Andrew Hill Breaks

1964 Interview with jazz pianist Andrew Hill

In this 1964 interview Andrew Hill, one of my favorite pianists and objectively one of the best if you love a rogue yet elegant lyric, reminds us that it is not enough to shower an artist you love in the drafty dead-eyed prestige of liberalism, pay him a living wage. It seems that entitled middle class consumers of all races see black music as their inheritance, a product they are entitled to extract from with no accountability or draw inspiration from and abandon. Hill is explicit about his issues with this and most poignantly suggests that the most creatively honest act Charlie Parker could have undertaken was self-destruction, if he was doing what artists are meant to do and mirroring their society back to itself. The issue is that pseudo educated consumers of culture find the sorrow of “the other” aesthetically jarring but beautiful, maybe even gratifying, and turn that mirror into self-congratulatory trophies. Parker’s corpse becomes a trophy, a symbol of aching beauty and sacrifice and they let him disappear into an inanimate idol.