Sean Trane
After the so-called “avant-gardism” of PoD (mainly due to Dolphy’s presence on it), one can wonder if Hill’s early works indeed deserve such an adventurous classification, Hill came-up finally with a groundbreaking album with the present Compulsion (with five”!”), but let’s be honest, only bassist Richard Davies is left from the earlier collabs, the rest of the usual suspects doing time in another big house. Indeed even Dolphy’s sax is replaced by a no-less adventurous and explorative Hubbard trumpet and Gilmore’s horn-tootings, but the main difference lies in the rhythm section, where appear McBee on bass and a three-man percussion team, including Chambers on drums. Yes, the two conga (and associate) players Qammar and Simmons) do bring that experimental and deeper touch that allows Compulsion to fly up two ladder rungs from the previous albums.
Opening on the almost 14-mins+ title track with some haunting and adventurous soundscape that flirt with dissonance from start to finish and playing with our insanity as Hubbard's sax takes us on the edge, and Hill's piano pushes us in the ravine. Closing the A-side is the nearly 6-mins Legacy, which takes the previously developed soundscapes and climbs another step up the experimental ladder, with hardly any instruments “going mainstream”, least of all Hill’s piano. Opening the flipside, the 10-mins+ expands on the dissonant musical foundations laid on the other side of the slice of wax, with Chambers’ bowed contrabass and Gilmore’s bass clarinet pulling the whole thing in the low-register and Qammar going the African percussion way. The album-closing Limbo returns to more familiar or reassuring grounds, but it still wouldn’t fit on the BF or PoD albums’ track list.
Finally an Andrew Hill album that truly deserves its “avant-garde” label, and to my knowledge the only one of its kind in his discography (even if I haven’t heard everything of his), but it’s not as if it would be a flaw either. Indeed, if BF, PoD might have seemed a little too tamed to this writer’s ears, Compulsion might have overcompensated in the other direction. In some ways, due to the low-freq drones developed on some tracks, this album might just be an early precursor