Jazz Articles about Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill: Passing Ships

by Andrey Henkin
December 3, 2003

Andrew Hill Passing Ships Blue Note 2003

The history of Blue Note Records is in many ways the history of the golden age of jazz. When Blue Note changed, the whole face of jazz changed. After releasing classic sides one after another for much of the '60s, Blue Note veered off into populist funk and, despite its present renaissance, never really recovered. With today's Blue Note subsisting on fewer quality ...

Andrew Hill: Passing Ships

by C. Andrew Hovan
November 17, 2003

Along with Sam Rivers and Archie Shepp, pianist Andrew Hill remains one of the few viable avant-garde musicians of his generation to continue to make an impact on the current jazz scene. Last year's critically acclaimed A Beautiful Day offered more proof than anything that Hill was still championing his post hard bop style while allowing his music to gain further breath and scope through his adventurous charts for a large ensemble.

In many ways the seeds that ...

Andrew Hill: A Beautiful Day

by C. Michael Bailey
September 13, 2002

Dusk was only the beginning to this part of the story...I cannot listen to Andrew Hill’s new big band recording without thinking of him and his band as a relatively well-behaved Sam Rivers and the Rivbea Big Band. Of course, that horribly shortchanges the 65 year-old Chicago native who’s Palmetto debut, Dusk, was considered by many critics as the best jazz recording on the year. Add to that that Blue Note’s Alfred Lion considered Hill his last great ...

Andrew Hill: A Beautiful Day

by Jack Bowers
August 1, 2002

"There is plenty going on," designated cheerleader Stanley Crouch informs the reader, on composer / pianist Andrew Hill's latest album, A Beautiful Day, which showcases Hill's sixteen-piece big band in a concert performance last January at New York's famed Birdland nightclub. “With a vision given to great plasticity," Crouch writes, “[Hill] has found his own ways to reinterpret 4/4 swing, the blues, the romantic or meditative ballad, and the Afro-Hispanic rhythms that have almost invariably connected one generation of Jazz ...

Andrew Hill: A Beautiful Day

by Jon Wagner
August 1, 2002

Sometimes a live recording captures the dynamism and vibe of a band that's really “on." In ideal situations, the musical energy is obvious right off the bat, continues throughout the set, and winds up on a disc. The listener thinks: “Man, I would love to have been at that gig." Andrew Hill's new release A Beautiful Day is one of those recordings. Hill is a pianist who's been around for a long time and played in many different ...

Andrew Hill: Lift Every Voice

by David Adler
April 1, 2001

Originally released in 1969, Lift Every Voice was one of the last of Andrew Hill's early Blue Note sessions, and easily one of the most unorthodox. Featuring a jazz quintet augmented by a small choir, the album brings to mind some of Steve Lacy's work with Irene Aebi, or the vocal tracks on Ornette Coleman's Science Fiction, or in a way, even Dizzy Gillespie's 1963 album with the Double Six of Paris. The original five cuts feature Woody Shaw on ...

Andrew Hill: Dusk

by C. Andrew Hovan
June 1, 2000

With the recent spate of deaths hitting the jazz community as hard as they have, you have to be even more grateful that guys like Andrew Hill are still around. And not only is Hill alive and kicking but he's still writing and playing with a vitality and freshness that continue to be his own exclusive property. Dusk proves to be a precious new chapter in Hill's discography, coming some ten years after his last two reunion efforts for Blue ...