Kurt Vonnegut Dies

[Ursus]

From Jazz Blog Destination:OUT (click on title for link):

POINTS OF DEPARTURE: Andrew Hill, 1931-2007

We're deeply saddened by the passing of the great pianist, composer, and bandleader Andrew Hill. He was an important artist who held fast to his idiosyncratic vision -- even when that meant long stretches in the commercial wilderness. In recent years, Hill's music experienced a resurgence through reissues and remarkable new projects. Where he once may have seemed a fascinating but marginal figure, his influence is now indelibly stamped on many of today's most creative players.

* * *

We're honored to include this touching remembrance and tribute to Hill from one of those musicians -- pianist and composer VIJAY IYER:

"Andrew Hill was a hero, mentor, and supportive friend to me and to a number of other young musicians.  His music changed my life, repeatedly, starting in the early 1990s.  Every time I heard him live, I would find my usual sense of time and space overridden or intensely altered.

"I introduced myself to him several times throughout the 90s, and eventually Hill came to recognize me as one of his crazed Bay Area fans (along with pianist Graham Connah, whom I first met with a copy of the LP Smokestack under his arm, as we both stood in line at Yoshi's to see Hill in action).  One particular revelatory evening was Hill's performance with Trio 3 (Workman, Lake, Cyrille) in '94 or so.  I also saw him at Maybeck Recital Hall, Mills College, the Oakland Museum, Golden Gate Park, and several times at Yoshi's -- unfailingly magical and beguiling.

"My move to New York coincided with his full-fledged return to the scene from Portland, so I started seeing him even more frequently.  In 1999 when I was on a Steve Coleman tour, he played solo before us in Verona.  I seized the moment and talked to him for a while, and perhaps he started taking me more seriously after that.  We became friendly enough that he started coming to my gigs.  He would call me early the next day to tell me what he thought, often to devastating effect; his gentle but frank words would echo in my head for weeks afterward, leaving me to rethink everything.  Once when the collective trio Fieldwork played at the KF's AlterKnit, Andrew was in the front row at a table with Henry Threadgill and Muhal Richard Abrams, making it one of the scariest evenings of my life.

"I was glad to be around to observe his post-millennial renaissance.  He made such interesting and careful choices in his music and career, and he provided a model for how to achieve longevity in a challenging area of the music world.

"And then one summer Andrew told me he was dying.  We were standing outside the hotel at the North Sea Jazz Festival.  My heart dropped, but he was oddly upbeat.  He had known for some time, and I was left thinking that maybe he found solace in the certainty of it, knowing that the coming years would be framed by this circumstance.

"The last time I saw him was at Merkin Hall last fall, for the recreation of Passing Ships.  His advanced frailty was heartbreaking to see, and I was mortified by the presenters' thoughtlessness: a man dying of lung cancer was made to carry his own chair, and then interviewed on stage without a microphone.  But Andrew's good humor and his top-form playing dispelled all the pity in the room; we were in the presence of sheer mastery.

"Afterwards I was headed for the subway, but as I reached the corner something told me to turn around.  The building had closed but I talked my way back inside, found him backstage, and sat with him and his wife Joanne for an inspiring half hour.  He was remarkably warm, light-hearted, lucid, even affectionate.  This was our last earthly interaction, and it will always be a cherished memory for me.

"Andrew Hill's recordings, performances, compositions, and personality influenced me to such a degree over such a long period that he feels like family, like a part of me.  I am humbled and blessed to have received his generosity, wisdom, and friendship.  His spirit lives on through his musical legacy, his vast influence on modern music, and all the lives he touched."

* * *

"The Man Who Knew More Than He Was Asked"
Jason Moran once said Andrew Hill knew more about different styles of music than people suspected. Hill famously carved out his own unique style of halting phrasings, odd chords and meters, and compositional left turns. His former student emphasized how Hill was also capable of pulling from a vast and surprising storehouse of styles at a moment's notice. Moran noted how Hill was deeply informed by classical, funk, boogie woogie, cartoon music, and numerous other genres not normally associated with the maestro.

"Still Waters"
These tracks pay tribute to Hill's range, casting light on some overlooked corners of his discography. "Hey Hey" is an atypical slice of free-funk, an insidiously catchy groove number complete with a large chorus. There's a wonderful sense of play here, melding funk and an odd vocal counterpoint that seems to stem as much from the classical tradition as the gospel.

"Nefertisis" is the flipside to the jubliant band effort of "Hey Hey." This solo piano effort is solemn and dirge-like, but completely riveting. When Hill filtered his ideas through ensembles, it was sometimes easy to miss the power of his own playing. What Ethan Iverson perfectly described as "the Mad Scientist approach." In this piece you can't miss his wonderfully eliptical phrasings as he teases, coaxes, and conjures one surprising idea after another from the material. You can also hear his absolute authority on the instrument -- a quality that was never showy but never more immediately palpable than on this track.  

"The Classic Years"
For those who want to hear tracks more representative of Hill's work, check out any of his stunning Blue Note albums from the early 1960s, all of which are back in print. Or see our previous post dedicated to Compulsion, one of Hill's more untethered masterpieces.

Be sure to check back in the coming days for more updates and thoughts about one of jazz’s true masters.

[Ursus]

Another Andrew Hill mp3 link, this one to Compulsion:

link to 'Compulsion'

Andrew Hill  Compulsion!  Blue Note : 1965

AH, piano; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Gilmore, tenor sax, bass clarinet; Cecil McBee, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; Nadi Qamar, percussion; Renaud Simmons, conga.

**************

Here's what Destination: OUT has to say about it:

http://destination-out.com/?cat=17

"Compulsion" is a longer track than we usually like to post -- 14 minutes. And while the entire piece is stellar, there's a particular four minute section I'd like to highlight. It's simply the most thrilling four minutes of Andrew Hill's entire illustrious career.

It starts at the 3:00 mark, when Hill's piano reenters the tune and the dark rhumba groove begins. That stuttering Latin feel subtly underpins this entire section, allowing Hill and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard to become increasingly unhinged. Hubbard soars against the beat with an impassioned solo that's full of rhythmic stabs and melodic shrapnel. Hill slowly turns up the heat on everyone, almost subliminally at first until he begins to unleash a tidal swell of notes. This oceanic rumble is so physical and menacing at first it's hard to believe it's coming from him. It's as if a whirlpool has suddenly emerged at the middle of the tune, threatening to capsize the other players and suck them into its vortex. Hill plays as if he's limning the void, gleefully. Amazingly, the song doesn't get blown apart, but manages to stay afloat and even on course -- but just barely. It's a remarkable passage -- the musical equivalent of watching an ocean linear tossed aloft by 100-foot waves.

There's plenty more excitement to come in the tune, including Hill's double-fisted and crabwise duet with John Gilmore and the song's frenzied full-band coda. But we'll leave those for you to figure out for yourself.  (CJC)

[Jesus H Christ]

Hi,

  Welcome to the culture corner.  Today a tall man from Minnesota reads a poem about bill Evans:

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/p ... 30/#friday

[Ursus]

Here is the text from the poem in question (link from the previous post):

Live at the Village Vanguard

Near the end of Bill Evans' "Porgy (I Loves You, Porgy)"
played live at the Village Vanguard and added as an extra track
on Waltz for Debby (a session made famous by the death
of the trio's young bassist in a car crash) a woman laughs.
There's been background babble bubbling up the whole set.
You get used to the voices percolating at the songs' fringes,
the clink of glasses and tips of silver on hard plates. Listen
to the recording enough and you almost accept the aural clutter
as another percussive trick the drummer pulls out, like brushes
on a snare. But this woman's voice stands out for its carefree
audacity, how it broadcasts the lovely ascending stair of her happiness.
Evans has just made one of his elegant, casual flights up an octave
and rests on its landing, notes spilling from his left hand
like sunlight, before coming back down into the tune's lush
living-room of a conclusion. The laugh begins softly, subsides,
then lifts up to step over the bass line: five short bursts of pleasure
pushed out of what can only be a long lovely tan throat. Maybe
Evans smiles to himself when he hears it, leaving a little space
between the notes he's cobbled to close the song; maybe
the man she's with leans in, first to still her from the laugh
he's just coaxed from her, then to caress the cascade of her hair
that hangs, lace curtain, in the last vestiges of spotlight stippling the table.

[Ursus]

The recording in question, done of Bill Evans Trio's infamous Sunday in 1961 at New York City's Village Vanguard, is discussed at length, along with assorted other Bill Evan's trivia and insight, in a New Yorker article from about six years ago entitled 'It was just one afternoon in a jazz club forty years ago,' by Adam Gopnik.

http://www.billevanswebpages.com/gopnik.html

Excerpt (re. the recording session in question):

On that Sunday afternoon in New York in 1961, the trio played five sets, about two and a half hours' worth of music. The numbers ran between five and ten minutes a turn. In the first three sets, knowing that the machines were running, they didn't repeat numbers, playing a lilting "Waltz for Debby," a hushed "My Foolish Heart," a floating "Alice in Wonderland," and an up-tempo "My Romance." Then, for the first time that day, Evans played "I Loves You, Porgy." In the last set, they ran back over numbers from the first few sets. By then, it was late, a long day's hard work, and they finished with a number by LaFaro, a strange 9/8 Zen thing called "Jade Visions." Throughout the recordings, you hear the crowd noise: glasses tinkle and conversation goes on, a counterpoint of forty-year-old flirtation and talk. Orrin Keepnews said, "I remember listening to the tapes and saying, 'There's nothing bad here!' Normally, you can cut one or two things right away, and there was nothing bad."

Two weeks later, on July 6, 1961, Scott LaFaro was driving up Route 20, a back road in those days, to his parents' place in Geneva, upstate. The car skidded and hit a tree, and he was killed instantly. "I was sleeping and the phone rang, and it was Bill," Paul Motian recalled. "He said, 'Scott's dead.' And I said, 'Yeah,' and I went back to sleep. And the next morning I said to my wife, 'Man, I had the weirdest dream last night. I dreamed that Bill called me and said that Scott had been killed!' So I called Bill right away at that apartment over on West Eighty-something to tell him about the dream."

After Scott LaFaro's death, Bill Evans became numb with grief; it took him months to recover, and there are people who think that he never did recover. Paul Motian: "Bill was in a state of shock. Look at my gig book: nothing, nothing, nothing with Bill, until December. Bill was like a ghost."

"All jazz records," Orrin Keepnews said, "have two lives, one in their time and another twenty-two years later. What no one could have imagined was that the second life would be so large."

Why has that afternoon lasted so long?

"You know what I like best on that record?" Paul Motian asked. "The sounds of all those people, glasses and chatter - I mean, I know you're supposed to be very offended and all, but I like it. They're just there and all." Perhaps that's it, or part of it. Though we're instructed to search for "timelessness" in art, it is life that is truly timeless, the same staggeringly similar run of needs and demands and addictions, again and again, which blend one year into the next and one day into another and February's gig in Detroit into March's in Toronto. It is art that puts a time in place. Art is the part of culture that depends most entirely on time, on knowing exactly when. The emotions it summons belong to the room they were made in, and the city outside the room when they were made. Not a timeless experience of a general emotion but a permanent experience of a particular moment - that is what we want from jazz records and Italian landscapes alike. The gift the record gives us is a reminder that the big sludgy river of time exists first as moments. It gives us back our afternoons.

One of the mysteries of Evans's career is that, after that Sunday, he continued to play "Porgy" over and over again, almost obsessively - but almost always as a solo number. Paul Motian gave this some thought. "I don't think there was any reason - no, wait, I remember something now. While we were listening to that number on the tape, Bill was a wreck, and he kept saying something like 'Listen to Scott's bass, it's like an organ! It sounds so big, it's not real, it's like an organ, I'll never hear that again.' Could that, his always playing it without a bass afterwards have been a sort of tribute to Scott? I kind of doubt it, but then again maybe so." When we hear Evans play "Porgy," we are hearing what a good Zen man like Evans would have wanted us to hear, and that is the sound of one hand clapping after the other hand is gone.

[Anonymous]

paul motian is still playing the vanguard.  I want to catch lovano and frissell  and motian some time.

[Ursus]

paul motian is still playing the vanguard.  I want to catch lovano and frissell  and motian some time.

You'd best make haste!  He is, sadly, getting quite old...