautiful!  I have another record of them that was made in the studio which is much different than this.  Somebody gave it to me in France.  It’s so great to hear a real kind of tonal thing, for the most part, taking place, these modal sections with Ornette’s beautiful melodic thing over it, and then the way Joachim Kuhn found his way out of the harmony slowly, with Ornette.  It’s a wonderful process.  A nice composition that really stands up, the whole thing.  There’s this sort of urgency or sort of mortality feeling to that melody, something haunting that Ornette has the ability to evoke so well.  They’re really together on that.  5 stars.  Definitely a great performance.  Nothing wrong with that.  I checked out mainly the early Atlantic stuff with the quartet, with Don Cherry and Charlie, like Change of The Century, This is Our Music. [Does his late ’60s stuff or the ’70s harmolodics appeal to you?] That stuff I haven’t checked out as much.  Actually, just in the last couple of months while I was on the road, Larry Grenadier was playing me a few things I’d never heard by Prime Time.  So that’s all another “yet” to me.  A lot of times with that quartet, I hear changes.  I’ve talked to Charlie Haden, and he’s like, “Hey, man, we were just making up changes.”  But there’s still definitely a harmonic component going on.

15.    Ruben Gonzalez, “Almendra,”  INTRODUCING RUBEN GONZALEZ (World Circuit/Nonesuch, 1996) (4-1/2 stars)

It’s a great rhythm section.  It sounds Cuban from the beat.  I’m not too familiar with the players, so I really wouldn’t know who to guess.  But I love the bass player and the Latin rhythm section; they’re so locked in.  The arrangement is cool, because they’re just blowing over this… You hear the beginning, the head, and it’s a V-chord.  So it’s suspended on this pedal thing for the whole blowing, because he’s just staying there.  And the piano player is rhythmically free of that and he’s sort of just playing over everything, extemporizing over that, which at first is interesting, but I guess after a while it sort of drags on a little. The content was interesting.  I found myself being reminded of Duke sometimes, actually, in the spaciousness of the way he plays melodies sometimes 2 or 3 octaves apart and leaves this wide-open space in the middle and gets in the lower end or upper register, and using those parts of the piano — and some of the voicings, too.  I thought it was really interesting, the chromatic things he was doing.  4-1/2 stars.

_________
It’s really interesting.  It’s difficult after the fifth one.  You find yourself swamped with information and it gets hard to be objective.  But you never are objective, really.  You’re listening, and then it would be nice to listen to it again.  Then your opinion might change.

Dr. Billy Taylor, 90th birthday anniversary: Interview, Oct. 14, 1999

For the ninetieth birthday anniversary of Dr. Billy Taylor, who passed away last December 28th, I’m posting an interview from October 1999, for the liner notes of a CD documenting a live performance at Manhattan’s Blue Note. For various reasons, the CD was never issued, and the transcript appears here for the first time. The opening section is specific to the recording, but the conversation evolved in interesting directions.

For more, see this video by Bret Primack.

* * * * *

How do you approach a live situation, albeit knowing it’s being recorded, versus a studio situation?

TAYLOR:  I actually prefer doing things like that outside the studio anyway.  I normally record everything I do.  I didn’t have my own soundman at this particular gig for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with the gig, but unfortunately he wasn’t available to me.  So I didn’t record other nights of this particular gig, and I’m sorry I didn’t because I had better nights than the night we actually recorded.

What is it for you that constitutes it being better?

TAYLOR:  Well, a lot of different things.  Basically, I’m talking about my work, what I do, but secondary is the way the trio comes together with each guy pushing everybody else into something else that they might not normally do.  We did a lot of that during this particular engagement, because that’s why I took the gig.  It wasn’t meant to be a clean performance, and so a lot of times I’d reach for something and paint myself into a corner, and just say, “Oh, well, okay,” and go somewhere else.

I kind of like that.

TAYLOR:  Well, I don’t.  The optimum thing is to paint yourself into a corner and get out, and I’ve been able to do that on some occasions.

Tell me about the band.

TAYLOR:  Chip Jackson has been with me for about five years.  One of the reasons I hired him is because I was looking… I had two musicians who had been with me for — I guess between them — more than 20 years.  So they knew me very well and there were no surprises.  I was about to enter into a project, and I really wanted to go into some other directions.  And it wasn’t about them, they’re wonderful musicians, both of them, and I really regretted that I couldn’t do with them what I wanted to do — but I realized that I just needed to hear something else.  So I looked around, and among the… I must have listened to maybe 25 or 50 bass players and rehearsed with them and auditioned them, did all kinds of things, just to hear them play, and then came back to… I didn’t audition Chip.  I mean, I had played with him with my former drummer, Bobby Thomas, and I liked his work.  So I knew what he did and I knew the caliber of his work.  So when I couldn’t find anyone among the people that had been suggested to me that I was looking at, I thought, “hey, let me go check this guy out,” because I remembered him in a very favorable light.  I checked him out and he was perfect, just what I was looking for at that particular moment.  The thing I like about Chip is that he comes to play.  This is a guy who has had a lot of different kinds of experiences, big band, small band; he’s always looking to challenge himself, and every time we sit down to play something he’s going to try to do something that just… He’s like a cheerleader.  he’s going to make it happen.

Good time, big sound, good harmony.

TAYLOR:  Yes.  But more than that, I have a setup… We didn’t use the setup at the Blue Note, and it bothered me a little bit because I’m accustomed to it.  I’m accustomed to having him right in my ear.  So he’s usually right on my left ear.  So that’s something that I work off of.  This was a little different setup.  This was a more normal setup where the bass player is in the bowl of the piano and the drummer is down at the other end of the piano.  I don’t like that.  I’d rather be closer physically to the other two musicians.

At the Blue Note you’re about 20 feet away from the drummer.

TAYLOR:  Right.  And that’s not the way I work.  But it was two groups on a bill, and so I had to be flexible on that.  I mean, it wasn’t impossible to do, so I didn’t…

You’ve probably been in worse situations at one time or another.

TAYLOR:  Well, absolutely, with worse pianos and worse PA systems and worse everything you can think of.  But for a recording I like things pretty optimum, and so I really want everything else to be in perfect shape so that I can fall back on that if I have to.

A few words about Winard.

TAYLOR:  Winard is a guy I’ve admired for a long time.  I mean, when he had his own group with his brother, I thought he was just terrific.  When he was with Betty Carter I heard him in a different setting.  He’s really creative in the sense of being very musical.  He uses the tonal qualities of his various drums in a very imaginative way.  He is the kind of person who, even in a situation where he doesn’t have a clue as to where he is going, after a few bars will hear something and will come up with something very musical to fit the situation.

Going into the Blue Note, did you know you were doing this record during the sets that were recorded?

TAYLOR:  Oh yeah.

Tell me about setting up the repertoire, then.  I suppose I should ask you if you’ve decided what the actual CD sequence is going to be.

TAYLOR:  No, I haven’t yet.  I’ve been listening to it.  But it will be a combination of the two sets as opposed to one set or the other.  I haven’t really listened to it sufficiently.

But obviously, one set is primarily compositions, with one exception, and the other set is, with one exception, standards and tunes you have very intimate and long-term associations with.

TAYLOR:  You know, I didn’t plan it that way.  It just happened that way.  I really was torn between two things, knowing that… I deliberately didn’t rehearse for this gig.  I wanted to go in, and… I knew I was going to play some things that had particular arrangements, but I wanted to see what Winard would do when he heard it.  Maybe he’d come up with something different.  And he did on each occasion.

“Theme And Variations” was a piece that evolved out of a composition that I wrote many years ago.  I was asked to do something for the National Symphony, and I took that particular theme and wrote variations on it for the orchestra.  Then I went back to it a few years ago and said, “I’m going to play it as a tune again.”  So this was the first time we had done that.  It’s never been recorded as “Theme and Variations.”  It had another title.  But the melody and the way we approach it is evolving.  Because I want to do something different with it as a trio.  Which is why I started it off in a semi-contrapuntal fashion.  I was really just figuring what are some of the things that I might want to do with this.  So I just kind of fooled around with it to get started, then I played a little introduction, and we went into it.

“His Name Was Martin.”  I guess I know who that’s about.

TAYLOR:  Yeah, right.  That was the second movement of a long work that I did for a symphony orchestra called “Peaceful Warrior.”  Of the three movements, it’s the one that I like the best, because it really is a simple theme, and when I do it right it really works.  I wasn’t particularly happy with my performance on this one.  I’ve done better performances of it.  It had nothing to do with anything.  It’s just that, you know, I didn’t say what I wanted to say.

Was it written in the ’60s or afterwards?

TAYLOR:  No, it was written way after.  I’m terrible on dates.  I was actually commissioned to write it by the Atlanta Symphony. I was the first American composer that they asked to do something with the orchestra in a series of commissions for American composers.

At what point in your career did you begin writing for large orchestras?

TAYLOR:  I was on the National Council On The Arts back in the ’60s, and I was asked by Maurice Abravanel… He heard me play at a party, and he said, “That was delightful; could you write something like that for the symphony.”  It was a party.  So I said, “Sure.”  I didn’t think any more about it.  A few days later he was back home and he called me from Salt Lake City and said, “I was serious.  I really like what you did, and I’d like for you to write something and come out and play it with the orchestra in the Mormon Tabernacle.”  I said, “Beg your pardon?” [LAUGHS] So to make a long story short, I wrote a piece, and he sort of nursed me through it.  Because he programmed it as Mahler, Bartok and Taylor, just those three on the program.  And I don’t often get stage fright, but boy, I was a bundle of nerves that night.  But it turned out really well.  I mean, it was a wonderful audience and they received it well.  I was surprised.  I really was.  That particular piece was from “Suite For Jazz Piano and Orchestra.”  I didn’t play anything from that.

“Soul Sister” is a blues that I wrote many years ago.  I was playing at a club in Harlem, the Prelude, on upper Broadway, and I wrote it, played it there on several occasions, actually recorded it around that time, and it’s been in my repertoire ever since.  I started playing it when Chip came in the band.  I had been playing with Ramsay Lewis, so I had taken it out of my trio repertoire, but I started playing it with Chip because he has a really good feeling for the blues.  He really gets into some serious things, and he takes it somewhere else every time he plays it.  So that’s one of the things that I play with him a lot.

“Titoro,” apart from your inventions, is Winard Harper’s first set drum feature.  Does that go back to your days with Machito?

TAYLOR:  No.  Actually, I went to Haiti. This was before I went into Birdland.  I was a co-leader of a band that played at a Latin festival down there many years ago.  We were invited and we stayed in Haiti for a month.  There was a drummer there whose name was Tiroro, so I wrote this piece to be played by him and by the young man who was playing with me in those days, whose name was Charlie Smith, who like Winard was a very imaginative and very musical drummer, and I just thought that this would make a good combination.  I didn’t know what I was getting Charlie into.  Drummers take that challenge thing very seriously.  So they really kind of went at each other whenever I played it.  It’s been in my repertoire ever since.  It got the title “Titoro” because Tito Puente recorded it, and his record company thought he wrote it, so they said, “Well, let’s not call it ‘Tiroro,’ let’s call it ‘Titoro.’  Well, he sold a lot of records, so I didn’t change the title.

Can you tell me a bit about your time with Machito?  You’re one of the earliest African-American musicians to blend with Latin bands in a somewhat different way than Dizzy Gillespie did it even.

TAYLOR:  Well, I was influenced by the same man who sort of indoctrinated Dizzy — that was Mario Bauza.  Mario was the musical director of the Machito band, and he was one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever met.  I mean, he was just wonderful.  A fine teacher, a very inspirational mentor.  He just picked me… I was working in the relief band, and their piano player, Joe Loco, was drafted, and Mario picked me to play in the band until they could get another pianist up from Cuba.  They had a guy they wanted to bring because they knew Joe was going to be drafted, but evidently he was called up before they were ready and they couldn’t get this guy up.  So I got a chance to play with the band until he arrived.

How long was that?

TAYLOR:  Not very long.  It was at an engagement at a place on Broadway called La Conga.  In those days were several Latin clubs right on Broadway.  Noro Morales was playing around the corner from us.

Was it a dance club or a sit-down club?

TAYLOR:  It was a club.  We had to play a show.  And they had dancing.  Nearly all of those clubs had dancing.  But there was a show, and it featured people singing and dancing and doing comedy and so forth.  It was just a regular Broadway type club show.

Was playing in clave a big adjustment for you at that time?  Did it seem strange?  Was it natural?

TAYLOR:  I didn’t have a CLUE as to what that was about until I joined that band.  It was really an education.  Mario explained to me that playing out of clave was like in jazz clapping your hands on the 1 and 3 instead of the 2 and 4.  Well, that’s pretty clear. [LAUGHS] I don’t want to do that.  Mario was a wonderful jazz musician.  He’d played with Chick Webb and Calloway.  So he really knew how to give jazz phrasing without fighting the clave, and that was really amazing.

Have you continued to be absorbed in clave and Latin music through the years?  Has it been a continuing preoccupation for you?

TAYLOR:  Oh, yes.  It’s something that is an important part of my style.  I wrote a book, “How To Play The Bombo” and some little piano books back in those years.  Whenever I play there’s always something Latin in it.  It’s just something that’s part of the way I like to play.

It would be great to hear you again with an idiomatic Latin band.

TAYLOR:  But over the years they’ve gotten closer and closer to what we do, so I’m not careful with the clave as I used to be, because you don’t have to be.

The next original is “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” which you did on one of your recent records on Arkadia.  It’s one of your anthems.

TAYLOR:  Mmm-hmm.  This is a totally different version of it, though.  This is more extensive, and I’m playing things in it to test different reactions that I’m getting from Winard in particular.  It was fun.  I enjoyed playing it.  That turned out very interesting.  I played many things that I don’t normally play when I play it, and then I played some things that I always play.  It felt good.

When did you wrote it?

TAYLOR:  I wrote it in the ’60s.  I wrote it for my daughter.

Then we get to this wonderful suite of standards.  “The Man I Love” is a real highlight for me. I don’t see it on any of the recent recordings.

TAYLOR:  I’ve never recorded it. I wish it had been recorded the night before, because it was a much better performance.  It’s something that I’ve been doing in concerts for a while.  I even have better tapes on it.  I’m nitpicking.  It was a good performance. It’s one of those pieces that really defines Gershwin for me.  What he does with harmony there, and what he does with that very simple melody just knocks me out.  I really like it, and I’m going to keep on working on it til I get it right!

It occurred to me for some reason that all the standards seem to be associated with things Coleman Hawkins was playing around the time when you came to New York and got onto 52nd Street.  He recorded “The Man I Love” in ’43, “Night and Day” in ’44, “Yesterdays” I think he did around that time, and also “S’Wonderful.”

TAYLOR:  Well, it might be subliminal.  Coleman Hawkins is someone I’ve admired, looked up to and been influenced by since I first heard him in 1939, when he first came back from Europe.  And to get an opportunity to play with him when I finally came to New York was just a wonderful experience.  So I’m sure that had something to do with it.  However, “Night and Day” is on the very first record I ever made; it’s always been one of my favorites.  And I recently re-recorded it.  I had forgotten all about it, and for some reason I was thinking about Earl Hines.  (I’ll be doing a project on Earl Hines in a couple of weeks.)  But back then, which was a couple of years ago, when I made the Ten Fingers, One Mind record, I was thinking about Earl Hines, and that’s what prompted me to play it.  It had nothing to do with either my first record or Coleman Hawkins.

Teddy Wilson played on his version.

TAYLOR:  Yeah, I remember the one with Teddy, but none of that had anything to do with it!  I was thinking of Earl Hines.  I was working with Eddie South, and Earl Hines played the tune on… We did a concert together in Washington, D.C., my home town.  That was the first time I had ever played opposite Earl Hines.  I did several times later, but that was the first time I’d ever played opposite him.  And he was one of those guys who I looked up to when I was a child, man.  I used to listen to him on the radio and see him when he had the great bands that he would bring to D.C., including the band that had Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.  I just couldn’t believe I was on the same bill with him.  So that night when he played “Night And Day,” I was all ears, because I had never heard him play that.  I heard him play stuff with bands, you know.  And he just wiped me out.  It was just beautiful.  After all these years, I’m sure there’s nothing on there that I played that I got from him.  But just the memory of him doing it inspired me to do it.

Within these, your Tatum reference is evident all the time because of your two-handed orchestral thing, but the Bud Powell vocabulary is so prominent in the voicings.

TAYLOR:  Well, Bud was influenced by Tatum, and so some of the things that are similar in our work, we both got from Tatum — or our take on what Tatum did.  I had a very difficult time making the changeover from some of the things that I loved in the style that I like to call Prebop.  It was beyond swing, but it was the kind of thing that Don Byas and Coleman Hawkins and Ike Quebec and Budd Johnson and Lester Young… A lot of musicians played in this style that was not yet Bebop.  They could play fast like the Beboppers, they could use very intricate harmonies and make all kinds of melodies using that harmony, but they didn’t have the rhythmmic change that came with Bebop yet.  Some of them did later, but at that time they didn’t.  So I was trying to come to grips with all these things that I loved in music, and I wanted to make the change to it.  I didn’t want to lose something just to gain something.  So it was a very difficult time for me.

When would you say that you formed the style that we associate with Billy Taylor?

TAYLOR:  I would say when I was with Don Redman, when I was in Europe, when I finally… I was away from the scene, and I really began to think about the things that I knew and the things that I wanted to say musically, and so it began to come together then.

In forming your style, you had a rather extensive musical training, and from what I know about you, always played music, had a lot of lessons, had always a facility for the piano, were talked into making it your life’s work by a teacher at Virginia State University…

TAYLOR:  I think you did your homework.

When did you start being cognizant of pianists with styles, with individual voices coming through the piano, and who were the first people you emulated?

TAYLOR:  My uncle was the first one.  He played different from anyone in my family.  Everyone in the family played European Classical Music.  And my uncle Robert played Stride piano.  I thought in those days, because I hadn’t heard a lot of pianists that he sounded like Fats Waller, because I had heard Fats Waller on the radio.  I realized later, when I began to hear the difference between Eubie Blake and Fats Waller and some of the other stride piano players, that he sounded more like Willie “The Lion” Smith.  He had kind of the lope that I associate with Willie, although he was kind of melodic in that sense.  It was a little different from Fats; it was melodic in a different sense.  But Fats Waller really was the first stylist that captured me.  I just thought that was wonderful, and that was what I wanted to do, and I wanted to play like that.  Then I heard Teddy Wilson, I heard Art Tatum.

Did your folks take you out to hear music.

TAYLOR:  No-no, oh, no…

Did you go to theaters?

TAYLOR:  I went to theaters.  Every week in Washington, D.C., there was a different band at the Howard Theater.  I got to hear all the great bands.  I heard Ellington, I heard Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson; you name them, I heard them, every week.  Jazz was the popular music of my childhood.  When I was growing up, you could turn on the radio and hear in the afternoon, “And now from the Savoy Ballroom the Chick Webb Band with Ella Fitzgerald” and all that kind of stuff.

When did you first start working?  Did you do little gigs as a teenager around Washington?

TAYLOR:  Yeah, when I was 13.

What sort of gigs?

TAYLOR:  Dance band.  That and parties were the only things around.  Every now and then somebody would ask me to play a party or something like that, which was sort of semiprofessional.  But the professional things, I’d get a chance to substitute for a real professional piano player in a real band, which was terrific!

So really for 65 years you’ve been playing in public.  A few words about your association with “The Man I Love.”

TAYLOR:  Well, Gershwin is one of my favorite composers.  I play a lot of Gershwin.  And I learned a lot about him from people like Willie The Lion Smith and some of the older piano players, who actually knew him and who hung out with him, and they talked about when he would come up to Harlem and some of the things they would do, and the tricks they’d play on him and vice-versa.  They had all these tales about him and other composers who came to Harlem to kind of listen to what was going on.  I realized that one of the reasons why jazz musicians play the musicians of the ’20s and ’30s so much is because those composers really hung out with the jazz musicians of the time, and so the things that they were writing were commingling.  I mean, everybody was influencing everybody else.

A few words about your association to “Yesterdays.”

TAYLOR:  That’s Jerome Kern, and that’s always been… The first time I saw the sheet music to that, I just loved the piece.  I fooled around with it and fooled around with it; I’ve been playing it for many years.  I always find something different in it.  It’s a wonderful composition.  That and “All The Things You Are” are two of the most interesting compositions in the American Pop-Broadway kind of repertoire for me.

Are you a lyrics man?  Do you know lyrics for all the standards that you play?

TAYLOR:  No, I’m just different from most of my friends who learn lyrics to these things.  I don’t even remember my own lyrics, the ones that I write to pieces.  I just don’t have a memory for words like that.  I don’t know why.  I guess because I don’t sing enough.  But I think lyrically.  In terms of anything I write, I sort of in the back of my mind figure, “One day I’m going to write a lyric to that.”  So I think melodically in that sense.

Who are some of the Classical composers who inflect the way you think about improvising?

TAYLOR:  Bach, Chopin, Debussy.  They’re probably the biggest influences.   But there are things there that go back to Mozart, go back to some Beethoven things that are embedded somewhere in my mind.

Have you continued to make Classical music part of your practice repertoire over the years?

TAYLOR:  No.  I really found that there was so much that I wanted to do in jazz that I’ve really focused on that, even in my writing.  All the pieces that I’ve written are jazz pieces.  Because since jazz is America’s classical music, I wanted to do what Duke Ellington did.  He wrote for everything.  I mean, he wrote for Broadway, sacred pieces, he wrote for movies, he wrote for nightclubs, he wrote for vaudeville — he did it all.  And I’m saying, well, if the music is that flexible, I’d like to try to get into as many areas as I can.  So I’ve written for dance, for television, I’ve written commercials and things for “Sesame Street.”  “Homage” is actually a string quartet with a rhythm section.  So I try to do things that are true to jazz, but in the same spirit that people like Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington have done before me.  They wrote with…even though they may have used a form that was associated with Mozart or with somebody else, the form didn’t dictate the content.

Could you, as Dr. Billy Taylor, evaluate the position of Billy Taylor the pianist in American music and in jazz lineage?

TAYLOR:  Well, that’s difficult for me.  I mean, I have influenced a lot of people, but it’s not obvious, and unless they acknowledge it I don’t… Or maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I’m hearing things…

Apart from the influence, what is your contribution?

TAYLOR:  I wrote the first book on how to play Bebop.  So a lot of people got the idea of the fact that Bebop was serious music and that it could be studied and so forth, based on this book I wrote back in 1948 or 1949 entitled Basic Bebop Instruction.  So I guess one of the things that I have really focused on for most of my life is to try to develop my own…to say what I had to say musically to as broad an audience as I could, and show through my own work that jazz was serious music…that it was all the things that I think it is.

So it’s to communicate without dumbing-down.

TAYLOR:  Yeah, that’s exactly correct.  I resent the things like in the ’70s where everybody said, “Let’s do Jazz-Rock so we can win over the young people.”  We didn’t win over a soul.  That was just a terrible time in terms of people delivering misinformation.  Yet at the same time, while all this misinformation was going on, there were people who were coming from jazz and coming from R&B, and really doing things that were exceptional, that have become a part of the music.  But the record people and the music business people are too stupid to know what that is.

Let me ask you about the three Ellington tunes that comprise a kind of suite.  I think I read a story that a friend of yours called Billy White in high school turned you on to “Sentimental Mood” back in the day.  “Caravan” seems to be a thing you use as a drum feature for a while.

TAYLOR:  Mmm-hmm.

And you’ve done that arrangement, that slowed down “Take The A Train,” which forgive me, but I seem to remember Coleman Hawkins doing on that 1962 Impulse record…

TAYLOR:  Really?

Oh, maybe that was “Cherokee” he did it with.

TAYLOR:  Yes, it was “Cherokee.”

I have Coleman Hawkins on the brain.

TAYLOR:  Hey, listen, you can’t do too much better than that.  Actually, there’s a story behind that.  I actually had been playing…not always in public… I started playing it at Billy Strayhorn’s funeral.  I was asked by Reverend John Gensel to play at the funeral, and I did.  This is when he had a church up on Broadway.  So I was up in the choir loft, playing.  While I was playing, during the service, Ray Nance came up and said, “Reverend Gensel said I could play something.”  I said, “Okay, what do you want to play?”  He said, “A Train.”  Well, I thought he was going to play it fast, because that’s the way I’d always played it.  So he said, “Let me start it.”  I said, “Okay.”  So he played a little cadenza and then started it as a ballad.  And I never until that moment realized how beautiful the melody was!  So I said, “Hey!”  So I started to play it like that, and I’ve continued to play it like that ever since.

A few words about the dynamics of the “Sentimental Mood” that make it so attractive to you.

TAYLOR:  Well, Duke Ellington was a master at doing a lot with a little.  He took a very simple harmonic device (and that’s what I do in the very opening of my introduction to the melody) where he plays a minor chord and then he lowers the tonic a half-step, then another half-step.  It’s a device that’s used by many people.  It was used harmonically in the tune “Blue Skies” by Irving Berlin.  It was used in “My Funny Valentine” by Rodgers & Hart.  It’s a really common device.  But he uses it so beautifully, and he’s so original.  He comes up with a melody you just wouldn’t expect from that combination of chords.

The impression I always get of you is that you’re perpetually looking forward to the next project, forward-looking,  and amazingly youthful.  A recording like this, and particularly the second set is such a beautiful dialogue with the past.  One of the things I love about jazz is that constant interplay of past and present.

TAYLOR:  Well, for me, in many cases, the past is the present.  I realize that what’s happening now, jazz is going through a period of reevaluation.  People like Wynton Marsalis and other talented young people are looking back, as I did when I was their age, and saying, “Here are some things that were done by mentors and by predecessors, and I want to really look carefully at that, because I want to build something… I don’t want to do what they did, but I want to build something on it.”  I hear so much of that now, I’m really excited by it.  It’s something that many people of my generation have done, but we do it from a different perspective.  So it’s just delightful to hear some of the young players now, trombone players and trumpet players using a mute to wah-wah kind of thing that Duke Ellington did.  They hadn’t done that in years.  And to hear some of the pianists utilizing two-handed playing, whether it’s stride or some other form of two-handed playing.  It’s really very refreshing to realize that it’s not just some of the things that one has heard other pianists do, Bill Evans or… They’re doing some different things.

One of the great things about jazz is that it seems self-regenerating within its forms.  When we talk about it as “classical music,” we’re not talking about it as a museum, but as a living entity.

TAYLOR:  Many people misunderstand what I’m saying when I say jazz is classical music.  When they think of classical music, they only think of European classical music.  But they refuse to recognize that there’s Chinese classical music and there is Indian classical music, both of which have things which are similar to jazz in terms of improvisatory aspects within the forms that they generate and things that are unique to the moment in both of those types of classical music.  So classical music doesn’t have to come to the conclusions that European classical music came to.  European classical music, unfortunately, in the ’60s or ’50s began to go into an area which excluded the audience.  It became so intellectual that the audience was excluded and the audience rejected it.  So now, many of the composers who were trained in that form are looking to other means of expression.  I was reading a review or something of Bill Bolcom the other day, an opera he’s just written, and it was a good review, so evidently he’s reaching out to the critics as well as the audience.  I hope that’s a trend which will continue.  Because there have always been people who wrote in the European tradition, like Leonard Bernstein, who was put down heavily because he was reaching audiences.  Everybody said, “How good could it be?  The audience understands it.”  And it was ridiculous, because here was a man who was a genius, and who really did wonders with the things that he learned and respected from Mahler and from all the great writers, and yet he was just as good…

[END OF SIDE OF FIRST TAPE]

Leonard Bernstein was to me one of the great musicians of the century.  He was a wonderful pianist, a wonderful composer, a wonderful conductor, and one of our great teachers.  I look at him as one of the directions that European Classical Music could go in, because he was very American in what he did, even though he was steeped in the European tradition.

One final question, which is a sort of silly one.  Do you have a most exciting bandstand moment that you can single out over the years?

TAYLOR:  Well, there are so many of them.  I’ve been playing a long time.  And every time someone asks that question I say, “Well, this was terrific, that was terrific” — any number of things.  In nightclubs, one of the great moments for me was when I played opposite the Duke Ellington Orchestra in Birdland.  It was a solo performance.  It was opening night, and Duke Ellington had just brought the house down with Louis Bellson’s drum solo, and just… I mean, the place was literally screaming; the people were just yelling and screaming and standing up.  It was bedlam in the place, you know.  Instead of taking his bow and thanking them profusely and walking off, he thanked them, and he stood there, and he thanked them again, and then he began to say, “Louis Bellson loves you madly, Johnny Hodges loves you madly,” and he began to go through the individual names of all the members of the band.  As he was saying that, the whole sound in the room lowered so that they could hear what he was saying.  And when it was sufficiently quiet, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a young man from my home town who is going to play the piano for you.  I want to hear him.  So I’d like you to join me in listening to Mr. Billy Taylor.”  Well, I’ll never forget that.

Do you see your sound as transcending style?  As Ellington might say, as being beyond category?

TAYLOR:  Well, I hope so.  Because I try to include… He was a big influence on me, Tatum was an influence, Don Redman was an influence, Don Byas was an influence.  I have so many things.  Coleman Hawkins.  When I worked with Coleman Hawkins, I knew the solo in “Body and Soul,” and he didn’t — because he never learned that solo.  It was an improvisation.

Did he always improvise “Body and Soul”?

TAYLOR:  Yeah.  He would never play that solo.  People would come in every night and ask for it.  He’d play “Body and Soul” but he’d never play that solo.

All the musicians knew it but he didn’t.

TAYLOR:  That’s right.  Everybody in the band knew it, but him.  I made several records with him, but the one that I remember was with Papa Jo Jones.

’54, right?

TAYLOR:  That’s right.

You play “Cheek To Cheek”…

TAYLOR:  That’s correct.  That’s the one.

…and “Jitterbug Waltz.”

TAYLOR:  For me, that was one of those dates that if I never made another record, I’d say, “Well, thank you.” [LAUGHS] Just to be with those guys on that occasion.

Andrew Hill’s 80th Birthday Anniversary

Two years ago to the day, not long after I’d started this blog, I posted a piece I wrote for DownBeat in 2000 on the  pianist-composer Andrew Hill (1931-2007). I’m augmenting that post today with four interviews that I conducted with Andrew (below the text of the story), two  on WKCR (1996, 2000) and three in 2000 for purposes of the article. As you can read in the section of 1996 interview that addresses Andrew’s encounter with Charlie Parker at Detroit’s Graystone Ballroom in 1949, and in a few other spots, Andrew was playing along with a 1937 birthdate attributed on the liner notes  of his Blue Note recordings in the ’60s…but 1931 is what it was.

* * *

When I was a child, I was able to write music without hearing  it,” Andrew Hill told me in the spring of 2000, during one of several conversations for a DownBeat article that ran later that year.  “I’d write it at the piano, and then reshape it away from the piano by looking at it—lines, counterlines, and different things. I was in the streets, hustling, and and people began to notice. The only thing they didn’t agree with was my own personalized notation.”

Individuality was the defining trope of Hill’s career. Born in Chicago 80 years ago today, and a South Side resident until 30, Hill—who died on April 20, 2007—blossomed creatively during the ’60s, recording a series of sui generis recordings—Point of Departure, Smokestack, Black Fire, Judgment, Compulsion—on Blue Note, animated by the likes of Joe Henderson, Eric Dolphy, Sam Rivers, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Dorham, Roy Haynes, Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Joe Chambers, and Richard  Davis.

“To me, it’s more like an alternative approach,” Hill had said of his attitude to music during a 1996 conversation on WKCR. “In Western civilization, melody is the major voice. Rhythm and harmony is just an accessory.  I’ve always, especially since emerging on accordion with the Blues groups and the Boogie Woogie, approached rhythm as the predominant voice, with harmony as an accessory. Though many things have changed traditionally, that dynamic hasn’t changed.  Always check the rhythm to hear the integrity of the music then and now, whether it’s retrospective or trying to go ahead.  If it’s static and stagnant, that means the music is dead, because they have such an academic approach, and they learned all the melodies but they have no rhythmic interaction.”

Hill’s music contained extraordinary rhythmic nuance—in the manner of  Charlie Parker, he stacked rhythms, morphing time signatures from measure to measure in his pieces, and, when comping, altering the beats in every phrase. This is one reason why Vijay Iyer, one of Hill’s numerous acolytes amongst creative musicians under 45, could write for the now-dormant webzine www.jazz.com that what had always drawn him to Hill’s music was its innate sense of mystery. “It challenges your sense of what music is,” Iyer stated. “You can’t really listen to it as style, like, ‘Oh, this is a great example of hardbop, or postbop.’ To me, it just explodes all those categories. It’s something much more fundamental about existence.”

In the aforementioned DownBeat article, posted below, Hill spoke of the context in which he developed his ideas.  (Please also see David Adler’s fine 2006 profile in Jazz Times.)

* * * *

At Birdland on the Saturday night after the United Nations Millennium Conference, Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure Sextet concluded a ferocious 90-minute first set to raucous applause from an audience that included a generous percentage of dark-suited men wearing wires up their sleeves.  Moments later, prompted by what the pianist-composer later informed friends was a Presidential request, Hill and alto saxophonist Marty Ehrlich, played “Summertime” as an impromptu encore.  Well, the bartender later burst the bubble by noting that it was the wife of the President of Ecuador who popped the question.  But it didn’t seem such a stretch to imagine Bill Clinton — who attended jazz camps as a teenage saxophonist when Hill was recording the 8 or 9 Blue Note sessions by which many people still define him — taking a break from various off-the-record meetings to hear the composer-pianist on whose classics “Black Fire” and “Point of Departure” tenor hero Joe Henderson appeared.

Hill began to revisit the sonic terrain of Point of Departure — which blended the sounds of Henderson, multi-reedman Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, bassist Richard Davis and an 18-year-old Tony Williams — two years ago, not long after returning from a two-decade West Coast residence spent teaching and sporadically performing.  Expecting to find a scene where “everything is a retrospective,” he instead discovered what he describes as a “golden age” defined by an intense cadre of improvisers intent on “creative contact with older musicians” working toward the end of “reclaiming a lot of things that had been lost.”

“There hasn’t been as much young, fresh talent as is on the scene now since the ’60s,” Hill states.  “Life has been breathed into the music.  I’m seeing young musicians who understand the traditional musical vocabulary — the free playing, which has been out for forty years, and the magic of Bebop — enough to be able to use critical thinking in terms of the timbre, to associate a certain sound with a certain creative process that will fit into this period.  They aren’t playing things they heard off records; they’re not looking at anything as old and new.”

Inspired by his young cohorts, Hill “got the writing disease,” producing a flood of new work, a smattering of which he recorded on Dusk [Palmetto], in September 1999.  The music is sui generis — mysterious, elusive, soulful, rich in mood and character, expansively written, replete with beautiful melodies and counter-melodies, complex intervals, unique voicings, intense vamps and ostinatos, each section tailored to the tonal personalities of the musicians, morphing in a nonce from keening rubato passages to long lines propelled by churning counter and cross-rhythms that define the overall motion.  “Each piece inhabits its own musical world,” Ehrlich says succinctly.  “Andrew is using a lot of different compositional devices in them, but what’s consistent is a sense of musical poetry and lyricism.”

Dusk is the capstone of a very good year for the 69-year-old pianist-composer.  He engaged Bobby Hutcherson, David Murray, Andrew Cyrille and Archie Shepp in well-publicized duos.  After spending most of the summer in a wing of a well-appointed castle courtesy of an Italian artists’ colony, he performed on a showcase night at the Chicago Jazz Festival that included a reunion with Von Freeman (they played “Stardust”), who appeared on Hill’s debut recording in 1956, for Ping, a Chicago independent operated out of the back of a record store at 47th and Cottage Grove.

“Andrew’s music is very heavily mental,” says Hutcherson, who first recorded with Hill on Judgment (1964) and on Dialogue (1965).  “You go into rooms you wouldn’t normally enter.  There’s always a little story in the melody, a reason why this tune is being played; it’s your own story, what you’re seeing as you play.  He’d give you melancholy, long notes, you’d think, ‘man, how long can you hold this note so that there will be this texture?’ — then all of a sudden it burst into a chant, a hope within the note.  Religious, I guess you can say…well, the religion of the bandstand…of someone’s thoughts.  It was very challenging, just because of its openness; the melody could be loose as a rubber band.  But just remember that it’s going to come down; the bar line is still moving at the same pace.”

“Andrew’s writing and playing sound like geometry to me,” notes Greg Osby, a Hill alumnus and vociferous acolyte who employed the pianist and guitarist Jim Hall on this year’s well-received The Invisible Hand.  “He builds his lines and melodic development and motives and themes in small fragments, and breaks those down into even smaller fragments.  It’s like building a pyramid, and setting that off with TNT, then building another pyramid based upon the smaller rock chunks or fragments, each one being more important than the structure itself.  And he has total elastic time, not your metrical, militaristic four-four predictable time feel.  It’s akin to that Dr. Doolittle animal, the pushmi-pulyu, which was like a two-headed llama who goes in both directions.  You have to really be game to push in the beat and pull it back — compression-expansion I call it.  Otherwise, you’ll get tossed.”

Scott Colley, Hill’s bassist of choice for the past two years, says: “No matter how much you’ve internalized the material, you have to be ready for the unknown.  More than anybody I’ve ever played with, Andrew is a true improviser.  If he feels you’re starting to formulize the music, he’ll take bits of a composition from one part of the form and put it somewhere else.  Though he writes simple bass parts for me, I have to look at the score because so much is going on that defies traditional harmony, that can’t be notated traditionally in terms of chord changes.  It sounds logical and beautiful, but when you analyze it, you realize it’s amazingly different.”

The unorthodox was norm in the blues culture of postwar South Side Chicago, Hill’s home town, where the overriding imperative was to establish an individual sound.  Hill’s parents, who had migrated to Chicago from the South, bought their son an accordion when he was 3; a few years later they acquired an old foot-pedaled player piano.  “I would match the keys as much as I could,” Hill recalls.  “I could experiment, roll it, stop it, keep the notes down, turn it off, and play whatever sound suited that particular recording — which was really enough to keep one busy almost all day.  I developed my social skills late, simply from the fact that I enjoyed the piano so much.”

Hill’s family was poor, and by age 12 he was a street musician, playing blues-style accordion and tap dancing “with his hustling companion,” guitarist Leo Blevins, who had a washtub with a string on it.  “It was safe at the time,” Hill remembers.  “I needed money.  I found out that when you played music, you got money.  My hustling block was the northwest side of 47th Street and State, which was a good block.  Across the street was the South Center department store, a little further down was the Savoy Ballroom and the Hurricane Lounge, where Albert Ammons and his son were playing, and the Regal Theater was right next to that.”

An almost mute child with above-average intelligence, Hill enrolled at the University of Chicago Lab School in what would today be called an off-track program that allowed him freedom to follow his muse.  By his teens, he was working weekends at sorority house dances, at rent parties, even after-hours sessions.  Hill’s first taste of the latter occurred one early morning at the Macombo Lounge, an all-night joint at the intersection of Oakland and Drexel Boulevard owned by the Chess Brothers.  Trumpeter/bandleader King Kolax and tenorist Claude McLin were playing “Idaho” with bass icon Oscar Pettiford and the drummer Ike Day.  “The piano player didn’t show up, and Kolax knew that I could play some wonderful choruses in F, so he invited me on the stand,” Hill remembers.  “I got the F part right, but on the bridge he kept hollering, ‘Go to A-flat, go to A-flat!’  They were nice enough to gently ease me off the stand; they told me what I did wrong.

“Ike Day had this incredible feel, and the way he played opened up my concept of rhythm out of the rigid 1-2-3-4.  It was a live rhythm, a rhythm you could feel with your whole body.  He played over the entire drumset, like Roy Haynes does, incorporating everything into a rhythm, creating a floating rhythm sound in the African manner almost.  He did amazing things; he’d come off the bandstand into this exhibition where he’d play on the walls.  He was doing that when he was 19 years old.  He was the most incredible drummer I’ve ever seen in my life.  The only one today who comes close to him in soloing is Andrew Cyrille.”

Hill cites Albert Ammons as an early local influence (“his boogie-woogie was a living thing; he created with it”).  As a teenager delivering the Chicago Defender he met Earl Hines, and “bugged him to death until he decided he would let me play something on his grand.  I played something in D-flat, and he was amazed not only that I could hear, but I had a technical facility for not having really studied.  What I liked about Earl Hines was that he played AB-AABA form, but at a certain point he would deviate and play something creative outside the structure; when I talked to him he said, ‘Well, that’s what we call concertizing.’”  Hill also admired the lesser-known pianist Willie Jones (“he used to play with ninths in the bass and had a nice single fingering, even though he was known around Chicago for his exciting block chord Milt Buckner approach; I would call him an early Cecil Taylor, someone who would place their style on a 20th Century composer”) and Sun Ra.

“Sunny had a basic Chicago approach,” Hill remarks.  Even on a Blues you would go Out and you would go In.  A lot of people cried when they first heard Ornette and a few others, but to an extent that style really developed in Chicago.  Chicago was a very interesting place when I was growing up.  There wasn’t anyone lettered or intellectual about the music, or about what someone else was doing; it was a venue big enough for everyone to flourish and do their thing.  But it was category-less.  It was organic, like an African modal situation, in which the performer would play in all the different voices.  Jazz wasn’t an art form; before television and integration got strong, it was the spiritual element that kept the community together.  The music was coming from the streets.  Most people talk about Blue Note like it was a philanthropic institution!  It wasn’t that.  It carried the heartbeat of the popular music in the black communities.  That’s why people could really play by ear in those days, because it was so accessible.”

As his teens progressed, Hill also soaked up recordings by Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk as they came out, plugging his turntable into a guitar amplifier “so I could almost hear them the same way that I heard the live artists.”  He found someone to show him Czerny technique to get the fingering necessary to grapple with Powell.  He and a gifted friend named King Solomon, “used to pride ourselves on the fact that we could lift Monk’s stuff off the records when I was 16 years old — it came natural to him because he was a church pianist; after he taught me the church perspective, Monk’s concept became more accessible.”

As the ’50s progressed, Hill became “mesmerized” by the environment around me,” and established himself as a professional musician in Chicago.  “I missed my chronological counterparts during that time, because I didn’t do that high school thing,” he recalls.  “I might appear at an after-hour place somewhere.  My parents generally approved, because at least I was being productive.  I had my warnings on dope and alcohol and stuff.”  He sidemanned at the Beehive on 55th Street and the Crown Propellor and Stage Lounge on 63rd Street, backed the likes of Charlie Parker, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young at various venues, played at Joe Segal’s bebop jam sessions, and from 1955 to 1959 became house pianist at the Roberts Show Lounge, where national acts like Sammy Davis and Barbara McNair would come through.  He summer vacationed with Dinah Washington in 1954, who took him to New York for the first time; he subsequently returned to the Apple with singers Johnny Hartman and Al Hibbler and with the comedian George Kirby.  He did supper lounge gigs on the Gold Coast with a steady trio comprising bassist Malachi Favors and drummer James Slaughter, became the pianist at the Regal Theater with the Red Saunders band, and began to explore his voice with hardcore Chicago progressives like Nicky Hill and Ira Sullivan.  And he never stopped playing the blues.

In 1961, while working a mundane job on the West Side of Chicago, Hill decided it was time to come to New York.  “I saw that if I stayed in Chicago I would descend morally because everything had a type of sameness,” he says.  “Once I found out as a young kid that to get away from poverty all I had to do was walk out of it, I’ve been walking into different situations following my mind!”  Hill found work with Kenny Dorham, Jackie McLean, and Walt Dickerson, and went to Los Angeles in early 1962 on a job with Roland Kirk.  There he met his first wife, Laverne, a talented organist; the couple moved back to New York in the spring of 1963.

Freed of Chicago’s artisanal cultural matrix, Hill found in New York a nourishing environment.  Opportunities presented themselves.  He eschewed sideman gigs that might pigeonhole him as a “blues pianist” or “singer’s pianist,” and instead pigeonholed himself as an artist, forging aesthetic commitments with a cadre of like-minded generational peers like Joe Henderson, Joe Chambers, Sam Rivers and Bobby Hutcherson.  Through a job with Dorham, Hill met Joe Henderson; they woodshedded and gigged, and Henderson hired him to play on “Our Thing.”  During the session, Hill recalls, “Alfred Lion said he would like to know if I had any songs, etcetera, that he liked the way I played and wanted to make me his piano player for the period.  That’s the type of person he was.  The next thing I know, I was recording under my own name with no strings of any type.”

The rest is history.  At Birdland, 36 years after the original “Point of Departure,” and a year after “Dusk,” working from a book that now constitutes about 40 new compositions, Bill Clinton, if he was there, heard music by — in Ehrlich’s words — “a master composer at the height of his powers” performed by an ensemble (Ehrlich and Aaron Stewart, reeds and woodwinds; Ron Horton, trumpet; Colley, bass; Nasheet Waits, drums) at ease with its intricacies.

“It’s easy to fall back upon what you’ve done, but it’s harder just to continue playing,” Hill concludes.  “The audience is fickle anyway.  It will either be with you or it won’t.  To me it’s terrible to play without the passion of music.  It’s the passion that connects, not the academic correctness.  The passion brings out the magic, something that draws the audience into you.  It was inspirational to discover that things aren’t static; it’s led me to the point where I don’t have to become the person I was 30-40 years ago, which is impossible.  The spirit of jazz is supposed to be built upon playing something different every time you play.”

* * * *

Andrew Hill (WKCR) – (6-26-96):

[MUSIC: “Monk’s Glimpse” w/C. Jordan-Reid-Riley]

TP:    “Monk’s Glimpse” features you with a fellow Chicagoan, Clifford Jordan, who I imagine you knew during your days in Chicago.  Did you?

AH:    Yes, I knew Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore, later on Leroy Jenkins, a few other what you would call precocious kids all my life, because when we would run into each other when we were quite young, and each one of us would have our instruments and different things that economics would allow us to do during that period.

TP:    The three people you mentioned all went to DuSable High School on the South Side.  Is that where you went?

AH:    No.  I was one of the first children admitted to the University of Chicago pilot program.  At that time, intelligence was based upon a certain middle-class standard, and if a person didn’t fit into certain this middle-class standard they wouldn’t have so-called “intelligence.”  But for some reason I appeared to be bright.  I was semi-autistic, but as they called me, bright.  So they took me in and brought me to the point where I would be sociable.

Chicago was a very interesting place when I was growing up.  I used to call it the University of the Streets, because on the tip of Oakwood Boulevard you had the Macombo where I could listen to people like the late Oscar Pettiford, George Duvivier, I even saw Fats Navarro one time playing tenor, quite a few others.  They had this class where I would miss school… Well, I didn’t have to miss school.  I was brilliant and kind of eccentric, even then.  So we would meet up.  And Jazz wasn’t an art form.  These were the days building up to the zenith in Jazz in the ’50s and ’60s.  So every block would have a band in the area… I grew up in somewhat a Red-Light District, not Red-Light defined as…well, yeah, Red-Light, where you would have music available.  Then they also had after-hour parties that I could attend, because musicians would come and get me.  So I would mentor under Albert Ammons, Earl “Fatha” Hines, all these type of influences.  I wasn’t musically literate then, so I didn’t categorize of classify things, so here I had this rainbow collage of music available at every turn — and so did all of us.

TP:    The years you’re talking about now would be directly after World War Two until the early 1950’s?

AH:    Well, the years I’m talking about is consciousness; you know, when consciousness first hit me and when I started accumulating childhood memories.  My memories go back to, we’ll say, 1941 as a baby almost, to the Regal Theater, which was part of the chitlin’ theater for Black artists, where I experienced such phenomenons as Fats Waller playing the organ and different things.  Then in 1945 there was a bar right down the street from me called the Savoy, where they had people like Hot Lips Page, and I would be chaperoned in these places.  There’s a joke about that.  I took up the northeast corner of 47th Street, because on the corner where the Regal and the Savoy was (what they called South-Center) that was the spot for me to play accordion Blues style and tap dance.  So I’ve in a sense been organically part of the scene since I was a little kid, because it was inclusive of me, and older artists would give me what I needed.

TP:    It sounds like music has been part of your entire living consciousness and memory.  Do you remember a time when you weren’t playing music?

AH:    No, not even recently.  Because a lot of times, when you’re not visible on the New York scene, there’s this theory that you’re not functioning.  Even off the scenes, I’ve written string quartets, performed with 40-to-100-piece choral groups.  It’s an interesting life, because music it has always been with me.  The crowd comes and goes.  At one moment it’s the mode, you’re not; the next moment you’re not so hot.  So now I’m back in New York again, and now it looks like everything is a retrospective.  But even in the retrospective I’ve begged to come back on the scene, because in a retrospective some things are missing, some things have never been captured, and if the person really don’t come back and give them a guideline to what was going on… Because it might just be the link to creativity itself, but if only the academic situation is available in a mausoleum type learning process, that means something could be lost.

TP:    I’d like to step back again to your days in Chicago.  You mentioned people like Albert Ammons and Earl Hines.  Some capsule impressions of them, and other pianists who influenced the way you approach the piano.  Albert Ammons first.

AH:    Albert Ammons, because he played boogie-woogie, and the way I played accordion, boogie-woogie was accessible, because you would approach it rhythmically, not harmonically, which after he taught it to me made me ambidextrous, which gave me complete independence between the hands.  And then Fatha Hines was interesting because, as you know, he started the single finger approach to Jazz.  And then there were so many other followers around the area with these individualistic approaches to music.  This was the difference between Chicago and New York for a long period of time.  In New York you would have one person who would be a great innovator, and a lot of imitators — which it’s all common property.  But in places like Chicago, after the music left New Orleans and came to Chicago, then people had the freedom to be flexible and not have to sound like anyone.  Their only rule was that they had to fit into the Tradition itself, the Tradition coming from, we’ll say, the beginning of the oral Protestant tradition.

TP:    Who were some of the other pianists in Chicago who had an impact on you?

AH:    There were so many.  There was a fellow named Vernon Griddle(?).  I don’t know if he ever made it; he was phenomenal.  Then there was Chris Anderson, who had and still has a unique approach to harmony, similar to Willie Jones.  Willie Jones played like Milt Buckner, but then he was into the new music aesthetic where he used to listen things like Lukas Foss 1950s’ music and stuff, so I would call him an early Cecil Taylor, someone who would place their style on a 20th Century composer.  Then there was Sun Ra, or Sonny Blount.

The amazing thing about Chicago was that there wasn’t anyone lettered or intellectual about the music, or what someone else was doing, because it was a venue big enough for everyone to flourish and do their thing.  But Sonny’s approach was a basic Chicago approach even on a Blues, where they said we would go Out and we would go In — which a lot of people cried when they first heard Ornette and a few others.  To an extent that style really developed in Chicago.  But like I said, Chicago was category-less, so people would come out to hear the music, so it was just an organic situation, like an African modal situation, which would put on the performer to be able to play in all the different voices, not a monotone where it’s a stylistic supported by an academic element who are more lettered than oral.

TP:    Ahmad Jamal followed Earl Hines’ path from Pittsburgh to Chicago in 1949, and was also a child prodigy and performer.  Did he have an impact on the way you approached the piano or the piano trio?

AH:    No.  In retrospect, what I just said is there were so many brilliant people, known or unknown, and we would exchange ideas.  But any time you go to mimicking or idol worship, you cancel creativity, because you negate the openness that you need to have creative contact.

TP:    Besides Clifford Jordan, John Gilmore and Leroy Jenkins, who were some other people in your peer group that you associated with?

AH:    I mentioned those, but there were a lot of others.  There was always Johnny Griffin, who was a little ahead of us.  But a lot of the others developed.  They had more of an academic approach than a natural talent approach, with a  continuous learning process.  There are people who are born with a talent for music.  The more you listen to something, the more available it becomes, and when it’s readily available in your environment, your aesthetic, your sense of harmony, rhythm, etcetera, develops that much faster.

TP:    When did you start working on the professional music scene in Chicago as a pianist in rhythm sections or as a trio pianist in various venues?

AH:    Almost from the start.  I remember at 12 years old an alto saxophonist named George Lee came and got me and took me on my first job.  It was at a sorority house.  From then on I was working every weekend.  Then I found out about the night circuit where the rent parties were still going on.  The pianists who were working that circuit used to get too much work, or they’d have a job where they couldn’t get there until 12 o’clock.  I had no curfew, so I could go and play the piano from around 8 o’clock until 12:30 in the morning.

TP:    I gather that your first recording was on a very obscure date with Von Freeman in 1952?

AH:    Yeah.  I had Von Freeman, Pat Patrick, Wilbur Campbell, and Leroy Jackson.

TP:    Was Von Freeman one of the people you were working with?

AH:    Well, Von Freeman used to work all the sorority gigs, he had some high school dance jobs, so he was always a presence because he and George and Bruz would always play those type of affairs.

TP:    Outside of people in Chicago, who were musicians on the national scene that had an impact on you.  We began with “Monk’s Glimpse,” and there’s always seemed to be a certain affinity to Monk’s approach to music in what you do.

AH:    Well, retrospectively, Monk to a lot of young pianists my age in 1949 was very accessible, in terms of understanding what he did and following his music.  That’s why now, when I talk about the periods of Jazz, I talk about the period when it was a popular music and when it became an art form.  Like, I came on the end of the period when it was a popular music, so that way someone from another lifestyle or another area in life could look at it as experimental, when it was very organic, which comes from people like Monk.  Before Television and Integration got strong, Jazz was the spiritual element that kept the community together.  So certain things we heard all the time.  It wasn’t even called Jazz then.  I remember up until 1949, Downbeat used to have pictures of Negroes (as we were called during that time) talking about how we play the flute, but my lips are too big… So when I think about Jazz, then I think about the first Jazz recording by a group who sounded like Spike Jones, and the Creoles were supposed to have the first recordings, but then they excluded the Blacks from Uptown, even though their music goes back to before Slavery…  I’m only saying that to say that ever since they took the drums away from us in this country, the music has been flourishing, and then 1917 is where Jazz came in, which isn’t very inclusive.

So a lot of people have had an influence on me, and then I’ve had an influence on quite a few others.

TP:    The next tracks we’ll hear come from a few of the extraordinary series of recordings Andrew Hill made for Blue Note when he hit New York from Chicago in the early 1960’s, and took the jazz world by storm through the originality and distinctiveness of these recordings.

[MUSIC: AH-Hutcherson-Davis-E. Jones, “Siete Ocho”; A. Hill-J. Henderson, “McNeil’s Island”; A. Hill-KD-Dolphy-Williams, “Refuge”]

TP:    Listening to those tracks raises several questions.  I asked you while the music was playing whether these were working groups, groups that performed live and played this or other music in performance.

AH:    Well, the group with Bobby Hutcherson, we worked the University of Toronto and Montreal.  We had an incredible college tour…

TP:    Did you set up drum parts in this music, or was the drummer free to create their own…

AH:    Well, it was basically drafts written off my interpretation of someone else’s playing, so that really was the catalyst.

TP:    Was all the music on Judgment set up for Elvin Jones’ style?

AH:    Yes, it was set up for his style.

TP:    Was the group with Joe Henderson, Richard Davis and Roy Haynes a working band?

AH:    Yes, we were really getting ready to work, but the only wrench that was thrown in that was right after we did a few nights at Birdland and a few other places, Joe joined Horace Silver.  So that was the end of that for a while.

TP:    Did you write the music for Black Fire with Roy Haynes’ style in mind?

AH:    Yes, I really loved the way Roy Haynes played during that time.  I still love his playing, but I was really enthralled during that period.
TP:    The front line of Point of Departure, indeed the whole band, reads like a who’s-who in the history of Jazz.  Was this a group that got to work for a while?

AH:    Well, we did a few things before Eric left for Europe, mmm-hmm.  During that period I was lucky enough to get quite a few college concerts, so there was always an opportunity to play with some of the great ones from that period.

TP:    Again was that music written with Tony Williams in mind?

AH:    No, actually Tony surprised me and gave me a little more than I was looking for — which I enjoyed.  Because you really couldn’t hear his whole style with Miles Davis, even though it was a great group, but it still didn’t cover all the areas that Tony could go into.

TP:    One of the characteristics of Andrew Hill’s groups is that always dynamic drummers are featured, and the drums and rhythm seems to be a major component in both your improvatorial and compositional sensibilities.

AH:    Well, I researched that while I was at Portland State, and then I came into this phrase “African retention” (all this after the fact).  To me, it’s more like an alternative approach to music.  In Western civilization, melody is the major voice, and rhythm and harmony is just an accessory.  I’ve always, especially since emerging on accordion with the Blues groups and the Boogie Woogie, approached rhythm as the predominant voice, with harmony as an accessory.

TP:    It’s almost as though rhythm is part of the dialogue that emerges among the musicians in improvisational situations.

AH:    It is.  And though many things have changed traditionally, that hasn’t changed.  That’s how you can really hear the integrity of the music then and now, whether it’s a retrospective or people trying to go ahead.  Always check the rhythm to see whether it is static.  If it’s static and stagnant, that means the music is dead, because they have such an academic approach, and they learned all the melodies but they have no rhythmic interaction.

TP:    One thing you seem to do to insure rhythmic dynamism is change the rhythmic signature from measure to measure within the compositions.

AH:    Well, between one and one in a space of time you can have 5, 7, 12 or 4, but it’s always imposed upon a strong four like the heartbeat.  Still, in between, so many things can be done with it rhythmically, even thinking in terms of strong and weak accents.
TP:    Let’s talk about some of the drummers you played with in Chicago, stepping back 40 or 50 years.  Ike Day is one of the legendary drummers of all time.

AH:    Oh, I cut my teeth on Ike Day.  Only three people had a profound musical effect on my life, and those were Charlie Parker and Ike Day and Thelonious Monk (I’d always heard Monk play but when I saw him play, it had a profound effect).  Ike Day was amazing.  As a kid, I didn’t know who these people were, but I used to see people like Buddy Rich, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, all of them would come to Chicago for a glimpse of Ike Day so they could prepare their respective styles.  He was the most incredible drummer I’ve ever seen in my life.  The only one today who comes close to him in soloing is Andrew Cyrille.

TP:    What made him so special?  Was it his interdependence?  His command of the timbre of whatever surface he was striking?

AH:    To really explain that, I have to bring in the sociological connotations.  Because in that period the community and the musician was close, because it was all a part of a sociological aesthetic in the community.  Tap dancing was strong.  The rhythm you played wasn’t like a dead rhythm; like you hear drummers play, and you say, “That’s dead” or “that’s alive” or “that’s great” — whatever one says.  But it wasn’t a dead rhythm; it was a live rhythm, one that you could feel with your whole body.  When I was in Chicago there was a place called the Macombo where the bandstand was perched up high, and Ike Day came down off the bandstand, like you’ve seen Gene Krupa and all of them obviously do, but there’s something about when you see the Master do it… He was the master.  You get involved.  It had an emotional impact.  It wasn’t just a static, visual experience.

TP:    Let me pin you down a little more on Ike Day.  Was he someone who was let’s say dealing with a different line with the right hand, left hand, right leg, left leg, like Max Roach developed and Andrew Cyrille?  Was he doing that functionally?

AH:    Well, you asked me about Roy Haynes.  The one similarity between him and Roy Haynes is that when he played the drum set, he played all these things over the entire drum.  He incorporated everything into a rhythm, so you had this floating rhythm sound instead of him stacking just doing a parallel…

TP:    So Ike Day was stacking rhythms on top of each other in the African manner almost.

AH:    In the African manner almost.  It’s true.

TP:    I commented that within “Refuge” that you’re constantly changing the rhythmic backing of each phrase, and this was something Charlie Parker would do this in his solos.

AH:    And I was saying I was surprised you knew that!  It’s really evident when you’re dealing with a music that’s really built off the rhythm, not the tonic dominant harmony, and that’s what I learned from playing with Charlie Parker. That’s why he had such a profound effect on me.  Some tunes I was too young to know, and Barry Harris took my place on a few numbers.  Well, I tried to get Barry to take my place, because Barry was one of the older Detroit guys at the time.  Anyway, before I played with Charlie Parker, he said, “Well, you play good and you do this well, but place more emphasis on the rhythm than the lyrical approach.”

TP:    Do you remember what year this was and the venue?

AH:    It was June 1949 at the Graystone Ballroom in Detroit.  Illinois Jacquet and Bullmoose Jackson were on the bill.

TP:    You were 12 years old at the time, playing with Charlie Parker.

AH:    Mmm-hmm.

TP:    The third you mentioned was Thelonious Monk.  Do you recollect when you first heard his records?

AH:    Oh, I heard his records as a kid, me and another pianist who we used to call King Solomon.  We used to dissect things like “Hackensack” and stuff like that on the piano, which came easily.  But then the dynamic of seeing him play in person… I’d heard his sound all my life, but to see that he played with two hands, you know, to maintain a certain type of volume, and the way he would hit the piano, it was just profound.

TP:    Do you recollect when you first saw Monk in person?  He did perform at the Beehive in Chicago…

AH:    Oh, I didn’t go to that, because I didn’t like the milieu of the situation because they didn’t give him the respect he was due.  So I really heard him at the Five Spot in New York when he was having this long run, and I would take the train or the Greyhound out and hear him, and get on it again and go back satisfied.

TP:    Did you perform at all with the great Wilbur Ware in Chicago?

AH:    Yeah, Wilbur Ware, the great one! [LAUGHS] I did a few things with Wilbur.  I enjoyed him.  But then, fortunately or unfortunately, being a retrospective of what I said around 40 minutes, there really wasn’t any great ones, because then you had Israel Crosby in Chicago and all these incredible bassists.

TP:    Richard Davis was up there as a young bassist as well.

AH:    He was coming up with the Ahmad Jamal trio, and this fellow who used to play Classical music.  He was hot for a brief moment, nationally and internationally.

TP:    What circumstances brought you to New York on the eve of your series of recordings for the Blue Note label?

AH:    Well, it was just like what brought me to New York to reside in this period.  My life seems to be based upon intuition, discernment, the ability to know when to go and when not… I don’t know, I just had this urge…

TP:    So it wasn’t a gig that brought you here; you just decided to come here on your own.

AH:    Yeah, that’s my life story.  Once I found out as a young kid that to get away from poverty all I had to do was walk out of it, I’ve been walking into different situations following my mind!

This weekend with Lonnie Plaxico and Pheeroan akLaff, in an environment where the only thing they can feed me is myself and my soul consciousness escapes in an occasional flurry, I say to myself, “I might as well…”  In the old days people didn’t really get carried away with what they sounded like.  The emphasis was on never playing the same thing twice, to create.  And I figure this weekend I can go for that.  I won’t be with people who are jaded, who go in different areas.

TP:    No repeater pencils, as Lester Young would say.

AH:    Oh, no.  No pencils! [LAUGHS]

[MUSIC: AH-Davis-Khan-Haynes, “Smokestack”; A. Hill, “Sunnyside”]

* * * *

Andrew Hill (3-22-00):

TP:    First things first.  Let’s talk about current events, about the record, about Dusk.  You recorded “Ball Square” in 1986 and “15/8” is on that solo record.  Did you do a lot of composition for this?  Has this been a fertile period for you writing?

HILL:  Yes, a very fertile period, where I’ve written new things that, as you said, went over older things and added different sections to it for… Let’s see, from ’97 to now it’s like I’ve had the writing sickness.  I find myself writing music all the time.

TP:    Talk about accumulating this personnel.  It’s the same instrumentation as Point of Departure.  I don’t know you’ve done this since.

HILL:  I’ve never done this sextet since.  I’ve done other sextets and septets and 10 pieces for Blue Note during that period that they haven’t yet released. They have enough backlog on me to bring out for ten years.

TP:    Another Mosaic box.

HILL:  Yeah, of unreleased compositions.

TP:    But here, was most of the writing done for the date?

HILL:  Most of the writing was done for the band.  We didn’t actually record all the compositions for this period, because when I recorded this there were 20 originals and it keeps on growing.  Now there’s more. [October ’99]

TP:    You’ve talked about writing for personalities.  Talk about the band as it’s constituted, and how you see each person as being applicable to what you do.

HILL:  Well, Marty, when the band was first formed, he brought a certain excitement to the band in his solos.  Ron Horton has improved drastically on trumpet, and he’s also helped me by copying the music and counting it out in strange situations where the bandstand won’t allow him to see me.  Greg Tardy, he’s like a fresh young talent, a star on the rise.  And Billy Drummond is a very musical drummer.  And Scott Colley has this incredible technique with this sensitivity to where he doesn’t overpower you with technique; he just overpowers you like a second left hand.  So I’m really happy about the last year because we worked some quality concerts, and the group was able to record intact, which is very unusual when I think of the caliber of the participating artists and their talent, and the fact that they’re working all the time.  Scott is very generous.  A lot of times he turned down jobs or other situations where he asked not to get paid… So to have this type of fellowship to the extent where everybody makes rehearsals, it’s just like a musical spirit that’s extended.  Like I was telling Howard, that’s why I was happy to have documented it, because sometimes it’s dependent upon economic expediency of some sort, where you get the band to work more, and the band has been generating work on its own, but it’s been sporadic, but at least maybe two or three concerts every two months, but that’s not enough to hold quality musicians.  So I’m glad we could stay together and partially document the music.

TP:    You came back in ’97?

HILL:  I left the college, Portland State University, in ’96, and I arrived in ’97.

TP:    Did you have any particular focus in mind for what you were going to do when you came back East?  Did you envision this…

HILL:  Well, I didn’t see anything, because at the time I came back for love, not my career.  I remarried in Portland, and my wife was part of the dance faculty, and they dissolved the dance department, so she was offered and received a position as the educational director at the Joyce Theater in New York City.  Her name is Joanne Robinson Hill.  So from that, I started navigating here.  The college was extremely generous to me, and they let me go… It was a good situation.  I came back for love, and I’m amazed by the venues that I hadn’t dared to dream of in decades.

TP:    Why hadn’t you dared to dream of them?

HILL:  Well, it’s good to be a rumor in your own mind, in a retrospective.  But with life in its current situation, one knows the impossibilities available to them.  If they dream from the reality, that’s one thing…

TP:    What you’re saying is that people tend to identify you with the records you did in the ’60s and less so the current things…

HILL:  No.  I’m talking about the venue.  It’s good that people think anything of you, good or bad.  But the reality is that you can tell whether you’re lukewarm or not from the activities that you’re participating in.  Because it’s till a supply-demand type situation.  So I was in a university out of the music milieu, and was completely… I could run off concerts and colleges and a few trips to Europe, but I really wasn’t in the business.  I was an educator, and I really couldn’t think about other things, because even if I hustled, they were obviously not available to me at the time.  So I came back here, and all of a sudden these unlimited things are… Like I said, things that I dared not dream of because it would be beyond my reality to envision my being accepted back on the scene like I have been.

TP:    In Portland talk about the scope of your performing activity, and also the way you organized curriculum and your aesthetic of teaching.

HILL:  Well, in Portland, a friend of mine was food and liquor manager at the  Salishon Lodge there, which is a resort.  After my deceased wife died in 1990, he invited me there for a few months to just relax on the grounds and shape my vision that spring.  So when the Fall came, it was time for me to pick a bigger city, and Portland was the biggest city there, so I arrived in Portland, and they presented me with information on all the colleges in Oregon to bring me into the circle.  Then I got a commission… While I was there I got every commission that Portland had to give, and received a tenured teaching situation at Portland State University as Associate Professor of Music.  So I could have stayed and gotten full professorship and all that.

But anyway, my classes were similar, in a sense, to the way I learned how to play in Chicago.  The only thing is it had texts with it.  But the way I tried to organize the curriculum was so one could make evolutionary type of advances.  Like any aesthetic, the more you introduce the students to certain things at a certain period, and all of a sudden they become more familiar and make the text their own.  I accepted students only through the audition process.  So I had these workshops where I tried to teach the students how to hustle, or I should use the word “market” themselves [LAUGHS], so they understand the mechanics of the business.  If you’re good, you can… But other than that, no matter who you are, you have to reach out.

TP:    But there was more to it than teaching students about marketing themselves.

HILL:  I had these ensembles that were created.  I created jam sessions for them to participate in.  In other words, I made a pedagogy out of my approach by having different aspects of musical training, like jam sessions, playing the tune in class, so different classes can get together and have a jam session on the material.

TP:    Were you mirroring your own experience as a young musician?

HILL:  I would say mirroring my experiences, plus taking advantage of the knowledge that I learned about teaching in, Pittsburgh, California before, where I was teaching special children, teaching advanced school…what they call in California key classes.  I was in K-to-12.  I started the Jazz Department at the New College of California in San Francisco when I first got there.  But anyway, all this accumulative experience helped me in teaching my students and giving them a sense of self-esteem.

TP:    Were you taking them also through the tradition in a step-by-step-by-step way?

HILL:  Well, I would have a question there where they would tell me their interests, what inspired them.  Because I want them to be grounded in text and situations and areas they weren’t interested in.  Because I figured if I could get their interest and work with them in their areas of interest, that they will evolve themselves the more they develop.

TP:    For you, in terms of writing your music and turning your music into text, not necessarily on a printed page, but maybe in a more general sense… When did you start writing music, composing music?

HILL:  Well, I always haven written music.  That’s what attracted great composers to me, because they figured with my imagination…composition… When I was a child I was able to write music without hearing music.  I was just writing symmetrical…

TP:    Oh, you could write it without being at the piano, out of your head?

HILL:  Yeah, write it at the piano and then reshape it by looking at it and have lines and counterlines and different things about it.  That came natural, and that used to amaze…

TP:    You can do that intellectually without sitting at the piano.

HILL:  Uh-huh, without sitting at the piano.

TP:     How old were you when people started noticing you could do that?

HILL:  About 10 or 11.  Because I was in the streets, hustling.  When you’re on a stage, you never know who your audience may be that day.  So everyone I met used to tell me, “Well, you’re writing it right, but that’s not…”  The only thing they didn’t agree with was my own personalized way of notation.  After I explained it to them, they told me the notation had to become more homogeneous.

TP:    Let me set a scene, and let’s start talking about Chicago.  You’re born in ’37 in Chicago.  Your parents had a piano in the house?

HILL:  Well, at the age of 2 or 3 I received an accordion.  First it was a toy accordion, then it was a regular accordion with the buttons on the side.  Then when I was around 7 or 8, we got this old player piano in the house, where you use your foot to pedal the rolls.

TP:    And you would match the keys?

HILL:  I would match the keys as much as I could.  Because I found out that a lot of those player piano rolls were built for two piano players.  So I could experiment, roll it, stop it, keep the notes down, turn it off, and play whatever the sound for that particular recording — which was really enough to keep one busy almost all day.

TP:    So by the time you were 7 or 8 you were playing piano all the time.

HILL:  Yeah.  Well, any chance I could get to it.  I developed my social skills late, simply from the fact that I enjoyed the piano so much.

TP:    There’s a published story I think that you won a turkey at the Regal Theater?

HILL:  Yes, for playing the piano and accordion when I was around 6.  They used to call Black Chicago Bronzeville, and in those days they had a regular Thanksgiving party for the “Defender” newspaper boys.  So every Thanksgiving they would have this amateur contest where the winner would receive a turkey.

TP:    And you played the accordion.

HILL:  Yes, and sang.

TP:    When you talk to people who grew up in especially in black neighborhoods in the ’20s-’30s-’40s-’50s, they say music was everywhere, and all kinds of music was everywhere.  Where was the music coming from for you?

HILL:  Well, the music was coming from the streets.  Like, my first jam session was at a place called the Macombo on Drexel Boulevard, where Oakland and Drexel come together at 40th Street.  It was owned by the Chess Brothers, the ones who later owned Chess Records.  But I didn’t know about that at the time.  I was just a young kid, 12 years old, at one what they called “blue morning” jam session.  King Kolax was playing, a tenor player named Neal Green, and Oscar Pettiford was there on bass and Ike Day was on drums.  So I was sitting there… They were playing “Idaho,” and King Kolax kept telling me when the bridge came, “A-flat!  Go to A-flat!”  I was young enough where they weren’t vicious; they delicately eased me off the stand after I played one number.  But I said, “Well, shoot, I was able to play with Oscar Pettiford.”

TP:    But when you were 4-5-6, you were basically picking up music…

HILL:  Picking up music hustling.  Hustling on the streets with my hustling companion Leo Blevins.  He used to play a washtub with a string on it.  And his brother Bobby Blevins and somebody else.  It was safe at the time.  I needed money.  I found out that when you played music, you got money.  I’m glad I learned that from playing music money comes, not poverty, because poverty is a lack-of.  There were these record stores you could just go in… And my hustling block was a good block.  My hustling block was the northwest side of 47th Street.  Across the street was the department store, South Center.  A little further down the block you had the Savoy Ballroom, and the Hurricane Lounge, where Albert Ammons and his son were playing.  Even though I wasn’t old enough to go over there, but it was still…

TP:    The milieu.

HILL:  The milieu.  And the Regal Theater was right next to…

TP:    When you were coming up, that was the center of entertainment on the South Side.

HILL:  Yeah, that was the cultural center.  They had stuff from the Lafayette Theater, you know, visiting places in other areas, but that wasn’t my area of interest…

TP:    So this is all happening from when you were 5-6 years old?

HILL:  Yes.  The moment I could get out of there.

TP:    What did your parents do?

HILL:  My parents were people who suffered from the oppression, who were basically trying to keep a family together and raise a family.  The best thing I can say about them is that they worked and found a way to work.

TP:    And they were able to get you an accordion and a player piano.  Were they musical?

HILL:  As I started playing, other relatives not in my direct family said they played, but my parents didn’t play any other instrument.

TP:    Were they born in Chicago or did they come from the South?

HILL:  My mother came from the South.  My father, it’s rumored that he came from Alabama.  But he was a strange…a very dark man… They say he may have been what they call Geechee.  Other things I’ve been trying to find…

TP:    Find out for yourself.

HILL:  Well, not really.  But now, the older I get, the more some of my relatives that I’ve never known before are trying to enter my life, so I guess the information is available if I get friendly!

TP:    You also said that you got in the University of Chicago Lab School.

HILL:  Well, most people during that period thought I was talented but autistic.

TP:    You weren’t verbal?

HILL:  No, it wasn’t anything verbal.  So they took aptitude tests on me and found out that I had an over-average intelligence.  So I was one of the second group of people accepted in this off-track type educational process.  I hear about off-track education now.  But then it was like an off-track situation.  Because from my background and stuff, tracking me… If it was just a situation where they would put me within certain types of rules and regulations of places, like things I was supposed to… I seemed retarded.

TP:    But then you were writing music.

HILL:  Yeah.  But in other areas… So a lot of times, I found out later, as I began to investigate myself, sometimes being autistic is just a refusal to enter society at a certain point.

TP:    When did you start to study the piano with someone?

HILL:  Well, I would take musical lessons with people, but sometimes my teachers were so boring, I just let them know after they played something one time that I could play the same thing that they could.  Then an old preacher liked me for some reason, so he was trying to tell me… He said, “Wouldn’t it be better for you, whatever you want to learn, learn that?”  That’s the way I approached the students.  He said, “What do you want to do?”  I said I wanted to build chords.  He said, “Well, find a teacher who can teach you that.”  Then at a certain point I needed technique.  So one teacher took me to the (?), but she couldn’t take me all the way because… It’s almost like what they call master classes today by me starting to participate in the jam sessions early, because I wasn’t stopped after that.  I didn’t go and put my head in the sand.  I just kept on participating, and through that, even though everyone… You know, you had these Classical pianists actually playing jazz better than the 25 cents and 50 cents teacher who needed the money who was located at these different community centers.  You had people who really… So they helped me out.  I would ask them how you do this, they would show me, and then I’d make a project out of it.  So there were so many different flowers in Chicago, especially in the period when jazz was popular music before it evolved to classical music.  You could almost learn in the street, which is where I tried to achieve different projects.  Instead of giving people a lot of material that they really can’t study, just…

TP:    Up to the time you were 14 or 15, when you do those early records and join the Paul Williams band and all this stuff, you’re taking lessons, you’re participating in various jam sessions with older master musicians and with your peer group, and you’re also listening to a lot of records as well…

HILL:  Well, I didn’t start meeting my peer group until I was around 17-18.  Because all of them, the ones who could play, went to DuSable.  And a lot of them hadn’t advanced harmonically to the point where they could play according to the form.  In other words, they first arrived at free music, and then regulated themselves to become musicians.

TP:    So you mentioned on our radio show that Albert Ammons and Earl Hines were the first two piano players who influenced…

HILL:  And Count Basie, when he first came…

TP:    Talk about all three, and how they entered your world.

HILL:  Well, Albert Ammons entered my world because when I was a kid he was at the tail-end of when Louis Jordan was hot, and boogie-woogie was popular.  But I noticed that Albert Ammons played his boogie-woogie differently.  It was a living thing more than a novelty.  He just created with his boogie-woogie.  He wasn’t just in one space.  That interested me, because his approach kind of freed me to really try to play the blues.

Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, what I liked about him was he played AB-AABA form, but at a certain point he would deviate from the form and play something creative, not within the structure of the music itself.  I like that.  When I talked to him he said, “Well, that’s what we call concertizing.”  It’s what they do now, you know, when they take extended solos off… But it was called “concertizing” then, because jazz had… You know, they had these black jazz musicians at Carnegie Hall, and Israel Crosby was telling that when you played with Benny Goodman then you didn’t play like you did with… If you were a black band, you had to alter it to concertize.  And Willie Jones, I liked him because most people during that period, known and unknown, were playing the piano voices like the (?) bass and the seventh up top in the left hand, and D in the right hand, A and D octave… He dealt with some variation of that.  And Willie Jones used to play with ninths in the bass and some really incredible things, and he had a nice single fingering even though he was known around Chicago for his block chord Milt Buckner approach because it was exciting, but he always had this terrific band playing with him — so he was a wonderful experience.

And Basie, when I was a man and heard “April In Paris” and so on, I didn’t associate that with the same Count Basie I’d heard when I was a kid.  Because when I heard him as a kid, he was a really exciting stride piano  player — and he had hair.  Then it took me years to realize that this sophisticated big band leader is this person whom I used to love hearing play those exciting stride piano solos.

TP:    A lot of people your age and up to a few years older than didn’t have a whole lot of connection to what they call prebop players.  Someone like Barry Harris was mainly inspired by Bud Powell.  But you from an early age were inspired by people who preceded that and then came to it from that perspective.

HILL:  Well, sometimes, when you’re living instead of studying, preparing to-be one day, it has a more natural evolution.

TP:    So you’re saying because you were performing this whole time, your ideas developed organically.

HILL:  Organic.  You ask questions, and there’s some memory work, and a little text, whatever the people give you.  I discovered Bud Powell and Monk as an adolescent, but before them there were people in the neighborhood.  So it wasn’t an outside influence that captured me.  The music itself captured me, and I acknowledged different other artists as they came that was true to form perhaps, it wasn’t real… Even though I devised a way to make me a music system out of a guitar amplifier at that time from the turntable so I could get the actual sound… A guitar and one of these turntables that would plug into the guitar amp for the sound of the records.  That’s how I heard Bud Powell, on records, but never live; that’s how I set it up so I could really hear him, so I could almost hear him the same way that I heard the live artists.

TP:    Did you transcribe Bud Powell or did you just apply it?

HILL:  Well, I listened to it and a lot of things I could hear.  What I couldn’t play naturally… Someone showed me Czerny, so I could get the fingering necessary to play that.

TP:    To play like Bud Powell, the Czerny technique.

HILL:  For piano fingering, mmm-hmm.

TP:    Again, the same thing about Bud Powell and Tatum.

HILL:  Well, before Bud Powell had the shock treatments he was the most exciting piano player I’d ever heard.  After he had the shock treatments he was a different person.  But he was an exciting approach to me on piano, because hearing stride piano in Chicago, those who didn’t play well, it sounded like BOOM-CHANG, but he eliminated that in such a way where he could play like a horn, in a sense, pianistically.  It was exciting, and it was an extension, in a sense, of what Fatha Hines was doing.  It was just a different approach, different music in the evolution.

Art Tatum was interesting, because… A lot of people love his technique, but I love his harmonics and the voicing of his chords and his contrasts, which was as strong as Monk, but more romantic whereas Monk is more rhythmic.

TP:    As far as understanding harmony, was that innate, or was it through developing your ear on the bandstand with people?  Hearing Tatum, you were able to comprehend what he was doing?

HILL:  Well, by the time I really heard Tatum, I had heard it before from pianists around Chicago, a lot of them unknown, who played like him.  Then they had this piano book on him that they released in 1944 or 1945, with “Body and Soul” and all these things transcribed.  So he wasn’t the first, but he had taken it to a more polished level than a lot of the stuff I heard in Chicago.

TP:    I want to talk about Monk and Bird and Ike Day, maybe Ike Day first, since you recollect sitting in with him when you were 12 years.

HILL:  He had this incredible feel of rhythm.  It was rumored that everyone from Buddy Rich, Max Roach and Kenny Clarke and got what he was doing.

TP:    Did he affect your sense of rhythm?  How to play against the drummer…

HILL:  The way he played, even back then, opened up my concept of rhythm.  It took me from a rigid 1-2-3-4… Because even before that time, with him playing between swing and bebop, he did so many amazing things.  When I heard him at the Macombo he was at the height of his powers before he got ill.

TP:    You said he was playing all over the drum set all the time.  You made an analogy to Roy Haynes.

HILL:  Well, it was similar to Roy Haynes, but not, because he had approached it a different way.  Not only did he play on the drum set; he would come off into this exhibition where he’d play on the walls.  He was doing that when he was 19 years old, and that was decades ago.  Lionel Hampton and a lot of people got… He was just incredible.  I never have heard anything like that since, which really leads me, every time I talk about him through the years, to say how important he became.

TP:    You said he played all these things over the entire drum, and incorporated everything into a rhythm so you had this floating rhythm sound.  And there’s something of that in the way you play over the drums.

HILL:  Well, a lot of times I would really like to play with them.  But sometimes that type of synergy isn’t available.  The main thing, you try to have this creative contact that seems to fit in certain situations more than (?) playing with someone… Especially now with everyone concertizing, they establish a certain a certain space as a rhythm.  So the only way you can exist is like a counter-rhythm.

TP:    You said you heard Monk’s records as they came out, when you were 10 and 11 years old.

HILL:  Me and a friend of mine, who was another prodigy, we used have a challenge to see who could play Monk’s compositions.  It came natural to my friend because he was a church pianist, so he was approaching it from the church perspective and play everything on a different degree, but still keep it… So after he taught me that, Monk’s things became more accessible.

TP:    Monk’s impact on you had more to do with his rhythmic concept?

HILL:  Well, Monk’s harmonic concept, the way he heard the harmonies, but still he kept it basic.  Even though he borrowed, his whole concept was very unusual, but then part of it traditional if you approach in from a church perspective from that period with modern harmonies.

TP:    What do you mean by “a church perspective”?

HILL:  Not the Baptist Church.  The Holy Roller; a certain church perspective.

TP:    You’re talking about getting the spirit, spirit-chasing…

HILL:  Well, that’s that type of musical approach, like the Prayer-Masters, which they call the piano and these religious situations that developed naturally in the community.

TP:    Were you in a church situation?

HILL:  Well, no, I really didn’t get into a church situation until I was 30.  So that’s why my friend was such a resource, because he played church piano and he could show me what he hear.

TP:    And one thing Monk and Charlie Parker had in common is that they were both dance musicians.

HILL:  Well, most music for the period up until 1960 was… Well, not dance music.  People had a more developed sense of rhythm than they have now, for some reason, maybe because the music and dance had split, became categorized and separated.  But from that, it wasn’t like commercial, homogeneous dance music.  People did unusual steps.  It wasn’t so much of a formula as it is now.

TP:    People were creating steps.

HILL:  Creative steps.  That’s before television took control and stuff.  Where I played with Charlie Parker was a dance hall, and they had dance halls across country, where they…

[END OF SIDE A]

TP:    [BIRD AT GRAYSTONE WAS ’51 OR ’52] You’re 14 or 15 and you’re going to Chicago, but you’re going to Detroit for a gig.  You also said that when you came to New York, you’d already had a full career in Chicago.  You’re 25-26 with a fully developed aesthetic.

HILL:  Bruz Freeman came by my house and told me that he had a job for me to play with Charlie Parker.  He said that Bird had asked for me, to play with me.  I have no idea how he knew me.  Like I said earlier, I was playing at the jam session.  I was really young and visible on the scene, and it was noted that I had certain natural things and I was a better supplement than a lot of other people who had evolved from the swing period or people who listened to the records…

TP:    So you knew the new harmony.

HILL:  Yes, I knew the new harmony better than people who could play just like Bud Powell or any of them, but it was like an artificial music because they weren’t flowing, they were just playing like the classical music, which it would be one day, but what really gave it the vitality for that earlier period was people being able to express themselves.

TP:    So to put it in my own terms, you knew the language of Bebop and you knew the phrasing of it, and yet it was a natural organic thing for you…

HILL:  Well, it was natural to a certain extent, but then there were things I had learned.  But at least I did have a learned approach that was partially creative at the time.

TP:    Which was the jam session at the Macombo, and you were doing that from the age of 12 to…

HILL:  Well, it evolved.  At first, Pat Patrick was rehearsing this big band, and I went to him and he showed me what the standard harmonies were, the popular harmonies that everybody was playing.  Because I could chord and I had a harmonic concept, but it really didn’t fit into the sound that people wanted to hear during that period.  So he gave me the basics, and I was able to go from there.

TP:    So that was from rehearsing with the Pat Patrick Big Band.

HILL:  Yeah, Pat Patrick and (?).

TP:    does that mean that you were hearing Sun Ra then, too?

HILL:  Well, Sun Ra was always around, but I had a different approach to him, because I asked him to sit in and he refused me as a kid.  So then as I got older he said I should support him, you know, and he really didn’t mean that much to me.

TP:    So Bruz Freeman comes by and has the gig for you, and you drive to Detroit and there you are with Bird.  When did you start making a living as a musician?  Were a professional musician then?

HILL:  Yeah, taking gigs.  Like I said, it was still a popular music; it hadn’t become an art form.  So I could look forward to being employed all week or all weekend.

TP:    If there was such a thing as a typical week, what would it be?  Would you be playing the same type of program?  Different functions?

HILL:  Well, there were so many various jobs, because it was before television.  There was weddings, funerals, dances, social clubs, blues jobs and jazz jobs…

TP:    Miss High School, 1958?

HILL:  Well, I missed those high school things.  I missed my chronological counterparts during that time, because I didn’t do that high school thing.  I might appear at an after-hour place somewhere.  My parents generally approved, because at least I was being productive.  I had my warnings on dope and alcohol and stuff.  But it was all type of… You could play a stage show. I played with a variety of singers.  It was just anything.  There was just work all around.

TP:    So you played the full spectrum of functional situations that a professional pianist would do.

HILL:  Yes.  Then they had places like Roberts Show Lounge, where Sammy Davis, Barbara McNair and all them were coming through, and I was the regular house pianist there.  I had a trio.  That was from around ’55 to around ’59.

TP:    Willie Randall, the old Earl Hines alto player, was the manager there?

HILL:  He was the bookkeeper.

TP:    So you were basically backing all the major acts coming through Chicago, and did a lot of playing with singers.

HILL:  And then at the Beehive also a few years before that when I was 16-17.

TP:    Then Norman Simmons did that later.

HILL:  Well, Junior Mance started with Buddy Smith and Israel Crosby.

TP:    At the Beehive you’re playing with the national jazz musicians coming through and you’re playing…

HILL:  And I played at Joe Segal’s sessions.

TP:    Did you back Lester Young ever?

HILL:  I never did back Lester.

TP:    Coleman Hawkins ever?

HILL:  I went to Milwaukee in his band as a kid.  They had a jazz club there.  I was invited to his house.  Then Sonny Stitt.  Almost anyone…

TP:    Ben Webster.

HILL:  Ben Webster.  Oh, I did play with Lester.  I played in a place called the  Stage Lounge.

TP:    So you’re playing rhythm sections, and you do that first trio on Ping.

HILL:  Right, where I had Wilbur Campbell on drums and Leroy Jackson on bass.

TP:    I have the one on Warwick with Malachi Favors and James Slaughter.

HILL:  That was ’59.  I made the ’45 for Ping in ’56.

TP:    I’m trying to get to the development of your concept and sound.  Because nothing I can remember on that Warwick record in ’59 sounds anything like, say, Smokestack or Black Fire.

HILL:  Well, that was designed for the supper clubs I was playing at the time.  Like, in Chicago you weren’t pigeonholed into one situation.  You could participate in multi-situations.  But here in New York, they just seemed to pigeonhole you into where you started working.  In Chicago, you could play the blues, you could play jazz, you could play behind a singer or in the various supper clubs that existed on the Gold Coast at that time.  So if you make a name and people dig whatever you do…

TP:    So each function was one function and there were other functions.

HILL:  That was one function.

TP:    It’s almost as though you got pigeonholed into being an artist in New York.

HILL:  Well, when you’re young and you first come to a city, you find your way.  If you’re disciplined, you’ll find something to get occupied with.  But here in New York… Like, I came to New York with Dinah Washington as a kid and Johnny Hartman, and I could see after that, when I got back to Chicago, the singers, like Al Hibbler…all of them would want me.  So if I came here…which is quite a bit… The only thing that would be available with me would be as an accompanist.  Regardless of what else I did… I was offered a job with Paul Butterfield, but then if I started working that job, I would be polarized again as a Blues pianist.  It was offered to me in New York, and that was why I couldn’t accept it, why I didn’t accept it even though I was moving at the time.  But I’m just saying that to say that whatever you participate in, you become part of.  Now I’m above all that where I’m doing it for my leisure and my sanity at this age.  But earlier, when I was younger, it was just polarized areas.  If one did one thing, he was drafted(?)…

TP:    Let me get you from 1959 to 1963, from the Warwick record where you’re doing supper club music, to Black Fire and Smokestack, which don’t sound like anything else anyone else is doing!  Was the music that you were doing on those first records music that you’d written and conceived of and performed in Chicago?  Or was it project-oriented?

HILL:  Well, the one on Warwick had some standards and originals I wrote, but it was conceived for a certain situation, as were things for other situations, but they were never recorded at the time.

TP:    So the music on that early Blue Note record were things you’d conceived of but never…

HILL:  The things on Blue Note were written especially for that session.

TP:    Did you perform music like that when you were in Chicago?

HILL:  Oh yes, especially with Ira Sullivan’s band before he left Chicago… We had a great band with Ira Sullivan, Nicky Hall…

TP:    Not Malachi.

HILL:  No, not Malachi.  Malachi wasn’t progressive; you know, at that time.

TP:    It almost seems to me, the way you’re describing your function as a musician in Chicago is almost artisanal.  Everything is according to a function and then you create art within that parameters of that function.  I can relate that to writing.  In this article, there are certain limits to what I can do, but I can try to make it as substantial and rich as I can.

HILL:  You have to compartmentalize.

TP:    When you came to New York, did you stop having to compartmentalize?

HILL:  Well, other opportunities were available here from people having seen me in Chicago.

TP:    Who were people you met in Chicago who you linked up with when you came to New York?

HILL:  Well, actually a lot of people I met in Chicago, I didn’t link up with.  Like Art Farmer, Charlie Mingus, who I refused to play with… So everyone I played with who were useful in Chicago weren’t useful in New York, but life has a certain way where you can flow on.

I played with Dinah Washington in ’54.  In the period they said I played with Dinah Washington I was with Johnny Hartman.  Then George Kirby, the mimic, I was his pianist for a while during that period, and I traveled for a short period of time with Al Hibbler.

TP:    Is that how you got to L.A.?

HILL:  No, I got to Los Angeles with Roland Kirk, and stayed over and played at the Lighthouse.

TP:    What gig got you to New York?

HILL:  I just paid my own way here.  I was working somewhere on the West Side of Chicago, and the way I looked at it then is I’ll be doing this all my life, even though I wouldn’t… The way things turned out, all of that evaporated.  So I just decided it was time to come here.

TP:    Chicago started to dry up a bit?

HILL:  No, it didn’t dry up for me.  I was doing fabulously.  I was working with Red Saunders doing stage shows at the Regal, getting all the jazz gigs, and getting… I really was pretty active.  But after ten years of it, it began to get boring.

TP:    So you thought you could find some fresh ways of expressing yourself in New York?  What was the pull?

HILL:  The pull was just the fact that it existed, and I wanted to see what it was, because I knew what I had in Chicago.  What I had in Chicago was nice and great, but it wasn’t satisfying at that point, and I saw to myself that if I stayed there I would have condescended morally because everything had a type of sameness to it.  And then in New York, once I got there, I discovered it had a certain type of environment that nourish me, nurture me.

TP:    And you came at a time when… At the time you got there, you and your peer group, the people you recorded with, Joe Henderson and Bobby Hutcherson all had… I mean, in terms of a distinction with a difference, you not such dissimilar sources and influences, and were looking for something new and for different ways to articulate it.  So it was this wonderful convergence.

HILL:  that’s the way I looked at it, to sustain me, and opportunities presented themselves.  It’s almost like this period now; it’s like coming full circle.  Even though the names and the faces have changed, it’s almost the same situation where there are some younger musicians on the scene, a lot of them unknown, but they exist, and the music can be played on a higher level.

TP:    Because they’ve mastered the tradition in some ways, or have a command of the fundamentals.

HILL:  Yeah, enough where they’re participating academians(?) where they might be able to enter the music.  A lot of them can… It’s just exposure.  In other words, that type of natural resources is here with the talent where one can be catalytic to the music, moving the music ahead.

TP:    Let me ask you about some dates and some of the personalities.  You and Joe Henderson had a real linkup… Through him you got the Blue Note…

HILL:  I did the Our Thing session with him.

TP:    Did that come out of a working situation?

HILL:  When I first came back to New York in ’63, my first job was with Kenny Dorham, and Joe Henderson was playing with Kenny Dorham.  Then the (?) thing started.  Joe had a session and he asked me if I would participate on it.  Then while we were playing the session Alfred said he would like to know if I had any songs, etcetera.  He really liked the way I played and he wanted to make me his piano player for the period.  That’s the type of person he was.  So next thing I know, I was recording under my own name with no strings of any type.

TP:    How did you know Kenny Dorham?

HILL:  I’d played with him in New York before I left to go to California.  I played with Kenny Dorham, with J.C. Moses, with Jackie McLean.  Anything else between ’61 and ’62 was a situation where I worked out of New York.

TP:    Talk about the affinity you and Joe Henderson had.

HILL:  Well, it wasn’t that close like relative fellowship.  During that period there were so many musicians, and everyone was feeling the music and had a different unique approach to the music.  Some people later defined it as it was recorded and worked, and others didn’t.  Because they had such a variety of artists there.  Blue Note was looking for a certain type of artists, like records companies are looking for a certain type of young artist now.  Each period has its similarities.  They were looking for someone who played in the tradition, but who could write music and had some type of direction.

TP:    You played with Walt Dickerson, too, that first time in New York.

HILL:  Mmm-hmm.  And I loved the way Joe Henderson played, but there were so many scholars to hear at that time.  The way he played excited me.  But then I still enjoyed hearing Von Freeman at the time.  So it wasn’t to me anyone greater or lesser.

TP:    This question isn’t about who’s greater and who’s not…

HILL:  No, but they were all an equal influence, because any other way would become too centralized.

TP:    Sam Rivers mentioned that he was playing in your band for a while, i think.

HILL:  Well, Sam had recorded for Blue Note, and I had this job in California where I had written something for 7 pieces.  Sam did a library job at Lincoln Center, I think, back then, with something for the Musician Fund, and I liked what he did there.  So I heard him and asked him to go to California to me.  He said he was leaving the Miles Davis band and that he wasn’t going with Art Blakey, so we had a certain period of time together.

TP:    Did you play in his bands at all?

HILL:  No.

TP:    And he did one record with you of all your music.  You said that the Point of Departure band was actually a working group for a while.

HILL:  Yes, we had a few concerts.

TP:    With Tony Williams.

HILL:  J.C. Moses was the drummer for things that weren’t recorded.

TP:    Did you ever in performance have Roy Haynes or Elvin or Tony in your band?

HILL:  Well, it was in ’71 when I was doing encounters with Roy Haynes and Richard Davis and Billy Harper.

TP:    But they never got recorded, though.

HILL:  They never got recorded.
[PAUSE]
HILL:  In Chicago the audience seemed to have the (?) with the artist, those who really liked the music of a different sort.  A lot of things that people in later years approached as experimental was almost like a natural evolution of the music itself.  You could approach music in various directions, like playing in two keys at once, or playing certain things and having an audience were a certain synergy existed.  That’s why a lot of people say, “Did they have approach this as such-and-such?”, etc., or some type of musical terminology that’s applied to it after the fact, after the actual… But these were just a natural evolution in that period, even to the extent of the New York… Like, with Ira Sullivan I had written things that evolved differently, like tunes with 10 bars and stuff like that.  A good part about that in Chicago is it wasn’t for just a situation where you would go to a coffeehouse or something and say it’s new music; it was something that the people felt.  That was why you could have somebody like Coltrane, who represented a certain musical period.

* * * * *

Andrew Hill (4-21-00):

TP:    At one point in our conversation you mentioned that this seems to be another golden age in jazz, not unlike things that happened in the ’60s when you came to New York.  Could you elaborate on that?

HILL:  Well, you have fresh young musicians on the scene who are not coming from the same aesthetic as the older musicians.  They’re coming because it’s economically expedient to play music.  They can make a career out of it, come college on.  Then on the other hand also, you have the younger players playing with older players, so that means a lot of things that were lost during what I call the retrospective period shortly before this period now have been acquired by the younger musicians through creative contact with older musicians.

TP:    Are you saying that musicians within the generations before this, maybe 1980-95, weren’t sufficiently in touch with older musicians?

HILL:  Well, they weren’t.  Because when the resurgence occurred, it occurred with what I call retrospective bebop.  In other words, good young musicians… Like you always have had good young musicians who copied other people’s music, and could play without achieving any type of creative contact with each other.  So you had that, which is the normal process for younger musicians to go through.  But now, I’m beginning to see young musicians with concepts where they’re not just playing things that they heard off the record, even though it’s still homogeneous, where Coltrane is still the main influence you hear out of a lot of them… But the music is changing again, going its own way, and then you have all this volume of jazz…all these jazz clubs for almost every genre of jazz here, and all of them have a capacity crowd.  Then you have another thing, that jazz all of a sudden seems to be a middle-class or upper-middle-class music.  Because it’s so expensive, a lot of people don’t hear it unless they hear through, you know, Wynton Marsalis, which is a service because it’s like a music appreciation lesson.  Even if one don’t agree upon the text, you can agree that he is bringing the music to young people who never heard it.  And other people have done it, so I can see there’s a wide flurry interest in jazz where people are trying to find not promoted hype, but the truth on the Internet and stuff like that.  Then most of the audiences, you have your chronological cross-section.  You have your older fans, but you have young fans, too.  Because where there’s younger musicians, there’s younger fans.

TP:    You’ve said a few times in these conversations that when you were coming up, jazz wasn’t an…I think the word you used was “art music.”

HILL:  It wasn’t like an art form.  It was still like a people’s music, but from the change of direction that Jazz has taken… Most people talk about Blue Note like it was a philanthropic institution!  You know what I mean?  It wasn’t that.  It carried the heartbeat of the popular music in the black communities!  They were more in tune to Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk… I heard him with a piano player friend of mine.  We used to pride ourselves on the fact that we could lift his stuff off the records when I was 10 years old.

TP:    This was King Solomon, huh?

HILL:  Yeah, King Solomon.  Oh, I told you about that.  Well, the art form was in the neighborhood even before television.  In almost any neighborhood that you wanted to go into, you could hear the music.  It was just coming out… I remember one time when I was 5 years old, I walked down the street and I could hear Billie Holiday coming out of every apartment blasting.  So it was like a people music.  That’s why people could really play by ear in those days, because it was so accessible.  It hadn’t become an expensive art form for social climbers and jazz connoisseurs.

TP:    But of course there was a group of connoisseurs, though not necessarily social climbers.  I just finished a story for Downbeat on Barry Harris, and he was talking about that time sitting in with Bird in Detroit when you drove there with Bruz Freeman.  But he said that when he was coming up (and he’s older than you), he and his friends got together, they listened to every record when it came out, they absorbed the solos, they took the things off the record, they slowed the records down until they had absolutely internalized all the solos that interested them.  They had their lessons, but they basically taught each other.

HILL:  Oh yes.  But then Chicago was definitely…it seemed to be further away…not further away… But it seemed to be geographically further and culturally different.  There wasn’t an emphasis on everyone being homogeneous.

TP:    Oh, you think the Detroit cats were homogeneous?

HILL:  In their approach to music.  Because you had all these older piano players who played different ways in Chicago.

TP:    you were mentioning Willie Jones.

HILL:  There was Willie Jones.  A slew of fine pianists.  They weren’t, you know, hip-hip-hip, or they weren’t the currently fashionable as the new jazz thing in the black community, but they worked all the time, and each one of them could play.  So you had all these variety of styles, from ragtime piano players who were in the church who were playing with Thomas Dorsey, the one who allegedly created gospel music…

TP:    Or commodified it anyway.

HILL:  Yeah, commodified it.  To all the fine pianists who were coming through town, which one could jam with; which I could jam with when one of the mature pianists was in there.  That’s how I got the job with Bird.  He asked for me and Bruz drove me there.  In other words, we had people like George Eskridge, who could take Bud Powell and Charlie Parker note-for-note off there, but there was no emphasis… Naturally, a lot of the alto players played like Bird.  But then you had Porter Kilbert and other older musicians who played like Willie Smith.  So there was such a cross-section that there was no…

TP:    Everybody was playing everything, is what it sounds like.

HILL:  Yeah, it wasn’t codified or marginalized.  You could work at supper club jobs; there jobs on the North Side, jazz gigs… In other words, there was an emphasis on people being well-rounded instead of polarized.

TP:    I understand.  Let me throw out another question.  How did you meet Hindemith, and what was the nature of your interaction with him?

HILL:  When I was a kid, I used to hustle on the corner of 47th Street with Leo Blevins, who at that time had a bathtub with a board with a G-string.  Me, Leo and Robert Blevins, I would bring my accordion and tap-dance, and we would just play on the corner.  That was our corner.  It was 47th Street and State on the northeast corner.  Because across the street was the cultural heart of what was called Bronzeville.  You had the Regal Theater, where they had a stage show and a movie, the Hurricane Lounge where Albert Ammons and later Gene Ammons played, the Savoy Ballroom, where Hot Lips Page and all… Then adjacent to that from where that was, there was a department store called South Center, which was the biggest… In other words…

TP:    The hub.

HILL:  The hub.  That was the hub of Bronzeville.

TP:    And your corner was in the hub of Bronzeville.

HILL:  Was in the hub of Bronzeville.  So when people didn’t show up, I used to go to South Center and just get a brown paper bag and allegedly call myself writing music.  And Hindemith came — I wasn’t musically literate as far as who’s supposed to be what in classical music and stuff — and he asked to see what I had written.

TP:    You mean he just was down there and he saw you doing it and said, “Little boy, let me…”

HILL:  It wasn’t “little boy.”  He was a very nice man.  We had a little conversation, as much as the age barrier would allow, and he asked me.  He said who he was, which I didn’t know.  But he said what I was writing was musically correct, but people who played, professional musicians, would have another type of notation.  And he showed me how I could do certain things without any type of musical instrument, like writing notes down and arranging them symmetrically and asymmetrically.  Things like that.

TP:    And you said that you had an innate ability to do that, to hear music without a tangible sound in front of you.

HILL:  Yes, I could do it without a sound in front of me.

TP:    But continue with Hindemith.  You wound up sending him something and he gave you a critique?

HILL:  No.  It was just when he was town he always arranged for us to get together and talk.  Later some people would call it a master lesson.  But the way he dealt with me is the way I tried to deal with my students in later life.  He didn’t try to change anything I was doing, but just enhance what I had naturally.

TP:    What about Bill Russo?

HILL:  Well, I bought a few lessons from him.

TP:    how old were you when you met Hindemith?

HILL:  I was around 14.

TP:    So that’s around 1951, and this relationship continued through the ’50s, to your being an adult?

HILL:  For a few years.  Once you get into your adolescence, different things change, and I became more mesmerized by the environment around me.

TP:    Elaborate.

HILL:  Well, I was getting to the point where I was making…you know, playing jobs.  Like, in ’54 I went out with Dinah Washington as her pianist, just a summer vacation.

TP:    She was covering tunes that were already hits.

HILL:  Yes.  “This Bitter Earth” and stuff like that.  That was right before she did her Emarcy sessions.

TP:    Are you saying that your performing career in Chicago subsumed your composing aspirations?

HILL:  Yes.  Because I had a career in Chicago as an adolescent and young man before I came to New York.  In Chicago there were so many things to do.  There were singers to play with, musicians to jam with — not to mention trying to stay in school.  So consequently, all my working time was in functional activity and trying to correct what needed to be correct so I could be more proficient.

TP:    And you were house pianist at the Beehive in ’53 and ’54?

HILL:  No, I played there.  Aside from the Beehive, they had the Crown Propellor and the Stage Lounge.

TP:    You sat in at all those places, but you were never house pianist as such.

HILL:  Well, I played…was almost house pianist at the Stage Lounge, which was on 63rd and Stony Island.  Then you had the Crown Propellor right before Cottage Grove.

TP:    And that was part of that 63rd Street strip.

HILL:  Yes, that 63rd Street strip.

TP:    A lot of musicians who were around then describe 63rd Street in awestruck tones.

HILL:  Oh, it was similar in a sense to what people said 52nd Street was.  On Cottage Grove you had the 6310; that’s where Willie Jones and his band played.  Then they had a disk jockey named McKie Fitzhugh, who had a club directly across the street.  And on 64th was the Pershing Lounge, where Ahmad Jamal was playing, and downstairs you had the first Cadillac Bob’s, where Sun Ra’s band used to play.

TP:    And they had a ballroom in there, too.

HILL:  Yeah, the Pershing Ballroom, where Gene Ammons, Tom Archia, Illinois Jacquet and people like that used to play all the time for the kids.  So the strip went up… They had a gay place a little further down on 63rd Street near South Park.  This was in the latter part… This was from ’54-’55.  Then before that, they had Nob Hill.  That’s where the Beehive was.

TP:    That was on 55th Street.

HILL:  Yes, in the Woodlawn area.

TP:    So you basically worked in all those places, and you said that you were de facto house pianist at the Roberts Show Lounge.

HILL:  Well, I did have the house trio at the Roberts Show Lounge with Malachi Favors and James Slaughter — and Teddy Thomas for a while.

TP:    So that formed the core of your activity in the ’50s.  You’re performing, you’re doing tons of jobs, you’re finishing school, you have your compositional fires sort of fueled by meeting Hindemith, but you’re not really doing it because there’s not time and not really opportunity, except for some things you’re doing with people like Ira Sullivan and Nicky Hill at certain concerts, and maybe some jamming.

HILL:  Oh, you know the names.

TP:    Well, I know a lot about the Chicago    music.  But when I asked you if there was any analogue to your Blue Note work, you mentioned that you had done some things like that with Ira Sullivan and Nicky Hill.

HILL:  Yeah.  And Red Lionhart(?). There was a bunch… Because Saturday mornings… Ira and the gang was on the North Side, and I was on the South Side, but I would occasionally go on the North Side to play with them.

TP:    And you said you played some of the North Side, Gold Coast supper clubs.

HILL:  Yeah, supper clubs, and they had a jazz club over there, too.  I forgot the name of that place.

TP:    And the Warwick record is ’59, not ’55.

HILL:  Yeah, ’59.

TP:    So you leave Chicago on your own, you get to New York, you know people I guess from their having met you through coming into Chicago, and you work with Johnny Hartman, you work with Walt Dickerson, you leave for Los Angeles with…

HILL:  Al Hibbler.

TP:    Al Hibbler.  Then you go to Los Angeles with Roland Kirk, where you meet your wife.

HILL:  Mmm-hmm.  We played at the Lighthouse.

TP:    And you do that record [Conflict] with Jimmy Woods.  Then you get to New York and settle back in.  So if I cite that as your chronology, I’m accurate.

HILL:  Mmm-hmm.

TP:    But just tell me one thing about playing with singers.  Was that something you liked doing?  Was it valuable?

HILL:  It was very valuable to me, because instead of voicing the chords which were popular then, which were sevenths in the right hand and, and thirds and sevenths, you know, like that…or fourths, bass on the seventh in the right hand… I could really go into the harmonics of the tune.

TP:    With the singers.

HILL:  Yes, with the singers it called for not the voicings so the horn players could play, but to play the harmonics of the tune so you could embellish and bring out what the singers were doing.

TP:    Did playing the accordion so young have an effect on your sense of time flow at the piano?

HILL:  Well, I played accordion very much like a harmonica.  Because with those bellows and stuff, you would get the same type of sound, just like a blues accordion player or zydeco…

TP:    All that vocalized timbre.

HILL:  Yes.

TP:    So it didn’t really have that much to do with your conception as a pianist, you don’t think.

HILL:  Well, in a sense it did, because you have the buttons, or stops, on the left hand.  But on the right hand, you had to deal with chordal clusters, not the chord itself.

TP:    In Chicago, did you see yourself as a Jazz pianist as such, or did you see yourself as a pianist who could play a variety of functions, including Jazz?

HILL:  Well, then I saw myself just as a pianist.  Because there was no need to polarize myself in one corner.  Because unlike New York, or maybe… When I came to New York, that road to supper clubs and the singers… I used to play with comedians like George Kirby.  So when I came here, I was more interested in playing jazz jobs than being well-rounded.

TP:    Did you come here with the intent of playing your own music also, or did that sort of happen…

HILL:  Well, that just came on its own.  Because everyone was to me writing so many interesting things, I found out I could evolve myself harmonically by participating with the others instead of stagnating for a certain style.

TP:    So in other words, through playing the original music of Joe Henderson and other people, it kind of spurred things that had been welling up in your mind over the years and music just came pouring out?  Was it that type of thing?

HILL:  Well, I always was a prolific writer.  But like most writers, you need new material to keep from becoming passe in your approach to writing, unless you market yourself to some institution where it’s necessary for you to have a certain almost commercial approach to writing.

TP:    Without going into a lot of detail about… Oh, Bobby Hutcherson asked me to ask you about coming back on the D-train early in the morning from Brooklyn.

HILL:  [LAUGHS] I’m not going to tell you about the D-train.  That’s not for public consumption.

TP:    But you mentioned sort of offhandedly that the friend you did the transcription with was a church pianist, and you learned a lot of the techniques of church music…

HILL:  Oh, that was afterwards.

TP:    You said you learned a lot from him, but you didn’t have your own church experience until you were 30.

HILL:  Oh, it was a her, not a him.

TP:    Oh, so it wasn’t King Solomon.

HILL:  That was a lady named Oveal Warren.  She was the choir-master at the First Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, California.

TP:    So that happened when you moved out…

HILL:  Well, when I left New York in ’76, first we bought a place in the Mariloma(?) Park section of San Francisco.  But I couldn’t take that because San Francisco at the time was trying to be just like New York, and Pittsburgh was kind of country, but it had the nerve to have its own identity.

TP:     Why did you start to get sick of New York?

HILL:  Well, I didn’t get sick of it.  My deceased wife was becoming ill, and once I moved there the condition was described as terminal.  So rather than run back to New York, I decided that I would just stay there because she would need me to be with her.

TP:    I’d like to get back to the present and talk about Dusk.  I don’t want to ask you anything so trivial as to talk about the genesis of the record.  But you said you’d been doing a tremendous amount of writing since you came back east in ’97, that it kind of opened up… Not everything on the record is from the last few years, but I gather most of it is.

HILL:  Well, maybe two or three.  Because when the sextet first started, we had a different repertoire, but the two or three tunes I kept in the book.

TP:    Well, Ball Square you played with Clifford on that Spirits record.

HILL:  Yes, but I just put more sections on it.

TP:    And “15/8” you might have done solo.

HILL:  Yes, I did on a French record.

TP:    Were you writing music for the qualities of the musicians in the sextet, or was it more them just dealing with your conception?

HILL:  Well, there was a combination of both.  The first compositions I wrote, that I took out the book literally wasn’t changed for the sextet.  But they really didn’t fit the sextet, so the compositions became more personalized the longer the group stayed together.

TP:    And the group going into the Jazz Standard is slightly different.

HILL:  Yes, we changed the bass player and drummers from last year.  Ratzo Harris is taking Scott Colley’s place, and Nasheet Waits in on drums.  The tenor player is Aaron Stewart, plus Marty and Ron…

TP:    And since this record I think you said you’ve done 20 more tunes.

HILL:  Yes, 20 more tunes.  But then some tunes were shaped around Greg Tardy, because he plays clarinet and bass clarinet also.  With Aaron Stewart we’re starting off with 7 tunes, and we’ll possibly rehearse every day we can during the job, so I can try to get a repertoire that fits his personality.

TP:    And then you’re going to record again?

HILL:  I think I’m recorded out for the moment.  The reason I did this recording, between you and I, is I was talking to Howard and telling him that I was thinking about disbanding the sextet, and he said, “Well, it would be good if you did a recording before you do that.”  Because the sextet is good, but it has a life of its own; it seemed to have a synergy that connected with the people.  So it created its own life.  Even though at times I wanted to stop it, but you know, it has a life of its own.

TP:    So it fulfilled a function and maybe now it’s not fulfilling its function and it’s more of an obligation.

HILL:  Well, I really don’t know how I feel about it, because time the people change, the music changes.  It’s a situation that I have to see how it goes at the Jazz Standard.  I know when I changed to Nasheet Waits it improved for me, because I had a more sensitive and open drummer.  Billy is wonderful, but he played like a leader drummer instead of a sensitive drummer.  Which was good, because the band before I started changing it around was like a machine that would just play on its own.  But then what I hate about big bands is the stagnation that comes from repetition.  So this was like a little big band, and it started getting to the point where it could easily become very repetitious from the way some people approached it.  So by making the change, sometimes it became more interesting.

TP:    Do you see your composed music as infinitely mutable material?

HILL:  Well, at the time I really write, I see my composed music as an outlet for my emotions.  Sometimes life is just life, and it has its frustrations for everyone, or problems or whatever, and I can use it as a vehicle to soothe my emotions, and I notice that every time I write when I’m emotional, or even when I write when I’m not emotional, something new and good to me will come out of it that expresses those emotions.

TP:    What’s the role of improvisers within your music?

HILL:  I like to try to get people who are sensitive, like I said before, and who love the music.  Actually the music is just a blueprint for, in most spots, the way it develops, for group improvisation.

TP:    So you see your compositions, at least within an improvisational sense, as templates for group improvising and group creation.  I guess the phrase you like to use is “creative contact.”

HILL:  Yes, for group improvisation.  Because some parts they play as written, but then what’s written sometimes is just a theme to expand on together.

TP:    Lately you seem to be doing a lot of concerts and special appearances.  I don’t know if the thing with Bobby was a singular event or one of a series you’ve been doing, but I know you’ve also done duos with David Murray…

HILL:  Yes, and last week I did a duo with Archie Sheep in London.

TP:    I guess Archie Sheep is your age, but one thinks of you as being from different generations for some reason — maybe because you were on different labels and didn’t at least historically interact during the ’60s anyway.

HILL:  Mmm-hmm.

TP:    And you see to be distinct from the “free” school of players.  Particularly in that time.  Did you see a distinction between you and, say, some of the players who were around Coltrane, or as you said when you called me while I was playing your record and Greg Tardy was soloing, “it sounds like Albert Ayler.”  Did you have any contact with that group of musicians then?

HILL:  Oh yeah, when I was in the Black Arts period, I produced Albert Ayler, the drummer Milford Graves and Don Pullen… On the streets of Harlem, I had three concerts a night(?) of free music.  But as far as myself, the only reason I was catalogued as an avant-garde is because they had no category to put me in.  Which they explained to me when I asked about it.  They said, “Well, we can’t say that you’re a Bebop drummer or a post bebop piano player or a solo piano player or avant-garde.”  But for marketing purposes, they put me under the classification of avant-garde, which seemed to have… It gave me life in the catalogue.  Because if I was classified as a post-Bebop piano player, that only had a certain duration on the jazz market.

TP:    I remember reading a review which I xeroxed of you doing a concert in Chicago in ’67 of your group opposite Roscoe Mitchell, I think it was.

HILL:  No, Roscoe Mitchell came up and jammed with me.

TP:    I realize you were out of Chicago by that time.  But did you have any contact with the nascent AACM, or its antecedents in the Experimental Band, or did you ever touch base with them…

HILL:  Well, I gave them one of their first jobs out of Chicago.  Because John Sinclair, who was in Ann Arbor, asked me to name some musicians who were with the new avant-garde, and I mentioned the AACM, particularly Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell.

TP:    And subsequently they got a lot of work through him.

HILL:  Yeah, he really gave them a big push.  That was around ’67-’68.

TP:    Do you remember your early contact with Joseph and Roscoe?

HILL:  Well, I first met Roscoe when he sat in with me.

TP:    What did you think of what they were doing when you first heard it?

HILL:  Well, I didn’t really know what they as a group were doing.  I just played with Charles Clark and Thurman Barker with a trio, and it was good, you know, but people have been playing like that in Chicago before Ornette Coleman hit the scene.  In Chicago we used to play what we would call “in” and we would play what we would call “out.”  So that was really nothing new for Chicagoans when it got promoted.  That represented a situation where we had Marshall Allen and a few people unnamed.  So when music was… Popular music.  I’ll go back to that.  The audience’s ears was more developed, so you could have a type of synergy…

[END OF SIDE A]

So people had been playing like that.  It was just…

TP:    I guess there’s a certain element of that that goes into blues playing as well.

HILL:  Well, it really goes into blues playing, because the true blues musicians really don’t cater to so many bars, let’s say.  Where people might say it should be a 12-bar blues, and it may be a 15-bar blues.

TP:    It’s whatever they feel at the moment.

HILL:  It’s like choir music, where you have the refrain before you start again, and all that.  Even though it’s based on some type of rhythm, what’s on top may not really fit in with Western harmony the way people think Western harmony should be.

TP:    You also mentioned that Israel Crosby told you that black musicians would play differently, say, with Benny Goodman than in a black band — that they had to concertize.  Which was the thing that impressed you to Earl Hines.  So we can even trace that way of playing Earl Hines in a very stylized show situation.

HILL:  Oh yes, playing something simple like “Sweet Lorraine” or whatever the repertoire, but he would take it out of the context of the standard form, even though it was in the mode of chords of that period, and do certain things… A musician like King Kolax would talk, and they would say… When they crossed over then, they would use that term, that they would concertize their music, put it in almost more of a concert form where the soloist would elaborate a little more than they would just playing together…just playing with each other.

TP:    When you’re talking to me about the range of sources that you can work with, it sounds like the way Muhal Richard Abrams talks, or Anthony Braxton, or Joseph Jarman — that almost any form of music, any genre of music, whether it’s Hindemith, or whether it’s the Blues, or whether it’s Charlie Parker, is grist for your mill, is something you can express yourself with in the most natural way.

HILL:  It is.  All material that you hear… A lot of things have been recycled or expounded upon.  Like, the rhythm may change over the decades or certain elements may change but the basics remain the same.

TP:    Going back to the idea that this is another golden age in the music, do you think this particular group of musicians at this particular moment is ready to seize upon all those possibilities in a way that they haven’t for a while.

HILL:  The ones who aren’t literate.  And by literate I mean those who aren’t so well read that they associate the music with European Art, the part of European art which has been adopted into Jazz, where people think they either have to compromise or live in poverty to play creative music.

TP:    Elaborate on that.

HILL:  By compromise, sometimes it’s not a compromise… They feel that because of the venues available and the visibility available from the institutional position of jazz when you’re in places like Lincoln Center, and the repertory used…that they either have to play like that, or they’re afraid to expand on their talent, because either they’re not open enough to receive it or feel that they won’t work.  To me, both camps, the retrospective camp…and the Free camp is retrospective also, because that’s over forty years old.  But then I see the young people using the entire vocabulary instead of one aspect of it to move the music forward.  Because when I first came back here I thought, like everybody else, “Well, ain’t nothin’ happening.”  Then I started playing with people and I thought, well, something is happening.  The music has moved already, even though it’s imperceptible to those who are loyal to the different camps… But the music itself, the way it’s being played, is totally different from what it’s been.  Now you have those who depending on what school they went to will dictate whether they’re playing allegedly Free or Bebop — because that was the text.  But those who have got past the academic approach, who have gotten into the sound, are taking it somewhere else.

TP:    Did that inspire you when you got back here and you found that out?

HILL:  Yes, it was really inspirational to find out that things aren’t static, which led me to the point where I don’t have to become the person I was 30-40 years ago, which is impossible.

TP:    You don’t have to recreate the things that you put down in the spur of the moment… You don’t have to be those three or four years of Blue Note recordings.  You can be who you are now, and progress and grow within a community of people.

HILL:  Yes.  And that’s always rewarding rather than isolated in a retrospective view of yourself.  Or I can express it better.  It’s easy to fall back upon what you’ve done, but it’s harder to just continue playing, because when one plays, either… The audience is fickle anyway.  It will either be with you or it won’t.  Then those who compromise can have a longer tenure of playing.  But it’s terrible to me playing without the passion of music.  Because that’s what I hear a lot of times, people playing without even a passion.  Because it’s the passion that connects; it’s not the academic correctness.  Because the passion brings out the magic, something that draws the audience into you.  But to be playing without any passion but playing correctly seems like people just make a career out of it instead of following their passion.

TP:    What music do you like to listen to these days?

HILL:  Well, now, other than newer things, I like Steve Coleman, the things I like…

TP:    Another Chicagoan.

HILL:  With his own… Yeah!  Then I liked the duo record that Frank Kimbrough did with Joe Locke, Saturn’s Child.  I listen to a variety of things.  Because what I do is, everybody is giving me CDs… I try to tell them not to give it to me.  So the things that I like, which is around 3% of what I get, I keep and listen to sporadically, and other things I just put in care packages and send them out to friends.

TP:    How did you like The Invisible Hand?

HILL:  I enjoyed doing it because Greg gave me the… I didn’t approach it as a sideman.  I just did it because Greg expressed to me sincerely how disappointed he would be if I hadn’t done it, and I have a feeling for him, so… I first met Greg ten years ago when we did Eternal Spirits, and it was good to see where he had progressed to and where he was at this point.

TP:    And in Classical music?  What do you listen to?

HILL:  Yes, I listen to Classical music.  I never have grown tired of Bartok’s string quartets — and other things.  I listen to a whole mixture of different music, but the composing I don’t really listen to it that much.  It seems like I’m able to draw a lot of things from the inside, even though I do go to concerts of all types — Classical, Jazz and stuff.  I have a preference myself for live music, because recorded music to me is like representational art.  That people hear so much… Even though most abstract things can be hung.  And the spirit of jazz is not on the repetition, but it’s allegedly supposed to be built upon playing something different every time you play.

TP:    And I think we have a good concluding question.  So you’re optimistic.  You’re seeing enough young people in this generation who embody that spirit going forward.  It sounds like you’re pretty optimistic about it.

HILL:  Yes.  I not only see the spirit; I see the outlet for that spirit, where someone, one who commits himself to the music, the rewards will be greater than someone who just approached the music career-wise.  I see where an outlet for creative music is bigger than the outlook for those who can confine them to a certain music simply because they found one formula that they can work or gain a professional image with.

TP:    One other question.  In the program notes to the Mosaic box, Cuscuna says that in the late ’60s you invested wisely in real estate and were able to support yourself comfortable and get away from the vagaries of the existence of being solely a performing musician.  Is that right?

HILL:  Well, from my beginnings, what made me play music was the desire to play, but also it was motivated by the fact that I got paid.  So I never associated music with poverty, because I found that when I played, no matter what my skills may be or how I may attempt to be the Renaissance man, that my rewards were greater even financially than they were by my being a tenured college professor.  But then I also realized that for me to have any duration I would have to get away from the music for certain periods so I wouldn’t be jaded either by my contemporaries or by my having a musical formula which I considered successful.

TP:    So you looked for outlets so you could keep your juices going.

HILL:  Well, when someone says they’re an artist, that’s not a poverty thing.  To be a true artist, you have to have a certain economic freedom.  And if you weren’t born with that, you can give it to yourself.  Because by working, you have escaped poverty.  So it’s just a matter of what do you spend your money on.  Do you need all the new technological toys or do you want a good life?

* * * *

Andrew Hill (WKCR, 5-5-00):

[MUSIC: “Dusk”]

TP:    Let’s talk about the genesis of this record.  The instrumentation comes from one of your most famous recordings, done for Blue Note in late 1963, called Point of Departure, which featured some of the legends of jazz in an ensemble oriented situation articulating your music [ETC.].  I guess the idea arose a few years ago came to revisit the aural timbre of that event for a Knitting Factory festival a few years ago.

HILL:  To revisit the aural timbre and try to reset the state of excellence.  Because there was a certain artistic excellence with that album which wasn’t uncommon for musicians when they got together for that period.  But for this period I figure we’d try to create a band that had the same type of synergy with the audience and who loved the music.

TP:    That brings up two questions.  One is, what qualities, in the general sense, distinguish the musicians who performed on Point of Departure from the generation that appears on Dusk, and what they need to interpret the music with the sensibility that it demands.

HILL:  What I’m trying for now is to be more open and not deal in comparisons.  Because the social and economic situations that created the artists of 20 and 30 years ago isn’t prevalent today.  Because now it’s economically expedient to be a jazz musician.  So you’re dealing with a vast majority of younger musicians who went to college to study jazz (bebop probably was the text) who can make a career out of music.  For me, when I discover musicians in that chronological age with a passion for that music, that’s what gets my attention.  Because I really can’t say what happened (it would seem like a contradiction of what I just said) can’t happen today, but it is happening, seems to be happening in a different way.  Because before I got more involved in my writing and playing, and the interchange with various chronological, 3 or 4 generations from… I discovered that something is happening today.  Because the usual look is that Jazz is something unique that happened in the 20th Century and went its own way and died, and is being preserved.  But now I look at some of the younger musicians and I say, “Well, they really don’t need anything but to play and to play with a certain type of openness.  Like, in any subject, they say, well, once people forget what they studied, then it all becomes organic and instinctive and something great arrives.  But I’ve seen those qualities in quite a few young, middle-aged and older musicians where I say, well, the music really doesn’t need anything.  Because those type of human resources are still available, and the cream of whatever always will find a way to rise to the top, regardless of the obstacles.

TP:    I guess a lot of the musicians who can sustain themselves in the contemporary scene will have to have internalized the styles of many different periods to be able, as you put it, to forget it — forget what they learned and play, in some sense.

HILL:  When I was at the university, the way I approached it was it’s good for a musician to transcribe and have a certain model for entry, and then once they discovered that formula they have something to study and make various improvements on the improvisations.  So it’s a matter of a student nowadays, moreso than everyone who’s been before them, is just to be able to apply critical thinking to the subject matter.  It’s good to go back, but if one really can’t go back and get the feeling out of it, I wouldn’t recommend it.  Because music is not just based on the academic approach, like tonic-dominant harmony and stuff, but it offers a certain magic when people play together and get a creative contact.  So if one can listen, like any aesthetic…listen gradually and get the emotional content out of their music, and in some kind of way figure out how it fit into the sociological mores of the time for the period when jazz was a popular music, not an art form.

TP:    Well, what is your relationship to this older music?  You began your recording contract for Blue Note in 1963, and by ’65, certainly by ’66, you had recorded 8 or 9 albums that stand out as individual documents and classics of the time — over about a three-year period.  To a lot of people it was like you’d come out of nowhere.  Well, that certainly wasn’t the case, because you’d been an active working musician in Chicago for more than a decade before that.  But most people define you by this music from 35 years ago.  So what’s your relationship to it in putting together a body of work for a group of contemporary musicians with that instrumentation, your relationship to that older body of music.

HILL:  Well, for my selection process, I would like a musician who partially understands everything that has gone on before, like the free playing which has been out for forty years, then the bebop, the retrospective, then the magic of Bebop… Just have an understanding of the traditional musical vocabulary that has happened before them enough where they can participate, use critical thinking in terms of the timbre, the sounds, able to associate a certain sound with a certain creative process, to say, “Well, this will fit into this period.”  Not looking at anything as old and new.  Because it’s all common property and always been recycled with a different beat.  But I look for people to have a knowledge of what has gone on in the past, because the freedom I will give them, I want them to make good musical choices.

TP:    There’s an explicit reference in this… The title track is inspired by a section of Jean Toomer’s Cane.  Talk about how your impression of the text set off the musical impressions we hear on the CD.

HILL:  Cane is basically a bunch of short stories linked together which is built on his experience in the South, when he went down South to teach and was drawn into what I call a native environment.  Prior to that period he was raised as mulatto gentry from that time, a Washington, D.C. background with his family… But what links it is these different things, like they say “her skin was beautiful, it was like dusk…”  Everything emphasizes dusk.  Dusk to me is the period between day and night.  Each one has a different dusk.  One could smell smoke, the baby burning… That was kind of a dusk.  Not dealing with it chronologically in years, but dealing with it chronologically by the season.

[MUSIC:  “Sept”]

TP:    When people in the band talk about playing with you from night to night, they describe an attitude on your part towards the music that it’s kind of like a work in process.  The musical texts seem to be infinitely mutable.  You change the form of the compositions from night, occasionally without much warning or on the spur of the moment.  Has that been your philosophy?

HILL:  Yes.  The sextet is nice, but then when you have arranged things it can become as boring as a big band.  Because some of the most interesting big bands I have heard, the musicians who play in them regularly are bored to death.  So I figure, well, maybe if you can change the form and context of the material and get the soloists involved where they can go into group improvisation on a theme or on a rhythm, you can keep the music alive.  Because other than that, everyone who would probably sound incredible from playing the same thing over and over again… But there’s a certain magic of creation.  Because I would rather have the magic of creation, which is success, rather than perfection of an academic approach where everything is perfect but meaningless.

TP:    Did you ever lead a big band or write big band music?  Am I correct that there is one unissued big band record in the Blue Note archives?

HILL:  There’s actually three big band things I started, with a tentet, with unorthodox arrangements, then I have two or three with 12 to 14 piece instrumentations, which to my memory isn’t like a standard orchestra.  But I always have enjoyed writing for almost any group.  Writing seems to be my passion.  I was amazed today… Two days ago I was working on a tune, and today it just revealed itself as a futuristically incredible composition.  So I’ve written for big bands, orchestras…

TP:    And you’ve been writing since before you knew it was writing, in a certain sense.

HILL:  Yes, I always have had that.  When I grew up, everybody would say it was weird, because the young kids my age were playing baseball, hitting each other in the head with the bat, the little things that came with childhood in the neighborhood I grew up in.  But I preferred, in a sense, to hustle.  I had two or three street corners where I would stand and play my accordion.  Leo Blevins, who was ten years older, had a bathtub with a board and a G-string.  So we would liberate a corner and play there.  During the intermission I would go to the department store and allegedly write things down on a brown paper bag, which I found out in time was correct… I was told that my method of notation… Because when you write, you try to make things a little more homogeneous so people can read it.  But my music didn’t have any mercy for the musician who would read it, but it was correct.  I always loved to write music.  Then when I got to the point where I could hear the music back, I loved it that much more, just… I notice that whenever I’m troubled or whatever, it’s like an…it’s amazing that from your creative outlets, something is born.

TP:    The neighborhood you grew up in that you’re referring to is the South Side of Chicago, which was a center of enormous cultural ferment in the time when you were growing up, after World War II and during the 1950’s  And the person who let you know about what you were writing, if I’m not mistaken, was Paul Hindemith.  Not necessarily the person you’d expect to encounter on the South Side of Chicago.

HILL:  Well, across from the corner where we were playing, you had such cultural attractions as the Regal Theater, where they had the stage shows, part of the black theater circuit, then you had the Savoy Ballroom where great artists would come in who people would dance to.  Then you had the Hurricane Lounge, where first Albert Ammons was playing, but then Gene Ammons and Tom Archia played… It was just a hub.  Not to mention 47th Street itself.  As you walked down 47th Street from east to west you would run into a few places that had blues bands.  So you would find a lot of people going through that strip because it was safe and there was a lot of, in a sense, material available.

TP:    So Hindemith just heard you, saw what you were doing, and took an interest.

HILL:  Yes, he took a partial interest.  I think he was going to the Regal Theater.  I think one of Fats Waller’s last performances was there, and he played organ.

TP:    So you were 6 years old when…

HILL:  Hmm-hmm. Anyway, he stopped… I guess I was a sight, a little raggedy kid who could play the accordion, and when I played it, it was like a harmonica almost, where it sounded like a mouth instrument, because you can  have those waves of air.  So that was interesting.  It looked like the stage show was getting ready to start…

TP:    And you were more interesting than the stage show.

HILL:  Well, everybody put their instrument down.  So I sat down and wrote something on some music paper.  I was calling myself writing, because I could hear the sound from when I was a baby… In hard times they had rent parties, and you had some of the finest pianists coming by your house playing stride and boogie-woogie and some modern.  So music was always available, and from my ears I could separate the various sounds.  I’ve always been talented at that.  At first it was like a game, but then the game grew into another type of reality.

TP:    I guess through playing on the street is how people like Albert Ammons or Earl Hines would have heard you play — you’ve mentioned both as early mentors.

HILL:  Well, Earl Hines, a few years after that he was at the new Grand Terrace.  The old one was at 35th Street.  In ’49-’50-’51-’52-’53, it moved to Oakwood Boulevard, which was on Oakwood and South Park, which is now King Boulevard.  Anyway, from being at the Regal as I got older, I started selling the Chicago Defender.  The way that worked was, you would go to the distributor and buy so many newspapers yourself.  Part of my route where I would go was these hotels and buildings, and sometimes it was the Grand Terrace.  I stumbled upon Fatha Hines.  Because at that age I didn’t know who was supposed to be who or what, but I was just happy that when I ran into an older artist, they would be supportive and maybe give me a…you know, explain something musically to me.  So I bugged him to death. [LAUGHS] Then he decided he would let me play on his grand.  So I played on his grand, I played something in D-flat, and he was amazed not only that I could hear, but I had an unlimited technical facility for not having really studied.

TP:    It’s something that couldn’t be duplicated today.  You mentioned to me that at 12 years you sat in for one tune at a breakfast session at the Macombo Lounge…

HILL:  Yes, they were playing “Idaho.”  They gently eased me off the stand because I didn’t play the bridge in A-flat.  Oscar Pettiford was playing bass and the legendary Ike Day was playing drums.  King Kolax, who was an older musician who had been in all these various big bands… The piano player didn’t show up, and he knew that I could play some wonderful choruses in F, so they invited me on the stand to play “Idaho” with them.  I got the F part right, but on the bridge he kept hollering, “Go to A-flat, go to A-flat!”  But after that, they were nice enough to generally ease me off the stand, but they told me what I did wrong.  They said, “On the bridge, you go to A-flat.”  Then years later…well, not that many years, when I discovered who everyone was, I was overwhelmed.  Which I think really created my personality now.  I said, “If people of that magnitude can be generous and gracious and giving, let me try to be like that.”  I know there was others who turned their back to the audience.  I’m not saying anything is greater or lesser.  But from my experience, I also try to be supportive.

TP:    Through the ’50s, you finished school, and also played rent parties, did various gigs around the South Side, which meant a range from supper club things to hardcore jazz to playing with singers — and blues.

HILL:  And blues.  Then all of a sudden I became a pianist at the Regal Theater with the Red Saunders band.

TP:    You played at the Beehive, where national acts would come through.

HILL:  Played the Beehive when it was in Nob Hill.

TP:    Subsequent to that, the Roberts Show Lounge, where major entertainers came in, North Side supper clubs, different clubs on the 63rd Street strip.  So by the time you got to New York in 1961, when you were 24, you already a decade’s professional experience, which puts into perspective the splash you were able to make once Blue Note allowed you to unleash your creative juices on the scene you encountered in New York City.

HILL:  The (?) had become polarized, in a sense.  Sometimes I’d say to myself, well, since I played all these clubs and so on in Chicago, why wasn’t I drawn to that in New York.  But when I arrived, what got my attention was all the various flowers, known and unknown, was were available.  It was just a big potpourri of musical talent.  It was thrilling to be alive.  Music wasn’t economically expedient at that time, but there was a certain type of fellowship and certain information and certain…you know, the joy of musicians really having a social work style where they were liberally given information all the time, and you were able to play… No one had gotten big enough where they couldn’t refuse certain situations where they got together.  Before I left, things had changed.  I knew it was time to go, because people were charging me for rehearsals.  I said, “The scene is changing.”

TP:    Dusk has a programmatic component to the recital.  There are sextet pieces, piano with a three-horn orchestration type of thing, and some solo tracks as well, of which we’ll hear one, which is called “Tough Love.”

[MUSIC: “Tough Love”; w/ Osby, “The Watcher, Vol. 2”; POD, “Flight 19”]

HILL:  I really enjoyed Freddie Waits.  He was a incredible drummer.  He was like Ike Day to me, one of the great masters who never really got their due.

I love playing with Marty because he’s always fresh and he always inspires me.  I can’t remember when he played the same thing twice on any different occasion, which I love.  Ron Horton is a nice person, a person I like who I’ve seen develop his own style, really coming into his own.  I heard Aaron Stewart last year with Marty Ehrlich’s group playing Julius Hemphill’s music, and I was impressed with his sound.  I was also mostly impressed with the fact that at the time he didn’t sound like anyone but himself.  Nasheet Waits is a person who has won my heart.  To me, everything is built of the spirit of the drums and where the drums goes, so to me, he’s the spirit of drums at this moment.  And Ratzo Harris is a very magnificent bassist.  I’ve been playing with him for years, since he was 17 in San Francisco, and he was spectacular then, so it will be interesting to see…

TP:    You spent a good chunk of the ’80s and ’90s on the West Coast.  There’s always been a bit of mystique about you, people wondering whether such-a-such a fact is accurate.  I guess you were away from New York for 20 years or so.

HILL:  I left in ’75 and returned in ’93.  I’d make runs in and out, but then at a certain point I felt New York was the place.  Because I could see New York coming alive again, things changing, a different space but the same place.

TP:    You’ve said that you think we’re in a sort of golden age, and the group of musicians who are sort of entering their prime now and defining the next stage the music will take… You describes it as almost analogous to the period when you first made your big creative splash.

HILL:  There hasn’t been as much new, young, fresh talent as is on the scene now since the ’60s.  But I see the music is well in their hands as evolving to something else.  Then I see the concert stages more available, not really comparatively… But Classical music has lost much of its audience, and it’s been sustained in a lot of areas with the orchestras contracting jazz artists for a collaboration.  I see where Jaazz is just going to flower.  The reason I say it’s going to flower is because of the creative young artists that are still alive, who… If they were all dead, it could really be looked at as a retrospective.  But I see life has been breathed into the music.

TP:    The way information is passed down is a lot different than when you were coming up, isn’t it.

HILL:  Well, now information and misinformation… Like, everything is… Now it doesn’t have the substance.  When it was passed down to me, like before television and stuff, it was, in a sense, more accurate.  You heard about Coltrane, and in New York they heard about me… Different people were..> it was more of an accurate assessment than it is now.

TP:    But I was referring to the way vocabulary was passed down, musical information.

HILL:  Well, it was more of the oral tradition, where they would show you… Depending on the instrument, you would show the instrument… And the ears were more sensitized or… I can’t compare it.  But you could play the most complex figure for someone two or three times and they would have it.  Whereas now everyone is reading 100% synthetic, so one really has to have compositional skills to write it down.  Because there is a great chance that if you try to share it through the oral tradition, it will really take more time.

TP:    [Re Shades] Did you used to gig with Clifford Jordan in Chicago?

HILL:  Yes, I used to gig with Clifford off and on when he was available during that period.  Clifford could play every instrument — bass, drums…

TP:    Speak foreign languages…

HILL:  Oh, he was an incredible person.

[MUSIC: “Ball Square” from Dusk]

TP:    I’m going to take you back about 40 years.  In the years before you left Chicago, which was in ’61, what if any was your connection with the people who comprised the AACM in Chicago directly or indirectly?

HILL:  Well, I had a talk with Richard Abrams…Malachi…

TP:    He was part of your working trio.

HILL:  He was part of my working trio.  But other than that, I had no working connection.  After I had moved to New York, I came back and played at a concert they presented at the University of Chicago, and introduced them to John Sinclair, who was at Ann Arbor at the time, and through that introduction they were able to expand into other areas.

TP:    Next week, how much is new repertoire and how much old?

HILL:  We’re starting with the tunes on this album, but we have about 7 compositions we’re going to work into the repertoire.  By the end of the week, I’m hoping to have a new repertoire of 25-30 tunes.  Because I’ve written a few things before, but I really can’t write for the group effectively until I’ve played one or two nights with the musicians.  Then I can write music that would fit their strengths.

TP:    So for you, writing is as much personality-based as it is…not abstract…

HILL:  Well, in certain situations… Extended compositions are different.  But in these groups, improvs where you put different sections of music together depending upon who is playing.  I’ve noticed through the years you may give an artist material that really may not fit their mindset for the period that they’re in.  This way, everyone can… Like the old jam session, even though it’s a little more rehearsed.  You can find a common denominator, a common level to play on.

TP:    You’ve also been doing a bunch of duos in recent years, as with Bobby Hutcherson recently, duos with David Murray and Archie Shepp.  Are these very satisfying performances for you?

HILL:  I don’t know if “satisfying” is the word because I approached them with apprehension, and then when they’re over it takes me two or three weeks to figure out whether they were successful musically, but they are challenging.

* * * *

Andrew Hill (6-22-00 & 6-23-00):

TP:    I’d like to speak about your relationship to your history, to your past.  I’ve seen you play several times now this year, with your current group, but also situations that bring you back in touch with past associations.  The concert last week with Jackie McLean and Bobby Hutcherson reaffirmed something I knew about your music, which is that you operate with a very specific language and vocabulary, and it seems that to be articulated in an effective way, it needs to be done with all appropriate detail, which it didn’t seem you had time to rehearse enough to make it come out in the concert.

HILL:  That’s partially true.  The problem with this job and the job coming up at the Chicago Festival, most of the promoters want to book me with past associations, because they say it will bring a better house.  But the other side of the coin is, everybody hasn’t kept up.  Musicians come to me with a desire, as they say, to play in the big room, which is defined as playing open, and they really haven’t developed their skills.  That’s why in my band I have a preference for… I can cross racial, chronological and different lines, and find open people who are open enough to have developed these skills to the point where we can go onward with a series of workshops and reprogramming.  Like I was telling Howard, this coming Festival, the only way I can see myself surviving is to cancel and redo it with musicians who I feel I can play with this decade, who may have been wonderful for me 20-30 years ago.  But like I said, everyone hasn’t really kept up.  I’m versatile enough to play other people’s ways.  But the unfortunate thing is, most of the older musicians… With the so-called success or whatever it is, the promotional visibility that I’m getting now, they figure they want to cater to me to the extent that they can play with me.  But then, it’s not about anything retrospective.  We’re talking about current skills.  Because the younger musicians have an encyclopedia from the so-called “avant-garde,” which isn’t avant any more, or bebop… So they have an encyclopedia where they can go into certain aspects of certain styles, and develop a new sound and even an identity.  But then if someone has been out there for years and really hasn’t upgraded their skills, in a sense they’re back at point one.

TP:    Or at the very least, their skills may not have gone in parallel with where you’ve gone in your own music.  Like, Jackie McLean’s skills are immense, but he’s a leader, and he hasn’t been a sideman on anything but Charlie Parker’s music and the tradition for a long time.

HILL:  Well, he wasn’t supposed to be a sideman.  It was supposed to be a collaboration where we went through new material, nothing so hard that anyone would have to go to school for it.  Just little things that were supposed to be natural, natural enough where people could just get together and get into the sound.  But for sound, it would be better for people to play the way they play.  That was my objection to the concert.  I figured it would be stronger if people didn’t try to get with me and allowed me to get with them.  That way I could accompany them, and bring them out.

TP:    I thought for that concert that a more effective way, if you didn’t have a day or two to rehearse…

HILL:  We didn’t.

TP:    …would be maybe to do trios or quartets or break the thing up.

HILL:  It was supposed to be broken up like that.  But they didn’t give us the space necessary for trying to adapt.  That’s the way it was arranged.  But we had bass, drums…everyone was supposed to be in different combinations.  But for some reason it didn’t happen.  Because for the performance, everyone really kind of reverted back to their first nature.  So this type of space was very new.

TP:    The concert needed a producer.

HILL:  It had a good producer.  Everything went well.  The problem was the same aspect that people couldn’t really relax, and when they couldn’t relax they were like a bull in a china shop.  Nothing bad.  But if they had relaxed, and just let everything float and had come in floating, they would have found that space and no one would have noticed.  But then people get used to becoming a dominant soloist, so much so that they feel they must fill up all of the space in certain areas, but they’re not equipped to fill up the space without listening and capturing what’s going on around them.

TP:    So in the ’60s, when this music was all fresh, people weren’t so set in their vocabularies, weren’t so set in their ways.

HILL:  Yes, that’s it.  Just like a young aspiring player today, or anyone creative.  To be creative, you can’t… Everyone can find a formula where they  can sound good, and they can sound good for decades by applying the same formulas.  But when someone says that there are more, then it is their responsibility to themselves that they keep on listening and evolving.

TP:    I’d like to talk about some of the ways in which your sense of composition has evolved over the years.  How do you hear your older music now?  How does it sound to you?

HILL:  The older music brings back the moods of certain periods.  I can almost experience my life during those periods by listening to the music, and enjoy it.  But as far as my having any established formula… I just write music every day, and there’s 10 or 12 ways that I try to get to a new creation.  But I can become analytical only when I’m inside the creation, as to which ways the melodies or fragments of melodies lean towards.  Some things lean towards voices.  So my sociability is my music composition.

TP:    Is the 4-5-6-piece combo sort of your natural metier?  Is that what you hear most naturally?  Or is that a pragmatic choice to write for?

HILL:  Well, I figured I’d get a sextet, get in and write some compositions.  It can be an outlet, but it’s not what I hear or all that I hear.

TP:    What are some other things you’re hearing?

HILL:  Oh, I hear voices, big bands, string quartets, two-basses.  Quite a few things.

TP:    Apart from the unissued tentet stuff for Blue Note, have you done big band…

HILL:  There’s 12 or more in the can.  And I did a big band composition for Harvard University and a few colleges.  I wrote for big bands and orchestras when I was an Associate Professor at Portland State University.  I’m marketed in such polarized areas that there’s really not that much interest in that aspect of me here.

TP:    Can you talk about how your style of piano playing and your individual technique of playing the piano inflects how you hear and compose?

HILL:  Well, it’s almost two different things.  On piano, I go through certain periods where I seem to be very dexterous, and then periods when I’m more into the content than the quantity.  These are things that I don’t analyze, but I try to…

TP:    They happen.

HILL:  Well, it’s not like a gift from God where I just sit down and play.  I have to keep on refining my skills to see how I want to play.

TP:    Tell me something analytically about the pieces on Dusk.

HILL:  Basically all I can say is that the various compositions are constructed in sections.  Different sections where I’ll put certain sections together with the versatility of the musicians.  Each section can have a different sound.  Then as a result, I can bring out different aspects in the various sections.  But as far as my approaching it analytically, at the moment I’m not… I haven’t really been analytical since I left the college.  I have the skills, so I want to apply the skills in almost an organic manner.  In approaching a composition in general, I generally don’t want to talk about something so that I find myself trapped within that for my interpretation of a certain type of creative… I’m happy that the sound means different things to different people.  But for me, as long as I have an activity…in writing, I just would rather pursue it naturally, instead of it being natural or retrospective about what I have done, to keep from having a series of repetitions.TP:    Let me ask you about your range of activities this year.  What are you doing in Italy?

HILL:  In Italy I have a fellowship to retreat for creativity and clarity.  It’s in the vicinity of Tellunueri Castle in Umbertide, Italy, right outside of Perugia.  There will be some writers, poets and painters there also.  I’m the only musician.  I’ll have a wing of the castle to myself a studio and an apartment.  They’re providing transportation, lodging and food, and a car and bicycles.  It’s kind of like the McDowell Colony.  The purpose, they say, is just to give creative artists a chance to reflect and, for consideration of their generosity and hospitality, maybe mention their name.

TP:    You’ve done a lot of duos, special projects. Hutcherson and David Murray are the ones I know about.

HILL:  I did one with David Murray, one with Andrew Cyrille, one with Archie Shepp.

TP:    How were they set up?  In an informal way?  Were they playing your compositions, compositions by both…

HILL:  No, in situations that I try not to be academic about the approach, to try to approach it seeing that there’s two people where I feed into their strength, or their style of performance, trying to create something that’s not specific… My approach to their different individual solos isn’t specific.  I just tried to play with someone and achieve some type of creative contact, no matter what approach I may have to use.

TP:    But which approach did you use?  Did you play your compositions…

HILL:  No, I played their compositions.  I’d try to make them feel completely comfortable.

TP:    With Hutcherson you have a much closer relationship, so I’d imagine the dynamic of performing together is very different.

HILL:  Well, with Hutcherson what happened is, I went to his house for three days and we just had an intensive workshop.

TP:    How is it different for you playing in let’s say the duo as opposed to a situation where there’s a drummer?

HILL:  Well, the drummer is still the basis of jazz, really.  When you’re playing jazz and you’re playing without drums, it’s kind of artificial, but it’s the mood of the time.  It’s artificial because jazz is another aesthetic.  Even though it’s European as far as tonic-dominant harmonies, it’s still a music where Western culture, the emphasis on the melody and harmonics, and rhythm is an accessory.  In African music the emphasis is on the rhythm, and the harmony and melody are accessories.  So basically, it’s been an osmosis of those things.  But still when you get past the rhythm, the beat, the feeling of the heart, all of a sudden you’re dealing with a situation where the guidelines between classical music and jazz are dissolved.  So maybe because people have two artists they call it jazz… It’s still spontaneous music.  It’s really spontaneous music then, because you two are relying on each other to feed each other.  But as far as the tradition, you take the drums out (like, I hear the drums being taken out of James P. Johnson’s music), and you have something else entirely.

TP:    Of course he made up for that with what he did with his left hand, but I take your point.

HILL:  I mean out of his written music.  He has operas and string quartets also.  But for all those things the rhythm has been taken out of the music so you have something completely different than what he wrote.  But like you said, on the piano itself… When they took the drums out of America, the piano because the spiritual master, where you have an evolution of church music in this country.  Especially in the black African-American Negro tradition, the piano has been evolving as a rhythm instrument, even going back to 1850, when they used to play the rolling piano, which was boogie-woogie.  So boogie-woogie came before ragtime.

TP:    I didn’t know boogie-woogie went back that far.

HILL:  They used to call it the “rolling piano” style.  It was known in the West, the same approach that boogie-woogie had.  These things were nourished in the subculture, even though it wasn’t predominant in the greater society.  Because in that period, from the free Negroes and the slaves, they wanted Coon music.

TP:    This record is extremely rhythmic, with amazingly complex and dynamic rhythms.  In the sextet with Nasheet Waits, you have an incredibly dynamic young drummer.  How much of a blueprint do you give the drummer?  Are you very specific about the rhythms that they have to articulate?

HILL:  First, I get drummers, again, who love the music.  The ones I’ve select, I select because of their abilities to play counter- and cross-rhythms.  So from that alone, I give everyone in the band the freedom to be themselves (it’s not a dictatorship) to the extent where they can utilize and develop their creative voice.

TP:    Greg Osby said that with your music, you have to disregard the page.  The page is just the blueprint and you can’t follow it literally.  If you follow the notations and rhythms just as you wrote it out, it won’t have the right sound, that there has to be a real experience of hearing the music.

HILL:  I understand what you’re saying.  With different musicians I use different approaches.  I have to, because everyone has their…soloists have their certain rhythmic priority, places where they can go and places where they can’t go.  Like, the younger musicians aren’t supposed to be as creative as the older ones, even though they’re developing that, but they have something special in the fact that they can read anything you put in front of them.  Even though I’m humble, but most people don’t realize that having been an Associate Professor for year, I am very precise.  Like, I can write for strings and do things for strings that most people can’t do.  They said in the old days that you couldn’t write for strings because they really couldn’t swing or capture the magic of jazz.  I’m skilled enough to communicate with anyone.

TP:    Do different musics that you write have different functions?  Does the music for the performing group have one set of parameters and the string music has another?

HILL:  Well, each song you write has to me a life of its own once you’re developing it.  It itself will tell you according to one’s own references what area or genre you think the music would fit best in.  So you develop it from that point on.  It’s not a thing where you sit down… Quite frequently melodies come to me in the head.  But then other things… Even they have a form of their own.  So when you write music, you try to capture the form, and when you’re playing with other people you try to capture the essence of their presence and not control them.  So with Greg, I give him the liberty that if he hears other things, he plays other things.  I don’t write it so set that if a person goes contrary to what I thought, that I’m offended.  I give it to the artist.  Some prefer to read it with the dynamics and stuff written in, like the sextet…

TP:    So in other words, the flow of it goes according to the personality of the artist and where they’re willing to go with what you give them.

HILL:  Yeah, and the things that I have completely written, like extended compositions.  Well, you’re supposed to be dealing with the creative music.  In the old days they used to take standards and bend them to their interpretation, so that they can take music and bend it to their interpretation and style where… If it’s natural to them, I honor it.  I don’t say, “Well, you have to play this note.”  Because what the sextet brought out is it shows the players how to play rhythmic counterpoint against each other in the group improv.  So I see from my having done that on the scene, it’s become popular on the scene.  But now the older musicians cater to me, but the younger musicians have been hearing me so long that I’m natural to them no matter what way I go.

TP:    With someone like Nasheet, his responses are based upon having heard you for a long time and kind of intuitively knowing what you need.  And of course, that’s his own predisposition to play like that.

HILL:  His response is to play.  Like I said, the sound may sound natural to him.  But to play and not be hemmed in.  Whoever you are, present yourself, moreso than the call-and-response… It’s a term that really is not completely appropriate, even though it’s used on certain occasions.

TP:    Now, Bobby Hutcherson said that the main thing about your music for him is that every song makes him think of a story.  There’s always a little story in the melody, and there’s a reason why it’s being played.  Do you write music abstractly, or does a work always have to correlate to some sort of story or some sort of mood or some sort of color.

HILL:  Well, those are two questions.  On the first question, about Bobby Hutcherson’s impression of my music compared with Greg’s impression of my music, everyone who performs with you looks at it a different dimension of your music, according to their understanding and how they connect with you.  But it has nothing literally to do with the composer himself.  I’m glad, as we said earlier, that the music can be interpreted by other artists in various ways.

Question two: I write because it is as natural to me as breathing.  I just write music.  I write all the time.  Like I said, that’s my relaxation and my sociability.

TP:    You made a comment a few years ago about Point of Departure, that Tony Williams surprised you in some ways in everything he did, and that there were areas he couldn’t go into with Miles that you were able to bring him into in some of the thing you did.  That’s how I’m interpreting what you said.  If you could be specific, what areas would those have been?

HILL:  Well, playing with Miles was an egocentric, demonstrative situation.  For a professional musician that the epitome, because from that other things are coming, and the more demonstrative you are, even musically, the more you’ll be seen.  But with me, he could go into calmer rhythms and deal with the music not in volume but in rhythmic intensity.

TP:    Also stepping back to the ’60s, you said that during that time in particular you were extremely enamored with Roy Haynes’ playing, and what you specifically liked was a quality you said also Ike Day had, that he incorporated every component of the kit into the rhythmic flow, so that there was therefore a floating rhythm rather than a stacked rhythm.

HILL:  What attracted me to Roy Haynes, when I first came to New York he was playing with trios all the time.  And I loved the way… Like you said, it’s a floating rhythm, it’s a relaxed rhythm… Playing with him, he relaxed the beat, i a sense.  Philly Joe Jones and them were playing precise metronome, like 1-2-3-4, and everything was pyramided on top of that.  But with Roy Haynes, he left space and he left the soloist, whoever it may be, a space where they could be precise but they could still float in.

TP:    What is the synergy between you and Nasheet Waits?  He seems to be an extremely effective drummer for your music.

HILL:  With me, being homogeneous, I’d say, well, my blessing is through these various decades to play with the best artists available, young artists, being able to interact with them, interact with anyone… Through the decades… I’m not going to say, “Well, such-and-such is the greatest,” but I will say that I’ve liked people who love the music… I mean, Billy Drummond, what he did is phenomenal, and I like Billy Hart.  I’m not so polarized on one person.  All I ask a person to do when I get together with them is play.  If they can play, I like them.  If they can’t play, I don’t like them.  I see people develop certain instinctual skills.  So if I’m lucky enough to be in an area where there are still some great budding artists, it means jazz isn’t dead, that it’s still evolving.

TP:    You said before that this is a golden period.

HILL:  Well, in more ways than one.  In the artists that’s available at any time… You have younger artists, you have young audiences — that’s a given.  So you have to have a chronological cross-section who love the music, and that will pick up the volume demographically.  So there are opportunities for things to happen that haven’t happened since the ’30s, and will go further than what happened in the ’30s.  It’s just the laws of general dynamics.

TP:    Everyone I’ve talked to has said that your voicings are totally distinctive, that if you write a standard chord change you can’t really play it as written because other notes are implied that aren’t in there.  I guess that’s maybe for them to say and not for you to say at this point.

HILL:  Well, that’s just a leftover from the old days.  People didn’t play the same chord the same way all the time.  They took certain liberties that gave the soloist liberties.  That’s just an extension of that.