In February, there was big news in the jazz world: the release of a landmark, seven-disc set from composer and saxophonist Julius Hemphill (1938-1995). An extensive Critic's Notebook piece in the Times notes that many of the recordings have never before been commercially released and were drawn from the Julius Hemphill Papers in the NYU Fales Collection. Kent Underwood, head of the NYU Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media, calls Hemphill “one of the most original and accomplished voices in contemporary music of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.”
Hemphill was born in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school as jazz legend Ornette Coleman, his elder by eight years. Establishing himself in St. Louis, he co-founded the Black Artists Group (BAG) there in 1968. Hemphill later moved to New York, where he became prominent in its downtown avant-garde scene, co-founding the World Saxophone Quartet in 1976. His papers were donated to NYU by his estate, a gift facilitated by the musician Marty Ehrlich, a Hemphill collaborator whom Kent describes as “the world’s foremost authority on the music of Julius Hemphill.” NYU archivists drew on Ehrlich’s expertise to organize and describe the papers, which are now fully accessible via this Fales finding aid.
In addition to the finding aid, musicians and researchers have an unusually rich information source to work from: Julius Hemphill: Composer, a comprehensive guide that Ehrlich has filled with minutely detailed information and musical insight that only a musician who knew and worked closely with Hemphill for 20 years could produce. On the website, Ehrlich explains that he built it “to support researchers and artists who want to make new recordings, performances, editions, and interpretations of Hemphill’s music. Because Hemphill continuously reconfigured his works and incorporated improvisation into performances, archival tapes are crucial documents of his compositional corpus.”
Hemphill’s compositions and arrangements are noted for their blendings of jazz, blues, big-band, and avant-garde classical influences, always shaped by his uniquely original creative sensibility. His papers include more than 22 linear feet of personal correspondence, ephemera, and manuscript music, including composition notebooks, scores, and arrangements. The materials were created or collected by Hemphill from the mid-1960s to 1995 and included audio, video, film concerts, rehearsals, and interviews.
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