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• Blue Lake public radio jazz jock Lazaro Vega posted a 1968 Downbeat piece by Wayne Shorter at the Organissimo jazz discussion board. To read it—and jazz writer Larry Kart’s interesting backstory on how Downbeat got Shorter to do the piece—go here.
  
  
• Gary Giddins this week in the New Yorker on pianist Hank Jones.
  
  
• There is a marvelous new website devoted to the Chicago years of Sun Ra.
  
  

• Terence Ripmaster has published a biography of longtime Voice of America jazz DJ Willis Conover.
  

• The widow of Al Haig has published a memoir/biography about the bop-era pianist. The book can be ordered online here, and jazz writer/musician Allen Lowe has posted some fascinating remembrances of Haig here.
  
  
• You can read a Washington Post article about pianist Billy Taylor and the current state of jazz here.
  
  
• Pianist Andrew Hill passed away on Friday, April 20 at the age of 75. I first heard Hill in 1995 when I bought the Blue Note reissue of his album JUDGMENT, which led me to pick up the then-newly-issued Mosaic box that collected all of his Blue Note albums from the mid-1960s. His music had a dark glow to it, with rhythms and melodic turns that I never found predictable; it led me to many of the classic Blue Note albums by other artists from that era as well. Just a few weeks ago I pulled out the Mosaic box and began listening to it for--well, I've lost track of how many times I've listened to that set. It occurred to me that I should really do a program based around it. Unfortunately, it will now have to be a memorial show. Many of the albums to which the New York Times' Ben Ratliff refers below are now available as individual CDs; they reward repeated listening. As one poster at the Organissimo discussion board declared, "Andrew Hill is now in Blue Note heaven!" Much gratitude to Mr. Hill for all of the musical testaments that he left behind. You can view a video of his last performance, at the Trinity Church on March 29, here.
  
  ANDREW HILL, 75, JAZZ ARTIST KNOWN FOR HIS DARING STYLE, DIES
  By BEN RATLIFF
  Published: April 21, 2007

  Andrew Hill, a pianist and composer of highly original and sometimes opaquely inner-dwelling jazz whose work only recently found a wide audience, died yesterday at his home in Jersey City. He was 75.

  The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Joanne Robinson Hill.

  It took almost 40 years for Mr. Hill’s work to be absorbed into jazz’s mainstream. From the first significant album in his discography (“Black Fire,” 1963) to the last (“Time Lines,” 2006), his work is an eloquent example of how jazz can combine traditional and original elements, notation and pure improvisation, playing both outside and inside strict time and harmony.

  Mr. Hill was born in Chicago in 1931 — not Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as his early biographical information read, and not in 1937, as he often stated. He started playing music at 7, by learning the accordion; beginning at 10, he said, he taught himself how to play piano.

  He eventually played be-bop with local musicians in Chicago, and worked on the road with Dinah Washington, Johnny Hartman and Dakota Staton. He got a chance to play with Charlie Parker at the Greystone Ballroom in Detroit in 1954. A job with Roland Kirk (later Rahsaan Roland Kirk) brought him to New York in the early 1960s.

  In those years Mr. Hill was perceived as a kind of extension of Thelonious Monk, 20 years after Monk’s emergence. Both were brilliant composers, and played in a style suited to their own writing. And both careers benefited from the enthusiasm of Alfred Lion, from Blue Note Records, who was so enthusiastic about Mr. Hill that he recorded five albums’ worth of material in eight months.

  Those five albums were “Black Fire,” “Smokestack,” “Judgment,” “Point of Departure” and “Andrew!!!,” and much of Mr. Hill’s reputation rests on them. With some of the best musicians at the time — Joe Henderson, Kenny Dorham, Roy Haynes and others — the records occupied an area between hard bop and abstract jazz. Some of the music was structured strangely, yet there was a strange emotional resonance in the writing, a cloudy romanticism.

  Mr. Hill was unsuccessful in finding much of an audience for his work after the mid-1960s, and found it hard to maintain bands or work in clubs. But he was also committed to the idea that the jazz bandleader could live as a composer, not just a nightclub entertainer. He sought arts grants and worked increasingly as a solo performer on the college circuit.

  He lived in upstate New York during the early 1970s, and then in California; in the 1980s, he recorded for the Soul Note label in Milan.

  In 1989 he was signed again to Blue Note, which had been recently resurrected by EMI, making the albums “Eternal Spirit” and “But Not Farewell,” and beginning a renewal of interest in his early work. That same year, after the death of his wife Laverne, he moved to Oregon to teach at Portland State University until 1996, when he returned to the New York City area, and re-entered the map of jazz. His wife Joanne Robinson Hill survives him.

  In his remarkable final decade, Mr. Hill led several bands, including a sextet, a big band and a quartet including the trumpeter Charles Tolliver. He made three new albums, all well received. In 2003 he received the Danish JazzPar Award, the biggest international honor in jazz.

  Finally he was signed for the third time to Blue Note, recording “Time Lines.” Much of his early recorded work came out on CD, including 11 albums recorded for Blue Note during the 1960s that had never been released. At last, his challenging music was being performed or adapted by other musicians.

  Mr. Hill’s last performance was at Trinity Church in Manhattan on March 29. On May 12 he is to receive an honorary doctorate posthumously from Berklee College of Music.
  

• Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. From the New York Times:

  Mr. Coleman, the 77-year-old jazz saxophonist and composer, won for “Sound Grammar,” a live album by his most recent quartet, recorded in 2005.

  Elastic and bracing, with two acoustic basses and much collective improvisation, the music harks back to the 1960s records that made him famous. “I’m tearing and I’m surprised and happy — and I’m glad I’m an American,” he said. “And I’m glad to be a human being who’s a part of making American qualities more eternal.”

• The Boston Globe recently published a poignant and interesting article about the relationship between Masschusetts governor Deval Patrick and his father, Pat Patrick, longtime saxophonist in the Sun Ra Arkestra. You can read the article here and also view a video about the story.
  
  
• On May 21 Blue Note Records will release a 2-CD set of the Charles Mingus Sextet in performance at Cornell University on March 18, 1964. Mingus’ group on the date included Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Johnny Coles, saxophonist Clifford Jordan, pianist Jaki Byard, and drummer Dannie Richmond. Tracks include Mingus’ legendary civil-rights anthem “Fables of Faubus,” “Meditations,” “Take the A Train,” and Eric Dolphy’s arrangement of Fats Wallers’ “Jitterbug Waltz.”
  
  

• Our YouTube jazz video of the week: Dexter Gordon in Europe 1964
  

• We’ve added some new jazz links to our jazz/cultural page.
  

• A recommendation for those who heard our recent Horace Tapscott program: a new movie, "Leimert Park: the Story of a Village in South Central L.A.," covers the story of a cultural resurrection following the Los Angeles riots of 1992. There are interviews with and performances by Tapscott, Billy Higgins, and others. The film, which has drawn rave reviews from the L.A. media, is produced and directed by Jeannette Lindsay.
  
  
• Check out this fascinating interview that Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus conducted with jazz writer Stanley Crouch.
  
  
• Mosaic Records will release a 7-CD set of music by swing-era tenor saxophonist Chu Berry in late March. You can read more about the set here. Other future Mosaic projects, featuring single-CD reissues of records by Art Farmer, Duke Ellington, and J.J. Johnson with Kai Winding are listed here.
  
  
• Ken Koenig has made a new film, “Jazz on the West Coast: the Lighthouse,” about the Hermosa Beach club and its attendant music scene, featured in this previous Night Lights program.