This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by f.fuchs@gmx.net. /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ IN AMERICA - NOMINATED FOR 6 INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARDS IN AMERICA has audiences across the country moved by its emotional power. This Holiday season, share the experience of this extraordinary film with everyone you are thankful to have in your life. Ebert & Roeper give IN AMERICA "Two Thumbs Way Up!" Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/inamerica \----------------------------------------------------------/ This ’Lost’ Album Was Worth Finding December 7, 2003 By FRED KAPLAN The best jazz album of 2003 was recorded in 1969 - then shelved, lost, forgotten, rediscovered, and finally released just last month, 34 years later. Usually, when an album of "lost tapes" gets issued, the only mystery is why anyone bothered to find them. But "Passing Ships," a nine-piece big-band session led by the pianist-composer Andrew Hill, is an unearthed treasure. Each of the album's seven tracks evokes a distinct and strange universe. An up-tempo melody is enmeshed by discordant blares that should sound wrong but don't. An English horn croons a lyrical ballad while a French horn and tuba weave an exotic backdrop. A plantation call-and-response blues is backed by a brass choir blowing funky riffs with atonal menace. Imagine the lush tonal colors of Gil Evans combined with the fierce rhythms of Charles Mingus and the dissonant precision of Thelonious Monk, and you get some idea of this music's odd pleasures. Mr. Hill is an insistent original. He grew up in Chicago, enthralled by the be-bop musicians of the 40's and 50's, but gradually moved away from their confining chord-changes. He came to New York in the early 60's and signed with Blue Note Records just as the free-jazz revolution took off, but his music was too intricately structured to fit that mold.
From his earliest albums, "Black Fire" and "Point of Departure," he played piano with a quirkily spare mastery, but he gained renown as a composer. When he was 8, he would take his accordion to a street corner in Chicago's theater district and play songs he had written on a brown paper bag. One day, the classical composer Paul Hindemith, who was in town to conduct the symphony, walked by and took an interest.
"Over the next couple years, we got together about five times to talk about the shape and design of music," Mr. Hill recalled. "I was interested in jazz, and he told me how jazz consisted of 12-tone scales. I guess he was my first tutor in modern harmony." On some of Mr. Hill's recordings, his off-centered chords and criss-crossing lines get tangled in the thicket. But "Passing Ships," while possibly his densest work, is also his most accessible. The melodies shine through clearly, in perfect balance with the counterpoints and harmony. "The difference is that we had rehearsal time and a lot of studio time," Mr. Hill said. "Some of those songs, we did take 45 or take 50. We played them over and over and over, till we got a complete take just right." The compositions were brand new and dauntingly difficult. Though some of the musicians had played with Mr. Hill in smaller groups, they had never all played together. Yet the performances are at once so tight and free-wheeling, you'd think the band had been playing this music for months. Not long before the session, Alfred Lion, Blue Note's founder and Mr. Hill's most ardent champion, sold the label to a conglomerate. Sophisticated jazz was in decline. Rock-based fusion - or, as Mr. Hill called it, "confusion" - was on the rise. The label's new owners dismissed "Passing Ships" as "uncommercial," and locked it away. In 1974, a young producer named Michael Cuscuna was organizing a recording session for Mr. Hill on the small Freedom label. Around the same time, Mr. Cuscuna was hired by Blue Note, then in the process of reviving its reputation, to sort through hundreds of tapes scattered in the company vaults. Mr. Hill told him about the "Passing Ships" session. When Mr. Cuscuna went into the vaults, it was the first tape he asked to hear. "I listened to the first two tracks," he recalled. "It sounded like a train wreck. So I put it away, and reported back to Andrew with the bad news." Over the next 25 years, the session remained unknown, omitted even in scholarly discographies. But Mr. Cuscuna kept getting asked about it by the musicians who had been there. The session had featured a top-flight roster - including the trumpeters Woody Shaw and Dizzy Reece, the bassist Ron Carter, the reedman Joe Farrell, the trombonist Julian Priester, the tuba player Howard Johnson and the drummer Lenny White - and its survivors remembered everyone playing at peak power. Two years ago, Mr. Hill brought it up again. Having spent most of the 1990's teaching at Portland State College in Oregon, he was back in New York. He'd signed with Palmetto Records, and cut a well-received sextet date ("Dusk"). He was writing material for a new big band, which stirred memories of "Passing Ships." He asked Mr. Cuscuna, by now a senior producer at Blue Note, to take another listen to the tapes. "This time," Mr. Cuscuna said, "I listened through headphones, and I kept hearing echoes of instruments that I wasn't hearing otherwise. I was listening, as I had before, on a two-track tape machine. But the echo made me think this might have been a multitrack recording. It sounded like there were whole tracks that were missing." He scoured the vaults again, and found an eight-track reel, which turned out to be the master tape. "I listened again," he said, "and just about flipped. This was some of the best stuff Andrew had ever done." Mr. Hill said of the album: "It represents a period when jazz was taking a siesta and I was deciding which way I wanted to go. First, I thought I might do classical music, but I couldn't participate in an arena where Beethoven and Mozart were kings of the realm. So I stayed with jazz, and I entered a period where writing music became my passion. I wrote and played a lot of solo piano and duet piano." Tomorrow night at Merkin Hall, Mr. Hill will play solos and duets with Jason Moran, 28, a former student who has emerged as the most inventive jazz pianist of his generation. Mr. Hill has written some new music for the occasion, as he always does before a concert. "I don't see the point of repeating what I've already done," he said. "It's more interesting to try something new." Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate.com and jazz critic for The Absolute Sound. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/arts/music/07KAPL.html?ex=1071801084&ei=1&... --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! 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