Andrew Hill - Timelines

[edpack]

I'm listening to this right now at work, and it sounds fine. I especially like Greg Tardy's work on Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, and Tenor. Highly recommended.

[mke]

February 24, 2006
Listening to CD's With
Andrew Hill: One Man's Lifelong Search for the Melody in Rhythm
By BEN RATLIFF

IN his precocious early days, the jazz pianist Andrew Hill traveled to Detroit from Chicago to play with Charlie Parker. It was a gig with a pickup band; Parker had called the players to back him up for a dance job at the Greystone Ballroom. From that first encounter with Parker, Mr. Hill ended up with more than a line on his résumé.

Mr. Hill's memory has been spotty about when this happened — in the past he has said 1948, or 1952. But Parker's movements are roughly trackable, and there are eyewitnesses; the pianist Barry Harris was there that night. All seem to agree that it was probably April 1954. Mr. Hill would have been 16.

In any case, he and Parker spoke a little, and Parker told him this: "I look at melody as rhythm." It was a stray comment, but for Mr. Hill it led to a long preoccupation.

As a jazz composer, Andrew Hill is as original as they come. From the start he has had only a modest following. He arrived in New York in 1960, to join Roland Kirk's group. When he started making his own records for Blue Note a few years later, he didn't make a great public splash, as Ornette Coleman had in 1959, or even keep a working band to establish a presence in the clubs. Instead, he played the college circuit, taught and applied for arts grants. At one point, in a 1966 interview in Down Beat, he encouraged each of his listeners to send him a dollar.

His work is dense and knotty and difficult to play, but much of it is beautiful, aerated with song. In "Time Lines," his new record for Blue Note, commanding rhythms keep rising out of the stop-start melodic phrases; with pecking repetitions at the piano, Mr. Hill elongates the phrases at will. Like Thelonious Monk, he can make his music sound as if its composed parts are improvised and its improvised sections are composed. And like Monk's, his music is a balanced equation, with melody embedded in harmony and overlapping rhythms swimming in agreement. It has a mysteriously powerful internal integrity.

Slight and kindly, with soft eyes and Old World manners, Mr. Hill delivers his ideas in bursts of information, often ending in a rising tone, like a question. He has a stutter — it is in his style of playing piano as well — and the way he phrases stories about his life, or his responses to music, leaves them open to interpretation.

"Am I confusing you?" he asked during a recent afternoon of listening to music and talking about what he heard. "Is the truth confusing?"

We met at his well-kept Victorian brownstone in Jersey City, with elegant old furniture in a front living room and a baby grand piano in the back; a book of sheet music for Bach's preludes and fugues lay open on it. He and his wife, Joanne Robinson Hill, director of education at the Joyce Theater for dance in New York, have been there since 2000, a little while after he returned from a long sojourn on the West Coast. His first wife, Laverne, died in California in 1989; after that, until 1996, he taught at Portland State University in Oregon, where he met Joanne.

Mr. Hill has been undergoing treatments for lung cancer recently. He looked tired but peaceful. ("You're normally only as good as you think, anyway," he said. "That's all there is.") We sat in his front room, listening to and talking about some of the music he knows best. He kept coming around to his gratitude that people have cared about his own work for so long.

Born in 1937, Mr. Hill grew up on Chicago's South Side. He is reluctant to say more about his parents than that they were "part of the struggling environment for their generation" and did not block his path as a musician. From ages 3 to 7, he said, he was in a state he describes as semi-autistic: he did not respond adequately in social situations. "I wasn't ready to accept my socio-economic position," he explained.

He evolved, he said, by playing music. He started on a child's accordion, graduating to a proper button accordion at 7, and taught himself piano at 10 from the player piano in his home. He balanced his high school work with extra classes for gifted students at the University of Chicago's lab school and played accordion on the street for extra money; he positioned himself at the center of black Chicago night life, 47th Street and South Parkway, near the Regal Theater and the Savoy Ballroom.

Mr. Hill grew up when bebop was popular, and he played it in the company of the best. Then, in the 60's, he stood on the periphery of a self-conscious vanguard that pushed jazz toward art music and social reform. When he first arrived in New York, he was not identifiable as either inside or outside the jazz mainstream. He still isn't. That worked against him for at least 30 years, but now history is on his side. Jazz musicians have been bending the loose ends of history toward each other, making sense of the fractures between tradition and innovation or coming to understand that they may be illusory.

"Time Lines" marks the third time Mr. Hill has been signed to Blue Note in 42 years (the first two were 1963-70 and 1989-90). He recorded five albums in his first eight months with the label (including "Black Fire," "Smokestack" and "Point of Departure," three of the great records of 1960's jazz) and 19 in all from 1963 to 1970, too much for the market to bear; only eight were released at the time. Over the past five years, every last scrap of it has been issued. In all, Mr. Hill seems to have won.

His first choice of music to listen to during my visit was Charlie Parker's most famous blues, "Now's the Time," from 1945. He calls it "the perfect record."

Mr. Hill understood Parker's comment about melody as rhythm as a refutation of the "Eurocentric" music education he had grown up with — where melody is paramount, harmony accompanies it and rhythm is the last part to worry about. "It opened my mind up to many possibilities," he said. "If everything is rhythm, then you just have these rhythms on top of each other. But they're not polyrhythms or pyramids of rhythm: they're crossing rhythms."

"Now's the Time" is driven by a short, syncopated melody with a strong rhythm, putting down a bounce in almost every beat. "In that period, one could pretend that one could hear," Mr. Hill said. "You didn't have to read it to understand it. It was all around you. And I guess because it had a blues sensibility, it was inclusive of more people."

I said that given his interest in this idea of melody as rhythm, I thought he would have suggested a bebop tune with a more complicatedly rhythmic line, like Miles Davis's "Donna Lee."

"There was something lovely about hearing those fast tempos," he replied, "like 'Donna Lee' or '52nd Street Theme.' But with the blues, one doesn't have to be a space scientist to get the harmony. 'Donna Lee' has more changes — bringing you in more than letting you out."

"And then there are the parts between the drums and the saxophones," he said as an afterthought. "Through the years, I've always said to myself that when the drums and the saxophone play together, that's a dance, which is an aspect of melody as rhythm. Mm?"

Next on his list was "Blue Rondo à la Turk," from Dave Brubeck's fluke-hit 1959 album, "Time Out." The song is famous for its meter shifts: it flicks between a fast 9/8 and an easy, midtempo 4/4 swing, though it doesn't try to make them flow into each other.

"I keep hearing the different rhythm-melodies," Mr. Hill said as the song played. "The rhythm-melody that the drummer plays, for example. But this also represents when people weren't as comfortable playing rhythms like that" — he meant the 9/8 — "all the way through numbers, as they are now."

With pieces like this, Brubeck made jazz seem sensible for many who came to it cold; it's a playful piece of music, and very schematic. He phrased almost right on the beat, and kept swing roped off in the song's four-four section. When Mr. Hill plays, on the other hand, he moves around the beat, never playing on it, and not consistently behind it or ahead of it, either.

"Yes, peaceful coexistence," Mr. Hill said when I brought up his relation to the beat. "It's always been like that."

The next piece was "As Long as You're Living," by the Max Roach Plus Four group. Recorded in 1959, it is a blues in 5/4 time, like Brubeck's "Take Five." (Playing jazz in five was new then. Mr. Roach was said to be irritated at Mercury, his label, for withholding the release of "As Long as You're Living" until after "Take Five" became a hit.)

It's a little masterpiece, sleek and grooving, with all the solemn bravado of Mr. Roach's music in that period. And the Roach band demonstrates that a five-beat rhythm can be swung as fluidly as the usual 4/4. "It shows the progression of how people become more comfortable with this rhythm," Mr. Hill said. "With 'Blue Rondo à la Turk,' one is disappointed that they don't continue the rhythm through the number. But here they do, and they have it down like a four."

For the last piece of the afternoon, Mr. Hill got away from time signatures and back to his youth. He picked a solo piano piece by Earl Hines, the standard "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams," recorded in 1974 at a private party in California.

"He was a very nice man," Mr. Hill said of Hines. "When I met him, I was 8 or 9. He played at this club, the Grand Terrace Ballroom, and he had a penthouse in the hotel where the lounge was on the bottom floor."

"I was his paperboy," Mr. Hill said with a high-pitched laugh. "The Chicago Tribune."

Hines thought fast and broadly through a performance like this. He keeps inserting new rhythms and rubato sections; the performance becomes free-associative. It has sweeping two-handed runs in it, the kind of thing Art Tatum liked to do, and it also rewrites the song in real time.

This was an example, Mr. Hill noted, of what jazz virtuosos like Hines called "concertizing" — making concert-hall fantasias of tunes, often by themselves in nightclubs. "You know," he said, "Benny Goodman took his band to Carnegie Hall. But black musicians at the time started consciously elaborating on melodies in a different way. They'd take it over the bar lines, or do whatever."

It's not so much that Hines is implying "this is the straight part" and "this is where I'm stretching it" and "now I go back to the straight part," I said. It's all mixed together, all the way through.

"What impressed me about him the most was that he enjoyed himself," Mr. Hill responded. "He was successful, and the people were with him. When a person has a message for the people, he's usually heard and well taken care of. The rest is what they think of themselves. You know, like Charlie Parker — people loved him. They treated him so much better than he treated himself. I mean, it's such a big honor to have people support you. That's quite a bit."

[Stuckinagroove]

coming through the mail shortly.....

[Darryl G. Thomas]

I've kind of stopped making recommendations because frankly so many of you here are much better at articulating the strengths and weaknesses of recordings. However, I feel that this is the strongest Hill recording I've ever listened to, and I've heard a great majority of his recordings.

The compositions are very strong. A great combination of what I like to call inside-out writing, avant garde but still mainstream, very accessible to bop and hard bop fans. All are infused with Hill's unique rhythmic style.

Tardy and Tolliver are wonderful on the horns. Tardy's bass clarinet kind of reminds me of David Murray's performance on Jack DeJohnette's first Special Edition recording (one of my all time favorites).

The title track is probably my favorite. has a real strong Dollar Brand feel (deep African vibe).

Loved the bassist, Herbert(?). Strong, resonant, he really stood out for me.

This CD is excellent.

[JamesH]

Darryl,

I was waiting for a strong endorsement and yours was really strong. I own probably 90% of Hill's stuff and this latest will be added shortly.

[Lois Gilbert]

Ailing jazz veteran Hill records new album
Fri Mar 3, 2006 7:26 PM ET



By Dan Ouellette

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Jazz veteran Andrew Hill is not letting lung cancer slow him down.

The 68-year-old pianist/composer has just released a new album, "Time Lines," which marks the beginning of his third go-round with Blue Note Records.

"I don't believe in a hope chest of music," says Hill. "This is all new music that I've written over the last couple years, so none of it is old-fashioned or outdated."

In fact, if Hill had revisited music from his classic Blue Note period (1963-66), it would be deemed advanced harmonically and rhythmically. Case in point: his 1964 album, "Point of Departure," a landmark recording that is still considered ahead of its time.

Hill also recorded two discs for Blue Note in '89-'90, which to him means "going full circle" career-wise. As for being off the radar screen for much of his 40-plus years as a leader, he waxes philosophically: "I don't feel overlooked. I feel like I've been supported. I love the music, and that's enough in itself."

Regarding his cancer, which is currently in remission, Hill says that he has had to "adapt to living with a terminal illness." As a result, he says, "Right now, I'm focusing on quality, not quantity."

Reuters/Billboard

[shrugs]

Lovin' it!

The title track is wonderful. Tardy got a visit from the spirit of Joe Henderson IMO.
Tolliver is wonderful throughout. One of the few that can still put forth the human emotion that a trumpet can convey.
The solo piano cut is a gem.

[Dick Bowman]

I've only listened to the extracts on the website (trying to assess whether to buy the disk). Didn't think it added a lot to his history (been listening since the original Blue Note period) - good playing and writing from him, but nothing I hadn't heard before (personal preferences are the Steeplechase/Japanese era). And maybe that's reasonable - players mature and offer more of the same rather than continuing novelty.

What I did find very jarring was the passage from Tardy (on Time Lines?) where the piano drops out as he starts soloing. It just sounded utterly discontinuous - almost a caricature of "free saxophone" - I thought it was very poor (and there's little I enjoy musically more than free saxophone).

What the samples did for me was to suggest that I'd be happy routeing the cash elsewhere and enjoying the Hill recordings I already have.

[relyles]

I can basically agree with the above assessment that Hill does not break any new ground with this recording, but I nonetheless enjoyed the recording and think it is a worthwhile addition to Hill's legacy.

I disagree, however, with the dismissal of Tardy's contribution. For me, Tardy's playing was the surprise highlight of the disc. I have seen Tardy three times with Hill (including last night) and IMO his playing on Time Lines is the most assured I have heard him with Hill yet.

[Gary Sisco]

I ordered this one yesterday based on the thumbs up from Darryl and Shrugs, as our jazz tastes often overlap. On the other hand, I've never been much up for Tardy, on record or the one time I've heard him live (with Hill on an unfortunate night where the acoustics of the room were such that while I was closest to Hill, with a view of the keyboard, I could barely hear him throughout). I don't remember the band knocking me out much but that might not be fair since the piano was so hard to hear.

Now I'm hoping my reaction is more in tune with Darryl and Shrugs and less with Dick.

[shrugs]

I am not sure new ground can be broken anymore.
I certainly don't expect it in jazz these days.
Samples are no way to judge a recording either.

[Gary Sisco]

I agree with you, there, Shrugs, about samples. Hell, a second later someone could launch into a blistering improv. I trust your and Darryl's jazz tastes, though, so I'm expecting a thumbs up here when I hear it. I need some new Hill in the house anyway. I dig him.

[Dick Bowman]

Originally Posted by shrugs

...
Samples are no way to judge a recording either.

I think samples put on websites by record companies bear a lot of comparison to film trailers. They're there to promote the product. In other words, they persuade the potential customer that there's more worth hearing/seeing. If the sample/trailer doesn't present the product in a good way, someone has done a bad job.

Remember the olden days when you could listen to (usually not all of) a record in listening booths in the shop. If what you heard made you want to hear more, you tended to buy the record.

[Gary Sisco]

True enough. I remember those days as well. But you could also listen for more than a few seconds when you did. I don't expect much in the way of quality work (people doing their jobs) these days, esp in the corporate world, esp when it deals with jazz. People are a lot more interested in getting paid than they are in the work they do, seems like, judging from results.

[Stuckinagroove]

first impressions: really digging it, love the bass clarinet playing, an underrated instrument. The first track (malachi?) is gorgeous. It's early, but I don't see how this won't be in my top ten by the end of the year.

[mke]

You can listen to three tracks here: http://www.bluenote.com/andrewhill/

I find Francis Davis's take quite interesting, both on "Time Lines" in particular and Hill in general:

Strata Various
A pianist who's resisted categories for 40 years goes home again
by Francis Davis
March 3rd, 2006 3:29 PM
http://villagevoice.com/music/0610,davis,72388,22.html

Once I started feeling better, I wished I could blame dehydration from my stomach bug for the notes I took while first listening to Andrew Hill's Time Lines a few weekends ago. But my notes made sense enough; my despair was with my flailing adjectives and metaphors—as futile as all the other critics who have tried to elucidate the inner workings of Hill's compositions and piano solos over the last 40 years, beginning with his 1963 Blue Note debut, Black Fire. Hill's lure is that he strikes the ear as somehow both conventional and a little odd. Conventional because he clings to bebop's theme-and-solos format and because, except for a 1969 session involving strings, and another from the same year with voices, his small-group recordings have always adhered to the standard horns-plus-rhythm instrumentation—Time Lines, for instance, introduces his new working band, the quintet he had at Birdland last week, featuring Charles Tolliver on trumpet, Greg Tardy on reeds, John Hebert on bass, and Eric McPherson on drums. And odd because of those inner workings—harmonies and rhythms so complex in relation to one another as to require more analytical precision than I can muster even in my right mind. So after a publicist supplied a finished copy, I passed along my advance to my friend E., a former George Crumb student who recognized the gesture as a cry for help and shared his thoughts with me in a series of e-mails.

The first thing E. noticed was what everybody does with Hill: three different tempos at once—three "strata," to use E.'s terminology—on nearly every piece, with drums moving faster than either piano and bass or horns, including during the solos. This device has never been unique to Hill, though "Wailing Wail," from Smoke Stack—digitally remastered by Rudy Van Gelder, the original engineer, and reissued last month in Blue Note's RVG series—shows him already employing it in 1963, with Richard Davis's arco bass in lieu of a horn. It was a characteristic of Miles Davis's '60s quintet with Tony Williams, and Ornette Coleman did something similar, minus piano, on "Lonely Woman" in 1959. But Hill exploits the rhythmic tension generated by this suggestion of ambiguity so deftly that not even E. could always say whether he was hearing unusual time signatures and regular departures from standard songform or if it just sounded that way.

Where E.'s perceptions helped crystallize mine, before he lost me with talk of false relationships and tetrachords, was in terms of harmony. Tempo isn't the only thing Hill doesn't nail down. To paraphrase E., the harmonies are destabilized too, meaning unresolved and never wholly major or minor. Hill the composer and Hill the pianist are one entity. He incorporates uncertainty about the actual tempo, along with broken rhythms and verbatim snatches of the contrapuntal theme, into his solo on the first of Time Lines' two versions of a piece called "Ry Round," and his tuned-in sidemen frequently emulate this typical ploy of his—most suspensefully when McPherson juxtaposes conflicting tempos on his bass drum and cymbals in his solo on the second, more headlong version. But even more than the thematic underpinnings of the solos, what makes a composition like the restless "Malachi" feel all of a piece is correspondence between the tempo games and what's going on harmonically. (Thanks, E., even if you don't agree that the one thing is necessarily related to the other.)

Time Lines marks Hill's second reunion with Blue Note, for whom he recorded prolifically until 1970 and added a pair of albums in '89 and '90. Though the renewed affiliation is assumed to be mutually beneficial, bringing Hill greater visibility while putting Blue Note back in touch with its fabled history, the excellence of Hill's two Palmetto CDs of a few years ago, coupled with a never ending stream of reissues and Mosaic Selects, makes you wonder if the label needs Hill more than he needs it. Hearing a similarity with Thelonious Monk, Blue Note co-founder Alfred Lion titled a track from the 1964 LP Point of Departure "New Monastery." The resemblance is there on Smoke Stack if you listen for it, but I think even then it must have been less a matter of style than of Hill being a fellow maverick—as coincidental to his era's zeitgeist as Monk was to bop. What put Hill at odds with free jazz was his emphasis on composition and harmonic complexity at a time when even John Coltrane was stripping down to a few chords. Blue Note's '60s roster at one point or another included figures who could be loosely classified as conservative (Kenny Dorham, Booker Ervin), moderate (Lee Morgan, Joe Henderson), or radical (Eric Dolphy, Sam Rivers) in their relationship to free jazz. Though Hill recorded with members of all three wings, they advanced to his orders.

Hill's 1989 return to Blue Note had little impact; what figures to make a difference this time is that young pianists like Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer have pointed to him as a model, putting his name out there again. Hill himself hasn't changed at all: Time Lines could be the next release after Point of Departure—but that 40-year-old album remains startling. As always, Hill nudges his sidemen out of their comfort zones. Tardy has never sounded more committed than he does in his tenor solo on the title tune; he builds slowly, crooning and then braying, before climaxing by leaning on a repeated note from the melody and a walloping beat entirely of his own making. Tolliver evinces a Caruso-like lyricism that comes across as almost ironic in the slightly ominous settings of "Time Lines" and "Smooth," and alluding to the first tune during his solo on the second demonstrates genuine insight. Scattered throughout are elongated rhythms, sideways harmonies, and bass vamps whose gravity makes them seem more Spanish than Latin. But there I go again with the metaphors. Oh well. Maybe they're the way to go in the face of music that pulls you in with its secrets and holds you with its refusal to divulge them.

[Gary Sisco]

I played this one twice yesterday and while I wasn't in a position to give it undivided attention, I did really enjoy what I heard of it. No new ground being broken but that's not a requirement of a good record for me. Established ground being perfected and done very well, is. For those here who still love jazz -- and I'm one -- this is a fine, very enjoyable record, with some excellent playing. That's enough for me.

Blue Note is nearly back in my good graces, first for having signed Robert Glasper and now for resigning Andrew Hill after all of these years, and releasing their fine recordings.

It's the only major label left that even seems to be interested in present-day jazz.

[JamesH]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

No new ground being broken but that's not a requirement of a good record for me. Established ground being perfected and done very well, is. For those here who still love jazz -- and I'm one -- this is a fine, very enjoyable record, with some excellent playing. That's enough for me.

Amen.

I purchased Timelines yesterday. I'll need to spend some more time listening but my 1st impression is that it's a very strong record.

[ribot_for_president]

I played this one twice yesterday and while I wasn't in a position to give it undivided attention, I did really enjoy what I heard of it. No new ground being broken but that's not a requirement of a good record for me. Established ground being perfected and done very well, is. For those here who still love jazz -- and I'm one -- this is a fine, very enjoyable record, with some excellent playing. That's enough for me.

Blue Note is nearly back in my good graces, first for having signed Robert Glasper and now for resigning Andrew Hill after all of these years, and releasing their fine recordings.

I agree with this guy ^^^^

[mke]

Originally Posted by Thom Jurek

Andrew Hill has been, in the gentlest of cases, an idiosyncratic player, composer, and bandleader. But often, reviews of his work have been quite strident and refer to him as an iconoclast. That's okay; some critics thought of Monk and Herbie Nichols that way, too. ... Hill's gift lies in his ability to employ the tradition exactly as he means to, yet he also seems to look for the mystery inherent in the improvisation and the dialogue of musicians with one another. ... Time Lines is yet another landmark in one of the most astonishing careers in the history of jazz.

(http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p...0:k9eyxdsb6ol7)

A ***1/2 landmark?

[Gary Sisco]

One guy's star is another's guy's nothing.

It's a fine jazz album, one of BN's very better offerings in recent years.

[Felix]

I've only played this twice, but I can already say it sounds like a great album from an old master (well, two old masters, if you include Tolliver...). While most people mention Monk when discussing Hill's music, I hear a definite ellingtonian touch in his playing. Tardy's playing was a revelation for me (I wasn't too sure about him). His bass clarinet is just right for this setting. While Hill's earlier Blue Note albums (I know Black Fire, Point of Departure and the recently reissued Andrew!!!) have an urgency that is perhaps lacking in this later recording, it gains a certain meditative quality (track 5, "Whitsuntide", could almost be a Tomasz Stanko theme).

[John Tapscott]

One listen tells me that it's a fine recording. It always takes me several listens to really get into Hill's music, but I am certainly am looking forward to hearing it again. I think Hill's compositions are excellent and I really dig Tolliver's playing. The overall sound of the group is impressive. The recording quality is very clear too, though I found it a bit "distant." If you like Andrew Hill's music, you'll like this. Perhaps no new ground is being broken, but for me, all of Andrew Hill's music breaks new ground.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

This thread kind of reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George are rumored to be gay. The catch phrase was, "I'm not gay... even though there's nothing wrong with that."

In this thread it's "no new ground is broken". It's almost like some of us feel we have to apologize for liking what is perhaps a very good recording.

My question is; why is it so necessary to break new ground?

Here's what Hill has done. He's created a musical world that is his own. You hear it, you know it's him. Of the gazillion jazz musicians who've come down the pike since the beginning of jazz, of how many of them can you say the same?

Come on guys. It's a beautiful recording with marvelous performances. Enjoy!

[rene]

One more thumbs up for Timelines!

This is one of his best!

[Gary Sisco]

Darryl -- You're right. Good analogy.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Gary,

I think we (jazz fans, critics, etc.) sometimes intellectualize too much. It's like the old JCS days when we had long heated threads over innovation and who were the innovators. It seemed that the quality of the music got lost sometimes. It's navel gazing at its best. It's almost a religion.

I listened to "Timelines" and I thought to myself, "Damn, this is really good!" And I've bought a lot of LPs and CDs since the '70s so I'm kind of jaded. For a recording to jump out at me on the first listening is really something. I can probably count on two hands how many times that's happened in the last 30 odd years.

[Lazaro Vega]

What do you think about the way he writes the melody on the title piece? It sort of bounces up and down in place, accelerando and ritard, and doesn't really move in a conventional melodic sense at all. Though Tardy does a good job improvising on that, Tolliver really runs with it, develops the notion with creativity and imagination. The way the melody does end up moving, by the way the horns and piano play off the idea in rounds, is unlike anything I can think of in jazz. Not that rounds are rare (Mingus took that a long way in jazz) but making a round out of this kind of up and down movement, that does't even suggest forward rhythm, is unusual.

[Xavier]

Not to make any direct analogy, seriously, but if you read some of Faulkner's supposedly "minor" novels they are amazingly good (The Unvanquished, for example). If anyone else had written the book they would have made their reputation on it. Because Faulkner wrote it (and it isn't The Sound and the Fury etc.) it gets lost in the shuffle. Anyone who has a huge body of quality work often gets the "ho hum" treatment because everything they release is compared to their very best work. It's casually dismissed with: Well, it isn't as good as . . .

[Gary Sisco]

Listened last night to Andrew Hill's *Andrew!!* for the first time. Very, very good. A classic BN.