Why black jazz died and white survived

Jazz pianist Andrew Hill, who headlines this weekend's Bray Jazz Festival, talks to Ray Comiskey about how younger musicians once again 'have a feeling'

Although Andrew Hill's music has straddled the line between the emotional and the intellectual, sometimes more on one side than the other, in the past it has been regarded as "difficult". That's partly the price of being one of jazz's great individualists; records such as the early 1960s Point Of Departure for Blue Note placed him emphatically on the cutting edge of the music. And, as the belated release of another 1960s Blue Note, Passing Ships, just a year or so ago showed, as late as 1969 he still had trouble finding musicians to play his music the way he wanted.

But, whether the balance shifted from the visceral to the cerebral and back, his music has always packed an emotional wallop. Time, too, has its own way of dealing with anything that once might have nudged listeners out of the comfort zone, and Hill's career has been going through a considerable resurgence in recent years, culminating in an acclaimed new CD, Time Lines.

Again, it's for Blue Note. And that's fitting; if his sometimes sporadic recording life has been documented on many labels, Blue Note is the one he is most identified with. It's also one whose musical values are rooted in black jazz traditions, even though it was created by two white fans, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff.

Andrew Hill agrees. "Blue Note was more in tune with the music of the community, jazz, which was a popular music. You had the organ trios, you had bop and you had the people who were - what did you say? - on the edge. Because all these styles would be played in the neighbourhood. People now say 'well, it was so experimental' and such; it only seemed experimental because part of the audience that used to love this kind of music has disappeared."

In his native Chicago, where Hill was born 68 years ago, jazz was the music of his neighbourhood and the academic resources commonplace today didn't exist. "Everyone had to go out to the old masters and figure out things themselves." Does he reckon that, overall, this encouraged more individuality?

"Well, even the musicians who go to Berklee and places - the only time they really start sounding like themselves, with certain limitations, is when they come out of school. Then they get the individual approach.

"Before, people were saying 'such and such is playing by ear and they're a natural musician'. And the natural musician seems to have some type of synergy with the audience. But now they are not natural musicians. They are academic musicians who come out wanting to do their own thing, not recognising that jazz was communal, it was shared and participated in by audiences."

It's something he feels very strongly about. While he acknowledges that music, obviously, has no colour, he believes the jazz of the neighbourhood was the music of the black community and it had a different feel to the jazz of white players. "But now," he says, "there's no difference. It's like white jazz survived and black jazz died."

Why does he think this?

"The musicians became more literate and more into self, so they started playing for the literate crowd and forgot the people who pay at the door. But then music was making an evolution in the 1950s and 1960s anyway. It was going from the pimps, prostitutes and those muggers, those sellers, who financed the music, to a vacuum." He means an emotional vacuum. "Then came the corporations who recorded people for their mental powers and not their musical skills. And in music, to get a grant you have to write a certain way to get it. So that shaped it right there."

The emotional response of the community audience was crucial, he feels, an instinctively shared cultural thing. Anyone who goes to a traditional Irish music session here and feels an Irish audience's response will appreciate what he means. He grows animated by the comparison.

"Jazz was the same way," he says, emphatically. "You go in there and it was a certain feeling . . . people weren't just lying with their heads back. The audience was very much into the music. They've been listening to it since slavery."

What's it like now? And what's it like to be back at Blue Note after all these years? "Now younger musicians are appearing like the ones that appeared in the late 1950s and 1960s, who have a feeling. So I like them, because they try to hold on to the history and tradition as much as it can be held on to today." And Blue Note? "Well, it's a different place, but they still have the same values."

It's clear that, for Hill, tradition is a living thing, not a museum piece. We turn to his own music, composing, orchestrating and performing; what needs do these things fulfil for him? "At this point in my life - how can I say this? - it's recreational and therapeutic."

In latter years, it's evident that, while his music remains as individual as ever, the emotional freight has grown stronger again. But it has not done so at the expense of its cerebral qualities. "You know, intellectually, I love writing. I try to write every day. In terms of a hobby, I love the practice of playing the piano. And I've never lost my excitement and joy of playing for an audience. And in music I just look for it to sound good to me." What does he look for in musicians? "I look for them to have a love of the music, and that they come with a love of themselves. I want them to be ego-free and love the music enough to come on the stage every night and not play the same thing over and over. And to sit with each other and have creative contact."

There's a particular relevance to his reference to the therapeutic qualities of music for him. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and has to husband his physical resources carefully. His visit to Ireland is one of only three concerts on this latest tour, for example. He's pragmatic about it.

"Well, you know, once you get cancer it may go and it may come, so what it does for me is make me just look at life as the positive moment. Because it really relates to the question you asked. What do I get out of music? During now, music is my life. It's my hobby, what I do, the thing I look forward to give me a good feeling. These things are a good way to make one focus on the quality of life, not the quantity. And it's not morbid. I mean [he laughs], life is terminal. Some people just have better luck than others that God hasn't called them yet. But nobody's gonna make it out of here alive." This is said with a real belly laugh.

"So just enjoy it, whatever it is. I try to be spiritual, but I feel 'shit, I swear to God I might be going straight to hell'."

He can hardly go on from laughing. "You know what I mean? For the sins of my youth! Well, what can you do? There's a life you try to have, as Roland Kirk said in Bright Moments."

Andrew Hill's quintet opens the Bray Jazz Festival on Friday at the Mermaid Arts Centre at 8pm. The festival will present a programme of more than 30 concerts and recitals, from Friday to Sunday, including performances from Nguyen Le's "Bakida" Trio, British pianist Gwilym Simcock, British sax player Andy Sheppard, New York pianist David Berkman, and the saxophonist and urban music innovator Soweto Kinch. See www.brayjazz.com for details