How Chicago's jazz scene made a champion of Marquis Hill

Earlier this month, a 27-year-old musician steeped in the ways of Chicago jazz won one of the most prestigious jazz competitions in the world.

To Marquis Hill, taking top prize in the Thelonious Monk International Trumpet Competition, which includes a $25,000 scholarship and a major-label recording contract with Concord Music Group, represented more than a personal triumph. It spoke to the city that shaped his art.

"Someone asked me, 'Marquis, what do you think made your sound stand out to the judges?'" recalls Hill, who competed in Los Angeles and won on the night of Nov. 9.

"Of course, it's impossible to answer that question, but I would say probably my sound. The type of sound I go for is the Chicago in my sound. It's just kind of a melting pot of my upbringing and all the music I was exposed to growing up and learning about this music on the South Side of Chicago."

Hill indeed stands as a made-in-Chicago musician, for he studied with the best this city has to offer and benefited from jazz traditions that run deep here. At Dixon Elementary School he was in the care of the esteemed bandleader and saxophonist Diane Ellis. At Kenwood Academy High School, then-bandleader William McClellan "helped me get my tone together, articulation," says Hill. Additional studies in Ravinia's Jazz Scholar Program, undergraduate work at Northern Illinois University with the recently retired Ron Carter and a graduate degree from DePaul University enriched his musicianship.

And then there was that other, critical form of education that happens on bandstands across the city, when young musicians play alongside elders who have devoted their lives to this music. Virtuoso Chicagoans such as trumpeter Pharez Whitted, pianist Willie Pickens and guitarist Bobby Broom mentored Hill in Ravinia's Jazz Scholar Program, preparing him to go toe-to-toe with them in clubs, where he also collaborated with saxophone titans Von Freeman, Fred Anderson and Ernest Dawkins, among others.

"I would say Chicago jazz musicians and their music throughout the history has always been really soulful, and it's real, so I would say that definitely rubbed off on me, and the AACM being there, as well," says Hill. He refers to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a South Side collective of experimenters who changed the course of the music in the mid-1960s and thereafter.

"Being incorporated into the creative music scene helped. That's how I approached playing with people like Fred and Ernest and Ari (Brown)."

You can hear all of that in Hill's music. The freewheeling improvisations he brought to Matt Ulery's "In the Ivory" music last September at the Green Mill, the serene lyricism Hill expressed in his recent album "The Poet" and the sleek, blues-tinged playing he offered when fronting his Blacktet at the Jazz Showcase last November attested to the expressive breadth and technical command of his playing.

Guitarist Broom has watched Hill's progress for more than a decade, coaching him in Ravinia's Jazz Scholar Program and sharing a bandstand with him during jam sessions at Andy's Jazz Club and elsewhere. Broom was impressed from the start and believes that it took a fertile musical landscape to produce a musician as promising as Hill.

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How Chicago's jazz scene made a champion of Marquis Hill