But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble
to discover what I have been.
- Ralph Ellison
A friend of mine told me, “All music is just a way of communication that is understood in many ways.” His comment helped me understand how jazz music has been communicating with me for many years, and that I have been developing a highly personalized relationship with it that has grown and changed throughout my journey. It also made me think back to the late 1970s, as a high school student, when I was first trying to comprehend the sound of jazz.
In the old, lean days of Jazz music, the only way to hear it in St. Paul, Minnesota, outside the jazz fusion playing on the radio, was to go to used records stores, sort through the records, and buy some. It was potluck. I still remember the first two used jazz records I ever bought:
Dewey Redman’s The Ear Of The Behearer (Impulse, 1973)
and, Walt Dickerson’s Peace (Inner City Records, 1976)
When I got home, I put the needle down on Redman’s song Interconnection, and it shocked me. I thought, “This stuff wasn’t really jazz at all, was it?” Expecting something more like Grover Washington Jr., I hated them. However, I kept them through all the years. Never played, I lugged them along in my collection from place to place. After all, they were my first two used jazz records - two oddballs, but still sentimental artifacts. The funny thing is, after all these years, now I actually like them: Redman’s Boody is funky and fun; and Dickerson’s Universal Peace is surreal, beautiful, and soothing - to my ears now, it is a masterpiece.
In some strange twist of fate, these two albums complete the circle - from hated to loved. I find it particularly strange that one of the albums is called: The Ear Of The Behearer. The sounds did not change, my comprehension of the sounds did - I understand them now.
This concept made me think about jazz and how we all hear it. It made me consider the uniqueness of each person’s jazz journey. It made me consider, for example, why so many people rave about Andrew Hills’ first four Blue Note releases, Black Fire, Smoke Stack, Judgment!, or Point of Departure, but I like far better his later releases, like Passing Ships. Those early albums just didn’t move me. I can’t hear them, like I hear Passing Ships, with that terrific score and Ron Carter’s unbelievable bass playing, or Yellow Violet from his 1968 Dance With Death, with Joe Farrell’s wonderful soprano sax and Billy Higgins just keeping time in a way only he can:
Jazz really is in the ear of the behearer.
Blues-style Accordion and Tap Dancer
I stumbled onto Andrew Hill through Malachi Favors, the great bassist of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I had read about an early recording Favors played on for an obscure independent record label called Ping, operated out of the back of a record store at 47th and Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago.
As it turns out, Sun Ra’s Baritone player Pat Patrick also appeared on the record. The leader on the record was a piano player I had never heard of, Andrew Hill. The recording took place at Universal Recording Studio in Chicago in October 1956. Here’s Down Pat from that session:
Andrew Hill grew up in the South Side of Chicago. His family was poor. By the age of 12, he was a street musician, playing blues-style accordion and tap dancing with his hustling companion, guitarist Leo Blevins, who had a washtub with a string on it. “It was safe at the time,” Hill remembers. “I needed money. I found out that when you played music, you got money. My hustling block was the northwest side of 47th Street and State, which was a good block. Across the street was the South Center department store, a little further down was the Savoy Ballroom and the Hurricane Lounge, where Albert Ammons and his son (Gene “Jug” Ammons) were playing, and the Regal Theater was right next to that.” By his teens, he was working weekends at sorority house dances, rent parties, and even after-hours sessions at the Chess brothers’ Macombo Lounge, an all-night joint at the intersection of Oakland and Drexel Boulevard.
In his own words from a 1996 interview, Andrew Hill talks about his youth: “I was one of the first children admitted to the University of Chicago pilot program.” This was the University of Chicago Laboratory School.
“At the time, intelligence was based upon a certain middle-class standard, and if a person didn’t fit into this certain middle-class standard they wouldn’t have so-called ‘intelligence.’ But for some reason, I appeared to be bright. I was semi-autistic, but as they called me, bright. So they took me in and brought me to the point where I would be sociable.”
During his high school years, Hill played in Von Freeman’s band and recorded on some small, independent labels before catching his first big break as a leader on the Warwick record label, which also later featured pianist Herbie Hancock's debut.
While digging through used records at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago, I ran across Andrew Hill’s Warwick trio album So In Love, recorded in 1959 with Malachi Favors on bass. Here is a nice rendition from that album of Burton Lane’s 1947 song Old Devil Moon, from The Broadway show, Finian’s Rainbow.
However, it wasn’t until 1963 that Andrew Hill made his Blue Note debut on Joe Henderson’s Our Thing, his second album as a leader for Blue Note. Hill and Henderson would both go on to play big parts in breaking the mold of jazz in the early 1960s.
Blue Note Years
Joe Henderson’s Our Thing was recorded in September 1963, and you can hear why producer Alfred Lion immediately brought Andrew Hill back as a leader. Listen to his piano solo on the title track, which starts at the 3:22 minute mark. I hear a lot of Herbie Nichols in there.
In fact, Our Thing is also worthy for Pete La Roca’s work alone; for this superb and quiet individual percussionist would soon leave the music business to become a lawyer. His second album as a leader, Turkish Women at the Bath, was recorded in 1967 for the Douglas Records label. Later, when Muse Records released it under Chick Corea's name without La Roca’s consent, he filed and argued a lawsuit against Douglas Records. He won and the Chick Corea labeled records were recalled. But even more interesting to me than La Roca’s drumming is the bass playing of Eddie Khan.
Eddie Khan and Pete La Roca were two of the more obscure, but no less brilliant, members of the Blue Note stable of this period. Rhythm section-wise, Our Thing is a jewel - an inspired performance from players we don’t get to hear much on many records.
I’m also partial to this Andrew Hill Blue Note album because it features Sun Ra’s great tenorman, John Gilmore. Recorded in June 1964, here is Black Monday from that album:
Michale Cuscuna in this short interview recalls how there were only three musicians who when Blue Note’s Alfred Lion heard playing, he just wanted to record everything: Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, and Andrew Hill. Lion called Hill his last great signing. High praise from a man who signed so many great musicians.
During the 1970s, the old, lean days of Jazz, when his records didn't sell, he moved to upstate New York and taught at Colgate University for two years. He then went to California, teaching in prisons and public schools, and later became a professor at Oregon's Portland State University. Here’s one more for the road, La Verne from Andrew Hill’s Shades, recorded in 1988 for the Soul Note label:
Andrew Hill came a long way from that semi-autistic accordion playing tap dancer on the streets of Chicago’s South Side to becoming one of the great Jazz communicators of our time and, in 2007, the first person to receive a posthumous honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music - Dr. Andrew Hill. His journey may not have been an artistic path anyone expected, but then who’s journey really is….
The past few weeks our journey has passed through a lot of pianists. The next two weeks on that Big River Called Jazz we’ll turn into different forks: the first to bassist, Eddie Khan, and the following week to multi-instrumentalist, Eric Dolphy.
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey and would like to share this with someone you think might be interested in learning more about our great American art form: Jazz, just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page. Also, if you feel so inclined, become a subscriber to my journey by hitting the “Subscribe” button here:
Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….