The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill

From avant-garde pioneers like Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill to the esoteric works of the pianist Herbie Nichols and the double bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik, there are some artists who loom large in the minds of contemporary jazz players and who have proved widely influential yet perhaps still rarely receive their due as composers. Braxton and Threadgill continue to write and record, but in February the Steve Lehman trio with the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner paid homage to The Music of Anthony Braxton through the release of a hard-swinging live album, while the Air Legacy Trio convened by Threadgill for his longtime colleagues Pheeroan akLaff and Marty Ehrlich plus the bassist Hilliard Greene went on tour around the turn of the year.

Roswell Rudd, Misha Mengelberg, Steve Lacy and the Herbie Nichols Project founded by Frank Kimbrough and Ben Allison sought to revive the works of Nichols while also extending his catalogue in the eighties and nineties, with the past year bringing the albums Tell the Birds I Said Hello: The Music of Herbie Nichols by Allison with the guitarist Steve Cardenas and saxophonist Ted Nash, plus the outstanding Life Is Funny That Way by Fay Victor and her Herbie Nichols SUNG project as the freeform vocalist presented for the very first time a full programme of lyrics for the pianist’s compositions, from ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ which is intimately connected to the life and legacy of Billie Holiday to lesser-known or previously unrecorded pieces like ‘Shuffle Montgomery’ and ‘Twelve Bars’. Meanwhile the quartet of Pat Thomas, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal and Seymour Wright continued to recuperate the works of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, with their live albums Wood Blues and Giant Beauty widely acclaimed as among the best jazz releases of 2024.

Now a talented and versatile new foursome give the music of Julius Hemphill the same kind of treatment but with a twist. Billing themselves as the Hemphill Stringtet, the violinists Curtis Stewart and Sam Bardfeld, the violist Stephanie Griffin and the cellist Tomeka Reid offer string renditions of four of Hemphill’s works as the founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet while also interpreting a chamber composition which Kronos Quartet commissioned him to write in 1988.

Reid is a regular on the jazz scene whether as the leader of her own quartet, adding electronics for the first time to her angular bows and sauntering pizzicato on the standout 3+3 from last year, or through her storied collaborations with the likes of Mary Halvorson, Tomas Fujiwara, Nicole Mitchell, Joe McPhee, Kyoko Kitamura, Taylor Ho Bynum, Joe Morris and more while Bardfeld is a member of the Jazz Passengers who like Reid has worked with Anthony Braxton plus Kris Davis and Ingrid Laubrock between tours and recording sessions with Bruce Springsteen. On the other hand Stewart and Griffin are more at home in the worlds of contemporary classical and chamber music as members of PUBLIQuartet and the Momenta Quartet, with that third stream commingling of styles helping to bring out the winding polyphonies as well as the sheer melodic catchiness of some of Hemphill’s music.

The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill commences with a memorable take on ‘Revue’, the opener and title track of the World Saxophone Quartet’s fourth studio album which was released on Black Saint in 1982. In contrast to the somewhat downbeat tenor of the original, which opens out into a loosely tethered display of squawking counterpoint, here the Hemphill Stringtet’s rendition is almost a hoedown as they take up with gusto the theme, a five-part motif which is alternately played arco and pizzicato by Reid on the cello, who gives both a lilting and languorous quality to the piece. The violins of Stewart and Bardfeld plus Griffin’s viola link arms for hesitant harmonies and swooning ditties before peeling off from the midway point of the composition, which touches upon George Gershwin and other modes of rootsy pastoralism while always returning to that rubbery and ebullient main theme.

Later the stringtet make a medley out of ‘My First Winter’ and ‘Touchic’, which reverse position from their debut on the 1984 album Live in Zurich, with the achingly tender restraint of ‘My First Winter’ giving way to the livelier ‘Touchic’ as the ensemble paint shapes in the sky. Bardfeld and Griffin take fine solos on each half of the medley, before The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill draws to a close with a woozy recital of ‘Choo Choo’, a piece penned by Hemphill for the World Saxophone Quartet which was only recorded a couple of years after his death in 1995, when Marty Ehrlich led a sextet for the runaway tribute album At Dr. King’s Table.

Hemphill had been one of the co-founders of the Black Artists Group alongside Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett when the multidisciplinary collective started out in St. Louis in 1968. As its members dispersed and moved variously to Paris or New York City in the seventies, Hemphill performed with Anthony Braxton sometimes in all-saxophone ensembles while Lake and Bluiett also made an appearance on Braxton’s highly regarded album New York, Fall 1974. With the addition of David Murray, the World Saxophone Quartet which Hemphill established in 1977 was structured much like a string quartet, as it typically featured the alto saxophones of the bandleader and Lake alongside Murray’s powerful tenor and Bluiett’s hefty baritone. So it made sense when Kronos Quartet commissioned Hemphill to write for them in 1988, with the result in Mingus Gold a through-composed work based on three popular pieces by Charles Mingus.

The Julius Hemphill Papers are part of a special collection at New York University, which maintains an annotated composition list in a bid to support artists who wish to make new recordings or performances of Hemphill’s music. The list is based on the work of Marty Ehrlich, a longtime Hemphill devotee who was a member alongside Tim Berne and then the eventual leader of the Hemphill Sextet. He describes Mingus Gold in the following terms:

This piece includes a cello part that captures Mingus’s sense of virtuosity and style. It is a substantial, through-composed work that extends upon the type of re-imagining Hemphill did with the World Saxophone Quartet for pieces by Strayhorn and Ellington, Junior Wells-Mel London and Marvin Gaye. There is a recorded performance of the work in the archival collection, by the Daedalus String Quartet at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Until now that live recording by the Daedalus Quartet was the only extant version of Mingus Gold, with the foursome of Stewart, Bardfeld, Griffin and Reid thereby furnishing us with the first ever studio rendition. The three parts of Mingus Gold occupy the centre of The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill and begin with ‘Nostalgia in Times Square’ which has a vintage noir feel, like a montage from some private eye film in the fifties.

In fact both ‘Nostalgia in Times Square’ and its follow-up ‘Alice in Wonderland’ were originally penned by Mingus in the late fifties for the John Cassavetes film Shadows, though his music was largely absent from the final cut after Cassavetes thoroughly reworked his independent drama. The title of the song makes its prevailing air of urbanity more explicit, yet here as the stringtet work on Hemphill’s incantation they capture only the nostalgia of peering over somebody’s shoulder in a crowded square, as they provide an anxious and furtive rendition of the piece replete with the scurrying of their instruments. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ features an improvised cadenza by Reid, which is played pizzicato from around the two-minute mark and is given space to develop before she goes it alone, sounding like the musical equivalent of those ‘drink me’ bottles. And ‘Better Get Hit In Your Soul’ carries an improvised violin duet as rambling sections and sweet countryfied airs play out over Reid’s plunking and circuitous bassline.