Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965
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The other tunes are equally memorable. "Evolution" is a stately, out-of-tempo, modal dirge: a two-note melody played over shifting internal voicings and punctuated by Williams's funeral-march rolls. "The Coaster" is a sort of avant-flag-waver, fired up by repeated riffs and building to Morgan's hot-blooded solo. And finally, "Monk in Wonderland" switches between j and i- time signatures, using a Jazz-Messengerish shuffle beat on the latter. All the musicians make the tempo transitions gracefully (how far we had come from the stiff experiments with jazz waltzes only a few years before!), gliding elegantly over the song's shifting beat and generally having a
ball. It's not surprising that Morgan later remembered the date as an important moment in his development.6 Everyone met the challenges posed and was propelled beyond himself on this electrifying session.
McLean, Morgan, and Rollins were not alone. With varying degrees of fanfare, most of hard bop's "stars" and popular combos found inspiration atnd renewal in the early sixties. Tony Williams's drumming, for example, became a key factor in Miles Davis's band. Horace Silver combined modal structures and Latin rhythms on The Tokyo Blues, his most cohesive album since Further Explorations. He then went on to hire two young turks for his new quintet: tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson and trumpeter Woody Shaw, both of whom could play "outside" and "inside," as musicians put it at the time. After Silver's departure from the Jazz Messengers in 1956, that combo had seemed to flounder for several years as later units tried to get by without a composer who could give their repertoire an overall shape. This problem was solved briefly in 1958 by Benny Golson's stint, but it was vanquished much more definitively when Wayne Shorter joined in 1960. For the next few years, Shorter's trenchant-yet-melancholy themes galvanized two outstanding ensembles: the first with Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, and bassist Jymie Merritt; and the second with Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, and Reggie Workman, in addition to Blakey and Shorter.
And as with Blakey, Davis, and Silver, so it went with any number of less celebrated musicians. Jazzmen and aficionados, for instance, had always valued trumpeter Kenny Dorham's sharply syncopated phrasing, full of subtle rhythmic displacements, as well as his tart, dark tone and austerely motif-oriented solos. Dorham was never a killer technically in the manner of Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown. But along with Miles Davis and Art Farmer, he had helped define an area of melodic invention and tonal nuance that greatly broadened the trumpet's range of expression. He now teamed up with Joe Henderson for a series of records, some under his own name and others under Henderson's, that reflected his openness. As he put it: "If you keep on living, you have to keep on growing. That is, if you keep your feelings and your ears open."7 Dor-ham had clearly remained responsive to new sounds, and his compositions on these discs used changing tempos and unusual bar structures and chord sequences.
Dorham, Henderson, Blakey, Hubbard, Hutcherson, McLean, Morgan, Shorter, and Silver all recorded for Blue Note Records, which dominated the jazz scene—or at least this aspect of it—as it never had before. Blue Note proved to be extraordinarily supportive of new developments in hard bop and, as Alan Rosenthal comments, its musicians "did seem to use the label freely and extensively as a laboratory situation in which to try out all the variable aspects of their music .. . The result of this broadening of horizons was that in the years immediately prior to 1967 the 'Blue Note sound' continued to be characteristic in stylistic ancestry [hard bop] and in instrumentation but ceased to be limited in scope. Perfection seemed imminent. In albums like Joe Henderson's In 'n' Out, Larry Young's Unity, and Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil (and many others), one hears the unmistakable extending of jazz's profoundly physical embrace to encompass the complexities and anxieties of modern life, not in the primitive 'out of the mouths of babes' way that swept Ernest Ansermet off his feet when he heard Sidney Bechet in 1919, but with a conscious awareness of those complexities and a determination to prevail over and even transform anxiety through sheer force of swing."8
Of all Blue Note's "new stars," perhaps the most intriguing was pianist Andrew Hill. I first encountered his work in fall of 1963.1 had returned home from Maury's Met Record Mart, one of those ghetto jazz specialty shops once so common and now virtually extinct, clutching a copy of altoist Jimmy Woods's Conflict. The album as a whole proved to be one of the most ferocious hard-bop releases ever. Though all the musicians played with originality, I was especially struck by Hill, whom I
had never heard of. His percussive attack and jagged lines seemed to leap forth from the record, announcing the arrival of a major new keyboard stylist.
Hill, who then stood on the verge of a remarkable outpouring of creative energy over the next two years, had grown up in Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago's Lab School. In an interview with Leonard Feather, Hill recalled his first musical experiences: "I started out in music as a boy soprano, singing, playing the accordion and tap dancing. I had a little act and made quite a few of the talent shows around town from 1943, when I was six, until I was ten. I won turkeys at two Thanksgiving parties at the Regal Theater. The parties were sponsored by the Chicago Defender, a newspaper I used to sell on the streets of Chicago.
"In 19501 learned my first blues changes on the piano from Pat Patrick, the baritone saxophonist . . . Three years later I played my first real professional job as a musician, with Paul Williams' rhythm and blues band. At that time I was playing baritone sax as well as piano."9
Gigs followed with such Chicago stalwarts as tenor saxophonists Gene Ammons, Von Freeman, and Johnny Griffin and bassists Israel Crosby and Wilbur Ware, as well as with a variety of jazzmen passing through the Midwest. These included Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young; and during this same period, Hill made friends with Barry Harris, whom he would later claim as an influence along with Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Art Tatum. In addition to practicing Monk's, Powell's, and Tatum's solos till he knew them by heart, Hill studied composition: "A friend of mine named Eddie Baker was taking lessons from William Russo. I took a few lessons with him too. Then I sent a composition to Hindemith at Yale that allegedly had maturity beyond my years. When Hindemith came to Chicago, I went to see him and he showed me things about extended composition during the five times or so that I saw him over a two-year period."10
After this initial burst of activity, Hill retired from the music scene for three years, which he spent studying "more serious things—books."11 He returned to public performance leading a trio that nailed down some of the best gigs in Chicago, cut an album for Warwick Records, and in 1961 accompanied Dinah Washington to New York. There he performed in a number of contexts, playing on vibist Walt Dicker-son's rhapsodic To My Queen album, backing up singers Johnny Hartman and Al Hibbler, and appearing as a sideman with Kenny Dorham, Clifford Jordan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jackie McLean, and the Johnny Griffin-Lockjaw Davis quintet. Late 1962 and early 1963 found him on the West Coast, accompanying Howard Rumsey's and Kirk's ensembles and recording with Jimmy Woods. He soon returned to New York City, however, and shortly thereafter (in September 1963) played on one of Joe Henderson's Blue Note records with Kenny Dorham. Alfred Lion, the label's co-director, was impressed by Hill's work and signed him to an exclusive contract.
What followed was a series of tremendously original recordings of great emotional power. Though Hill seemed—at least to New Yorkers—to have sprung into being full-grown, those who had heard him earlier in Chicago described a rather conventional pianist whose playing was more a pastiche of standard effects than a volcano of individuality. Lion, perhaps regretting his earlier parsimony with Thelonious Monk (who recorded only ninety minutes of music in his five years with Blue Note), brought Hill into Rudy Van Gelder's studio three times in three months. Black Fire, Hill's first Blue Note LP, was cut in November 1963. Smokestack followed a month later, and Judgment a month after that. Point of Departure, his best-known album, was done in March 1964; Andrew! dates from June 1964. Even today, 95 percent of Hill's reputation rests on these fi
ve albums, all recorded within an eight-month period.
In the liner notes to Black Fire, Hill is quoted on the subject of his three pianistic teachers (five if you count Ravel and Debussy): "Monk's like Ravel and Debussy to me, in that he's
put a lot of personality into his playing, and no matter what the technical contributions of Monk's music are, it is the personality of the music that makes it, finally. Bud is an even greater influence but his music is a dead end. I mean, if you stay with Bud too much, you'll always sound like him, even if you're doing something he never did. Tatum, well, all modern piano playing is Tatum."
In a sense, modern-jazz piano playing may well derive from Tatum. But Tatum as a specific influence is hard to detect in Hill's music, nor is Powell much easier to find. There is a parallel with Monk in that Hill's world is instantly recognizable and stamped with a singular vision and set of musical coordinates. Temperamentally, however, the two pianist-composers are far apart. For one thing, Monk's music is often good-humored, while Hill's is about as solemn as you can get in jazz. Hill's playing is simultaneously tormented arid cerebral, two adjectives rarely applicable to Monk. Monk's borrowings from the popular and jazz traditions have mostly to do with the 1930s, a decade Hill makes scant use of. No artist exists outside his own time, and Hill is clearly a modern-jazz pianist, but his main stylistic antecedents cannot be found among the pianists of the 1940s.
To understand Hill, one must look toward hard bop, both as it crystallized in the playing ol musicians like Elmo Hope and Mai Waldron and in a more general sense, as a style and emotional stance. Like Hope's and Waldron's, Hill's playing has a somber, driven quality. His tunes, like theirs, tend to favor the minor mode. Dissonance, insistent use of seconds, obsessively repeated phrases, asymmetrical melodic lines, and empty space employed as a structural element are all points of comparison. Many of Hill's compositions (like "Land of Nod" on Black Fire, "Catta" on Bobby Hutcherson's album Dialogue, or "Siete Ocho" on Hill's Judgment) are typical hard-bop numbers in several respects, including their quasi-Latin flavor and a sinister air, easy to recognize but harder to define, known as "badness."
In addition, Hill's classical background makes itself felt in subtle and complex ways. His initial flurry of Blue Note dates, as it happened, coincided with "third stream music," an insipid hybrid despite the involvement of artists like pianist-composer John Lewis. What Hill seemed to take from the European tradition, however, had little to do with such middlebrow pablum. Instead, he drew upon the sort of feelings and postures that Alan Rosenthal calls "complexities and anxieties." These had begun to creep into jazz with bebop (and even more with hard bop) but had rarely been appropriated so directly and wholeheartedly. "Sinister, brooding, cerebral, angst-ridden, intellectually restless"—how many of these words could be applied to any jazz prior to 1945? And how much qualification would they need with most beboppers? Powell, however, was an exception in some ways and fit the profile better than his peers. Classical music, then, may have functioned for Hill and for a number of others (for example, Elmo Hope) as an invitation to venture—or venture further— into affective realms relatively unexplored by their predecessors.
With such examples around and behind him, Hill set about creating his own music. Standard jazz licks were so rare in his initial recordings that they stood out emphatically. One of the most percussively alive of pianists, Hill used a bassist (Richard Davis, aided by Eddie Khan on Smokestack) and drummers (Joe Chambers, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones) who could create dense, polyrhythmic textures for him to work with and against. As much as any African master drummer, Hill relied on first-rate accompaniment to orient himself rhythmically. This symbiosis is particularly clear if we compare his interactions with Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones. Haynes tends to push the time, and Hill responds by holding back; Jones plays a little behind the beat, and Hill tugs against him too, pushing things forward to maintain the same rhythmic tension we find with Haynes. Cascading runs; rolling triplets; punched-out, repeated, transposed two-note chords and phrases all form part of
Hill's melodic vocabulary. So does his eccentrically fragmentary phrasing, which violates bar lines even more than bebop did. Hill's harmonic sense brought him close simultaneously to the atmosphere of much previous hard bop, to Monk in certain respects, and to the French impressionists he cited in the same breath as his favorite jazz pianists.
Any of Hill's initial Blue Note releases could be discussed as an example of his work in the early sixties. Smokestack, however, is possibly the most suitable, if only because it consists solely of Hill, bassists Khan and Davis, and Haynes. Khan generally stays in the background, soloing only once and laying down an unobtrusive line behind Davis's far more aggressive contributions, which range from inspired ob-bligatos to veritable duets with the pianist, as on the ballad "Verne." Every tune is an original, as was the case on all of Hill's early LPs. Smokestack's one up-tempo cut is the title track, where an exceptionally busy rhythmic-harmonic texture churns and swirls around Hill, who sometimes cuts against and at other times rides the rhythm section's ebb and flow. Intricately voiced, ringing chords alternate with tumbling runs and licks lifted from blues vocabulary and demonically hammered out on medium-tempo tunes like "The Day After," "Ode to Von," and "Not So." Through it all, Haynes and Davis surge in and out of the foreground, complementing Hill, filling whatever gaps he leaves, and displaying an exquisite alertness both to each other and to the pianist. Perhaps the most striking piece on the record is "Wailing Wall." There, over the tide of Haynes's cymbals and sputtering traps, Hill's lush chords, and Khan's walking bass, Davis creates a bowed solo described by Don Heckman as "a long declamatory line that moves sensuously in and out of semitone and microtone changes of pitch."12 Another high point is "30 Pier Avenue," a slow rocker free of all the cliches we usually associate with this genre and yet as soulful after its fashion as anything Jimmy Smith ever played.
Critical reaction to Hill's first five Blue Note releases was unanimously favorable, though for entirely different reasons with different critics. A. B. Spellman, who wrote the liner notes to Black Fire, praised Hill's intrepid avant-gardism as opposed to what he called "a sickening familiarity about the jazz mainstream." Leonard Feather, on the back of Judgment, took an opposite tack, congratulating the pianist for his closeness to the jazz tradition and avoidance of "nihilism" (presumably a reference to Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and others championed by Spellman). Yet despite all this variously motivated praise, five-star reviews in Down Beat, and a steady stream of new releases, Hill performed infrequently in public. Although he had previously worked in a wide variety of contexts, he now turned down gigs in others' groups, remarking to Nat Hentoff that "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."13 Hill seemed to think of himself as another Thelonious Monk, waiting for the world to catch up with him and determined not to compromise his artistic standards. Meanwhile, Blue Note's Alfred Lion—and later, Frank Woolf—went on recording Hill regularly, apparently convinced of his genius. All told, according to Michael Cuscuna, he recorded "eighteen or nineteen" albums for the label between 1963 and 1971.14
Andrew Hill stopped being a significant presence in the world of night clubs (where most live jazz is played) after the early sixties. In 1968, he declared that he had been "living off the generosity of patrons—composing, practicing and now really thinking about starting to perform more often again."15 Instead, however, he took a position as composer-in-residence at Colgate University between 1970 and 1972, during which time he also earned a Ph.D. in composition. From 1972 to 1975, he participated in the Smithsonian Institution's touring program together with his wife, Laveme. In 1975 he moved to California: first to San Francisco and then in 1977 to Pittsburgh, some sixty miles away. There he performed in churches and concert halls, participated in musical therapy programs in prisons like Soledad and San Quentin, and worked in the schools.
Hill's success in maintaining his involvement with music while avoiding the pressures and challenges of the jazz life has not been matched by the quality of his production. After his first spate of recordings, he ventured into free jazz with a release entitled Compulsion. The record, which features a standard jazz quintet augmented by a second bassist and two percussionists, is a dismal failure. It is muddy in texture, pretentious, full of pseudo-exotic effects and aimless noodling despite the excellence of the musicians (Freddie Hubbard, tenor saxophonist Johnny Gilmore, bassists Cecil McBee and Richard Davis, and Joe Chambers). Hill must have thought better of this direction, for we soon see him attempting an old-fashioned, straight-ahead hard-bop album {Grass Roots) with Lee Morgan, Booker Ervin, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Freddie Waits. But again, despite the caliber of the sidemen, the record is a disappointment. Hill's solos sound diffuse, as though his mind were elsewhere, and the drive, focus, and edge of his earlier playing are absent. The side includes an inept and blatantly commercial groove number called "Soul Special." "The Rumproller," a Hill composition featured on Lee Morgan's follow-up to The Sidewinder, was another failed attempt at popular success. In 1969 Hill recorded a disc entitled Lift Every Voice, on which he was backed by a chorus, and another with strings, issued as One for One.