Open Air: The Saxophone Quartet Music of Julius Hemphill

About this event

Celebrating the release of the Complete Saxophone Quartet Compositions of Julius Hemphill on Out of Your Heard Records.

Saxophonist, clarinetist, and flutist Marty Ehrlich (b. 1955) began his musical career in St. Louis, Missouri, performing and recording with the Human Arts Ensemble. He appears on their 1973 recording “Under the Sun” with Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake, Jim Marshall, J.D. Parran, and others. He attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where his teachers were George Russell, Jaki Byard, Gunther Schuller, Joseph Allard, Ran Blake, and Joe Maneri. In 1977, Ehrlich received the Conservatories' Chadwick Medal for outstanding academic and artistic achievement at graduation.

Moving to New York City in 1978, Ehrlich performed in the ensembles of George Russell, Chico Hamilton, Anthony Braxton, Charles "Bobo" Shaw The Human Arts Ensemble, and Julius Hemphill. He continued to work in America and Europe with the artists of BAG and the AACM, in the ensembles of Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell, and Baikida Carroll. He performed for numerous years in the John Carter Octet, the Don Grolnick Octet, Andrew Hill Point of Departure Sextet, and Anthony Davis Episteme Ensemble. Ehrlich was involved in Davis' opera "X: The Live and Times of Malcolm X," from its earliest stages to its world premiere in 1986. He reprised his role as saxophone soloist in “X” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2023.

Other long-term associations have been with Robin Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz, and Bobby Previte, centered around the New York Composer's Orchestra and Previte's' "Bump" quintet. He has performed in Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition, Jerome Harris Ensembles, Mario Pavone Ensemble, and in diverse projects of John Zorn. Ehrlich appears on over a hundred recordings with these and other artists.

Ehrlich has composed a distinctive body of music for his improvising ensembles of the last four decades, including his Dark Woods Ensemble, featuring his clarinet with cello and bass, and his two- saxophone group, The Traveler's Tales Quartet. His other ensembles include Trio Exaltation, The Rites Quartet, Philosophy of a Groove, and the Marty Ehrlich Large Ensemble. Ehrlich has made duo recordings with pianists Muhal Richard Abrams, Myra Melford, and Mike Nock, and bassists Anthony Cox and John Lindberg. He has made two recordings, Sojourn and Fables, that explore his roots in Jewish liturgical music. He has sustained three collective groups, C/D/E with Andrew Cyrille and Mark Dresser, Relativity with Peter Erskine and Michael Formanek, and the Ray Anderson/Marty Ehrlich Quartet. His recordings for Jazz Orchestra include The Long View (2002) and A Trumpet in the Morning (2013). His compositions are represented on 30 recordings with these ensembles, on the Enja, New World, Muse, OmniTone, Palmetto, Tzadik, and Clean Feed labels.

Ehrlich's long-form works include a String Quartet and work for Alto Sax and String Quartet, entitled Starlings Suite. He has created an evening-length musical setting of poems on Charlie Parker entitled Cartographies of Flight read by poets Erica Hunt and Charles Bernstein. In 2002 he created a gallery installation at Harvard University of his music with the paintings of Oliver Lee Jackson, the distinguished artist with whom he has had a long association. Further work includes a solo woodwind performance with soundscape entitled Bells I and II. He recently prepared and conducted a concert and recording of Soundpath by Muhal Richard Abrams, performed in Philadelphia by the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound Big Band, released on Clean Feed.

As a woodwind multi-instrumentalist passionate about improvisation and interpretation, Ehrlich has performed throughout the classical world. He was a soloist in the music of Bernard Hermann with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and Orchestra National de Lyon, and has performed with the New York City Opera, New York City Ballet, and Chamber Music Northwest, and the Metropolitan Opera. Ehrlich has premiered concertos written for him by composers David Lang and David Schiff. He has performed the music of James Newton with the Jose Limón Dance Company and took part in multi-year performances of the music of Julius Hemphill with the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Sextet and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, in their award-winning work The Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Promised Land.

To keep Julius Hemphill's (1938-1995) music before the public, Ehrlich continued the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Sextet posthumously as musical director from 1997-2007. He has curated "Julius Hemphill: Composer Portrait" concerts in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. He is the chief researcher for the Julius Hemphill Papers in the Downtown Collection at New York University and has curated the 2021 New World box set release The Boye' Multi-National Crusade for Harmony: The Music of Julius Hemphill. Ehrlich has edited 18 folios of Hemphill's music for Subito Music Corporation, making the majority of Hemphill’s music available for performance and study. Ehrlich’s writings on the archive and these compositions

is available at https://bit.ly/Hemphill-Ehrlich .

From Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares