Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill, jazz pianist and composer: born Chicago 30 June 1931; twice married; died Jersey City, New Jersey 20 April 2007.

The jazz composer and pianist Andrew Hill was one of the most important figures in the post-bop generation who followed the heroic creators of modern jazz such as Charlie Parker (with whom, as a 14-year-old in Chicago, Hill claimed to have played his first professional engagement).

A vital member of the Blue Note Records roster of artists in the 1960s, and a particular protégé of the label's co-founder Alfred Lion - who called him "the next Thelonious Monk" - Hill created a strikingly original and influential series of small-group albums whose polyrhythmic density seemed to offer a compromise between hard bop and the avant-garde. Yet, he never attained even the fringe popularity of his recording colleagues Joe Henderson and Bobby Hutcherson, and the final album in his 1960s Blue Note sequence, Passing Ships, was considered too uncommercial to release at the time.

An influential teacher and guru for young pianists, including Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, Hill spent much of the last three decades working in music education, at Colgate University in Hamilton (from whom he received his doctorate), and the State University of Portland, Oregon, as well as in California, where he also devoted time to nursing his first wife, Laverne, who died in 1989.

When Hill returned to New York in 1996, it was as an elder statesman commanding serious respect. His album Dusk (2001) was selected as "Album of the Year" by both Down Beat and Jazz Times magazines and in 2003 Hill became the recipient of the most esteemed prize in jazz, Denmark's Jazzpar.

The fame attendant on this led to Hill being signed for a third time by Blue Note (now owned by EMI), for whom he recorded Time Lines (2006). It also led to an Arts Council-sponsored tour of the UK with a big band made up of both American and British players. Hill's transforming effect on young British bandsmen such as the trumpeter Byron Wallen - who dedicated his most recent album, Meeting Ground, to Hill - has ensured that his legacy will live on on both sides of the Atlantic.

But if Andrew Hill was an enigmatic presence on the international jazz scene, someone whose intricately rhythmic style was never really assimilated by the mainstream, it was an enigma at least partly of his own making.

In the sleeve-notes for his first album for Blue Note, Black Fire (1963), the writer A.B. Spellman (author of the influential 1966 book Four Lives in the Bebop Business) states that Hill was born in Port au Prince, Haiti, before moving to Chicago with his parents at the age of four. This unusual Caribbean heritage was seized upon by critics to decode Hill's extravagant ostinatos, and frequent excursions into Afro-Cuban metre. There were also questions of Negritude. Didn't "Black Fire" refer to Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian slave rebellion? Wasn't there a definite lilt to his playing?

"I lied", Hill told me, when I interviewed him on the eve of his British tour in 2003.

I used to blame it on other people, but it was me, and A.B. Spellman helped me plot the crime. I was born in Chicago and had no interest in Haiti or patois, but that enabled me to get gigs on the college circuit, the Dave Brubeck thing, you know? People looked at jazz music as exotic and pretending you came from Haiti helped.

An affinity for Latin music came, he said, as naturally as breathing. "If you grew up in an urban environment and liked music, you couldn't help hearing it. There were Cuban musicians in the neighbourhood and I got an opportunity to play with them at an early age. All you had to do was go to the movies and you heard everything you needed to know about advanced harmony. Claude Thornhill [the composer whose experiments led to Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool of 1949] was on the radio. It was a learning situation more thorough than a university."

Andrew Hill was born in Chicago in 1931. Although his parents were not especially musical - his father was a railway porter - they did own an old pianola. The young Andrew taught himself to play - or so he told me - by stopping the piano roll and putting his fingers in the keys that remained depressed. He didn't realise that some of the performances were for four hands rather than two, which may account for his unusually chromatic style.

Later, as a busker playing accordion on the streets of Chicago's Brownsville, he was to make the aquaintance of the classical composer Paul Hindemith.

I was writing music on a brown paper bag and Hindemith, who taught nearby, asked what I was writing. It was musically correct but not written in the correct conventions, so he offered some advice. After that, he would come by now and then and look at what I was doing, teaching me about symmetrical and asymmetrical ways of writing music.

(An alternative explanation has it that Hill was introduced to Hindemith by the jazz composer Bill Russo).

Hill began his career playing with rhythm-and-blues bands in Chicago, as part of a flourishing jazz milieu that also featured the saxophonists Gene Ammons, Von Freeman and Johnny Griffiths. His big break came when he was chosen as piano accompanist for the great jazz/blues singer Dinah Washington, with whom he toured in 1961.

After time in Los Angeles, where he played with Roland Kirk, Hill made New York his base from 1963, the year from which his great sequence of five Blue Note albums dates (incredibly, all were recorded in the same eight-month period). The most celebrated of the series, Point of Departure (1964), is one of the key recordings of all modern jazz, whose combination of sophisticated writing and spirited improvisation (from a band of Kenny Dorham, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Richard Davis and Tony Williams, plus Hill himself) make it a model of jazz composition and performance.

Phil Johnson

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