[Dixielandjazz] Andrew Hill and Earl Fatha Hines

[Steve barbone]

Here is an excerpt of an interview of jazz pianist Andrew Hill, by critic
Ben Ratliff of the NY Times. They were listening to various CDs and
discussing Melody as Rhythm and vice versa.

Cheers,
Steve


"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."