Publisher: Bardic Edition
Playing Score (2 copies) BDE 807
Duration: c. 4 minutes
First performance: Thursday 6 March 2003; Oxford, United Kingdom; Adam Bushell vibraphone, Tom Norell marimba.
“38a Hill Street Blues” owes something to the uhadi bow music of the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape where I used to live. It also owes something to stride piano playing (in particular Meade Lux Lewis’s Honky Tonk Train Blues) which I listened to a lot in my teens. The title itself possibly owes something to an American television series, but was in fact my home address in Grahamstown. I wrote the piece, in the desert in Namibia during January 2000, at the request of Marcel Worms for his ongoing New Blues for Piano project.