BST 84203

Andrew Hill - Andrew!!!

Released - April 1968

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 25, 1964
John Gilmore, tenor sax #1,2,4-6; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Andrew Hill, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums.

1382 tk.6 Black Monday
1383 tk.12 Symmetry
1384 tk.17 The Griots (mistitled as The Groits)
1385 tk.20 Duplicity
1386 tk.31 Le Serpent Qui Danse
1381 tk.33 No Doubt

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
The Groits	Andrew Hill	June 25 1964
Black Monday	Andrew Hill	June 25 1964
Duplicity	Andrew Hill	June 25 1964
Side Two
Le Serpent Qui Danse	Andrew Hill	June 25 1964
No Doubt	Andrew Hill	June 25 1964
Symmetry	Andrew Hill	June 25 1964

Liner Notes

ONE of the oldest esthetic aphorisms informs us that the public is always ten, or fifteen, or twenty years behind the artist, and that because of this fact, truly creative talents are rarely appreciated in their own time. Like all aphoristic comments, it has just enough of a ring of truth to make one pause and take notice. Possibly the most familiar example in jazz is the case of Thelonious Monk. After years and years of playing what might most accurately be described as himself, Monk has finally begun to receive some small measure of the public recognition he deserves. Important as this public recognition is to his bank accounts, however, much of his standing as a major jazz contributor traces directly to the fact that Monk’s fascinating tunes have become a basic part of the contemporary jazz repertoire. No better test of a musician’s excellence can be offered than the fact that he has had a major effect upon his contemporaries.

One can only speculate whether or not in the music of pianist/composer Andrew Hill we are hearing another, newer version of the Monk story. Like Monk, Hill is a forceful improvisational stylist; and increasingly, his compositions have achieved the character and quality of genuinely original artistic contributions. Hopefully. of course, Hill will not have to wait as long as Monk did for his audience to find him.

Included here is a particularly good set of originals, performed by players who have revealed a special affinity for Hill’s music. Despite the variety that Hill injects into his selections, certain fundamental qualities — what might be called the basic components of his style — soon become apparent. At least three of the pieces — Duplicity, Le Serpent Qui Danse and Symmetry — are constructed of unusual, and difficult to play, intervals. (Again, the similarity with Monk is obvious.) Two others suggest another facet of Hill’s musical personality: Black Monday and No Doubt are slow, almost rhapsodic lines, romantic in a way that rarely has been heard in jazz of late. This range of expressiveness is characteristic of a viewpoint Hill described to me in an interview for Down Beat: “The way I like to play,” he said, “is to perform each time with a new piece of music or with some different kind of instrumentation.”

Aside from the intrinsic compositional qualities of Hill’s pieces, listen for the remarkable shaping and forming that takes place. under Hill’s direction, in the actual playing. Hill’s interaction with Richard Davis is on an almost magically intuitive level. That Davis is a fine player who makes a compositional contribution to the music he plays will come as a surprise to no one, but his playing with Hill, It seems to me, reaches beyond even that high quality. Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes function as an extension of Hill’s keyboard, weaving in and out of the lines like a needle through the nubby strands of line linen. John Gilmore, too, has long been a familiar of Hill’s and fully reveals his special understanding of the music; and drummer Chambers continues the uninterrupted string of good performances he has had recently.

Only with players of this calibre would it be possible for Hill to mold his music in such dramatically spontaneous fashion. Listen, for example, to his solo on Le Serpent Qui Danse, in which he builds rhythmic suspensions and dissonant time accents that cross and conflict with the music’s flow; Hill’s solo on Symmetry has many of the same qualities. On The Groits (performed by the quartet. without Gilmore) one is constantly aware of rhythmic feeding back and forth among the group, one player lobbing accents to another, both jumping on the same split second of time, bouncing, pushing and surging in and around each other’s music. Interaction of such complexity takes place only if there is a strong hand at the controls, sometimes gently pointing out directions. other times urging and even forcing the creative momentum of the piece. This is one of Hill’s strongest talents, and it is one that seems to have been present in the work of all great jazz players.

Hill’s music, like most significant artistic expression, is meaningful in direct proportion to the accuracy with which it speaks for its time. For that reason, as well as the less esthetic fact that it is simply pleasant to hear. it would be a shame indeed if it took the audience ten or twenty years to respond to Hill. “What I really want to do,” he told me, “is play music.” If enough people hear the kind of music he plays in this collection, Andrew Hill is surely going to have the opportunity to do all the playing he wants.

—DON HECKMAN

Connoisseur Addendum to Original Liner Notes

Blue Note founder Alfred Lion, after using Andrew Hill on a Joe Henderson and a Hank Mobley session, asked the pianist to play him some of his own compositions. When he heard the prodigious amount of completely unique material that Hill had created, he signed him immediately. Alfred told me in 1986 that it was like the first time he heard Monk and Herbie Nichols. The material was so original that he wanted to record everything they'd composed. And, like Monk and Nichols, he recorded a financially burdensome amount of Hill's material before a single note was released.

Andrew!!! was the fifth album to be recorded in eight months. At that point, Black Fire had been released, and Judgment! and Point of Departure would soon follow. Smokestack, the second album recorded, finally came out in the summer of '66. Andrew!!! did not see the light of day until April 1968, almost four years after it was made. The delay is somewhat bewildering given that the denser, more avant garde Compulsion, recorded in October 1965, had come out four months earlier.

This album is made all the more valuable by the presence of John Gilmore (he also appeared on Compulsion). Although he was introduced to the jazz world on Blowing in from Chicago, the Blue Note album he co-led with Clifford Jordan in 1956, most of his professional life (he died in 1995) was devoted to Sun Ra's Arkestra. 1964 was a year of considerable freelance activity for the tenor saxophonist, who had exerted a profound influence on John Coltrane. That year, he recorded with Elmo Hope, McCoy Tyner, and Paul Bley, as well as Hill; he toured with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, appearing on their 'S Make It album.

Bobby Hutcherson and Richard Davis had shown an amazing affinity with Hill's music since the beginning of his career at Blue Note. Joe Chambers, as brilliant a composer as he is drummer, is extraordinary in his ability to juggle time without losing a beat. Clearly, Hill is playing with his peers here.

The highlight of this album for me is "Symmetry," a remarkable piece with constantly shifting accents within its 4/4 time signature (Woody Shaw tackled this piece on his 1977 album Iron Man). The alternate takes of "The Griots" and "Symmetry" were actually recorded after the takes that became the masters. Interestingly enough, according to his session notes, Alfred Lion chose the earlier take of "The Griots" because there was "more happening," feeling the second take to be "more conventional.

This is music that functions on an amazing level that we all took for granted at the time.

- MICHAEL CUSCUNA, 2005