Oppens, a celebrated concert pianist, specializes in 20th-century and contemporary music by composers such as Elliot Carter, Conlon Nancarrow, and Frederic Rzewski. But she has also commissioned and performed pieces by composers generally thought of as jazz musicians: George Lewis, Anthony Davis, Anthony Braxton, and Hemphill. "I feel that they're among the most imaginative composers today," she says.
"And it's classical music, adventurous classical music. I think there's no division at this point." Oppens has an additional connection to Hemphill and his music.
After performing on the same bill with the World Saxophone Quartet in 1981, she says, "I was . . .
overwhelmed. I met Julius then and we became very close." By 1983, Oppens and Hemphill had moved in together; they remained a couple until his death from complications of diabetes in 1995.
"I've never quite had [another relationship] that started so much with music," Oppens says. "I mean, we heard each other's music, and that was that." Thursday, Oppens will perform two pieces written for her by Hemphill: "One Atmosphere," for piano and string quartet, and "Parchment," for solo piano.
Says Oppens of Hemphill's compositions, "Julius was always a fantastic blues composer, but he also wrote modern music and was mostly at that edge in between the two. And his harmonic language to me is sort of like if you took the most complicated harmonies of Ravel and made them more intense and went in that direction another degree or two." Saxophonist and composer Russ Gershon, who leads the Boston-based 10-piece Either/Orchestra, is a huge Hemphill fan; his trio, the Intimate Ensemble, will perform a pre-concert show in the Gardner's courtyard as part of the museum's "After Hours" series.
"He was one of the guys after Coltrane and Albert Ayler who reconnected the freedom that was opened up by that music in the '60s with other parts of the jazz vocabulary and other parts of the wider African-American music vocabulary," Gershon says. "I'm thinking of the blues in particular, Hemphill being such a bluesy player and having such a great take on the blues outside of its 12-bar form. In particular, his piece 'The Hard Blues,' which is to me such an American masterpiece, such a music masterpiece.
" The main concert will end with "The Hard Blues," which Ehrlich calls the sextet's signature piece. He adds, "We're also doing several pieces that come from [Hemphill's] collaboration with [choreographer] Bill T. Jones .
. . the first time he put the six saxophones together.
A significant amount of the music that the sextet performs came from that collaboration." The sole piece on the program not composed by Hemphill will be the premiere of Ehrlich's "Reflections on a Theme by Julius Hemphill," for solo saxophone. "Let me call this my 'reimagining' of a theme of Julius's," Ehrlich says.
Ehrlich has certainly earned the right to put a piece of his own on the program. Says Oppens, "It's because of Marty that the Julius Hemphill Sextet still exists. He's also done a lot of research, and some of the works they play are pieces that had kind of gotten lost and were recovered.
" Gershon agrees. "I don't really wear a hat," he says, "but if I had a hat I'd take it off to Marty for keeping this repertoire alive.
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