Marquis Hill Blacktet

Even before Marquis Hill won the coveted Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2014, he was a rising trumpet star. After switching to trumpet from drums as a preteen on Chicago’s South Side, Hill had become something of an early phenom, first working through the city’s historic jazz education lineage but then playing with the likes of Fred Anderson and Von Freeman while still in college. He’d grown up in a household where soul music and jazz were part of the same proud Black continuum, inseparable in foundation and function, a sense he supplied to a string of albums he self-released before turning 30. But the Monk award was a true catapult, earning him press and bookings and catalyzing his move to New York. His Blacktet has since become one of jazz’s most enterprising new institutions.

“I take this great Black American art form we call ‘Jazz’ seriously, let’s face it,” Hill once said. “The Blacktet’s main priority was and is to ‘adventure’ forward while uniquely preserving the very essence of the tradition.” With the amorphous Blacktet, Hill slips into the same continuum he found in his South Side home, where jazz, soul, and gospel shared space at the record player. On albums like Love Tape, Soul Sign, and Composers Collective: Beyond the Jukebox, he has explored matters of both head and heart, delivering numbers about love, loss, and life like pieces of the same puzzle. As a trumpeter, Hill is both smooth and raw, the feelings clear beneath the exquisite curves of his tone. The Blacktet has long been both amorphous and adventurous. At Big Ears, the band includes his longtime bassist Junius Paul, SML saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Emmanuel Michel, drummer Jonathan Pinson, and very special guest Gerald Clayton on piano.