Andrew Hill's masterpiece — recorded March 21, 1964 at Van Gelder Studio and released on Blue Note in 1965. The sextet Alfred Lion assembled around Hill is one of the great one-off lineups in jazz: Eric Dolphy on alto sax, bass clarinet, and flute; Joe Henderson on tenor; Kenny Dorham on trumpet; Richard Davis on bass; and a 19-year-old Tony Williams on drums. Hill wrote all five compositions ("Refuge," "New Monastery," "Spectrum," "Flight 19," "Dedication").
The session has a piece of bittersweet history attached to it: this was Eric Dolphy's last studio recording. He died in Berlin three months later, in June 1964, at age 36. Knowing that gives "Dedication" — the closing ballad — a weight it didn't have at the time.
Cool stuff:
- Eric Dolphy's final studio session. He died three months after the recording, in June 1964, leaving this as the last document of him in a controlled studio setting
- Tony Williams was 19. Already deep in his Miles Davis Quintet run, he was a teenager when he cut these dates
- Alfred Lion considered Hill a peer of Thelonious Monk as a composer, which is why Blue Note rushed him through four leader dates in five months in 1963-64
- Considered Hill's masterpiece by virtually every jazz critic who's weighed in — and the album that established him as one of the defining voices of '60s post-bop
- Reissued in the Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series, mastered by Kevin Gray on 180g vinyl
Spin it for: one of the unrepeatable jazz sextet dates of the 1960s, with Dolphy's last studio appearance and Hill writing at full throttle.
Standouts: "Refuge" · "New Monastery" · "Flight 19" · "Dedication"
Sources: Wikipedia · uDiscover Music · Blue Note Records · Elsewhere by Graham Reid · The Absolute Sound