Gerry Hemingway

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A largely self-taught saxophonist with a physics doctorate (in "the theoretical properties of charmed quarks"), Butcher has been reeding since the late '70s. At the onset of the '80s, he was working with several different jazz vehicles, among them the BBC Big Band Award-winning Chris Burns Group. He was also working with contemporary dance and music theater groups and was pursuing his growing interest in free-improvisation, experimenting with the unconventional sonorities and techniques that would inform much of his later work.

This decade has seen saxophonist John Butcher making several successful solo forays into the worlds of electroacoustic and environmental improvisation – the former best documented on his Fringes solo disc Invisible Ear, the latter on last year's Resonant Spaces (Confront) – but in case you'd forgotten how good he is at burning it up with a drummer, this latest offering on Gerry Hemingway's Auricle label will remind you.

If I had to pick my favorite Braxton CD this would be the one. Recorded after six nights in Yoshi's, which was documented in the earliar release on Music & Arts. I think it captures the group at it's pinnacle, and the recording done by the local public radio station has immediacy lacking in the Yoshi's recording. This is the quartet with Marilyn Crispell and Mark Dresser which performed together for nine years from 1985 to 1994 when it gave it's last performance in Paris.

My audio-visual collaboration with Beth began in the 1980's with a number of short standalone video works. More recently we began to explore her visual work integrated with my solo performance. The Behavior's program has grown steadily starting from only the first and last pieces of this evening's program which are with pre-composed video.

Hemingway and Butcher have similar backgrounds in the avant-garde. The percussionist’s CV includes work with such artists as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Anthony Davis and Leo Smith, jazz artists whose compositions frequently push at the barrier between jazz and what is more commonly accepted as “Art” music. The London -based saxophonist Butcher cut his improvisational teeth playing the music of Stockhausen and has worked with the likes of Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, the latter a former Hemingway collaborator as well.

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