BST 84303

Andrew Hill - Grass Roots

Released - 1968

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 5, 1968
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Booker Ervin, tenor sax; Andrew Hill, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Freddie Waits, drums.

3069 tk.10 Grass Roots
3070 tk.20 Venture Inward
3071 tk.23 Bayou Red
3072 tk.36 Soul Special
3073 tk.41 Mira

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Grass Roots	Andrew Hill	August 5 1968
Venture Inward	Andrew Hill	August 5 1968
Mira	Andrew Hill	August 5 1968
Side Two
Soul Special	Andrew Hill	August 5 1968
Bayou Red	Andrew Hill	August 5 1968

Liner Notes

GRASS ROOTS is exactly what this album is about. “Before this,” Andrew Hill says, “I had been trying to gratify myself as a musician. It's inevitable, I guess, in the process of finding yourself as an artist. You have to keep on proving yourself, testing your skills. But that kind of self-absorption tends to leave out a large number of people. I felt finally that the time had come for me, and perhaps for jazz, to make an album like this. I’m not proving myself here. I’m not concerned with what may or may not be hip now or in the future. I want to give something. I want to reach out from myself to make people happy who listen to this. That’s what GRASS ROOTS are in music. Getting down to the basics, getting down as deep as you can into feeling.”

All the songs are by Hill and, he explains, "I tried to write each one as lyrically as possible, but each in a different mood. The title song came to mind when I was in Central Park one day just watching some animals. Looking at them, I thought that human beings consider animals naive, but how naive we are! We are almost down to the question of the very survival of the human race and yet there are people — I call them “high school intellectuals” — totally immersed in the divisions between people on the basis of color or class or whatever. And then I saw some kids playing together in the park. They were of different races, but they were having a great time. There was no malice, no animosity among them. Where they were, the way they were acting, is to me the real roots of mankind. So what the song is about is that rather than being consumed by rage or, for that matter, rather than proclaiming ‘love’ for everyone, I just wanted to tell about life as it really is. And you know, real life isn’t bad at all.”

Aptly, GRASS ROOTS has a declaratory, l’m-glad-to-be-here kind of theme. And in terms of explosively life-sustaining sound and beat, Booker Ervin’s solo is a propulsive illustration of the medium being the message. More reflective but no less firmly personal is Lee Morgan; and Hill himself — over the deeply nurturing beat of Ron Carter and Freddie Waits — further underlines the value of now. Carter’s solos seems to reach into the earth itself, and then that proud theme returns until Ron — the solo pulse — ends the experience.

VENTURE INWARD, Hill points out, is just what it sounds like — exploring the self. And it applies to all concerned on the track. “I chose Lee and Booker,” Hill says, “because each has so distinct a style. They’ve explored themselves, as is evidenced by the fact that they’re among the few musicians left with enough guts to develop and sustain their own individual sound and conception. They are who they are no matter what’s in fashion.” I would also venture that this performance, and the album as an entirety, will last through many different changes of fashion. It crackles with individuality and with such directness of emotion and fullness of spirit as to be energizingly infectious.

MIRA is Spanish for “Look” “Come see!” “Watch out!” and many other permutations of paying attention. During years of living on the upper West Side of New York, cries of children shouting “Mira!’ would often awaken me. “I’ve dedicated this song,” Hill says, “to a lot of my friends of the Dominican Republic on the West Side. And I’m proud of it because it does have an authentic feeling to it.” It does indeed — a fusion of Latin and jazz that doesn’t dilute the essence of either strain. The song also has a spontaneously festive air, a kind of out-of-doors ease and spaciousness of musical speech.

SOUL SPECIAL is so titled, Hill explains, “because ‘soul’ in a sense has become a commodity, and I’m having a special on it. But the song is not a put-on. I’m trying to express the essence of the ‘soul’ mood — that quality which remains even after rhythmic approaches to it change. And they do keep changing.” Central to the evocation of basic “soul” here are Ron Carter and Freddie Waits, as well as the horns. “Ron,” Hill says. “is quite simply one of the greatest jazz bassists now living. He certainly has the technique to be fancy, but he concentrates on the one thing that makes jazz what it is — basic, honest feeling. He doesn’t use pretty phrases. He gets to the roots. And Freddie too doesn’t let technique get in the way of real expression. Like Ron, he’s also remarkably diversified — he can play all kinds of styles well.”

BAYOU RED is a tribute by Hill to the “gens de couleur,” the Creoles and mulattoes in and around New Orleans who, he maintains, “were so important in contributing to the Negro heritage. Everybody’s so caught up in nationalism these days that these people are being put down, but they did so much to help in the building of black culture.” The theme of the song is intriguing and Hill and his colleagues develop it evocatively — mingling echoes of loss and of fulfillment.

At the beginning of our conversation, Andrew Hill said he had wanted this album to be an act of giving. But at the same time, I told him, the compositions and the performance also indicated his own growth — in assurance, in strength of individuality, in expansiveness of spirit. I asked him what he wanted to do next. “I’ve been living,” he said, “off the generosity of patrons — composing, practicing and now really thinking about starting to perform more often again.”

“Mainly in concerts, or in clubs as well?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hill said. “I’ve outgrown the childishness of wanting to restrict myself to only one kind of environment. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to play in all kinds of places, and now I know that what counts is not where you play but the quality of your performance. That’s what I’m aiming at — getting as high a quality of performance each time as I can.”

With regard to that criterion, he has succeeded brilliantly in this album. Not the brilliance of technique, though that’s there too, but rather the brilliance of consistency of conception. The performances here are all of a whole, and of a high order of unity.

— NAT HENTOFF

Connoisseur CD Reissue Liner Notes

ADDENDUM:

GRASS ROOTS is the album that reconciles the man who'd recorded challenging albums like Black Fire, Smoke Stack and Point Of Departure with the man who wrote "The Rumproller." I once asked Andrew if held been commissioned by Alfred Lion to write "The Rumproller" for Lee Morgan. Andrew said that it had just been one of many compositions that he'd played for Lion. When he came to "The Rumproller," Lion declared it a perfect follow-up to "The Sidewinder" for Lee Morgan. And so it was.

In 1966 and '67, Andrew's music became more abstract and little was issued from this period, in part because Andrew didn't feel that he was finding players who could properly realize his music. When Grass Roots came out, it was a bit of a shock to those of us who'd forgotten he'd composed "The Rumproller." And although the album didn't have the desired effect of bringing Andrew's way of hearing things to a larger jazz audience, the Latin tune "Mira" has endured in popularity.

When the album was first issued, I asked Andrew how he came up with these compositions. He replied in his enigmatic way that it was "easy when you study the improvising styles of people like Lee Morgan and Booker Ervin to write material suited to them." However, a decade later, nosing though the Blue Note vaults, I came upon the first draft of Grass Roots, recorded four months earlier with three of the same songs and an entirely different cast. Woody Shaw was working with Andrew among others at the time. But Jimmy Ponder and Idris Muhammad came from Lou Donaldson's incredibly successful group of that period and Frank Mitchell and Reggie Workman were working on and off with Lee Morgan. It is the five performances from this session that grace this CD as bonus tracks.

Through the years, we've lost Lee Morgan, Woody Shaw, Booker Ervin, Frank Mitchell and Freddie Waits. It's heartening that Andrew is still with us, constantly creating new music and that Idris Muhammad, the magic behind Lou Donaldson's Alligator Boogaloo in 1967 is the creative engine behind Joe Lovano and Greg Osby's Friendly Fire in 1999.

MICHAEL CUSCUNA, 1999