In the precocious early days of his nightclub work, the jazz pianist Andrew Hill traveled from Chicago to Detroit to play with Charlie Parker. It was a gig with a pickup band; Parker had called them to back him up for a job at the Greystone Ballroom, one of Detroit’s dance palaces. From that first encounter with Parker, Hill ended up with more than a line on his résumé.
Hill’s past has been notoriously hard to put together, and his memory has been spotty about when this happened; when pressed, he would say 1948, or sometimes 1952. But Parker’s movements are roughly trackable, and there are eyewitnesses: the pianist Barry Harris, among others, can testify to being there that night. Harris and some jazz historians are in agreement that it was probably April 1954. Calculating by the birth date that Andrew Hill preferred to use before his death in April 2007, he would then have been sixteen.
In any case, he and Parker were talking about music, and Hill said that Parker told him this: “I look at melody as rhythm.” A stray comment led to a long preoccupation.
As a jazz composer, Hill was as original as they come. From the start he had only a modest following. He arrived in New York City in 1960, to join Roland Kirk’s group. When he started making his own records for Blue Note a few years later, he didn’t make a great public splash, as Ornette Coleman had in 1959, or even keep a working band to establish a presence in the clubs. Instead, he played the college circuit, taught, and applied for arts grants. At one point, in a 1966 interview in Down Beat, he encouraged each of his listeners to send him a dollar.
Slight and kindly, with soft eyes and old-world manners, Hill delivered his ideas in bursts of information, often ending in a question. He had a stutter—it was in his style of playing piano as well—and the way he phrased stories about his life, or his responses to music, left them open to interpretation.
“Am I confusing you?” he asked during our afternoon listening to music and talking about what he heard in it. “Is the truth confusing?”
For the last seven years of his life, Hill lived in a well-kept Victorian brownstone in Jersey City, New Jersey, with elegant old furniture in a front living room and a baby grand piano in the back; when I was there, a book of sheet music for Bach’s preludes and fugues lay open on it. As I moved around the room, he saw my eyes go to the piano, and he feigned alarm when I wrote down the page on display. “Oh, no,” he said. “Don’t tell the world that I can read.” The joke, it seemed to me, was about how few incontrovertible truths the world knew about him.
He and his wife, Joanne Robinson Hill, the director of education at the Joyce Theater for dance in New York, settled there after his return from a long sojourn on the West Coast. His first wife, Laverne, died in California in 1989; after that, until 1996, he taught at Portland State University in Oregon, where he met Joanne.
Hill had been enduring his fight against lung cancer when I checked in with him in 2006. He looked tired but peaceful. (“You’re normally only as good as you think, anyway,” he said, coughing. “That’s all there is.”) We sat in his front room. Hearing some of the music he knows best filled him with enthusiasm—for his audiences, among other things. His talk kept coming around to his gratitude that people have cared about his work for so long.
Hill was born in Chicago in 1931—not Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as his early biographies read, and not in 1937, as he often stated. He grew up on Chicago’s South Side. He was reluctant to say what his parents did—or perhaps did not quite fully know himself—except that they were “part of the struggling environment for their generation,” and that they did not block his path as a musician. From age three to seven, he said, he remained in a state that he describes as semiautistic; he didn’t respond adequately in social situations. “I wasn’t ready to accept my socioeconomic position,” he explained. “By not recognizing it, I could escape it.”
He evolved, he said, by playing music. He started on a child’s accordion, graduating to a proper button accordion at age seven, and taught himself piano at ten from the player piano in his home. He balanced his high-school work with extra classes for gifted students at the University of Chicago’s lab school and played accordion on the street for extra money; he positioned himself on a corner of the South Side, at Forty-seventh Street and South Parkway, near the Regal Theater and the Savoy Ballroom.
It has always been hard to place Hill within jazz’s spectrum. He started playing jazz when bebop was a popular music, and played it in the company of the best. But when he moved to New York in 1960, he stood on the periphery of a self-conscious vanguard that was exploding jazz’s basic elements and functions, pushing it toward abstraction and social consciousness. He wrote a great deal of dense, nettling music, which often turned out—curiously, with repeated exposure—to be songlike and pleasurable. It is difficult to play, and he consistently hired, at each point in his career, the most authoritative musicians in jazz to help him bring it to life: Lee Morgan, Ron Carter, Roy Haynes, Bobby Hutcherson, Greg Osby. This continued with his final quintet, one of his best. That band included Charles Tolliver on trumpet, who played with Hill in the late 1960s, though the rest of the players—the saxophonist and clarinetist Greg Tardy, the bassist John Hebert, and the drummer Eric McPherson—were all a generation younger. Throughout, Hill was impossible to identify as either inside or outside the jazz mainstream. But whereas this worked against him for at least thirty years, by the end history was on his side. Jazz musicians have been increasingly bending the loose ends of history toward each other, making sense of the fractures between tradition and innovation or coming to understand that those fractures may be illusory.
In 2005, after being signed by Blue Note for the third time in forty-two years, Hill made a superb album, Time Lines. It was his last. As usual, it was full of Charlie Parker’s inadvertent lesson, melody-as-rhythm. (Even the title seemed to play on the idea: time as in rhythm, lines as in melody.) Commanding rhythms keep rising out of the stop-start melodic phrases; with pecking repetitions, Hill elongates parts of them at will. Like Thelonious Monk, he made his music sound as if its theme sections are improvised and the improvised sections are composed. And like Monk’s, his music is a balanced equation, with melody embedded in harmony and overlapping rhythms swimming in agreement. It has a mysteriously powerful internal integrity.
His work is dense and knotty and difficult to play, but much of it is beautiful, aerated with song. Sometimes it reduces into absolute parts—two bars in one meter, four bars in another. (He liked switching between meters, and he liked unusual ones.) And sometimes it doesn’t; instead, there’s an undefined, shifting-sands feeling.
Alfred Lion, one of the founders of Blue Note, was beguiled by Hill in the early 1960s. As he had done with two other pianists, Monk and Herbie Nichols, he encouraged Hill to record as many of his compositions as possible for his label, as quickly as he could. So Hill made five records in the first eight months after signing with Blue Note in 1963. Among these are Smokestack, Point of Departure, and Black Fire, three of the great records of the era. In all, from 1963 to 1970, Hill recorded nineteen albums for Blue Note, too much for the market to bear; only eight were released at the time. (Two more were released in his second period with the label, from 1989 to 1990.)
In the last five years of Hill’s life, he teamed up with another champion of his work: Michael Cuscuna, the founder of Mosaic, the CD reissue company, and the producer of Time Lines. Starting in 2002, Cuscuna reissued all the music Hill made for Blue Note, even the sessions that were never before released.
All in all, Hill had won.
His first choice of music to listen to during my visit was Charlie Parker’s most famous blues, “Now’s the Time,” from 1945. He called it “the perfect record.”
Hill understood Parker’s comment about melody as rhythm as a refutation of the “Eurocentric” music education he had grown up with—where melody is paramount, harmony accompanies it, and rhythm is the last part to worry about. “It opened my mind up to many possibilities,” he said. “If everything is rhythm, then you just have these rhythms on top of each other. But they’re not polyrhythms or pyramids of rhythm; they’re crossing rhythms.”
“Now’s the Time” is driven by a short, syncopated melody with a strong rhythm, putting down a bounce in almost every beat. “In that period, one could pretend that one could hear,” Hill said. “You didn’t have to read it to understand it. It was all around you. And I guess because it had a blues sensibility, it was inclusive of more people.”
I said that given his interest in the idea of melody as rhythm, I thought he would have suggested a bebop tune with a more complicatedly rhythmic line, like Miles Davis’s “Donna Lee.” “There was something lovely about hearing those fast tempos,” he replied, “like ‘Donna Lee’ or ‘52nd Street Theme.’ But with the blues, one doesn’t have to be a space scientist to get the harmony. ‘Donna Lee’ has more changes—bringing you in more than letting you out.”
We listened to Fats Navarro and Gil Fuller’s “Webb City,” from 1946; Bud Powell, who cowrote the tune, is the pianist on the record, and his solo is a bebop masterpiece, delivered in curling streams of single notes. “This is almost the same area,” he said. “But it’s not entrapped harmonically; it’s not so demanding as ‘Donna Lee,’ ” he decided. “Another good example of melody as rhythm.”
The song finished. “ ‘Now’s the Time’ had that call-and-response blues that brought me in,” he remembered. “And then there were the parts between the drums and the saxophones. Through the years, I’ve always said to myself that when the drums and the saxophone play together, that’s a dance, which is an aspect of melody as rhythm. Mm?”
He paused to think. “But ‘Webb City,’ the way Bud Powell was playing,” he continued, “that was the next step.”
Did he go through a period, like many of his contemporaries, of wanting to play like Bud Powell, who established the common bebop language for the piano the way Parker had done for saxophone?
“In general,” he answered evenly, with a rising tone at the end, “I was very analytical about the ways you can learn?”
Next on his list was “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” from Dave Brubeck’s fluke-hit 1959 album, Time Out. The song is famous for its meter shifts: it flicks between a fast 9/8 and an easy, midtempo 4/4 swing, though it doesn’t try to make them flow into each other.
“I keep hearing the different rhythm-melodies,” Hill said as the song played. “The rhythm-melody that the drummer plays, for example. But this also represents when people weren’t as comfortable playing rhythms like that”—he meant the 9/8—“all the way through numbers, as they are now.”
With pieces like this, Brubeck made jazz seem sensible for many who came to it cold; it’s a playful piece of music and very schematic. He phrased almost right on the beat and kept swing roped off in the song’s 4/4 section. When Hill played, on the other hand, he moved around the beat, never playing on it, and not consistently behind it or ahead of it, either.
“Yes, peaceful coexistence,” Hill said when I brought up his relation to the beat. “It’s always been like that.”
The next piece was “As Long as You’re Living,” by the Max Roach Plus Four group. Also recorded in 1959, it is a blues in 5/4 time, like Brubeck’s “Take Five.” (Playing jazz in five was new then. Roach was said to be irritated at Mercury, his label, for withholding the release of “As Long as You’re Living” until after “Take Five” became a hit.)
It’s a little masterpiece, sleek and grooving, with all the solemn bravado of Roach’s music in that period. And the Roach band demonstrates that a five-beat rhythm can be swung as fluidly as the usual 4/4. “It shows the progression of how people become more comfortable with this rhythm,” Hill said. “With ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk,’ one is disappointed that they don’t continue the rhythm through the number. But here they do, and they have it down like a four.”
For the last piece of the afternoon, Hill got away from time signatures and back to his youth. He picked a solo piano piece by Earl Hines, the standard “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” recorded in 1974 at a private party in California.
“He was a very nice man,” Hill said of Hines. “When I met him, I was eight or nine. He played at this club, the Grand Terrace Ballroom, and he had a penthouse in the hotel where the lounge was on the bottom floor. I was his paperboy,” Hill recalled with a high-pitched laugh. “The Chicago Tribune.”
Hines thinks fast and broadly through the performance of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.” He keeps inserting new rhythms and rubato sections; the performance becomes free-associative. It has sweeping two-handed runs in it, the kind of thing Art Tatum liked to do, and with them he rewrites the song in real time.
This was an example, Hill explained, of what jazz virtuosos like Hines called concertizing—making concert-hall fantasias of tunes, often by themselves in nightclubs. “You know,” he said, “Benny Goodman took his band to Carnegie Hall. But black musicians at the time started consciously elaborating on melodies in a different way. They’d take it over the bar lines, or do whatever.”
So it’s not so much that Hines is implying “this is the straight part,” and “this is where I’m stretching it,” and “now I go back to the straight part,” I said. It’s all mixed together, all the way through.
“What impressed me about him the most was that he enjoyed himself,” Hill responded. “He was successful, and the people were with him. When a person has a message for the people, he’s usually heard and well taken care of. The rest is what they think of themselves. You know, like Charlie Parker—people loved him. They treated him so much better than he treated himself. I mean, it’s such a big honor to have people support you. That’s quite a bit.”
Set List
Charlie Parker, “Now’s the Time,” from The Genius of Charlie Parker (Savoy Jazz), recorded 1945.
Fats Navarro/Gil Fuller’s Modernists, “Webb City,” from Goin’ to Minton’s (Savoy Jazz), recorded 1946.
Dave Brubeck, “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” from Time Out (Sony Legacy), recorded 1959.
Max Roach Plus Four, “As Long as You’re Living,” from The Complete Mercury Max Roach Plus Four Sessions (Mosaic), recorded 1959.
Earl Hines, “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and Dream Your Troubles Away),” from Solo Piano (LaserLight), recorded 1974.