LT-1030

Andrew Hill - Dance With Death

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, October 11, 1968
Charles Tolliver, trumpet; Joe Farrell, tenor, soprano sax; Andrew Hill, piano; Victor Sproles, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

4029 tk.4 Yellow Violet
4030 tk.8 Partitions
4031 tk.14 Dance With Death
4032 tk.22 Fish 'N Rice
4033 tk.27 Love Nocturne
4034 tk.29 Black Sabbath

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Yellow Violet	Andrew Hill	October 11 1968
Partitions	Andrew Hill	October 11 1968
Fish 'N Rice	Andrew Hill	October 11 1968
Side Two
Dance With Death	Andrew Hill	October 11 1968
Love Nocturne	Andrew Hill	October 11 1968
Black Sabbath	Andrew Hill	October 11 1968

Liner Notes

ANDREW HILL

What we have here is an unexpected musical dividend — a previously unreleased session by one of the most authoritative individualists in jazz. Deeply rooted in the whole history of the music, Andrew Hill, through the years, has created his own uncategorizable body of work. He has done this with only glancing publicity, and always at his own pace to meet his own highly demanding criteria He does not so much defy as ignore fads. Like Thoreau, Hill reverberates to his own imperatives. He thinks and writes and plays in terms of a life-span rather than this year's popularity polls. And so, like Thelonious Monk, or Cecil Taylor, or Bill Evans, each of Hill's recordings is of unusual value — both in and for itself and also as part of a compelling personal continuum.

When I first became aware of Andrew Hill, in the early 1960's, what initially struck me was that, from note one, he had presence. The presence of a true original. Also, there was this extraordinary clarity — his lines, his rhythms, the way he could make a combo cohere, no matter how complex the music, into a kind of incandescent lucidity.

And there was the clarity Inside Andrew Hill's head. He would analyze what was happening in jazz with a depth of musical as well as historical perspective that Kept reminding me how much woodshedding I had to do. As when he pointed out, in the mid-60's how far back the avant-garde players of the time had started from. "Listen," Andrew Hill said, "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."

He himself had been playing, as well as hearing, the basic history for a long time. In a recent Cadence interview, Hill noted: "When I was six years old, I used to be able to play stride piano and Boogie Woogie extremely well."

But Hill came Into the consciousness of jazz listeners as a post-modern player. And so he also was, and is. Yet, unlike some of the dauntless explorers then, Hill was always accessible, even to listeners quite new to the music, Part of this was due to his clarity; part to his delight in contrasts (he never imprisoned himself in any one bag for too long); and part was due to a lyricism that, however intense, always sang.

I also remember, at the beginning, being impressed and instructed by the scope of Hill's interests. He read widely and critically, not only such craft-tools as manuals of orchestration, but also books on economics and politics. He was like Booker Little and Donald Byrd in that way. They wanted to know as much as they could about the society in which they were trying to keep themselves intact.

I also remember from that period how Hill, though he needed the gigs, would turn down jobs as a sideman with certain renowned leaders so that he could have what he felt was essential time to figure out where he wanted to go. It was time for reading, and for playing into a tape recorder, at home, and then analyzing what he heard. "You see," he told me, "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."

This self-grower was born in Port Au Prince, Haiti, on June 30, 1937. When he was four, the family came to Chicago. "I started out in music as a boy soprano." Hill said in an interview with Leonard Feather. "Singing, playing the organ, and tap dancing. I had a little act and made quite a few of the talent shows around town." This career lasted from the time he was six to the age of ten.

By 1953, Hill, playing baritone saxophone as well as piano, had a professional gig with Paul Williams' rhythm-and-blues band. It is usually cited as his first gig. But in that Cadence interview, Hill says that his very first job was at 14 — with Charlie Parker who, as a friend of his father, was visiting the house, heard him practicing, and brought him along to the job.

Says Hill: "Bird was a hell of a man. I respected the way he carried himself. What he was trying to show me was not the way he was, but how he wanted to be and the way he wanted me to be."

As a teenager, Hill's influences on piano included Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Thelonious Monk ("no matter what the technical contributions of Monk's music are, it is the personality of the music which makes it, finally.") Also helpful then was the perennial teacher, Barry Harris. And Miles Davis, who came through Chicago on occasion, left his mark.

Hill's seasoning as a pianist came through dates with Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Roy Elridge, Ira Sullivan, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, and road trips with Dinah Washington, Al Hibbler, and Johnny Hartman. He had come to New York in 1961, moved to Los Angeles the following year (gigging at the Lighthouse and with Roland Kirk), and was back in the Apple in 1963.

The following year, Andrew Hill began a series of Blue Note albums that were to establish him internationally — among musicians and a steadily growing number of lay listeners — as an authentic and durable contributor to the lengthening and deepening of the jazz language.

This music from October 11, 1968 was a well-seeded session, as might be said in tennis. For one thing, there is a crackling conjunction of energies. Farrell's spare, gritty, often steaming work here is just about the most satisfying I've heard by him on record. Tolliver, with his ringing, singing, brass-proud sound and lively imagination, incisively complements Farrell and the leader. Billy Higgins, with his care for texture as well as time and his swiftness in anticipating the horns, is a paradigm of pivotal percussion. And Victor Sproles contributes utter dependability and forceful inventiveness.

As pianist, Andrew Hill is customarily clear and inexorably logical in his improvisations. And he persistently creates and sustains momentum—of ideas, colors, rhythms, Hill's compositions, moreover, are also easily assimilated though variegatedly complex, His pieces are characterized by structures that are both firmly original and also more than sufficiently resilient so that each soloist can assert and connect his own ideas.

Hill, as leader, has been well described in Don Heckman's notes for a previous Hill album — and the analysis holds here as well: "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 players."

Since this session, Hill has continued to go his own determined, uncategorizable way. He has played a lot of colleges, and was composer-in-residence at Colgate in 1970-71. (He also received his doctorate there). Continually searching out new places to be heard and to hear, Hill has performed at rural art centers in the midwest, played in prisons for the New York State Council for the Arts, toured much of the rest of the country for the Smithsonian Heritage Program, and became a Smithsonian Fellow in 1975. He has also established a fund — from the sale of his music — to help impoverished musicians.

Some years ago, Leonard Feather said of a 1969 session by Andrew Hill: "He is at once one of the most articulate and adventurous, most communicatve and reachable musicians of our time. As composer and pianist, he displays a sensitivity, a feeling for contrast that I find all too rarely among his contemporaries. What will he be doing in 1980 if he continues to evolve at his present pace? There is, of course, no answer but the prospect is fascinating to contemplate."

The only safe prediction, I suppose, about what Andrew Hill will be doing in 1980 is that it will be what he wants to do. It is that insistence on allowing no one to tell him who he is, or where he ought to be, that binds the man and his music.

Or, as he put it in a conversation we had a long time ago — discussing a piece of his called Refuge - "There is no refuge. There is no place to hide, No matter where you look, you're still the one who's looking."

It is not, however, that Hill is — in what used to be a modish word — "alienated." As noted, his roots in his music (and in his own odyssey through that music) are lifelong-strong. But because he does not want those roots attenuated and his own potential smothered, Hill will not become part of any "movement" or "school." And that is why, to his great credit, he cannot easily be labeled to this day.

Nor will Hill allow himself to be assimilated. Before "black" supplanted "Negro" in usage, Hill used to talk about "the legacy of the Negro tradition." And he once wrote a composition that he called "Premonition" — which he explained as "indicating not alone a look ahead but also a 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."

In that respect too—along with the model he sets as a kind of modern Thoreau — Andrew Hill has already accomplished much, in and through his music. It is his own, fresh part of a long heritage.

In a book I wrote, The Jazz Life, I tried to explain how much I owe — for themselves as well as for their music — to jazz musicians. "I have covered," I said, "many beats through the years — civil liberties, education, classical and folk music, rock, the courts, films and theater, politics — and still, by and large, I most enjoy being with jazz musicians.

"For one thing, they have little patience with euphemism, since they spend much of their working time being direct, Also, being accustomed to change as "the only constant in their music, they tend to be more resilient and curious than most — and less likely to be conned by the manipulative conventional wisdom of institutions and institutional figures. And, as you might expect, most jazz people are lively, irreverent, sharp-witted. They see as well as hear a lot."

I could have been speaking of Andrew Hill. As also in this passage about the improvising players: "They are a brilliant motley, each having lived — or still living — a life obsessed with this spirit — music, its mysteries and infinite seductiveness. And the magnetism works both ways, of course, Once you're inside the music you'll want to keep going deeper and deeper, because it is impossible to get enough of it."

I expect that once you have heard what is here, you'll find yourself searching for more of Andrew Hill.

—Nat Hentoff

Notes for the 2012 CD Edition

Alfred Lion considered Andrew Hill as his last great discovery. And he is in the same lineage as Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Andrew recorded so frequently for Blue Note that it took me 30 years finally get all of his music left in the vaults released with "Mosaic Select: Andrew Hill" (MS-016) in 2005 being the final release to make all of this music available.  

I picked the session now known as "Dance With Death" for the LT series because it was uncompromising original Hill music but it has a foot in the Blue Note tradition with the classic hard bop quintet instrumentation and the masterful Billy Higgins on drums. Joe Farrell and Charles Tolliver prove to  
be fresh interpreters of Andrew's unique music.  

An alternate take of the title tune was added to the session in the CD era.  
 
- Michael Cuscuna