The popular music of the Americas and the Caribbean infuse the work of Andrew Hill just as much as do sharp-end jazz and contemporary classical music. It is precisely this mix that makes the soundworld of the Chicago-born pianist so absorbing. The 66-year-old wrote a funk pop hit for trumpeter Lee Morgan in his Blue Note period, and has worked with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, so he is not unfamiliar with the most communicative vocabularies of jazz.
Thickly woven, harmonically ambiguous, triumphantly colourful - this was the way the music sounded when Hill, who has not visited Britain in many years, played the London leg of his current Contemporary Music Network tour. His own rhythm section (John Hebert on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums) forms the molten core of an otherwise largely British orchestra. The Anglo- American band is augmented by Hill alumni Ron Horton (trumpet) and Greg Tardy (sax), with Horton also sporadically acting as musical director when the role isn't being usurped by the gracefully gesticulating Hill himself.
The sound jostled and sprawled a little at first. But when the leader embarked on an unaccompanied piano passage of glinting elided notes and gently percussive chords, which soon built into a trio intensified by the formidable Hebert and Waits, Hill's world began to beckon irresistably. The ballad Faded Beauty unfolded as a soft rustle of brushes and an exquisite flute solo from Phil Todd, and the first half wound up with a tantalisingly curtailed version of the impulsively intricate Flying in the Sky.
A ducking-and-diving Hill melody against riptides of cross-rhythms opened Divine Revelation and the second half; a brooding, Gil Evans-like lustre coloured the chords on New Pinocchio. Andrew Hill has emphatically confirmed with this tour that, as a latecomer to big-band writing, is almost on a par with the legendary George Russell.
• At the CBSO Centre, Birmingham (0121-767 4050), tonight. Then touring.
