Hill Pebble
Andrew Hill is dead. The fact of this escaped me until now. Poor Andrew. Well, he had a long life. People die and we ask: what did they produce? Hill produced my favorite album cover. A true meaning of the words grass roots. Wrote my favorite melody of all time, the head of Refuge. I remember finding the tape by accident. Finding him before he found his wide audience.
I was in 8th grade, hard all the time. I found Point of Departure among the 36 jazz cassettes at the Queens Public Library in Astoria. I remember how heavy my backpack was that day. I was at an age. If I saw a song was more than 10 minutes I knew I had to listen to it. Refuge chimed in at 12:13, a number combination I remember twice a day and often, if I'm looking at the clock, like some people will cloe their eyes and wish when they see triples like 5:55 or 4:44, I'll hum the head to Refuge instead, when I see 12:13. I was at an age when the epic was absolute, when 12:13 lasted forever, and that's the age I found Andrew Hill, or he found me.
Sometimes I sing Refuge to myself when I'm not in the mood for singing at all. I can remember listening to it on my Walkman when I lived in Indiana without a car and I would walk across empty fields that would soon be malls to get to malls that were already there. It was Refuge and Subterranean Homesick Alien, the soundtrack of my life then. I live in a town, where you cant smell a thing. Have you ever walked in empty fields? No really. Empty fields. The construction is not as redundant as it might sound. Empty fields, surrounded by sharp 9s and flat 13s which do exist there.
I would play Refuge over and over again in these empty fields, rewinding on the Walkman, pierced by Dolphy's and Henderson's bumpin' up against the screen door entrances, amused by Hill's blue connotation, after Coleman. The horns like holy ships trying not to sink over Richard Davis' puppet string solo, an echo of Hill's ironic connotations seven minutes earlier. But not ironic, because for all of the billions of examples of all jazz being nothing but the exact center of the blues, I don't know if I've ever heard anything further away and still closer to the blues than the head of Refuge. Like the billions of stars, with plain life not far from most of them. Miraculous and still earthy. Not beyond or hostile or one upping duality, rather a triumph of modern composition that allows pleasure and affords biography.
Being 12:13 it would take about 22 seconds to rewind each time. and then another empty field. And then a mall playing Ella with strings in the elevators of the mall. You'd be so nice to come home, perhaps. And I remember listening to it leaving strange women's apartments in my early 20s in New York, on Saturday mornings when I was lucky enough to have my iPod from the work day on the Friday before. It's a good reason to never sleep with someone on a Saturday night: no iPod for the way home. No refuge from the untalented city noise. I remember listening to it in my mother's kitchen, my ex-wife's bedroom, my father's car, and on planes just as they were taking off and just as they were about to land.
Yes, when I dubbed it over to a Maxwell UR90 the day I got home from the library in Astoria. Even my mother said, what is that? I was young. So was she. We didn't know who Dolphy was then. Didn't know who many people were. Didn't know myself, of course. That was the first place I had it, illegal on that hospital red UR90. Later I found the full CD at the Lincoln Center library in the city, bought the CD itself in Indiana with my 20% off Borders teacher's discount, then i downloadg from iTunes about a month ago. Album only.
Refuge calmed me while I was doing my New York packing, getting ready to leave for Chicago. I think it might be the single track that I've listened to the most in my life. A close second: Bird's Now's the Time, alt take. A closer second, 3rd movement of op. 109. Indeed, I take refuge in all three when times are tough. Or when times are not so bad at all.
But mostly when I hear something, the city, an awful human voice, the unclear drones of responsibility, anything that I need to block out with a tune, I'll sing. Or when I just don't want to be thinking about what life actually is when I'm not singing. About death or about life. I'm singing right now.
