Andrew Hill - Grass Roots (1968)

Words by Andrew Hill: "Before this, I had been trying to gratify myself as a musician. It's inevitable, I guess, in the process of finding yourself as an artist you have to keep on proving yourself, testing your skills. But that kind of self-absorption tends to leave out a large number of people. I felt finally that the time had come for me - and perhaps for jazz - to make an album like this. I'm not proving myself here. I'm not concerned with what may or may not be hip now or in the future. I want to give something. I want to reach out from myself to make people happy who listen to this. That's what grass roots are in music. Getting down to the basics, getting down as deep as you can into feeling."

"I tried to write each [song] as lyrically as possible, but each in a different mood. The title song came to mind when I was in Central Park one day just watching some animals. Looking at them, I thought that human beings consider animals naive, but how naive we are! We are almost down to the question of the very survival of the human race and yet there are people - I call them 'high school intellectuals' - totally immersed in the divisions between people on the basis of color or class or whatever. And then I saw some kids playing together in the park. They were of different races, but they were having a great time. There was no malice, no animosity among them. Where they were, the way they were acting, are to me the real roots of mankind. So, what the song is about is that rather than being consumed by rage or, for that matter, rather than proclaiming 'love' for everyone, I just wanted to tell about life as it really is. And you know, real life isn't bad at all."

Tracks 1-5: Lee Morgan [trumpet], Booker Ervin [tenor sax], Andrew Hill [piano], Ron Carter [bass], Freddie Waits [drums]. Tracks 6-10: Woody Shaw [trumpet], Frank Mitchell [tenor sax], Jimmy Ponder [guitar], Reggie Workman [bass], Idris Muhammad [drums].
Recorded April 19 [6-10] & August 5 [1-5], 1968, at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

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