BLP 4167

Andrew Hill - Point of Departure

Released - April 1965

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 21, 1964
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto sax, bass clarinet, flute; Joe Henderson, tenor sax; Andrew Hill, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Anthony Williams, drums.

1321 tk.6 Refuge
1322 tk.8 Dedication
1323 tk.10 New Monastery
1324 tk.19 Flight 19
1320 tk.24 Spectrum

Session Photos

Tony Williams and Richard Davis

Eric Dolphy and Kenny Dorham

Andrew Hill

Eric Dolphy and Kenny Dorham

Andrew Hill and Eric Dolphy

Eric Dolphy and Kenny Dorham

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Refuge	Andrew Hill	21 March 1964
New Monastery	Andrew Hill	21 March 1964
Side Two
Spectrum	Andrew Hill	21 March 1964
Flight 19	Andrew Hill	21 March 1964
Dedication	Andrew Hill	21 March 1964

Liner Notes

When I hear a musician for the first time, I’m not as sure of my judgement as I suppose a critic ought to be. In fact, it sometimes takes me a very long time indeed to really comprehend what a musician is doing and to be clear about my own reaction. Once in a great while, however, I have no doubts from the very beginning. The talent is so clear and so compelling that, in a sense, the judgement is made almost before I’m aware it’s been made. It was that way when I heard Andrew Hill’s first LP as a leader, Black Fire (4151). His second album, Judgment! (4159) revealed additional dimensions, and now Point Of Departure provides further proof of his singular force of emotion and musical imagination.

Hill’s odyssey to this point has been described in the notes for the previous two sets; but briefly, he was born on June 30, 1937 in Port au Prince, Haiti; grew up in Chicago; became a professional on piano and baritone saxophone in 1953 with Paul Williams’ rhythm and blues band; gained further experience at sessions with a wide range of experienced jazzmen passing through Chicago as well as with searching local musicians; accompanied Dinah, Washington for a time; worked in New York with the Johnny Griffin-Lockjaw Davis unit, Al Hibbler, Clifford Jordan, Jackie McLean and Kenny Dorham, among others; played in Los Angeles in 1962 with Roland Kirk and at the Lighthouse; and returned to New York in 1963.

Although his first Blue Note album received unusually enthusiastic reviews, Hill is still trying to get widespread enough recognition so that he can form and sustain his own combo. In the meantime, he continues to record, to practice and to read a provocative variety of material - from orchestration books to economic and political analyses of the way we live now. He has been turning down jobs as a sideman with several prestigious leaders because, as he points out, “When you become a piano player in someone else’s band, you have to adopt that band’s style, and I feel that I’m in a period during which I have to grow by myself.” So he plays at home into a tape recorder, continually correcting what he hears.

For the past year or so, Hill has not listened to jazz on the radio and he has retired his record player for the time being. “In listening to other people,” Hill explains, “you absorb their thoughts, however unconsciously, and as I said, right now I have to concentrate on finding my own way. If I were playing regularly, I could listen to records because I’d be able to find ways each night to apply what I hear in all kinds of different ways. But since I’m not working regularly until I can get my own group going, I’m sort of forced into solitude.”

Point Of Departure, Hill feels, is an additional series of steps toward more freedom than characterized his previous two sets. “Because of Tony Williams being on the date,” Hill points out, “I was certainly freer rhythmically. And the way I set up the tunes, it was more possible for the musicians to get away from chord patterns and to work around tonal centers. Sn harmonically too, the set is freer. Also there’s a broader range of moods than in the other two, and the personalities of the musicians themselves are diversified so that there’s a freer interaction between quite different kinds of people.”

The title of Refuge comes from an autobiographical experience Hill was going through at the time he wrote it. “It’s about someone trying to find a refuge and learning that, there isn’t any, that theres no place to hide. No matter where you look, you’re still the one who's looking. As for the structure, it’s built like a blues - two twelve-bar sections - but harmonically it’s much different. And the harmony is such that one scale can fit the whole tune so each musician can pick a tonal center for his solo within that scale.”

After the ensemble states the angular theme, Hill plays a probing solo in what is a characteristic vein of his - lyrical ardor fused with a firm, incisive beat and a continually intriguing, cohesive melodic conception. Eric Dolphy is slashingly, viscerally exciting as well as technically formidable while Kenny Dorham indicates how well he fits into a more avant-garde context than he’s usually associated with while remaining strongly himself. Richard Davis, unmistakably one of the most important of contemporary jazz bassists, is brilliant and the rapidly growing Joe Henderson adds his particular quality of emotional directness and inventiveness. On this, as in all the numbers, it’s worth paying particular attention to Tony Williams. “Once I kicked off the tempo,” Hill emphasizes, “Tony was free to do what he wanted to and since he prefers not playing time in the strict sense, he made the whole experience much more liberating for all of us.” Williams’ own solo is extraordinarily well constructed and paced, and then the horns return to the challenging theme.

New Monastery received its title because, as Frank Wolff and Alfred Lion of Blue Note listened to it, Wolff said the song reminded him in a way of something Thelonious Monk wrote a long time ago. “O.K.,” said Hill, “We’ll call it New Monastery.” The basic structure is 22 bars - two units of 11 bars each. “I wanted,” Hill adds, “to get a march feeling without actually playing a march. I wanted some of that old, basic ragtime feeling going on against our playing solos as freely. as we wanted to.” Again, the soloists are sharply distinctive and yet they fuse organically into Hill’s gestalt.

“I selected the men,” Hill says, “because of the particular strengths each has. I also selected them because I think they feel as I do that there’s no point in being different for the sake of being different. Difference has to come out of musical reasons; and also, anything ‘new’ has to evolve out of the old. Now Tony was important because of his extremely free sense of time. Kenny I consider the most underrated player in the business. His problem is that he’s so nice, and people seem to associate greatness with meanness or bitterness. In this business, you have to create some kind of angry or tough image of yourself to be accepted, and therefore, too many people take Kenny for granted. He told me he liked this date so much because it made him think and play in new directions and in the process he proved again how musical and flexible a trumpet player he is.

“Joe Henderson,” Hill continued, “is going to be one of the greatest tenors out there. You see, he not only has the imagination to make it in the avant-garde camp, but he has so much emotion too. And that’s what music is - emotion, feeling. Joe doesn’t get into that trap of being so technical that the emotions don’t come through.

“As for Richard Davis,” Hill went on, “he is the greatest bass player in existence. Most good bass players have one thing going for them. A man may walk a good line, but his intonation may leave something to be desired. A very good bass player may have two things going. He may have good intonation and walk well but if you ask for octaves and double stops, technical limitations show up. Another bassist may read real good but have no imagination. But Richard he can do anything you demand of him. He has a lot of technique but his technique doesn’t overpower his imagination. So what I often do with him is to write out what amounts to a piano part and let him pick out the notes he wants to use.

“Eric was so important,” Hill underlined, “because while a lot of people are becoming individuals, he’d already developed his individuality. He’s another one, like Kenny, who maybe didn’t get all the attention he deserved because he was such a sweet, beautiful person. People tend to take kindness for weakness because they don’t know that an artist - a real artist - can afford to be kind because he can’t be bothered with petty thoughts.”

With this array of sidemen thoroughly compatible with his own approach to music, Hill worked out Spectrum as an attempt to depict a wide diversity of emotions within a single number. “In terms of structure,” Tlill points out, “every solo is based one way or another on elements in my eight-bar piano solo. And that breaks down into four bars of 4/4, one bar of 5/4, two bars of 3/4 and one bar of 4/4. As for the different emotions, to give you some examples, Kenny's solo indicates searching. Eric’s alto solo might be considered peaceful - but with a shadow of doubt. And the 5/4 section in which Eric, Kenny and Joe play has anguish in it.” I would only add that the organization of the piece and the quality of the solos reveal new values on each replaying. It is a particularly durable performance.

The brisky, energetic Flight 19 acquired its title from Hill’s feeling that “if the melody is played right, you can almost imagine birds flying in a line. The tune feels very animated to me.” The basic form is 16 bars - 4 fast, 2 slow, 8 fast and 2 slow. There is a tonal center for each section - in order, C, (1 flat, C and d flat again. Here again I’m struck by the depth of interplay between these men. Although Hill’s music strongly reflects his own temperament, it is nonetheless sufficiently open to allow other individualists to be themselves within it.

“Until we got to Dedication,” Hill recalls, “the session had been, extremely happy. But here, a kind of melancholy settled on us. At one point, Kenny, after playing that wah-wah section of his part, said it brought tears to his eyes. Well, that was what I was writing about. I wanted something that would fit a death march. Originally, I called it Cadaver. The Dedication isn’t to anyone in particular. It's meant to express a feeling of great loss.”

Here, then, is more of Andrew Hill - a pianist-composer who is building a very personal and, I’m convinced, a very substantial style and body of work. In so far as he has a “bag,” it’s an unusually capacious one because he is able to tell many different kinds of stories in his music, and they all ring true. They ring true because the unyielding motivation in Hill’s music is his desire to keep finding out who he is and to make his music out of that deepening knowledge.

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT POINT OF DEPARTURE

Andrew Hill first came to Alfred Lion's attention via Joe Henderson. Blue Note's promising new tenor saxophonist had been woodshedding with Hill in 1963, and requested the then-unknown pianist when it came time to record his second album, Our Thing, in September. Lion responded strongly to Hill's originality as a soloist; and when Hill played some of his original compositions, the producer immediately offered a recording contract. "Alfred told me in 1986 that it was like the first time he heard Monk and Herbie Nichols," Michael Cuscuna recalled. '"The material was so original that he wanted to record everything they'd composed."

Since this was Blue Note, Lion made an attempt to do just that — as he had with Monk in 1947 and with Nichols seven years later. Given the economics of the record business in the mid-sixties, Lion's ability to achieve his goal with Hill is even more impressive. In an eight month period between November 1963 and June 1964, Hill entered the Van Gelder studio for the label five times, and produced a memorable album with a different instrumental configuration on each occasion. Point of Departure was the fourth project chronologically, and it was taped shortly before the release of Hill's first, Black Fire. With all due respect to that auspicious debut and the equally memorable Smokestack, Judgment And Andrew!, this session was (and 35 years later remains) Hill's magnum opus.

A glimpse at the personnel speaks volumes about the quality pf the music. Every one of the participants, even the 18-year-old Williams, was already recognized as a leading stylist on his instrument, while Henderson and Davis had already demonstrated their mastery of Hill's challenging music. The bassist, a product, like Hill, of the vibrant Chicago scene, appears on each of the pianist's first seven sessions. Henderson was the horn soloist on the Black Fire quartet date, and also played on a 1965 quintet album that remained unreleased for a decade. Hill's woodshedding relationship with Henderson in this period meant that he was also in touch with Kenny Dorham, who, of course, had contributed both his trumpet and his compositions to Our Thing. Dorham and Henderson were in the midst of producing their own five Blue Note classics of 1963-4, and the veteran trumpeter shows just how far he had stretched his conception at the time in the collective improvisations on "Flight 19" and the wrenching lead of "Dedication."

This would be the only occasion on which Eric Dolphy and Tony Williams recorded with Hill, and the brilliance of their responses to his music only hint at the horizons further collaborations might have revealed. Dolphy's virtuosity in the areas of harmony and uncommon musical structure are certainly put to the test here, and his performance led Pete Welding to comment in a Down Beat review that "It is Dolphy who utterly dominates this music." Yet the subtler shadings and complex rhythmic responses pf the drummer are equally fascinating, and, as was the case each time Williams was taped at Van Gelder's, brilliantly recorded. The close relationship of Dolphy and Davis, and the triumph of Dolphy's Out To Lunch a month earlier with Davis and Williams teamed in the rhythm section, also had to enhance the collective confidence.

Yet Point Of Departure is even greater than the sum of its magnificent parts, because Hill prepared a program of music in which each composition both stood on its own and reinforced the larger statement. He took complete advantage of the three horn front line, and of the variety that Dolphy's multi-instrumentalism brought to the enterprise. (Henderson adds some doubling of his own, with a spot of uncredited flute on "Spectrum.") As the alternate takes reveal quite clearly, Hill also was at pains to establish the ideal tempo for each piece; and he devised five different solo routines to ensure further variety. As a result, the entire album, like the multi-sectioned "Spectrum," suggests a finely calibrated suite.

Nat Hentoff's knack for eliciting valuable insights regarding individual performances and fellow musicians is on display in his original liner notes. His interview also suggests the single-mindedness with which Hill approached his music, Complete self-expression was the goal, and Hill pursued it despite a public that was interested in far less demanding fare. Hill continued to spurn work as a sideman in the period after Point Of Departure was recorded, and when jobs playing his own music did not materialize, he even wrote a letter to Down Beat suggesting that those wishing to support his efforts do so by sending money. No sponsor with deep pockets was forthcoming, so Hill simply continued to pursue his lonely path. More than three decades later he is still focused on his personal vision, and still leaving those fortunate enough to hear his music in awe. In the '90s, as in the '60s, Andrew Hill is one of the great overlooked geniuses of jazz. At least back then he had Alfred Lion to capture the evidence for posterity.

-Bob Blumenthal, 1999