2-LP/CD reissue of Hill’s 2002 live big band recording features a fresh remaster, an extended edit of one track and a previously unreleased bonus track, available November 1, 2024 via Palmetto Records
“One of the most serious, probing personalities in the world of modern jazz.” – Leonard Feather
“His music changed my life, repeatedly, starting in the early 1990s. Every time I heard him live, I would find my usual sense of time and space overridden or intensely altered.” – Vijay Iyer
More than twenty years after the original release of legendary jazz pianist and composer Andrew Hill’s 2002 live big band recording A Beautiful Day, Palmetto Records founder Matt Balitsaris felt compelled to revisit the original recordings. The music, featuring the Andrew Hill Sextet Plus Ten, was so strong that he decided to use advances in recording technology to touch up these old masters and reissue the album, with a fresh remaster, extended edit of one track and a previously unreleased bonus track.
Internationally renowned pianist and composer Andrew Hill (1931-2007) was still in the afterglow of Dusk, his 2000 sextet masterpiece on Palmetto Records, when he played three nights at Birdland with his Sextet + 10 big band in January 2002. “It was a really epic journey,’” says Palmetto founder and producer Matt Balitsaris. Typically, the larger an ensemble is, the more structured the arrangements will be. That was not how Andrew approached anything. Going into the recording, the band had rehearsed a lot of short ensemble pieces, but no one knew how they fit together.”
“Most of the tunes were untitled, or just had working titles,” adds trumpeter Ron Horton, the ensemble’s musical director. “Nobody had talked about a roadmap. It was just completely like, ‘what is happening?’ And yet, when the band started playing, through that confusion, came a lot of absolutely gorgeous music.”
The music was so strong, in fact, that Balitsaris felt compelled 20 years later to revisit the original recordings that were released in 2002 as A Beautiful Day. Advances in production and editing technology over those 20 years allowed him to touch up those old masters and add some new perspective. A Beautiful Day, Revisited, the result of that refurbishment, will be released November 1, 2024, on Palmetto Records.
“So much was going on back in the day when we made this record,” says Balitsaris. “Last summer I went back and listened to the multi tracks. I’d forgotten that I didn’t have any mixing automation in those days. I started tinkering around with it and immediately realized how much better it could be. And the next thing I knew I was redoing the whole album.”
A Beautiful Day, Revisited expands the original single-disc album to two LPs/CDs. It features the eight Hill compositions that comprised the original album—with some important enhancements. The band’s theme “11/8,” confined to just over a minute’s run time on the 2002 release, is here extended to more than six minutes, during which Hill introduces the band. Revisited also adds a second, 16-minute performance of the title track (from the first night of the Thursday-Saturday Birdland stint) as a demonstration of how different the music could be from one night to the next.
The rest of the tracks will be familiar to those acquainted with the original A Beautiful Day, but they now have a cleaner, steadier sound that also offers a bit more natural ambiance than the 2002 master.
“The musicians were playing to the room, so they weren’t really focused on where the recording mics were placed. As a result they were often off mic. Twenty-something years ago, I could bring the soloist up in the mix, but when it would go into a section where the reed players might switch from saxes to flutes and/or clarinets, I couldn’t rebalance that section for just that part of the song and then move everybody back,” Balitsaris explains. “I just didn’t have enough fingers for that.
“But now I could zero in on one 12-bar section and say, ‘I need to bring the flutes out,’ he adds. “’I can just fine-tune things so much more. When a certain soloist was playing, I could mute different mics until I found a combination that made me feel like I was in the room, but still had the presence of feeling close to the instruments that were actually playing.”
This can be heard in the renewed clarity of bassist Scott Colley, tubist Jose Davila and drummer Nasheet Waits on “New Pinnochio,” as well as in the uncluttering of the collective improvisation that begins “5 Mo.” The new mastering also gives remarkable dimension to more open pieces like “Faded Beauty,” making the space between the musicians more palpable and dramatic than ever before.
It’s the new “A Beautiful Day (Thursday),” however, that truly astounds. It shares some sections with the 2002 release (still included) of “A Beautiful Day,” but in a different sequence, and connected with distinct and previously unheard material. Even the musicians themselves were unaware of how the performance of any composition would sound from night to night.
“Andrew liked everybody to be off balance,” Horton explains. “One time he told me that ‘If everybody is like that, then you all have to rely on each other to get from beginning to end.”
It’s a unique glimpse of Hill’s genius for those who weren’t lucky enough to be at Birdland in January 2002. A Beautiful Day, Revisited beautifully serves the mission that Hill can be heard giving to the audience on the newly lengthened closer “11/8”: “Hope you heard something you enjoyed. If you did, tell the world about us.”
*** BIO ***
Photo by Lourdes Delgado
Andrew Hill was born June 30, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up on the city’s segregated South Side. As a small child he played accordion, boogie-woogie blues style, on Chicago’s streets. He was probably a teenager when he switched to piano. A few years after graduating from Wendell Phillips High School, he played his first “professional” job (with R&B star Paul “Hucklebuck” Williams) and was on his way to becoming a major figure on the South Side Chicago jazz scene.
After spending the 1950s building his career locally—during which he played with the greats passing through Chicago, including an unforgettable 1953 date with Charlie Parker; held court with his trio at the popular Roberts’ Show Lounge; and recorded his first album, So In Love, in 1959—Hill decamped for New York in 1961. He found work with Johnny Hartman, the Johnny Griffin/Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis Quintet, and multi-reedist Roland Kirk, with whom he recorded and toured in 1962.
The following year, Hill’s appearance on tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson’s Our Thing brought him to the attention of Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion. He signed the pianist to his label and shepherded him through an astonishing series of innovative and utterly original recordings including Black Fire (1963), Point of Departure (1964), Dance with Death (1968) and Passing Ships (1969).
After his Blue Note contract ended in 1970, Hill continued regularly composing, performing, and recording (mostly for overseas record labels) until 1976, when he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to care for his ailing wife. He worked and recorded occasionally over the next 14 years, then moved in 1990 to Portland, Oregon, where he became an assistant professor at Portland State University.
In the late ‘90s, Hill returned to New York and signed with Palmetto Records, where his albums Dusk (2000) and A Beautiful Day (2002) finally brought him the long-deserved stature of a highly influential jazz visionary and innovator. He worked steadily, winning critics’ and audiences’ polls and prestigious awards including Denmark’s Jazzpar Prize, the Jazz Foundation of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Endowment for the Arts’ Jazz Masters fellowship before his death in 2007 at the age of 75.