Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill was born on the thirtieth of June 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, to William and Hattie Hill, an African American family of the great Northern city. As a boy he sang, tap-danced, and played accordion outside neighborhood clubs, taking up the piano at ten. His gifts drew the encouragement of Earl Hines, and he would later study composition under the exiled German master Paul Hindemith, welding a rigorous classical discipline to the living language of jazz.

His apprenticeship was hard-won: he backed the alto giant Charlie Parker at Detroit's Greystone Ballroom, recorded his debut So In Love in Chicago in 1956, and in the early 1960s made his way to New York. There he was signed by Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records, who prized him as a last great protégé. In an intense stretch across 1963 and 1964 Hill cut the works that secured his name — Black Fire, Smokestack, Judgment!, and above all Point of Departure — angular, searching music that stood apart from every school around it.

In his early years Hill wove a legend that he had been born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a fiction meant to lend him an exotic air and win gigs on the college circuit. He set the record straight in later life — "I was born in Chicago and had no interest in Haiti or patois" — and history honors the truth of his American birth over the myth he once found useful.

He taught with devotion at Colgate, Portland State, and elsewhere, and enjoyed a luminous late renaissance: his 2000 album Dusk was named record of the year by both DownBeat and JazzTimes, and he received the Jazzpar Prize in 2003. Andrew Hill died of lung cancer on the twentieth of April 2007 in Jersey City, and was named an NEA Jazz Master the following year. May the honored composer who told his own truth be remembered for the singular, uncompromising beauty of his music.