One For One

Andrew Hill had already redefined what a Blue Note session could sound like earlier in the 1960s, and the three dates gathered here - from February 1965, August 1969 and January 1970 - show him continuing to push the music's structure and timbre years after those sessions were actually recorded. The 1965 quartet with Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard is dense, through-composed post-bop in the vein of Hill's celebrated mid-1960s run; the 1969 date pairs his trio with a string quartet led by Kermit Moore, an unusual chamber-jazz experiment for the label; and the 1970 session with Bennie Maupin, Pat Patrick and Charles Tolliver pushes further into open, modal territory. None of this material saw release at the time it was made, a victim of Blue Note's shifting ownership and changing commercial priorities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hill himself was known as one of jazz's most restless composer-pianists, equally versed in blues language and advanced harmony, and these sessions capture him moving fluidly between those poles. When the material finally reached listeners, it was received as a valuable addition to the Hill discography, filling in a documented gap in one of the era's most searching bodies of work. The album stands as a testament to how much significant music from the period remained unheard, and to Hill's consistency as a composer across a five-year span of change.