Who is Gregg Hill?

Original jazz composer finds champions

Jan 09, 2025

Among recent releases, I ran across Found in Space: The Music of Gregg Hill, by trombonist Michael Dease. The name Gregg Hill was unfamiliar. I soon found that Found in Space had been preceded in 2023 by Dease’s The Other Shoe: The Music of Gregg Hill.

But that's not all: veteran bassist Rodney Whitaker has released three full albums all subtitled The Music of Gregg Hill. Guitarist Randy Napoleon has released two. All in all, no fewer than 14 albums (by my count) have been released since 2019 putting the spotlight on Hill's compositions!

I like to think I keep abreast of things, but this phenomenon had passed me by. These albums have in fact received glowing reviews, including on the high-traffic All About Jazz, but you have to dig a bit to figure out what's going on.

One reason the name Gregg Hill is not very well-known is that unlike most jazz composers of note, he has apparently had no parallel career as a performer or recording artist. Now in his late 70s and self-taught as a composer, he had a professional life unrelated to music. After retirement, he became active in the jazz community around his home town of East Lansing, Michigan. And it's there he came to know members of the jazz faculty at Michigan State University, including Dease and Whitaker, who soon championed his cause.

Hill is not hiding his light under a bushel but actively working to get his music out there. He created a website and a label, Cold Plunge Records, and has organized concerts and produced CDs for sale by mail order. Also available are his books compiling the scores. Certainly the main vector for listeners, however, will be the recordings by established artists.

All this would be merely a nice human interest story if the music weren't captivating. It is: a cornucopia of varied forms and memorable melodies served up by top-notch players (Whitaker and Dease, Napoleon, Terrel Stafford, Bruce Barth, Tim Warfield, Bill Cunliffe, Geoffrey Keezer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Etienne Charles, Luther Allison, et al.) who are not just willing but eager to play and record it. The albums bristle with spirited solos and feature absorbing arrangements. Several compositions have had lyrics set to them, sung on Whitaker's albums by lyricist/vocalist Rockelle Fortin. In the mix there's swing and soul but also dissonance, rhythmic complexity, and a variety of moods and settings. One album is by a Latin jazz band. Hill has said, “I'm very oriented towards melodies, but I don't try to marry them to my changes. I write material that turns the soloist loose, down their own territory.” The results are a lot of fun but also imaginative, original, searching, and free of cliché. The more I listen the more I want to keep listening to this atypical jazz composer’s output.

Here’s a list of the albums, many of which are on streaming platforms:

Rodney Whitaker, Common Ground: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin, 2019)

Rodney Whitaker, Outrospection: The Music of Gregg Hill (2021)

Rodney Whitaker, Oasis: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin, 2022)

Michael Dease, The Other Shoe: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin, 2023)

Michael Dease, Found In Space: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin, 2024)

Randy Napoleon: Puppets: The Music of Gregg Hill (Cold Plunge, 2022)

Randy Napoleon, The Door Is Open: The Music of Gregg Hill (Cold Plunge, 2024)

The Outrospectives, Dancing Light: The Music of Gregg Hill (Cold Plunge, 2019)

The Outrospectives, The Outrospectives Live! (Cold Plunge, 2020)

Brothers: The Music of Gregg Hill (Cold Plunge, 2020)

Ben Rosenblum Trio, Portrait of the Artist: The Music of Gregg Hill (Cold Plunge, 2020)