MON, April 9, 7pm              

Spirit of Place/Finding Home – a panel lead by Leo Hwang, musician, poet and Dean of Humanities at Greenfield Community College examines the boundaries and malleable nature of home. Moderating an impressive line-up of panelists, Leo Hwang brings a range of experiences to the evening. With a Ph.D. in Geosciences, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing, his interests intersect the worlds of economics and arts. His work has appeared in Rethinking Marxism, Meat for Tea, The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Rivendell, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Fiction, Three Candles, Gulf Coast, The Vermont Literary Review, and The Dickinson Review. He was the recipient of the Rosselli/de Filippis Scholarship at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and has been awarded scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Mr. Hwang plays in three bands, The Warblers, Vimana, and The Original Cowards. The panel includes Milena Dabova from Double Edge Theater; Alyssa Arnell from Greenfield Community College; Fadia Hasan from Smith College and Hampshire College; and Becky Wai-Ling Packard from Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts.

Marty Ehrlich – a solo concert by renowned multi-instrumentalist and professor of music at Hampshire College, Marty Ehrlich, promises to be an ambitious one! A master of improvisation and interpretation, he now celebrates forty years in the nexus of creative music centered in New York City. Ehrich’s career began in St. Louis, Missouri, while in high school, performing and recording with the Human Arts Ensemble. He graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, where his teachers included George Russell, Jaki Byard, Joseph Allard, and Gunther Schuller. Since that time, he has made twenty-five recordings of his compositions for ensembles ranging in size from duo to jazz orchestra, touring throughout America and Europe. He has performed with a who’s who of contemporary composers including Muhal Richard Abrams, Ray Anderson, Steven Bernstein, Anthony Braxton, John Carter, Andrew Cyrille, Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser, Peter Erskine, Michael Formanek, Don Grolnick, Chico Hamilton, Julius Hemphill, Andrew Hill, Wayne Horvitz, Robin Holcomb, Leroy Jenkins, Oliver Lake, Myra Melford, James Newton, Bobby Previte, David Schiff, Wadada Leo Smith, and John Zorn. He appears on more than 100 recordings with these and other composers. Marty Ehrich’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition, the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Residency at Harvard University, composition grants from Chamber Music America, the NEA, and NYFA, “Clarinetist of the Year” from the Jazz Journalist Association, and a Distinguished Alumni award from NEC.  

BELLS I and II

MARTY EHRLICH will present a solo woodwinds performance in dialog with a soundscape recording made by composer and saxophonist Julius Hemphill and dramatist Malinke Elliott in the 1970's. Hemphill and Elliott, both founders of the Black Artist Group (BAG) of St. Louis, MO., made this recording inside a shed at a lumber industry junkyard outside Eugene, Oregon. They suspended dozens of old saws, some of great length, and other tools of the trade, playing on them with mallets they built from found wood and rubber tires.  This soundscape recording, with sections of silence edited within it, was utilized for solo performance by Julius Hemphill, and was incorporated into multi-media performance works by Malinke Elliott and Hemphill.

I have long been inspired by the role solo performance has played for woodwind players in improvisational music, from Coleman Hawkins to Eric Dolphy and Anthony Braxton, to artists of the present day. However, I have always leaned at least toward duo contexts for my own work. Within this percussion soundscape I have added short pre-recorded saxophone and woodwind choir passages, some composed by me and some by Hemphill, as yet another layer of dialog within the work. Interacting with this recording with improvisation is a dynamic answer for me in engaging with solo performance

Having found this tape recording in the Hemphill archive, it is also a context of loving sentiment, from my many years of work with Julius Hemphill (1938-1995), and my long friendship with Malinke Elliott, still living in Eugene, Oregon.

Marty Ehrlich