The evolution of various traditions in American music has been explained through simple metaphors that eventually outlive their applicability. Jazz is a prime example. Beginning in the mid-20th Century, the history of the music was primarily conveyed by the image of a tree, whose roots and branches represented nourishing antecedents like spirituals and blues, as well as flowering extensions like bebop and subsequent modernist idioms.
Despite its virtues, this model became increasingly unwieldy as jazz composers and improvisers incorporated a host of musical traditions outside the African American music continuum the tree represented, including European art music, rock, and folk music from around the world. The evolution of jazz over the past 60 years has all but uprooted the tree from top-heaviness.
A dynamic model for considering the evolution of jazz has long been indicated. The Third Stream movement of the early 1960s was an early marker. Led by Modern Jazz Quartet pianist and composer John Lewis and composer Gunther Schuller (who played French horn on Miles Davis’s seminal Birth of the Cool recordings of the late 1940s), Third Stream music mixed jazz and other classical and folk music traditions to create new strains of concert music. More importantly, it described a flow of ideas.
However, Third Stream was only one of many approaches to blending traditions that flowered in the 1960s, “fusion” becoming the most widely used label. Some were immediately popular, like the melding of American jazz and Brazilian bossa nova, typified by the 1964 Top 10 hit, “The Girl from Ipanema” by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto. Others were initially controversial, like the fusion of jazz, rock, and funk, pioneered by Miles Davis on late-decade albums like Bitches Brew. These cultural exchanges permanently expanded the parameters of jazz; but “fusion” does not fully express ongoing, kinetic, and unpredictable, artistic dynamism like “crosscurrents.”
Concurrently, there was a robust discourse during the 1960s in African American communities from coast to coast about artists gaining control of the means of production and ownership of the cultural product, a pushback against decades of exploitation of African American creatives by white capitalists. Among the organizations created from this discourse was Black Artists Group of St. Louis, a collective of musicians, visual artists, dancers, actors, poets, and playwrights, formed in 1968. Leasing a vacant building in a decaying industrial zone, BAG’s year-round programming of performances and educational services gained international notoriety. Its chairman was Julius Hemphill.
Hemphill’s participation in BAG’s trademark multi-disciplinary works – which drew on Surrealism as well as the Black Arts Movement – and his yeoman stints with jazz and R&B artists prepared him to ride the crosscurrents. Much the way Prokofiev upturned 18th Century concert music with his “Classical” Symphony, Hemphill used his great fluency in African American idioms to compose double-edged, even sardonic, compositions like “Steppin’,” which uses a cakewalk vamp to build a coiling tension, and “R&B,” a thoroughly undanceable, labyrinthine line that nevertheless conveys the joyful physicality of the idiom.
Even though he wrote are variously sized ensembles, Hemphill’s most historically impactful vehicle was World Saxophone Quartet – their recording of “Steppin’” was included in the second edition of The Smithsonian Guide to Classic Jazz just several years after it was recorded.At the time of its inception in 1976, the idea of four saxophones performing without the support of a conventional rhythm was audacious, but within a few years The New York Times proclaimed them to be “the most protean and exciting new jazz band of the 1980s.”
While Hemphill understood the potency of the familiar to create music that undermined stereotypes, he more acutely knew the greater power of the artist baring his soul. Though some of his most stirring compositions fit the formal criteria of ballads, others are better described as “adagios,” slow paced, evocatively lyrical works like “My First Winter” that dredge the deepest human emotions. Hemphill not only rode the crosscurrents between idioms, but between the nuanced and the immediate, as well.
Hemphill’s close collaborator Marty Ehrlich and Maryland Saxtet (Frederick resident Darryl Brenzel; FCC Jazz Ensemble Director Howard Burns; and Baltimore’s Gregory Thompkins) will perform a cross section of Hemphill’s saxophone quartets at Hodson Auditorium in Rosenstock Hall at Hood College at 8pm on Saturday, April 11th.
General admission tickets are $20 and may be bought in advance through Event Brite.
This concert is made possible through grants from The Delaplaine Foundation and Maryland State Arts Council, with additional support from Plamondon Hospitality Group.
Ride the crosscurrents of American music.