Julius Hemphill, like Oliver Lake, Hamiett Bluett and many others, used to occupy that space in my head of the “lesser reported musician”. You had to dig a little into the history to find out where they were from, what they were up to. The seventies seemed like it was a kind of heyday for music between the cracks of blues, gospel, composed and improvised musics, and yet the fusion post-Miles is often the only show in town for jazz historians, with AACM and its related offshoots reduced to footnotes. For me, the fact that Julius Hemphill isn’t more widely known is everybody’s loss, and if your journey of discovery starts here you’ll wonder how music this good stayed undercover for so long.
I first heard him blowing on a track from Bill Frisell’s “Before We Were Born”, where he seems to find the perfect notes for the harmonies, yet produce them with such gut-wrenching intensity that they also seemed to defy pitch entirely. He hit some kind of sweet spot that stuck with me. The earthy and the specific, I later discovered, were always bound up together in his music like an oil and water cocktail. Science says they shouldn’t mix, bloody minded determination begs to differ.
The first bars of the opener, “Revue”, could almost be a string quartet at a wedding, but the sequence quickly moves into more angular chords, stopping here and there to cycle round an interesting spot like a cat sniffing its own tail mid-scamper before the band effortlessly shape-shifts into an improvising ensemble around the first two chords. String quartets don’t groove that easily, but this band play with an uninhibited glee that makes you forget how difficult it can often with all that weight of history.
Mingus is the perfect choice for Hemphill as an arranger. “Nostalgia In Times Square” is chopped up and spun around in a hall of mirrors: like Mingus, he rubs the blues and twentieth century classical music up against each other, making a good case for the dissonance of both as suitable bedfellows. “Alice” sets the opening theme against pairs of oscillating chords (a favourite device of his: “Ceora”, from his big band album, is a truly breathtaking example), and they’re right in the cracks between lush and crunchy. Cellist Tomeka Reid takes the second theme pizzicato against dense yet serene accompaniment: it’s a beautiful moment of stillness, and yet everything is moving. Passages that feel rooted, however distantly, in the chords sometimes end up in strange and wonderful tangents… both Hemphill and Mingus share a willingness to wander from A to B in their own time. The opening of “Better Git Hit In Your Soul” does little to prepare us for the theme itself, except that it clears the palette somehow…this theme is taken pretty straight but then switches into the famous stop chorus solo a little early and so again, we are taken by surprise. The ensemble here play brilliantly together, the lines between the written and the improvised keeping everything mobile. When the music hits a slow medium swing swagger, the groove feels authentic, and that’s no mean feat. I’m left wondering how the music can move so far away from the original tune yet feel so tied to it throughout. When the theme returns, it’s like the return of a long-lost friend more than a compulsory nod to jazz formalities.
“My First Winter” seems like it’s going to be a simple and beautiful melody, but again, like “Revue” we are blown off course into more ambiguous waters. Sam Bardfeld’s solo references a kind of violin-specific virtuosity, yet at the same time feels right at home here, and backings change constantly around him, some written, some improvised. The potential for a change in direction is never far away, and when the band slips into the hard grooving “Touchic” and its constantly changing two bar loops, there’s one that really pops out, as if James Brown suddenly walked in on rehearsal. Stephanie Griffin’s solo sits Ornette-like on top of the bassline, both related and “not related”, just one of many instances of happy marriages of extremes. “Choo Choo” sounds like a piece of John Adams’ minimalism at first, but by now we are expecting the handbrake turn and it duly comes. This way of composing seems so close to improvisation: skittish, witty yet never obtuse.
Hemphill makes a good case for himself here as the natural successor to Mingus, Ellington, Morton and all those other composers in jazz that used whatever came to hand to fuel their strange imaginations. The music goes where it will, often taking long detours, but it never feels forced. Hemphill clearly could have penned a few hits with a sense of melody this strong, but he probably would have got restless, wanting to move, like his music, on to whatever felt right at the time.
The Hemphill Stringtet:
Curtis Stewart – violin
Sam Bardfeld – violin
Stephanie Griffin – viola
Tomeka Reid – cello
Release date is 4 April 2025
