38a Hill Street Blues (2002)

“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.