A
FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MARTY EHRLICH
Being
a card-carrying member of the late Julius Hemphill's Sextet has helped
Marty Ehrlich develop into one of the leading composers of his generation
as Hemphill was for his own. Need proof, take a gander at his latest for
Omnitone, Malinke's Dance with the unheralded Tony Malaby. In particular,
his composition, "Cry Of," which is as interesting as anything that I
have heard of late. I spoke with the reedman from his home about his time
with Hemphill, about his new recording, and about his road to the music,
as always, brought to you, unedited and in his own words.
FRED
JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.
MARTY EHRLICH: For me, the place where I really feel like I started was
in St. Louis, Missouri, where I lived during my teen years and earlier.
It was there that I got exposed to a lot of music and a lot of art. I
lived in a community called University City and I was surrounded by poets,
classical composers, St. Louis Symphony musicians, and I met a number
of artists that were connected with the Black Artists Group, which had,
this is about 1968, '69, through a program called Mecca, which was the
weekend arts program. Through this sort of community of poets and musicians,
I became aware of, in particular, the music that was really happening
at that time in the Mid-West from Chicago and St. Louis. I began also
to listen backward through the history of jazz. I started on clarinet
when I was quite young. Then I added saxophone and then I added flute.
So I had this sort of classical up ringing and then expanded it to this
very active jazz scene in St. Louis. I also at the same time, there was
sort of these informal concerts and get togethers where people would play.
It called up more of the new jazz at the time that was coming out of the
Mid-West. Then there were also the clubs that had the hard bop groups
that I would go listen to and try to sit in with as well. So that was
St. Louis. It was really where I got my sense of artistic direction in
many ways. From St. Louis, I went to Boston to the New England Conservatory,
where I was in their jazz department and in my four years there, I studied
with Jaki Byard, George Russell, Gunther Schuller, Joe Maneri, and Ran
Blake. I got a very involved and very interesting education there and
a lot of performing. I went on, years later, to perform in New York and
around the world with George Russell and Jaki Byard. While in Boston,
I met Leo Smith and I began to work with him and through him, I met a
lot of the Chicago guys. Gradually, I met Muhal Richard Abrams and Leroy
Jenkins and Leo and Roscoe and began to perform with them. In any event,
I am getting a bit ahead of myself. So I am in Boston for four years and
then after I graduated from the Conservatory, I moved to New York in 1978.
I have been in New York now for twenty years, a little more.
FJ: Influences?
MARTY EHRLICH: For me, it was a gradual process of working backwards.
What grabbed me first was Coltrane, Dolphy, the Art Ensemble of Chicago,
Braxton's solo saxophone records, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake. I started
with that stuff and then gradually I worked backwards. First, Charlie
Parker didn't grab me and gradually, that began to make sense. When I
got to the New England Conservatory, a pianist named Anthony Coleman was
there and he is quite well known now for his own music and Anthony was
sort of an Ellington scholar and with him, I started listening to a lot
of Ellington and earlier jazz and working back through that period to
Armstrong. So for me, that is how I did it. I went backwards. I also began
to heard contemporary classical music much more at the New England Conservatory,
which had a great contemporary music department. It was just a gradual
expanding to all that was happening on the planet. As far as influences,
for me, I was always the guy that didn't have just one guy I emulated.
I always was into making the threads and making the connections. I always
think my own style has been a certain combination of a lot of things.
FJ: Your approach is not the norm, to work from Braxton to Ellington.
MARTY EHRLICH: Let me give you a bit more context that would be interesting
especially to students. For one thing, it was the times. It was the end
of the Sixties. There was the war. I had been part of protests. My junior
high school sent thirty kids to the march on Washington. There was very
much this radical arts scene in St. Louis. I started writing poetry and
hanging out with a group of poets. They took me under their wings and
I would read my poems with them. There was a radio station, this is very
important, called KDNA, which was alternative, listener supported, free
form radio, very radical, both politically, it was a voice for politics
going on and it was also, what I mean by free form, there was no format.
Deejays played whatever they want. So I just turned on the radio and I
never knew what was going to follow another thing, which was a great thing.
It is something I believe in a lot. I played music on that station as
a young guy. I started reading my poems with the poets and then I started
bringing my saxophone along and improvised with them. I had no idea what
I was doing, but I seemed to be part of the thing. There would be these
poetry readings in people's houses and gradually, there would be these
jam sessions in the park. It might be three drummers and two saxophones.
I hung out and started doing it intensely. Up to that point, I had been
studying classical clarinet rather seriously. I was studying with the
principle clarinetist in the St. Louis Symphony. I dropped everything
and got deep into this music that was happening around me. I really got
the jazz bug and put poetry aside. I decided that I did want to be a musician
and I wanted to play and be part of this music and I did it everyday.
So it really was the fact that I was surrounded by the people doing it.
It led to through my years in Boston and when I got to New York, it was
in New York where I really began performing with Julius Hemphill and Oliver
Lake and the Chicago, St. Louis people.
FJ: You came of age during the Sixties, a particularly volatile period
in this country's history.
MARTY EHRLICH: Well, I mean, for example, Fred, what was going on in education.
My older sister tried to start an alternative school in our high school,
which didn't quite work. But by the time I got there, I'm three years
younger than her, they had started an alternative school, which I, in
eleventh grade, became part of and graduated from with thirty kids at
the end of eleventh grade and I spent my last year, my twelfth grade,
sort of teaching in this high school, teaching jazz and poetry. Right
there, you've got something. I was able to get outside of the big, traditional
high school, make my own education, combine my passions with what I wanted
to do, and sort of make my own way. So that was one thing. Again, the
other thing was the political movements. It was definitely an activist
time. I was influenced a lot by a Quaker family, who lived in our neighborhood
and were very involved in the peace movement and had a lot of kids my
age and my sister's age and came from a real background of protest and
community organizing and stuff. So it was just sort of you were surrounded
by that, radical art, radical politics. People tried to change institutions.
FJ: Did that have a profound stimulus upon your musical vision?
MARTY EHRLICH: Yes, in the sense that I was influenced by the people who
were influenced by that as well.
FJ: When you initially made your way onto the New York scene, did you
find it was a challenge for you to find work?
MARTY EHRLICH: Well, I actually moved to New York on New Year's Day 1979.
It is funny. When I got to New York, Tim Berne, who at that time had a
loft in downtown Brooklyn. We had met earlier through Julius. I had come
down and Tim had offered that I could stay with him and he was studying
with Julius at the time and I had stayed in touch with Julius from meeting
him in St. Louis. My plan was to stay in Boston a year and continue studying
some more, but that didn't work out and the musicians I liked playing
with weren't there anymore. So Tim offered me a place in his loft and
I moved down to New York. I remember I was there. I had a certain amount
of money and I started to go to here music every night. And just when
I was about out of money, this guitarist who I had grown up with, he was
playing with Chico Hamilton and he said that Chico was looking for a sax
player. So I went down and auditioned for Chico and got the gig and went
on the road briefly with Chico. And then George Russell started to re-put
together a New York big band and we played a lot at the Village Vanguard
and did a tour in Europe and made a couple of records. And then I ended
up getting a gig with Braxton going to Europe and then with the Human
Arts Ensemble, which was led by Bobo Shaw (Charles Bobo Shaw) and Joe
Bowie and through that, things just started to happen. I didn't make my
living from performing for a number of years. I actually made most of
my living during the day accompanying modern dance classes, which was
something I had gotten into in Boston. So that was sort of my day job
and would do as many jam sessions as I could and gradually, I was part
of this new jazz that was happening at the end of the Seventies, early
Eighties.
FJ: It sounds as if that was a very productive period for you musically.
MARTY EHRLICH: Oh, I would say very much so. It was very much about people
defining what they were doing. I have been very fortunate in that I've
always worked as a sideman with what I feel are very individual composers,
people who were really into making their own context, starting with George
Russell and Jaki Byard, two very unique composers, up through the St.
Louis, Chicago guys, and a number of years later, Bobby Previte, John
Zorn, who had what is called the downtown scene. I began performing with
them quite a bit and still continue to do so.
FJ: Were you a member of the downtown scene?
MARTY EHRLICH: Well, not really. When I got here, I was not part of that
scene at first. I didn't meet those guys until the mid-Eighties. I was
really more apart of the new music from the Mid-West guys, sort of the
new jazz from BAG and AACM. I began working with the bassist, John Lindberg
quite a bit. We started doing duos together. We did a duo tour and I toured
in his quintet in Europe some. I met Ray Anderson around then and began
playing with him. I hired Bobby (Bobby Previte) for a couple of gigs.
He began playing in my group and I ended up playing in his group. Through
him, I met Wayne (Wayne Horvitz) and have had a long association with
him. But I wasn't part of the early stuff that they did with Zorn.
FJ: The scene has grown tremendously since those early years.
MARTY EHRLICH: Surely, it has grown. It went from being marginal to for
some people, quite successful financially worldwide and other people,
still sort of marginal, like every scene. I'm not crazy about the word.
I think it is bit of a racially coated word. The scene when I came up,
which was, I worked primarily with black led ensembles, led by black composers.
I had missed the mid-Seventies loft scene in New York. By the time I came,
most of the performing around New York was at the public theater and I
went there every weekend. I never missed a weekend. I heard everybody.
I would say this, Fred. That scene was much more about one's own original
composing and less about exploring. There was a lot of experimenting going
on then. Everyone was trying to write for bigger ensembles. I played in
a lot of big bands. I played in like every new music big band there was
pretty much. And all along that time, I was doing my own music.
FJ: Let's touch on your work with the late Julius Hemphill.
MARTY EHRLICH: I met him in St. Louis and then when we both were in New
York, I began to spend a lot of time with him. I would do a gig here and
a gig there. He added me on, on bass clarinet to a few things and I did
all his big band stuff in the early Eighties. Shortly after that, he put
together the World Saxophone Quartet in the early Eighties and that was
his main performing thing. The overwhelming amount of performing I did
with him was from 1990-1995, when he formed the Hemphill Sextet and then
he became my principal employer for a lot of those years. It was my main
gig. He was a friend that I talked to a lot and it became a long dialogue
and in that sense, I did learn a lot from him. We really enjoyed talking
about music history together. He also was a very principled person in
the sense that he did not concern himself with artistic fashion as it
were. He very much listened to his own barometer of what felt artistically
essential to him. That was always interesting. He was a pretty blunt guy.
He would tell you what he was thinking and feeling, which I have also
found to be a very admirable quality. I will say the main thing from Julius
was I think he did not work from an ideology of what art should be, which
I think is very hard to do, in that, if he felt something sentimental,
he did it. If he felt something rigorous and experimental, he did it.
He was a combination of a lot of things. He honored his own complexity
in a way that meant a lot to me. It meant a lot to experience it, both
as a person and as an artist. Now having said that, that in it of itself
does not make great art. I think the man was a fucking brilliant composer,
about as brilliant a composer and conceptualist as there was and I am
very moved by his music and in the incredible passion of his own playing.
I miss sharing what I am doing and I miss talking to him about it and
I miss hearing what the hell he was going to write next because at the
end with the sextet, he was writing hit after hit. I mean, every piece
was gorgeous. He was really on a creative role.
FJ: Let's touch on your current projects.
MARTY EHRLICH: I have a record that came out last year with a trio called
Relativity with Peter Erskine and Michael Formanek. I have another trio
record coming out with Andrew Cyrille and Mark Dresser. I have a duo record
coming out with Myra Melford on Arabesque. So this year, there is a lot
of my music coming out on CDs. The current thing out is the record, Malinke's
Dance, with my Traveler's Tale Quartet, which is what I am now titling
the instrumentation of two saxophones, bass, and drums. For this current
version, I am using this very dynamic saxophonist, Tony Malaby.
FJ: Tony is very well known around these parts and a heavy player, but
I am curious about why you chose this instrumentation?
MARTY EHRLICH: This has always been a fertile combination for me. What
is different about this particular record is that I always use acoustic
bass. Now, Jerome Harris is a longtime musical associate, going back to
Boston. We were at the New England Conservatory together. I've played
on most of Jerome's records. We have co-led groups together. I was intrigued
with this particular aggregation to explore the electric bass a bit more.
Now, Jerome plays something called the acoustic bass guitar, which is
somewhere in the middle. It is not an acoustic bass. It doesn't have that
bottom like the acoustic bass. Jerome is a very rhythmically acute player
with this deep harmonic knowledge and so it pushed me in a different direction,
both in his personal sense of music and the instrument. Bobby is a drummer
that gets a lot of punch out of his drums and works very good with Jerome.
They play so beautifully together. I have been playing with Tony and I
feel we get a tremendous blend. For that group, I tend to write a lot
of harmonic stuff for the two horns and bass.
FJ: Will you revisit the Dark Woods Ensemble?
MARTY EHRLICH: Well, I plan to. The last record I did with that was this
record, Sojourn on the Tzadik label. That record has been very successful.
People have been very moved by it, which has been a satisfying thing.
What I have doing with the Dark Woods over the years, at its core group
is cello and bass and I have been fortunate to have this fairly core group
of Erik Friedlander and Mark Helias. We have a live record out on Music
& Arts called Live Wood. So I have to figure out the next step with it.
Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and Unedited and in His Own
Words. Comments? Email
Fred.