This week, trumpeter Marquis Hill will make his debut as a bandleader at Village Vanguard — the legendary basement club in Greenwich Village where generations of jazz history have been written, one set at a time.
For many musicians, that moment might feel like a personal milestone. For Hill, it’s also an opportunity to bring an entire community through the door and down that famous staircase.
Hill grew up on the South Side of Chicago, a city where mentorship is part of the local identity. He remembers being a teenager, barely in high school, slipping into late-night jam sessions at clubs like Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge.
Older musicians noticed how serious he was about the music and took him under their wing. “Chicago is the type of city where the elders see a young musician who’s really serious about the craft,” Hill told me. “They grab you up right away.”
Those mentors included figures like Ernest Dawkins, Ari Brown, and Von Freeman — musicians who embodied Chicago’s unique musical culture: deep respect for tradition alongside a fearless embrace of experimentation.
In Chicago you might hear bebop, blues, gospel, hip-hop, and free improvisation all colliding on the same bandstand. Hill says that openness shaped his musical philosophy. “When I sit down to compose,” he told me, “I erase all those genre boundaries and just create.”
You can hear that approach on his recent project Beautifulism, which Hill describes less as an album than a conceptual tape which is built around the simple idea of not knowing what would happen. “I didn’t want to overanalyze,” he said. “I wanted the music to be what it wanted to be.”
Originally the recording was conceived as a simple trio with bassist Junius Paul and drummer Marcus Gilmore. But as Hill listened back to the sessions, the music kept asking for more, additional voices, singers, MCs, collaborators.
So he followed the music where it led. The instinct to treat music as a collective process runs through much of Hill’s work. He’s part of a generation of musicians deeply connected to one another: artists like Makaya McCraven, Joel Ross, and Immanuel Wilkins.
Hill sees that spirit of collaboration as something he inherited from Chicago’s musical culture. “It’s about bringing your colleagues and your peers along,” he told me. “I call it a family band.”
And that’s exactly what he’s bringing to the Village Vanguard. For six nights — twelve sets — Hill will lead a group made up largely of musicians who share those same Chicago roots and relationships.
From March 17–22, 2026, Hill will lead an almost entirely Chicago-bred band at the legendary New York venue. These musicians are Hill’s long-time peers—many of whom he has previously recorded with or extensively collaborated or toured with—plus the emerging hottest young musician on the NY scene, guitarist Emmanuel Michael from North Dakota.
Some of them will be stepping onto that historic stage for the first time. Which, in Hill’s mind, is exactly the point. “I wanted Chicago to be represented at the Vanguard,” he said.
In jazz, cities have always had their own sound. And for Marquis Hill, Chicago is the sound he brings with him. It’s a city where the tradition is passed hand to hand, generation to generation, carried on the big shoulders of those who came before.
And where, if the elders see you’re serious about the music… They just might pull you into the band.
