Interview by Beat Blaser from June of 2011 for DRS 2 Jazz Actuel Series. Broadcast on August 9, 2011. Available here as a podcast. In German & English.Gerry Hemingway - News
Welcome to the news page, August 20, 2011- please visit Tours/Performances page for up to date performance info. This page receives only occassional updates due to my currently very busy schedule.
| Interview by Beat Blaser from June of 2011 for DRS 2 Jazz Actuel Series. Broadcast on August 9, 2011. Available here as a podcast. In German & English. |
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This new quintet has evolved from my long standing compositional platform that began in 1985 with the recording of "Outerbridge Crossing" and has enjoyed numerous incarnations while retaining its penchant for an integrative compositional/improvisational ensemble approach. What that adds up to is a compositional practice that has refined a way to frame the individual member's unique sonic, interpretive and improvisational vocabulary with pieces that are detailed, structured and rich with content. The character of the music is multi-faceted, from coloristic subtlety to visceral intensity, sometimes the groove is deep and other times the rhythmic interplay is elaborate and mischievous. The group mixes well established players with some of the most exciting emerging talent of the New York scene including multi-reedist Oscar Noriega, guitarist Terrence McManus who join Hemingway's long time associates, Ellery Eskelin on tenor saxophone and Kermit Driscoll on both acoustic bass and electric bass guitar. The material from this CD mixes new settings of two previously recorded quintet works with seven new works. For those unfamiliar with the legacy of my quintet work, now spanning twenty-six years, "Riptide" will serve as a wonderful introduction, and for those who have followed his past work will be more than delighted with this new quintet setting. With intelligent and insightful notes by writer Brian Morton and meticulously produced by Hemingway this richly detailed recording is a must-have CD to any collector of today's creative music. |
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This site has received a major update, and new additions, as well as a new cover page, slightly fancier than the one I had previously. Let me know what you think and also if you notice any odd issues on your browser (particularly those of you with IE browsers). Creating compatible html code for all systems is challenging to say the least, so your feedback is appreciated. |
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Intakt Records has just released (May 2011) the duo recording with Marilyn Crispell entitled Affinities. This recording was derived from two sources, a performance in Baltimore in March of 2009 which I recorded, and also a performance in October of 2010 in Tel Aviv, Israel which was recorded by Assif Tshar at Levontin 7. I produced the recording from these two multitracks which both include my performance on both vibraphone and drums. As has been my practice as a producer of late, a great deal of time was spent perfecting the sound of each recording to enable us a wonderful audio listening experience, so a richly detailed experience is to be enjoyed. As well Marilyn, Mark Dresser and I convened at Tedesco's studio in Teaneck, NJ in April 2011 to record a CD for Tzadik records of Anthony Braxton's music. The idea for this production emanated from a reunion we had on the occassion of Anthony Braxton's 65th birthday which was celebrated in the form of a fundraising for the Tri-Axium foundation at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC in 2010 (read more and hear the concert recorded by NPR here). John Zorn was there whom I also performed with in a quartet with Dave Douglas and Brad Jones, and the following day when Dresser and Zorn met by chance in the East Village, the idea for this production was discussed. I will produce the recording in the next months. Too early to say when it will be released. |
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 Not enough can be said about the celebration of BassDrumBone's 30th Anniversary (now in it's 34th year). Our first concert happened at the Educational Center for the Arts, in New Haven, CT, in the early fall of 1977. A chemistry was evident to all of us from the start, but none of us could have predicted that our music could evolve and sustain a musical partnership that remains as vital now as it was from the start. BassDrumBone is a 1977 grantee of Chamber Music America's "New Work's" program. Nine new works (3 by each of us) were created reflective of our thirty year collaboration. The works were premiered at the "Sculptured Sounds" festival in February of 2007 and also at the "Discover Jazz" festival of Burlington, VT. In the fall of 2007 there was an article for the Europe based ARTe TV about the trio featuring recent interviews and performances as well as some vintage footage. Some clips from this can be found on TouTube. Keep your eye on the Tours page for announcements of upcoming BDB performances in the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012. Our studio recording in August 2009, capturing all of the material we developed via the CMA grant, is now released on Clean Feed Records and is entitled "The Other Parade". It was mixed and produced by Mark Helias and recorded at Acoustic Music in Brooklyn, which is also where the previous recording by BassDrumBone was made, "The Line Up". Samples of both releases can be found on this site's mp3s page. |
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 The quartet Of Sylvie Courvosier, Mark Feldman Thomas Morgan and myself has been having a lot of activity in 2010 - 2011 including two recordings for Intact Records and a number of tours and appearances in Europe and NYC. I recommend both recordings highly, both recorded with great care and loving fidelity at Sear Sound in NYC and reflect the sonic detail and nuance that permeates this group's musical interaction. |
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Auricle Records released three new duo cds in limited editions in the summer of 2010, they are available from me directly and I will try to have them available at concerts. There are two duos recorded in the summer of 2008, one with guitarist Terrence McManus and the other with tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin. The third duo was recorded almost exactly one year later with Korean Komungo player Jin Hi Kim, please see the Auricle page for details on ordering these cds.
pictures from the (2008) recording sessions: On the left with Ellery Eskelin and the right with Terrence McManus. You can find two YouTube videos of the duo with Ellery in 2008 (Part One, Part Two). Terry & I have also posted some video earliar in 2008 from a performance at RUCMA (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four). Terrence has also posted a web page regarding our duo and also many more video clips which are accessible from it.... click here. Terrence has also secured the release of a trio recording with Mark Helias on No Business Records from Lithuania. Check Terrence's site for details. |
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 Avant (Mode) records released "Old Dogs (2007)", the 4 cd set of myself and Anthony Braxton in duo. The release date coincided with the June 18th (2010) 65th Birthday benefit concert for the Tri-Axium Foundation, that happened at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC. Notes for the CD were written by Graham Lock who you may remember was the author of "Forces in Motion" which captured many elements of the Quartet on the road in England in 1985. We recorded the material in the summer of 2007 in four one hour long sessions recorded at Wesleyan University. Jon Rosenberg was the engineer. Anthony played his entire family of saxophones, sans the tenor, no clarinets this time, and I had marimba, vibes, steel drum, electronics and of course trap set for my pallette. Each hour, for me, retained a definitive character at the same time as exploring an extremely wide range of material. Other than a short encore at Ulrichsberg I have not played with Anthony since the final performance of the quartet in early 1994. I can not convey what a connection I experienced in this reunion. There is a sense of mutual understanding that runs very deep in these explorations, informed both by the many years spent together on the road and from where are paths have led us since that time. I am very grateful that this occured. Mark Corroto review in AAJ. |
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Additional recent 2009 Auricle & Clean Feed releases available from this site "Buffalo Pearl" is culled from a performance in April 2005 with myself and John Butcher and marks the 7th release on my own Auricle Record label (AUR-7) which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary. John and I worked collaboratively on the multi-tracked mixing and editing to put this together and simultaneously we have organized a second recording taken from two nights earliar at Roulette in NYC. Each performance retains a different character, perhaps in part as the Buffalo performance was a new electronic setup for me, or perhaps it was the club atmosphere, whichever this performance has a lot of material that favors higher, faster energy. "kinetics" is the third release of Tom & Gerry (also on Auricle records, AUR-8), the other ongoing duo of myself and Thomas Lehn. These performances come from Ulrichsberg, Austria; Köln, Germany and the Densités festival in Fresnes-en-Woëvre, France. Thomas recorded these performances multitrack with his excellent equipment and so the quality of the recording is very high. Additionally we also worked collaboratively mixing and editing these recordings, a process that takes months and engages us in a very detailed discussion of converting these performances into an audio experience. The result, in this case, has produced a recording that for the first 45 minutes is primarily very quiet and delicate. The listening experience is rich in detail, sounding fantastic on very good headphones or turned up loud on a quality sound system. The final 15 minutes, assuming you dont turn it down, is one of the more explosive, earth moving and viscerally intense expositions of extremely dense and rhythmically intense material we have offered so far in recordings. I particularly find this performance to maintain an exceptional state of tension, both in the quiet and loud sections. Not for the casual listener!! Thomas and I are almost done with a second cd that will come from four different performance venues in the US. Mauger is a collective trio with Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mark Dresser & myself that began over three years ago. This studio recording was done in December of 2006. All three of us contributed compositions and as well some collective inventions are included. The group gets its name from a letter scramble of the first two letters of each of our names and is a preposition defined, "in opposition to, notwithstanding" which seems appropiate to creating art in our time. I like that we found this word and by alchemy brought it to new life from its more prevalent use in Shakesperean times. |
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 I am partcularly excited by a new collective project I have initiated that premiered at the Stone on June 12th, 2010 with pedal steel player, Susan Alcorn and cellist Hank Roberts.It sources the lyric, sentiment and texture of rural old time music as a starting point for improvisational dialogue. Keep an eye on this page for more details on the continuation and development of this unique project. |
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Its back!!! Songs, the 2002 release on between the lines out of print for almost 7 years !! US re-release date October, 2009, European re-release date: September 2009 - its available from me directly via this site: check here:
Songs "A rich, atmospheric disc, with an intelligent approach to the shape, exuberant in the interplay and splendidly played. Top Rating ***** Paolo Curtabbi (All
About Jazz- Italy) from "Out
of the Trees" |
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AND re-release date was May 15th, 2009 now in stock and available here:
hatOLOGY 673 A live concert recording at Ottenbrucher Bahnhof, Wuppertal-Elberfeld on March 2nd, 1993.
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Mauger, a collective trio with Rudresh Mahanthappa and Mark Dresser enjoyed a fantastic March 2009 tour of Europe (picture from a performance in Venice at Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, March 23....). This was followed by a wonderful West Coast tour in February of 2010, including performances in San Diego, Irvine, Davis as well as Takoma, WA. Check Tours & Performances for updates on our next appearances including a tour in Europe in the fall of 2011. |
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 Perhaps the most significant news I have to share with you is that in the Fall of 2009 I started a new teaching position at the Hochshule Luzern in Switzerland. I am teaching composition, improvisation, drums, ensemble and maybe eventually some history as well. I now live in Luzern, Switzerland. With regret I left my five years of teaching at the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music division where I have been teaching two history lecture classes (World Music and Contemporary Jazz) as well as running the Sound in Time ensemble and teaching composition.
I recently posted some recent in depth interviews from 2008 and 2009, including a radio interview on Taran's Free Jazz Hour out of Paris (listen here), the first for El Intruso with Sergio Picirilli (in English) and also an interview with Rogelio Peirera Conde for Oro Molido which will be published in hard copy in January 2009, you can find here (in English). There is also a 2011 interview with Barry Davis of the Jerusalem Post. On the lighter side for those of you who are aware of my interest in rural traditional music's of the Americas I did radio show with Kurt Gottshalk on WFMU, which you can listen to any time by visiting this link which is the playlist of the whole show. From there you can easily navigate to the audio of the show, as you will see from the playlist I start about a little over an hour into the show, my section lasts about one and half hours. |
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  In addition to the release of the 2009 recording of my duo with composer/komungoist Jin Hi Kim, we have been active with performances throughout the world including several recent performances in Jakarta, Indonesia - here is a preview in the Jakarta Post. performed earliar in the spring of 2009 at the Detroit museum (from where this picture comes from). We also returned to Korea in November of 2008 for two duo performances in Seoul. You can now see excerpts of a performance of Jin Hi Kim's "Sanjo Ecstasy" performed in Jeunju City, Korea in 2003 ("UnKnot" "Sanjo Ecstacy"). The group included a number of outstanding Korean Traditional musicians including the extraordinary Haegum player Kang Eunil and Kayagum master Ji Aeri. More recently there is also a clip of our duo from a performance in Vigo, Spain at the Museo do Mar from the summer of 2008 (Digital Buddha excerpt). |
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Anders Jormin/Verneri Pohjola/Gerry Hemingway & GH/John Butcher in Raahe, Finland July 26, 2008 In the summer of 2008 I performed at the Raahe festival in Finland (July '08), where I also recorded and performed with Swedish bassist Anders Jormin and Finnish trumpeter Verneri Pohjola. The recording done in a lovely, soon to be lost, vintage movie theater was for TUM records, and in the same building I performed in duo with John Butcher in our first performance together since 2005. |
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You can find it in "How to get Recordings" or Auricle Records page on this site. |
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 Toward the end of February (08) I participated in a recording for Mode Records of an older work of Bob Ashley called Trio III. The recording features the violinist Conrad Harris and will include a number of early works by some of the well known rebel composers of the 1960s including Alvin Lucier and Alvin Curran. Trio III is a piece featuring violin and text regarding the history of the violin accompanied by two other instruments in this case myself and pianist Blue Gene Tyranny. The recording session was also taped in Surround Sound and video taped for DVD release at Systems 2 in Brooklyn. |
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 I have also begun what I expect will at least be about a multi-year project in interviewing the musicians who were involved in the very vital music scene of New Haven, Connecticut in the 1970's. I am eventually interviewing everyone I can find who is still alive about their impressions of what for me was a catalytic period of activity; a crossroads where I and many others began many musical relationships that remain active to this day. I am interested in hearing from anyone who I have lost touch with who was active in the New Haven musical scene in the 1970's or who knows someone who was involved at that time. I am doing my interviews both in video and audio anticipating that the culmination of this project may be in more than one format. I have for some time felt strongly that what occured in New Haven in this period was historically significant and deserving a more complete investigation and documentation. |
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If you have not already checked out Graewe/Reijseger/Hemingway 10th anniversary tour release, "Counterfactuals" on Nuscope Recordings I highly recommend you do. For more info see the page devoted to the trio (GRH Trio). |
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  There are a number of interesting articles about the two 2005 quartet and quintet releases in AllAboutJazz. There are two related articles by Kurt Gottschalk who did a feature article in April 2005 which is available online (check it out), he also reviewed this recording and the new quartet recording (recent review AAJ-NYC). There was a flurry of touring, cd releases and performances in the spring of 2005. My quintet with guests, Peggy Lee on cello and Mark Helias on bass as well as Frank Gratkowski and Wolter Wierbos performed at the 20th Vancouver Jazz Festival in June (2005). In Europe the new quintet cd entitled "Double Blues Crossing" on Between the Lines, was released in the beginning of May, it is distributed by Allegro in the States starting late this summer. My quartet had a successful two and half week tour in Europe in May with many performances in Paris, as well as appearing on the Ulrichsberg Kaleidophon. "The Whimbler" was released mid-May 2005 on Clean Feed Records from Portugal (see below for more details - hear some excerpts). |
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 As of Oct 2006 you can download some of my earliar LPs as mp3s at the JazzLoft site. I will provide a direct link to these items from my How to Get Recordings page. A CDR release of my solo recording of 1988, "Tubworks" is now available from this site. The LP has long been out of print, and the label that released it (Sound Aspects) has all but disappeared (anyone of news of the label or its producer Pedro de Freitas please contact me). |
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"Riptide" the newest release of my quintet with Oscar Noriega, Ellery Eskelin, Terrence McManus and Kermit Driscoll was released on July 6, 2011 on 
The newest manifestation of my 
My collaboration with video artist 
In October the occassion to return to the US for a weekend of performing was first set in motion with an invitation from Evan Parker to perform in trio with Mark Dresser at the Stone as part of a two week Evan fest that NY enjoyed for the beginning of October. We were joined on the second set by Herb Robertson and the whole concert was recorded by WKCR for future broadcast. I haven't heard the recording but the evening was an exceptional musical experience, that follows only one other occassion where we had played as a trio in the Knitting Factory many years ago. The weekend also included a performance by Mauger with Rudresh Mahanthappa and Mark up in my home town of New Haven, CT.
Photo Credit: Pat Ferro
In September (08) a performance with 
I am delighted to report the release of "Clepton" on 
There is another collaborative project initiated by reedist Michael Lytle (bass/contrabass clarinet) along with 
The GRH (Graewe/Reijseger/Hemingway) trio's recording for Winter and Winter was released in the spring of 2006. We toured in the fall of 2009 (our twentieth anniversary!!!) I can not recommend it enough. We had an opportunity to create this CD under ideal circumstances, a room with superb acoustics, completely silent) with a great piano, super marimba and percussion equipment (it is the rehearsal room for the Munich Opera). The technical part of the recording was equally ideal with Adrian von Ripka at the helm and Stefan Winter as our producer. We recorded three hours of music and this CD is the distillation of that effort. You will not be dissappointed. As always with Winter & Winter productions it is beautifully packaged. The trio touried briefly in the fall of 06 with performances in the UK and the aforementioned project for the SWF radio with composer/electronic musician Earl Howard.
My second orchestral work,"Sideband", a Concerto for Three Improvisors
and Orchestra was given it's world premiere at Cal Arts on March 8th of 2003.
Anne LeBaron and David Rosenboom joined me as the concerto soloists along with
the Cal Arts New Millenium Ochestra under
the baton of Marc Lowenstein. This piece was created with funding from the Paul
Simon Guggenheim Foundation. I am hunting for future opportunities to perform
this work and will keep you posted.