Andrew Hill

Compulsion!!!!! is one of the boldest records Andrew Hill made for Blue Note in the mid-1960s. Hill set out to express the avant-garde through the roots of jazz in African rhythm, playing the piano more as a percussion instrument than a melodic one. Recorded in 1965, it stayed in the vault until 1967.

The session took place on October 8, 1965 at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, produced by Alfred Lion and recorded by Rudy Van Gelder. Hill leads a large, unusual ensemble. Freddie Hubbard plays trumpet and flugelhorn, and John Gilmore plays tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, in one of his rare dates away from Sun Ra. Joe Chambers is on drums. Cecil McBee plays bass on three pieces, with Richard Davis on Premonition. Two percussionists thicken the rhythm section: Renaud Simmons on conga and Nadi Qamar on African drums and thumb piano.

All four pieces are Hill's, and three of them run past ten minutes. The title track lasts more than fourteen, with drums and hand percussion churning under the horns while Hill attacks the keyboard as a rhythm instrument. Limbo, a 20-bar theme, was written to depict the state Hill felt most African Americans were in at the time, cut off from their heritage. In Nat Hentoff's original liner notes Hill describes Premonition as "a sufficiently revealing look backward" as much as a look ahead.

When the album finally appeared, Billboard (1967) heard "the wild, yet disciplined piano" of Hill as the driving force behind "this strange and moving record". DownBeat gave it three and a half stars that June. It came out almost a year and a half after the session.

This Blue Note Tone Poet edition in stereo was produced by Joe Harley. Kevin Gray mastered it at Cohearent Audio from the original analogue master tapes, and it is pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI and housed in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket.