Reviving a Major Andrew Hill Album (+ Bonus)

It was during my time in Palo Alto in the late Nineties that I began to put serious effort into building up a collection of jazz recordings. Much of the effort was due to the limited-edition box sets released by Mosaic Records. Sadly, I no longer remember the chronology of my acquisitions of those albums. My guess is that I began with the two boxes of Roulette recordings of Count Basie, one in studio and the other “live.”

When it came to “adventurous discovery,” however, the collection that really drew my attention was The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions (1963–66). There were cerebral qualities about the tracks he recorded for Blue Note; but they also disclosed visceral qualities that had been pathetically lacking in the “third stream” efforts of composers such as Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, and Harold Shapero. Hill continued to record with Blue Note on and off into the Nineties, with a release in 1991 entitled But Not Farewell. After about a decade, he released two albums on Palmetto, Dusk and A Beautiful Day.

Cover of the album being discussed

Recently, Palmetto released a “revival” of A Beautiful Day entitled A Beautiful Day, Revisited. What impressed me was that all of the musicians on the new release had contributed to the recording of the original version. All eight of the original tracks have been dutifully “revisited;” and a ninth track has been added “for good measure,” a “second look” at the “A Beautiful Day” track entitled “A Beautiful Day (Thursday).” If I can believe the dates in the accompanying booklet, “A Beautiful Day (Thursday)” is the only “new” track, while all of the eight originals were re-mixed by Matt Balitsaris in October of last year.

This new release reminded me of how absorbed I could get in the tracks of the Mosaic collection. I used to joke about telling the difference between jazz as “chamber music by other means” and chamber music as “jazz by other means.” Those of us that know about Venn diagrams know that they were conceived to illustrate how different collections would overlap. Suffice it to say that Hill occupied securely an area that shared the best qualities of both chamber music and jazz. I expect that I shall spend many future hours exploring the different regions of A Beautiful Day, Revisited; and it would not surprise me if Hill took up more of my time than Arnold Schoenberg.