[148.1] KING OF THE HILL

There's a rare chance to hear pianist Andrew Hill and a specially commissioned 12-piece US-British band on tour in the UK this month. For those who don't know him, Hill is, like Cecil Taylor and Thelonious Monk (to whom he is particularly dedicated), the occupier of his own unique stratosphere in the world of extemporary jazz. John Fordham says of him: "[Hill] is a distinctive composer with a fondness for a rattling, percussive music full of sudden rhythmic zigzags and odd intervals, and with a harmonic imagination as audacious and visionary for his generation as Monk's had been 20 years before." The tour takes in the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester (20 May), London's Queen Elizabeth Hall (21 May), the Irish Centre in Leeds (22 May), the CBSO, Birmingham (23 May), and the bath Festival (24 May). Hill is the winner of this year's JazzPars Award. His album 'Dusk' took the Downbeat and Jazz Times prizes in 2001.