Born in Chicago, Andrew Hill played with many jazz musicians as a sideman, including Dinah Washington and Roland Kirk. But it was after moving to New York in the 1960s and working as band leader that cemented his reputation as the adventurous composer he is viewed as today. His run of albums on Blue Note between 1963–1969 are hailed as reinventing bop from the inside-out. In the 1970s, Hill moved to the West Coast and worked as an educator in schools and prisons, before moving back to the New York area in the 1990s, where he continued to record and perform right up to his death.