“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.
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