Recorded at the University of Oregon. Funded by a Meet-the-Composer.grant to Pacific Rim Players. From pianist Andrew Hill's "Nikkei Symphony," commissioned by the Northwest Creative Orchestra and Portland's Japanese-American community cultural organizations to commemorate Japanese Americans interned in WWII.

In 1992, I had the great good fortune to work closely with the late legendary pianist-composer Andrew Hill. Our project together as musicians was a collaboration between my Northwest Creative Orchestra (NCO), his composition Nikkei Symphony, and the Japanese-American cultural community in my home state of Oregon. This was in the heyday of multiculturalism as a fresh thing in the arts, after the rise of a commercial “world music” scene in the ‘80s, and I wrote a grant to commission Andrew’s piece for concerts in Eugene and Portland, a tour of solo piano “informances” at campuses around the state, and some community panel discussions and receptions with Japanese-American community organizations in Portland about their history in Oregon and America.

When I recall the six weeks or so of working and traveling around the state more or less daily with Andrew, a few memories branded on my brain forever come up:

• meeting him for the first time at his Portland Willamette Riverfront condo, after months of phone conversations to plan and propose the project to the relevant parties. It was the day before our first rehearsal with the Orchestra and the Japanese and Japanese-American musicians, and we were to work together on his rough score to develop and refine it more specifically for the particular players I’d managed to assemble. We ended up pulling an all-nighter to orchestrate improvisations, copy parts, and even do a bit more composing and arranging;

• taking a walk with him in the nearby Riverfront Park into the then-two-year-old Japanese-American Historical Plaza. It is a memorial garden with a series of plaques and sculptured artwork that “tells the story of the Japanese people in the Northwest—of immigration, elderly immigrants, native-born Japanese Americans, soldiers who fought in US military services during the war, and the business people who worked hard and had hope for the children of the future.” (Andrew’s “symphony” was a similarly sequential musical “plaza” that narrated programmatically, starting with the ‘40s big band swing sound, the innocent Americanism of Japanese-American citizens, moving through increasingly ominous images of militarism, chaos, enmity, the darknesses of dispossession and internment, Japanese identity sounds rising to displace the American ones, and, finally, survival and liberation, albeit irrevocably more jaded.) Andrew told me about a childhood playmate he’d had in Chicago, a Japanese-American boy, whose family had just disappeared one day, and how puzzled he was at the time over that. He talked about his friendship with Oregon jazz bassist and poet Lawson Inada, who had also been interned with his family as a child. Lawson seemed to be Andrew’s main contact with the local Japanese-American community organizations that helped us fund and produce our project. Later to become Oregon’s poet laureate, he wrote these lines on one of the Plaza’s plaques:

With new hope.
We build new lives.
Why complain when it rains?
This is what it means to be free.

• driving around the rainy state with Andrew, talking for hours in the car about anything and everything—mostly about women, love, death, being alone versus being with a woman, because his wife of 30-some years, Laverne, had died just a year or so before, and he was still very much a grief-stricken and shattered man trying to heal the pieces back together, slowly and unsurely. Lawson and a few other friends in the music and in academia were taking him under their wing; he got a teaching gig at Portland State University, and was playing a bit, getting by, doing what he had to and could. His playing and general communications were uneven, as a result. He’d be playing something, or speaking, then instead of resolving it coherently would break off midstream, as though someone had just turned off the juice. Then he’d have to start again, some new thought or line...only to hit the same brick wall, sooner or later. It made for some awkward-to-mortifying moments during his solo performances and workshop interactions, but those of us who knew him picked up on the situation and carried him as best we could. (Things went best in the big-band context; there he could stop and start all he wanted or needed to; we made up a big family energy that he could just bob and drift in, and take the reins and the floor when he felt up to it. That was quite the lesson for me about the real power of the collective as opposed to, say, the Glenn Gould-ish approach to music-making as a solitary art form);

• him meeting and getting to know my daughter, who was going through a rough spot with an abusive man in her life at the time. He immediately picked up on that with a fierce and proactive grandfatherly protectiveness with his own brand of dispatch that helped me help her get out of that briar patch.

Andrew came through his mourning time, including some painful dead-end dating, to marry again and have a few happy years of love- and music-making before succumbing to cancer in April, 2007. I got an email from him when we were both back East, and went to see him perform at Birdland with another large ensemble of all-stars. We talked about working together again, but...