Andrew Hill’s Book of Compositions

by Fritz Byers

Among the more audacious album titles in jazz is Genius of Modern Music (Vols. 1 & 2), applied to a pair of separate albums that Blue Note released in 1956, gathering the recordings from 1947 through 1952 of Thelonious Monk. I’ve always been happy the producers avoided leading with either “A” or “The”. “The” would been a smidge too bold, since around that time there were doubtless more than one genius mining the modern vein. But “A” would have been far too pallid – Thelonious was always too singular to be lumped with anyone else. So, “Genius” it was.

And it was apt. Maybe we’ll talk another time about Thelonious’s incomparable pianism. Today, I have in mind his genius as a composer.  About seventy songs, a modest output for twenty-plus years. But they are enough to have made him, after Ellington, the most recorded composer in jazz history. His tunes are central to the jazz repertoire, endlessly reharmonized, reinterpreted; they are precious and durable stones that have been turned over, again and again, by new generations of players hunting for what’s still hidden in them. Monk tributes, by musicians across the full spectrum of jazz, arrive with the regularity of the seasons. If you’ve listened at all to Jazz Spectrum over the years, you’ve heard the master and his acolytes countless times. Yes, we should talk about him.

But not today. Rather, what I really have in mind today is Andrew Hill, a pianist and composer whom I associate with Thelonious, not stylistically but because Andrew, too, was a compositional genius. His music (which is featured this week on Jazz Spectrum Saturday) is every bit as singular as Thelonious’s, and he has his followers, but the world has not quite yet caught on. (Of course, it took Thelonious a long time to become an icon, so I guess we should be patient.)

Andrew was a great pianist – jagged, elusive, sounding almost all the time like no one else at the keyboard.  But the Genius case for him rests, to my ears, more soundly on what he wrote. His 1964 Blue Note masterwork Point of Departure contains a piece called “New Monastery,” and the allusion is not incidental: Andrew is nodding at Monk, the composer he most resembles in ambition and idiosyncratic bent, and at the same time announcing his own claim to that lineage and its implications.

The evidence is there for anyone willing to look and listen. Between 1963 and 1966, Andrew recorded a run of Blue Note albums – Black Fire, Smoke Stack, Judgment!, Point of Departure, Compulsion, Change – that constitutes one of the richest bodies of composition in the music’s history.  And his compositional brilliance lured many of the era’s most demanding and in-demand players (Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Kenny Dorham, Richard Davis, Tony Williams among them) to the recording studio to play on Andrew’s albums, great musicians deployed in service of writing that was irresistible – melodically bold, rhythmically subtle and shifting, and harmonically indeterminate in ways that somehow sound nearly inevitable.  Andrew’s peers recognized his compositional flair immediately. For example, the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson turned to Andrew’s pen for several pieces on his own 1965 masterwork, Dialogue, evidence that Andrew’s compositional language was already in use among the musicians best equipped to speak it and test its grammar and syntax.

The '70s brought trying times for Andrew, as they did for many jazz musicians, with the blandishments of the jazz-rock fusion machine and the quicksilver promises of fame and mass sales.  Andrew stayed mostly true to his muse against those daunting market pressures.  But measured against his Promethean 1960s output, Andrew’s recorded work over the ensuing three decades was less disruptive – far from dull, to be sure, and virtuosic; but not way ahead of the crowd.

And then, astonishingly, Andrew released Dusk in 2000, eight new compositions and a dazzling band, with reed greats Marty Ehrlich and Greg Tardy and the trumpeter Ron Horton on the front line, and the bassist Scott Colley and the drummer Billy Drummond. Dusk is one of the essential jazz records of this century, proof that the generative intelligence behind the Blue Note sessions was still, decades later, inventing his special brand of exacting, ambitious music; still a genius.

Since Dusk, Andrew’s compositions have continued circulating, at increasing distance from his own idiosyncratic touch at the piano. I miss his sound, but I think the spread of his tunes into the jazz repertoires is the strongest argument for the greatness and the durability of the writing itself. In 2006 the guitarist Nels Cline released New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill, a piano-less sextet reading of Andrew’s Blue Note book with Bobby Bradford’s cornet and Ben Goldberg’s clarinet, horns Andrew never used, and Andrea Parkins’s electric accordion standing in for, of all things, Andrew himself.  And in 2023, the trumpeter Ron Horton, who played in Andrew’s working band and on Dusk, and who spent years transcribing the records by ear before Andrew’s original scores turned up, released A Prayer for Andrew, a tribute built from the inside out. Two very different musicians, forty years and two instruments removed from the source, each found Andrew’s tunes sturdy enough to carry their own inventions.

Andrew’s book is there, and it’s full of fascination. The compositions reward the same kind of attention that Monk’s have received. The time for that has come.