Wake Up Call
The album will be available on all major record sites December 2025. For pre-release sales visit Gregg Hill Jazz Store
Rick Roe
Wake Up Call: The Music of Gregg Hill
For a potent example of how the collaboration of a composer and arranger can yield fresh avenues of expression, and how a superb quartet can add yet another layer of creativity, jump to the title track of Wake Up Call: The Music of Gregg Hill.
Hill conceived “Wake Up Call” as a fast swinger, a humorous evocation of a challenging 5 a.m. lobby call for touring musicians. He wrote an AAB form with a quirky, stop-and-go five-bar A section. The lickety-split 8-bar bridge provides harmony for solos. That’s how the Michael Dease Quintet played the piece on The Other Shoe (Origin).
But when pianist, arranger, and bandleader Rick Roe sightread the tune, his imagination took a sharp left turn. He heard in the staccato theme and Thelonious Monk-like whole steps the insistent prodding of a dissonant alarm clock. He extrapolated a rhythmic vamp for the introduction. He slowed the tempo drastically and introduced an insinuating, nuevo tango-like beat. He extended the A section to 8 bars, tweaked the melody, and invented a new harmonic scheme. Then he wrote a new melody and harmony for the bridge. The form is still AAB, but in Roe’s version soloists improvise for as long as they want over the A section, before cueing the bridge for a final 8 bars.
The aesthetic DNA of Hill’s original remains ever-present, but Roe’s ambitious arrangement takes listeners on a trip Hill never considered. The unified band of Detroiters draws out formal implications and excites the emotions. Note the dancing, interactive beat that Roe, bassist Robert Hurst, and drummer Nate Winn slap on the song and the relaxed intensity of the solos by Roe and tenor saxophonist Marcus Elliot.
This rewarding alchemy between composer, arranger, and ensemble distinguishes every track on Wake Up Call, the 19th (!) recording of Hill’s music to appear in the last decade. Based in Lansing, Mich., and largely self-taught, Hill, 79, has been documenting his catalog of nearly 200 songs in partnership with the world-class talent in southeast Michigan, including bassist Rodney Whitaker, trombonist Michael Dease, and guitarist Randy Napoleon.
Roe, 59, does not have the national reputation of Whitaker, Dease, or Napoleon, but he is their peer – a secret weapon on the Ann Arbor-Detroit scene and a charismatic swinger and attentive accompanist with an infectious melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic flow. He was a two-time semifinalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition and won the 1994 Great American Jazz Piano Competition. His resume includes work or recordings with Marcus Belgrave, Wynton Marsalis, Frank Foster, Gerald Cleaver, Whitaker, Napoleon, and Wendell Harrison, co-founder of Detroit’s legendary Tribe collective. The pianist’s own dates have featured heavyweights like drummers Greg Hutchinson and Karriem Riggins. Roe’s most recent recording, 2024’s Tribute: The Music of Gregg Hill (Cold Plunge Records), includes Hurst and Winn.
“Rick is a masterful player, a major talent, and he’s underexposed,” said Hill. “His arranging style is fresh, he understands the value of contrast, and he’s coming from the same influences as me, especially Monk.”
Roe not only appreciates Hill’s unique voice as a composer, particularly the surprising twists of his tart melodies, but also the freedom that Hill bestowed on him as an arranger. “What a gift,” Roe says. “It enhances that feeling of collaboration, allowing me to listen and respond with whatever the music triggers.”
Hill puts it this way: “I tell the arrangers to go wild. That’s why they like me!”
Roe doesn’t always take as many liberties as he does on the title track. Other than a few modest harmonic alterations, the minor-key Latin tune “La Canción” unfolds with no changes to Hill’s original, including the composer’s startling modulation to E Major in the 10th bar of the main strain that lifts the spirits like a shot of endorphins every time you hear it.
Elsewhere, Roe’s arrangements remind me of how a first-rate literary editor can make changes within an author’s voice, offering alternatives to structure, pacing, phrasing, and word choice that further the writer’s original intent. On “Sunspiration,” for example, a brisk waltz with one of Hill’s most alluring melodies, Roe devised an organic introduction where there was none by interpolating Hill’s rhythmic hook from the back half of each A section. In the first four bars of the bridge, Roe raised the melody and harmony a whole step to better connect the new material with what comes before and after it. The pianist’s solo, full of bright melody, floats buoyantly atop Hurst and Winn’s loose waltz time. The rhythm section digs into straight swing for Elliot’s dashing soprano saxophone, and Roe’s alert comping gooses the action.
Each of the 10 tracks shows a different side to Hill’s language and personality. “Inside Straight” presents a curious 12-bar blues with altered harmony. “Modal Yodel #2” is post-bop burner. The oscillating, half-step root movement on “The Ringer” winks at Monk’s “Well You Needn’t,” as do those playful whole-tone wrist-flicks on the bridge; but the clever marriage of a 5/4 introduction to set up a tune in 3/4 is pure Hill.
The quartet embodies Detroit’s jazz tradition. Hurst, 61, remains one of the leading bassists of his generation, working and recording with everyone from Kris Davis to Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Tony Williams, and Diana Krall. The strength and swing of Hurst’s beat, the quickness of his reflexes, the freedom of his phrasing, and the clarity and creativity of his thinking and execution are everywhere apparent.
Winn, 40, who has worked with Danilo Perez and Pat Metheny, has been the drummer in Hurst’s bands for years. An unimpeachable bond carries them through a parade of shifting rhythms. Elliot, 36, plays with warmth and patience uncommon for a musician of his generation. He’s less interested in impressing listeners than moving them emotionally.
Finally, don’t underestimate Roe’s leadership in shaping the arrangements, mediating Hill’s vision and the quartet’s interpretations, and bringing a selfless attitude to the studio that permeates the date. Everyone is operating in the service of the music, and that starts with Roe.
--Mark Stryker
Author of Jazz from Detroit (2019) and writer-producer of The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit (2025).