Warren Hill stuns himself with some of his success

Sometimes expectations fall short, but in Warren Hill’s case, they can be exceeded.

Hill, who will perform Sunday at Thornton Winery, captured three Canadian Smooth Jazz Artists Awards.

“It's kind of surreal because you don't expect it because there are a lot of talented people you are up against and this is all done through online voting,” he said. “It's who mustered up the most fans and you don’t know what to expect. I was hoping I would get one and wound up with all three.”

Hill won for “Wind Instrumentalist of the Year,” “Best Original Composition” for “La Dolce Vita” and the CD of the same name picked up 'Album of the Year.'

As it turns out, Hill made history.

“I've won the wind instrumental award before, but I didn't realize that I've won the most Canadian Smooth Jazz Artists awards,” he said.

Not bad for someone who only became a sax player so he could be in the school band. Eventually, he attended Berklee College of Music and was hired for sessions work with Chaka Khan. By 1991, he had his own gig.
Currently, he is about to criss-cross the country, doing shows in Florida, Texas, California, among others.

“I like to be busy,” he said. “This month has gone non-stop so it’s nice to kind of get a little rest. These days there are not an abundance of gigs so you take what you get.
Hill sees the effect of the economic downturn on live shows.

“Lot of festivals have taken a year off because many of them are sponsorship driven and the sponsors are usually auto dealers,” he said. “They don’t have a lot of extra money this year. The other sponsors are typically banks and you know what's happening with them.”
However, just because he is touring a lot doesn’t mean he hasn’t found a few projects to work on in the meantime.

For starters, there’s the topic of love and two CDs worth of love songs.

“A lot of people like the old CDs and they wanted to know where to get the songs,” he said. “They'd tell me I don’t have a greatest hits album so I decided to compile them into themes. The love songs idea was a perfect fit for what I play.”

What began as a CD project morphed into a double CD. “The Love Songs of Warren Hill, Volume 1 & 2.”
“That theme pretty much fit what I do, but I found it too difficult to put it into one CD,” he said. “So this is kind of a retrospective where people can hear what I sounded like earlier in my career and then what I sound like now.”

The first volume covers 1991-1999, while the second captures songs from 2000-2007.

A lot has changed over those years, including how and where he records songs.

“There’s definitely no big studio stuff anymore,” he said. “For the horn stuff, I do it at home, as well as the pre-production and sequencing.”

Even when adding other musicians’ parts, it tends to be the home studio.

“When we put the other players on we usually record them at their home studio,” he said. “The last record I pretty much did on my laptop and then we mixed it on a bigger computer.”

Another project is the Sax Club, an endeavor that enables Hill’s fans to learn his style.

“I have a lot of fans that are sax players and I found that I could fill a need,” he said. “I’d ask people questions and get good responses. I've wanted to do this for five or six years and I was able to make the time to set it up. I at least got started and have a couple DVDs and I want to add a few more.”
He’s also expanding his instruction to private times with budding sax players.
“I'm even doing private lessons if people want to get with me,” he said. “They get a lesson, come see the soundcheck and play a few notes with me and talk about it, schedule permitting. If I can be inspirational it makes me feel good.”

That could lead to something more universal in the future, but that’s not a pressing thing.

“It would be nice to get an online forum someday but I'm not there yet,” he said. “I'm not sure if I'll get into the universal stuff but this is tailored to my style for people who want to learn my tricks.”