The term “jazz” covers a vast and contentious aesthetic terrain, pushing musicians to new frontiers of technical excellence and creative depth. This season, the Philadelphia Music Project funds performances that highlight the music’s idiomatic range and expansive po-tential. The slate includes a tribute to the late trumpet master Clifford Brown; accounts of the experimental yet wholly distinct languages of Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill and Andrew Hill; and a residency involving Brooklyn composer-bandleader John Hol-lenbeck with 12 handpicked musicians representing the cream of today’s Philadelphia improvising circuit. While these offerings may suggest a chronological timeline, they do not propound a view of music as a linear progression. Rather, in jostling together the most “traditional” swing-oriented work with the most “avant-garde” outpourings, from the ’60s to the ever-unfolding present, these programs seem to say: We can have it all.

The paradigmatic figure in jazz is in many ways the trumpet player, from Louis Armstrong onward. Clif-ford Brown (1930–1956) is one of the most thrilling players ever to take up the instrument. A child of bebop and heir to the innovative mantle of Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro, “Brownie” brought a level of stunning harmonic accuracy, turn-on-a-dime phrasing, melodic flair and tonal brilliance to the field. Successive generations, from Freddie Hubbard to Wynton Marsalis to Roy Hargrove, have all had to grapple with Brown’s legacy. But thanks to his sheer musicality, and his authorship of modern standards such as “Joy Spring,” “Daahoud” and “The Blues Walk,” Brown has left his mark on all jazz musicians, not just trumpeters.

This season the University of the Arts presents a concert series under the banner “Brownie Speaks.” The participants include two of Brown’s friends and contemporaries, saxophonists Benny Golson and Lou Donaldson, irrepressible performers who appear with their respective bands. Terence Blanchard, who, much like Brown, came up under the tutelage of drummer Art Blakey, plays Philadelphia with his groundbreaking ensemble as well. The Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra, with featured trumpet soloist Jon Barnes, also presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by the acclaimed composer and trombonist John Fedchock.

“Clifford’s been very inspirational in my musical life,” says Fedchock, “and so certain melodic frag-ments, ideas he used in his solos, came right to the forefront when I started thinking about the piece. I tried to incorporate those ideas, and then, through further study, look for other aspects to influence the development. Over the past several months I’ve been studying Clifford and his soloing, looking at

transcriptions. It’s just mind-boggling, letter-perfect playing.”Brown was born in Wilmington, Delaware and spent much of his

creative life in Philadelphia. In addition to his enduring work with Blakey, he co-led the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet (featuring a young Sonny Rollins), one of the most influential working bands of the 1950s. According to critic Martin Williams, author of The Jazz Tradition, “Brown became something of a rallying point for Eastern [coast] musicians: in the face of a fad for ‘cool jazz,’ it was as if he rose up and shouted to his contemporaries—even to his elders—that jazz should not abandon the other side of its technical and emotional heritage, that it could find a renewed life in a reiteration of some of its first principles.”

Sadly, Brown’s life is also one of the most tragic stories in jazz. Golson vividly recalls standing by the stage door at the Apollo The-ater and being told by a weeping friend, pianist Walter Davis, Jr., that Brown had been killed in a car crash the previous night, on June 26, 1956, en route from Philly to Chicago. Golson responded with the ballad “I Remember Clifford,” which quickly became immortalized in trumpet literature thanks to recordings by Dizzy Gillespie, Lee

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Jazz Horizons: A Diverse Lineage in Context

documenting composed and improvised works of innumerable con-figuration for some 40 years. His Philadelphia performances involve radically disparate concepts over the course of two nights.

The first, at Settlement Music School, features his Falling River Quartet, with Braxton on reeds, Katherine Young on bassoon, Erica Dicker on violin and Sally Norris on piano. This group uses Braxton’s colorful graphic scores, painted and laminated on sheets of 11x17 paper, to fashion worlds of sound at once organized and wholly spontaneous. Braxton refers to the Falling River scores as “sources for visual extraction into an intuitive coded logic.” Young likens them to “a map of a park—you want to think about jumping around them. Your eye is encouraged to move in a nonlinear way.”

The second night, at St. Mark’s Church, finds Braxton conduct-ing two earlier through-composed works: Composition No. 103 ( for Seven Trumpets) and Composition No. 169 ( for Brass Quintet). Braxton has used parts of these pieces as material for other set-tings in what he calls his “tri-centric” system. But complete readings with the intended instrumentation—what Braxton calls “origin performances”—remain extremely rare. The brass quintet piece is

Anthony Braxton,

photos by Emiliano Neri

Morgan and Donald Byrd.Dead at age 25, Brown had already changed the course of jazz

history. Eerily enough, we have a recording of his final night alive, a Philadelphia session titled The Beginning and the End, on which he’s heard to say: “Thank you very much, you make me feel so wonderful. It’s been a pleasure being here. I really must go now, it’s so hot.”

After Brown’s death, in the increasingly tumultuous decades of the ’60s and ’70s, the language of the music changed, new tributar-ies opened up and an edgier experimental aesthetic came onto the agenda. Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill and Andrew Hill epito-mized these new departures, and the three are honored this season as part of the Ars Nova Workshop’s “Free/Form: Composer Portraits” series. Questions swirled around this new music. Could it be called

“jazz”? Was it a break from tradition or a logical, necessary develop-ment in that tradition? One thing is certain: the stylistic syntheses and sonic innovations of these artists now form part of the cultural bedrock for a wide range of up-and-coming players.

Saxophonist Anthony Braxton (b. 1945) came of age as a key member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Mu-sicians, the Chicago-launched organization explored in depth in George Lewis’s new book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. One of the most prolific art-ists of our time, Braxton, a 1994 MacArthur Fellow, has gone about

intensely rhythmic, “almost physically impossible to play,” accord-ing to trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum. No. 103 entails an additional twist: the musicians must perform in caped costumes and Zorro-style masks, according to specifications in the score. “Braxton has a beautiful way of magnifying the moment,” says Bynum. “Each of us also has five different mutes strung around our necks,” he adds, “so the timbres are constantly changing. Even though there’s a certain homophonic character built into the piece, it really becomes quite an orchestral world.”

Julius Hemphill (1940–1995) was born in Texas and emerged from St. Louis, Missouri as a highly original saxophonist, composer and leading light of the Black Artists Group (BAG). He worked as a Braxton sideman and went on to a highly productive tenure with Oliver Lake, David Murray and Hamiet Bluiett in the World Saxo-phone Quartet. Like Braxton, Hemphill dealt with a broad range of creative propositions, from swinging, blues-soaked jazz to music for string quartet, woodwind ensemble, theater and multimedia produc-tions, big band and more. In the mid-’90s he performed with Björk.

“Hemphill looked backward with great sentiment, and forward with a fearless and focused personal vision,” says veteran reedist and longtime Hemphill associate Marty Ehrlich, noting that cross-disci-plinary work such as this can be both radical and traditional.

The Ars Nova tribute to Hemphill falls in two parts, both involv-

FEATURE

BY DAvID R. ADLER

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ing Ehrlich. First, at Settlement, Ursula Oppens plays “Parchment” for solo piano and joins the Daedalus String Quartet for the complex, evocative “One Atmosphere.” Daedalus also ventures the remarkable

“Mingus Gold,” Hemphill’s sequence of Charles Mingus compositions arranged for strings. Ehrlich, fronting two different in-carnations of the Rites Quartet, rounds out the program with selections for saxophone choir and items from Hemphill’s landmark 1972 debut Dogon A.D.

The following month at World Café Live, Ehrlich joins fellow alto saxophonist Bobby Zankel and his progressive big band, the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound, for readings of classic Hemphill compositions. The Philadelphia-New York summit con-tinues with a Philly-specific incarnation of the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Sextet, a group Ehrlich has kept in business since the passing of its founder. Joining Ehrlich, Zankel and the accomplished Elliott Levin will be the promising younger horn play-ers Dan Peterson, Bryan Rogers and Dan Scofield. Count on the program to include a showstopper titled “The Hard Blues.” In a recent performance at Miller Theatre in New York, this piece inspired the sextet to march around the hall, with Alex Harding hooting and hollering on baritone sax.

It’s no coincidence, and a testament to Hemphill’s lingering impact, that a select group of Philly improvisers (including Levin, Rogers and Scofield) chose to perform “The

Hard Blues” when they recently launched Science Fiction Sessions (now called Sci-FiPhilly), an avant-garde concert series sponsored by Ars Nova and held Sundays at the Ethiopian restaurant Gojjo.

Exactly where pianist Andrew Hill (1937–2007) falls on the jazz spectrum has long been a matter of dispute. His language, while elusive, wound up making a huge im-pression on players ranging from guitarist Nels Cline to pianists Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran. Cline, in an article he penned for Jazz Times in February 2007, observed how Hill’s music “still felt rooted in harmonic tradition. Hill’s never been predictable or safe, and his music maintains a maverick, loose-limbed quality that trusts the impro-viser while also providing a visionary sonic structure to work within.” A West Coast avant-jazz veteran and now lead guitarist for the indie-rock band Wilco, Cline released the acclaimed New Monastery: A View into the Music of Andrew Hill in 2006. This sea-son he comes to Philadelphia to give Hill’s work the honor it deserves, by interpreting it in his own, highly individual way.

Hill recorded five classic albums (includ-ing the historic Point of Departure) for Blue Note in just eight months in 1963 and 1964, when he was 26. The music confounded distinctions between post-bebop and the avant-garde and featured greats on the or-der of Eric Dolphy and Bobby Hutcherson. But in the end, Hill’s unclassifiable sound

JAZZ HORIZONS: A DIvERSE LINEAGE IN CONTEXT

such greats as Bob Brookmeyer, Kenny Wheeler, Fred Hersch and Meredith Monk. His own music defies easy categorization, moving from tuneful, poetic lyricism and ethereal soundscapes to intense, hard-charging grooves and open improvisation at a moment’s notice. From broad-canvas large ensemble scores to woodwind and percussion works, to the tight, punchy romps of his Claudia Quintet, Hollenbeck’s expressive palette is admirably far-reaching and continually expanding.

This season PMP facilitates a novel collaboration between Hollenbeck and a di-verse group of Philadelphia improvisers, who will workshop and perform together at the Painted Bride Art Center during a fall-winter residency called “Big Ears.” From a wider pool of applicants, Hollenbeck chose as his ensemble mates Bobby Zankel (alto sax), Matt Davis (guitar), Katt Hernandez (violin), Bart Miltenberger (trum-pet), Venissa Santí (vocals), Brent White (trombone), Brian Howell (bass), Matthew Mitchell (piano/electronics), Bryan Rogers (tenor sax), Aino Söderhielm (soprano sax, clarinet) and Patricia Franceschy and Gabe Globus-Hoenich (marimba, vibes, percussion).

The group meets for two separate weeklong sessions. “My goal for the first week is to get a sound as a band, to find each other musically,” Hollenbeck says. “After the first session I’m hoping to write some music specifically for them. It’s important for everyone to get to know each other’s timing and hear our sound together. Some of the players are composers themselves, and would maybe want to write for the group. So during the first week, everyone can listen to each instrument and explore what the possibilities are.”

“Big Ears” culminates in Painted Bride performances by the Philadelphia ensemble and Hollenbeck’s New York-based Large Ensemble as well. The project represents a coming-together of musical communities, not to mention a rare opportunity for brilliant but overlooked Philly players to gain wider exposure. Moreover, “Big Ears” is another welcome instance of Hollenbeck and his peers breaking boundaries and looking ahead to tomorrow’s artistic pursuits. “I feel that all the best stuff is in that unnamable category, at least when it’s still new,” Hollenbeck muses. “It’s great to listen to something I did and I can’t even put an ownership on it. I have no idea where it came from, no idea what it is. That’s a happy moment for me.”

David R. Adler writes regularly for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Jazz Times and Down Beat. His work on music, politics and culture has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic Online, Slate, Democratiya and many other publications. He blogs at

lerterland.blogspot.com.

pushing musicians to new frontiers of technical excellence and creative depth.

rendered him an “outlying cult figure,” as critic Gary Giddins once put it. Braxton paid homage to Hill with Nine Compositions (Hill) 2000, and wrote in the liner notes:

“This is a private musical universe that is not always appreciated by the greater jazz business complex.”

Thankfully, that began to change in Hill’s final years. There were new recordings for Palmetto involving Marty Ehrlich and trumpeter Ron Horton; a slew of reissues and discoveries from the Blue Note vault, including the long-lost 1969 nonet session Passing Ships; and finally, a new Blue Note quintet album called Time Lines, a ravishing farewell made shortly before cancer claimed Hill in April 2007.

Horton, former music director of Hill’s large ensemble, participated in one of Hill’s final concerts, a reading of the Passing Ships repertoire at Merkin Hall in New York. Lead-ing a formidable sextet, Horton travels to Philly this season to revisit Passing Ships and take stock of Hill’s legacy now that the artist has passed. “Andrew didn’t really enjoy looking back,” Horton says. “He was more concerned with being in the moment. When Merkin Hall proposed that concert, I knew Andrew didn’t want to play the music just like the CD. So I don’t intend to do it like the CD either.”

Remarking on the place of Passing Ships in Hill’s oeuvre, Horton notes: “It was a middle period, a changing period, when Andrew’s early Blue Note days were com-

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ing to a close. And he was experimenting during that time with larger ensembles, string quartets, vocal groups. I want to tap into that experimental part of what he was doing.”

With his long absences from the jazz scene, Hill could have been all but lost to music history. But thanks to his valedictory efforts, and the work of Cline, Horton and others, new generations of players and listeners are discovering what Braxton has long known: “[Hill’s] compositions are sonic gold and can be mined for musical secrets forever.”

Among the many gifted musicians following in the footsteps of these pioneers, drummer-composer John Hollenbeck has gained particular respect and recognition. A New York native, he has received repeated nods from the Down Beat Critics Poll and the annual Jazz Journalists Association Awards, not to mention a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Grammy nomination for his 2006 Large Ensemble recording A Bless-ing. Hollenbeck has worked in a wide variety of settings in jazz and beyond, with

Page 4: Terence Blanchard, photo by Jenny Bagert

Page 5: John Hollenbeck, photo by Oskar Henn

The term “jazz” covers a vast and contentious aesthetic terrain,