Questions for Chris Enright

On November 15th, composer and pianist Chris Enright will open the Jazz at the Gardner series with a performance at 7pm. We talked with Chris recently about his music.

Tell us a little about the music you’ll be playing. Any stories behind how any of these tunes came into being?
We’ll be playing at least one movement from my “Blessed Are The Forgetful” suite. It was originally an extended composition project I had to do while I was at Berklee.

I had a hard time getting rolling, and found most of the writing for the project to be too academic. If you spend enough time studying music, it’s pretty easy to over-think things and micromanage a piece. At the time, I was working for one of my former music teachers, Ran Blake, who often writes pieces inspired by various Hitchcock films. So I decided to write a suite inspired by one of my favorite films, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” It really opened things up for me and I started fusing the technique I’d gained from Berklee, with my own compositional voice. I use this technique with a lot of my pieces.

We’ve got rhythm

Take a sneak peak at this month’s gallery tour:

Sure, we have concerts every Sunday in season, performances throughout the year, and other hip events, but what is the rhythm of the Gardner? Seems obvious that old Isabella Gardner had style, but did she have rhythm? Could she boogie in those heavy, silk and satin, Victorian duds she wore? Let’s look to the design of her museum for answers. This is a short lesson in close looking and spatial awareness.

Think back about how you entered the museum. The entrance hall is low-ceilinged and cramped. Walking into the Spanish Cloister area gives you a bit more breathing room, and you see some art, and a little more interesting scenery. Once in the cloisters, windows allow views outside, and you get obstructed views of the courtyard. Most people naturally move toward the court to get the full view. When finally standing at the edge of the court, space, light, and color explode before you.

The short journey takes you from small, constricted, dark spaces to wide open wonder!

Musicians talk about Hemphill

For Duke Ellington, the pinnacle of praise was to describe a musician as “beyond category.” The late Texas-born saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill, who came up through the worlds of R&B and jazz, merits the full measure of that Ellingtonian encomium. Read more.

For an article in yesterday’s Globe, jazz correspondent Kevin Lowenthal interviewed a number of the musicians performing this Thursday at After Hours about saxophonist Julius Hemphill’s legacy and impact. Click the link above to read more about what pianist Ursula Oppens and saxophonist Marty Ehrlich, both playing in the 7pm concert “Music of Julius Hemphill,” had to say. You’ll also get another perspective from saxophonist Russ Gershon, who will be playing live in the courtyard from 5-7pm.

Tickets to the 7pm concert are going fast, so act soon if you’re interested in hearing some of Hemphill’s music. The courtyard performance is included with After Hours admission.

Music in the archives…

In 1888 the Manuscript Club gave its first concert at 152 Beacon Street, Mrs. Gardner’s first Boston home. A local paper, Town Topics, described the club that year: “Mrs. Gardner’s latest triumph in Boston is the successful launching of a new musical organization called the Manuscript Club, wherein all the several amateur musicians in town play their own compositions.” The Club had been organized to secure for local composers an intelligent and sympathetic hearing of their compositions and included local female composers – an avant garde idea for the times.

Notice the signature of Margaret Ruthven Lang. [Just click on the image at left to zoom in.] Five years after playing for Mrs. Gardner, in 1893, the Boston Symphony Orchestra programmed Lang’s “Dramatic Overture” and it became the first orchestral work written by a woman performed by an American orchestra.

Who is Hemphill?

“Much was made of a four-horn group [Julius Hemphill's World Saxophone Quartet] working the turf of jazz without a rhythm section. Hemphill insightfully replied that he did not know what all the fuss was about. Nobody pointed to a string quartet to marvel at how well they got along with no rhythm section.”

On October 18, the Gardner will kick off this season’s Composer Portraits series with a concert of music by Julius Hemphill. If you’re a jazz fan, you may know him from the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group, or the revolutionary World Saxophone Quartet. But you may not know that he wrote classical music, too, for string quartet and piano. We’ll be playing it all in the concert at the next After Hours, but until then, a few words about his music from program annotator Ben Young:

Hemphill’s impact and legacy offer different things to different audiences. His identity as a fiery, constructive-minded alto saxophonist powered a substantial part of his recorded output, on which he appears as an improviser but not composer or arranger… Hemphill’s long-form writing for ensemble, with or without his participation as a player, is maybe the hardest subset of his writing to grasp..But the enduring benchmark of Hemphill’s identity as a music-maker is his craftsmanship and style as a jazz composer–arranger, the last giant in the 20th century to make an unmistakably new contribution to the field. This dimension of music making was neglected in the oeuvre that Hemphill entered when he moved to New York in 1973. Only the early work of Butch Morris suggested that there was anyone on the scene paying as much attention to the modernist precepts of beauty, ballad, close harmony, and tight execution.