BLP 4217

Andrew Hill - Compulsion

Released - February 1967

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, October 8, 1965
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet, flugelhorn #1,2,4; John Gilmore, tenor sax, bass clarinet #1,2,4; Andrew Hill, piano; Cecil McBee, bass; Richard Davis, bass #4; Joe Chambers, drums; Nadi Qamar, African drums, African thumb piano; Renaud Simmons, congas.

1664 tk.3 Compulsion
1665 tk.6 Limbo
1666 tk.10 Legacy
1667 tk.14 Premonition

Session Photos

Cecil McBee

Freddie Hubbard

Nadi Qamar

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Compulsion	Andrew Hill	October 8 1965
Legacy	Andrew Hill	October 8 1965
Side Two
Premonition	Andrew Hill	October 8 1965
Limbo	Andrew Hill	October 8 1965

Liner Notes

AS the probing, personal, disciplined lyricism of his music indicates, Andrew Hill is a thoughtful man. This album comes from a recognition on his part that as jazz moves further ahead, it is simultaneously — in part - reverting to its beginnings. Listen.” he says, “to what is called the 'avant-garde' and you can hear African kinds of rhythms. You can hear field cries. You can hear the basic roots of jazz.”

“And that,” he continues, “is one of the healthy elements in the move forward. You can best extend a heritage by understanding its past thoroughly. Another healthy element in what’s happening now is that we're engaged in the first real musical breakthrough since the be-bop period. Although some writers tend to categorize all avant-garde players a being part of the same style, the fact is that there are now so many individual styles instead of everybody trying to mimic Charlie Parker and playing fast series of eighth notes and flatted notes. I think that this rise in individuality is also linked to a growing awareness among the young players of how deep and diversified our musical roots actually are.”

The first track in this exploration by Andrew Hill of his own heritage as a Negro born in Haiti and raised in the United States is Compulsion. "But", he points out. “that word applies as well to the rest of the album in that I had a compulsion to construct an album expressing the legacy of the Negro tradition. For one thing, you’ll notice I try to use the piano in this set more as a percussive than as a lyrical instrument.”

In the sense of celebrating a heritage, each of the four sections — though individual entities — do flow into each other. And the whole is an affirmation — a celebration — of the Afro-American musical experience. “It’s important,” Hill emphasizes, “to point out that nationalism, in this sense, is not racism. Jews, Italians. Germans and other groups of people have remained aware of the particular strengths and value of their own traditions. And now more and more Negroes are similarly discovering and being nurtured by the strengths and values of their heritage.”

Evoking the polyrhythms of African music, the opening Compulsion sets off various counter-rhythms against 5/4. The drums speak, there is a brief melodic fanfare by the horns, and then Hill — in one of his most forceful solos on records — digs percussively into the poly-rhythmic matrix of Compulsion. The percussion instruments continue to churn, the horns cry, and then there is a slashing interplay between Hill and the conga drum leading to a soaring exclamatory flight by Freddie Hubbard with clanging counter-lines from Hill while the rhythm section swirls volcanically. Tension climbs and climbs in further awakening of self as well as collective identification. There is surcease as Hubbard moves into a lyrical phase, but underneath, the insistently percussive piano of Hill keeps the fires high. John Gilmore adds another distinctive cry, improvising with melodic sweep and speech-like urgency — as did Hubbard — while the rhythms (and percussive textures) proliferate in complexity. Note the range of colors Hill meanwhile extracts from the piano while Gilmore stretches the expressive capacities of his horn. There follows a conversation of mutual recognition between Conga drum and Joe Chambers on jazz drums with intermittent punctuation by Hill. (Throughout Chambers is a marvel of inventive, acutely relevant accents and textures.) The bold horns return, Hill and the rhythm section add their spiraling voices, and at the very end, there arc sounds by John Gilmore that recall echoes of recordings made in tribal Africa.

Legacy means, of course, the Afro-American legacy. Here the counter-rhythms are set against 6/4. With the horns absent, this is a surging play of tensile polyrhythms and bristlingly assertive, percussive colors. A note here is needed, I think, to underline not only the technical assurance of Cecil McBee but also his capacity for bending lines and notes to fit into the continually shifting, continually challenging poly- rhythmic context. And Hill, though playing percussively, cuts through with glittering, knife-edged slits of melody that are inextricably tied to the whirling rhythmic substructures.

Premonition takes its title front Andrew Hill’s belief that “before you become aware of the strength and extent of your tradition, you have to have some kind of premonition of what has already transpired as well as of what is to come. I mean ‘premonition’ as indicating not alone a look ahead but rather a sufficiently revealing look backward so that you can really begin to know what may come. I hope this kind of awareness spreads among Negroes because otherwise, as the American Negro advances, he will lose sight of his own traditions and blend into the middle-class, forgetting the distinct values of his own culture.”

The composition itself is basically a six-bar tune, and each soloist is free to take any of those six bars as a base on which to extend his solo. The tempo is rubato. The performers include Hill, Richard Davis on bass. John Gilmore on bass clarinet and Nadi Qanar (who has played with many of the African troupes visiting the United States) on the African thumb piano. The basic theme is yearning, and there is a provocative color interplay between. for instance, the bold-toned, declamatory trumpet of Freddie Hubbard and the richly brooding bowed bass of Richard Davis. There is also the almost rhapsodic sweep and power of Hill’s piano as contrasted with the measured rhythm Section and the limber, poignant but forceful bass clarinet of John Gilmore. Davis takes the foreground with a beautifully, resonantly executed solo — his own rubato ruminations proceeding over the regular pulse of the thumb piano. Davis continues as Hill re-enters, preceding an ensemble passage in which the tender, passionate theme is stated once more with a rare combination of delicacy and strength.

Limbo is where Andrew Hill thinks the majority of American Negroes are — “they’d rather float in space, hoping, than look into their heritage and take strength front that. Again this has nothing to do with racism. Knowing who you are and what your roots are is positive, healthy knowledge for, after all, we all seek identity and our future is more secure if we know our past. As for the song, it’s a twenty-bar tune. For the first ten bars, the soloists play cadence-style harmonies and for the second ten bars, the rhythm section takes over, shaping the directions the horns take.” Again the solos are proud, boldly colored, rhythmically seizing and altogether a collective celebration of the Afro-American heritage.

Andrew Hill, of course, is not the only jazz musician who has been searching into his lineage for material, spiritual and musical, on which to grow. But I expect that this particular Andrew Hill stage on that search back and ahead into time — will stand as a memorable achievement on its own as well as an exhilarating augury of sounds, shapes and rhythms to come in the further growth of the Afro-American tradition.

—NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT COMPULSION

If the content of Andrew Hill's music were not singular enough, its uncommon history would set it apart. How many other jazz artists, living or dead, produced such a varied and substantial legacy during the 1960s that is still coming to light?

Hill benefited from a commitment on the part of Blue Note founders Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff that might be compared to Manfred Eicher's relationship with Keith Jarrett at ECM and little else. In both cases, the artist was encouraged to record as often, and in as many contexts, as he chose, far beyond what those who feared an oversaturated market would allow. The major difference is that in Hill's case, business types put the brake on issuing albums long before the pianist and his producers slowed their pace. What has resulted is a huge volume of important music recorded by Hill for Blue Note between 1963 and 1970, a good 60% of which was not issued until between 10 and 35 years after it was created.

Compulsion, an Andrew Hill album that did arrive on time, appeared in 1966 shortly after it was taped. It was the fifth Hill disc to be released in a span of roughly two years, and was greeted as a clear move toward the more harmonically open and rhythmically free terrain of the avant-garde. On the basis of subsequent releases in the late-'60s, the move appeared temporary. Hill would lead a dozen distinct ensembles in Rudy Van Gelder's studio in the four-and-a-half years following Compulsion; yet Liberty Records, which purchased Blue Note in 1966, issued only the most audience friendly of the lot — Grass Roots, a quintet session with the soulful tendencies one expected from the albums of its featured trumpeter, Lee Morgan, and Lift Every Voice, a quintet-plus-chorus effort in the manner of Donald Byrd's A New Perspective.

It has taken 35 years and the arrival of such important Hill collections as Dance with Death (recorded in 1968, released in 1980) and Passing Ships (recorded in 1969, released in 2003) to fully appreciate the magnitude of this misperception. We now know Compulsion as the beginning of Hill's immersion in new forms and new textures, represented here by the presence of two percussionists. Nadi Qamar, whose first name was misspelled on the original LP, was a pianist known as Spaulding Givens when he recorded a 1951 duet album with Charles Mingus. Qamar participated in a second Hill session during February 1967 that only saw the light of day in 2005 on the pianist's Mosaic Select anthology. It appears that Renaud Simmons, aka Samuel Humphreys, never made another recording under either of his names.

The core personnel tended to be Hill regulars — especially Richard Davis, who played a prominent role on all of Hill's previous Blue Note sessions as well as on Bobby Hutcherson's Dialogue, where Hill both played piano and wrote a majority of the music. Like Davis, John Gilmore was an associate of Hill's in Chicago and the saxophone voice on the then-unissued Andrew!!! the first of four consecutive Blue Note dates involving Hill to feature drummer Joe Chambers. Freddie Hubbard had also played Hill's music on the Hutcherson date, as well as a February 1965 session currently available under the title Pax. Only Cecil McBee was new to Hill's music, but he adapted quickly and proved particularly adept in conceiving his role percussively in this drum-driven music.

The album is among the best Hill ever recorded, open yet still structured as Nat Hentoff's notes explain, with outstanding contributions by every member of the group. The program features a balance similar to that of another Blue Note classic of the time, Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures, with two longer blowing pieces, a more reflective title featuring different horn colors, and a fourth track where the horns lay out. The musical character in each case is totally personal.

As was his wont at the time, the Chicago-born Hill claimed origins in Haiti, a fabrication he described as "a good career move" to Michael Cuscuna in 1995. In all other respects, the pianist's comments to Hentoff are an early and still notable example of enlightened multiculturalism.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2006