Seating: Reserved Seating
Additional Performances:
March 2, 2024—7:30PM
Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker, and multicultural gateway,” composer and pianist Vijay Iyer is one of the leading music-makers of his generation. Iyer returns, following his Harlem Stage commissioned work, Holding It Down, to guest curate and perform in Eternal Spirit: Vijay Iyer & Friends Celebrate the Music of Andrew Hill. Iyer leads a stellar ensemble, including drummer Nasheet Waits, trumpet player Milena Casado, saxophonist Mark Shim, bassists Devon Gates and Reggie Workman, flutist Nicole Mitchell, vibraphonist Yuhan Su, and others, through his arrangements of compositions by his friend and hero, the vastly influential jazz piano legend Andrew Hill.
Andrew Hill’s album Black Fire, released on Blue Note Records in 1964, was a “revelatory vision of jazz — and impacted generations of progressive pianists” (TIDAL Magazine). Iyer reflects on Black Fire, “there’s so much wildness going on inside of it…You could not write that down, whatever that is. It’s just in its own universe” (TIDAL Magazine).
A reflection from Pat Cruz, Harlem Stage Artistic Director & CEO:
“I have been privileged to learn of, follow, and love Andrew Hill's music for decades. He and my husband, the late artist Emilio Cruz, became friends and mutual admirers. I first presented Andrew in the early 90s at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the Artist's Voice series that I created. Andrew sat down at the piano declaring to play something with which we were all familiar. I joined the audience bewildered and bewitched as we tried to find the familiar in the music he performed. He concluded his performance by claiming it as his version of an ‘old Negro spiritual.’ A spiritual transformed and reinvented into an unrecognizable piano solo, grounded in tradition but radically reimagined and transcendent. We later presented Andrew Hill in our Pianos for Duke concert in 1999.”
This program is supported, in part, by, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support is provided by the Diana King Memorial Fund presented by the Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation.
Vijay Iyer
Andrew Hill
ABOUT ANDREW HILL
Andrew Hill was a great and even groundbreaking composer and pianist, yet the relatively circumscribed scale of his innovations might have originally caused him to get lost in the shuffle of the ’60s free jazz revolution. While many of his contemporaries were totally jettisoning the rhythmic and harmonic techniques of bop and hard bop, Hill worked to extend their possibilities; his was a revolution from within.