AFTERLIFE - a new recording of songs - four years in production !!!   (see here for how to get it)

"Afterlife" is the first release from me since 2014 and I would say may well be the most significant project I have created so far. Starting four years ago I took my time to sing covers of songs I admired, songs by Dylan, Geeshie Wiley, Lou Reed, the Monroe Brothers for example. I did this to understand the expressive range and character of my voice, as well as to go deeper into producing (which for these covers was often about re-contextualizing the original song). After a while my own songs started to arrive, sometimes inspired by my primitive guitar playing. Songwriting was always somewhere in me, close to the roots of why I became a musician. It seems the desire to migrate from instrumentalism into singing songs has been slowly gestating. As well lyric offers the opportunity to be more direct with what I am concerned with, and there is a lot to be concerned with in this time. I put my heart deeply into this work, knowing full well that it could fail but trusting as an artist that it was what I needed to do in this time. As in the recording from 20 years ago, "Songs" on between the lines records, I have imbued my vision of pop music with my love of orchestration and the help of remarkable musicians, who replaced my parts with their unique and singular sound. 
The recording is officially released on November 1, 2022. At that time it will be on all streaming platforms, Bandcamp and in CD and LP.              

LP & CD RELEASES in 2018 (see here for how to get them)

Tree Ear "Witches Butter" released late 2017 on Clean Feed Records as both an LP & CD
Samuel Blaser & Gerry Hemingway "Oostum" on NoBusiness Records (limited edition LP)
FroNTTon featuring Gerry Hemingway "Drives Me Crazy" Unit Records
Exodos "Heueristics" Leo Records
Simon Nabatov/Barry Guy/Gerry Hemingway "Luminous" No Business Records (to be released Nov/Dec 2018)
Gerry Hemingway/Sarah Weaver "Reality Axis" Sync Source Records (Release concert December 21, 2018)

Samuel Blaser & Gerry Hemingway toured in the US and Brazil in April of 2019 to celebrate their duo release "Oostum" on No Business records. The tour concentrated on Texas and the Southern area of the US as well as Southern California. Hopefully more duo performances will come in 2023.

WHO Trio released "Strell" in September 2020. The project title refers to the repertoire we have been developing a unique path for: the music of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington.It began with slowly internalizing a series of well known and more obscure works by both composers so that we could draw upon the themes and use them for instantaneous constructions that might only utilize only a motif, a harmony, a part of a form or a resetting of the whole theme. The trio is currently at work on a second recording of this project.

Since moving to Switzerland in 2009, many interesting projects have evolved from the musicians I have met, played and in some cases developed projects with. One rather special project is the duo with Vincent Glanzmann, a former student of mine and an excellent percussionist who has been exploring electro-acoustic percussion. We took a solo work of his as a starting point and evolved a co-composed duo piece entitled "Composition O". Among other elements the piece explores micro-sound worlds hidden in cymbals and as well utilizes controlled feedback with the skin surface and resonances of drums. This work has been recorded and was released in February 2020. Our work continues and we hope to bring you more performances and a new recording in 2023.

Recorded live in the LOFT, Cologne, Germany on 30-31st October, 2015, a trio with Simon Nabatov - piano, Barry Guy - bass, and myself on drums and marimba had a release on NoBusiness records in November 2018 entitled "Luminous . I was responsible for the editing and mixing the recording which was done with engineer Christian Heck and the sound quality of the recording is superb. Stuart Broomer wrote lovely notes and here is an excerpt from the booklet:
Collective free improvisation is both a special psychic state and a special social state, and the degree, quality and richness of these states are compounded by the qualities of the participants, including the listeners, that is, us.
That psychic state, fruit of an intense attentiveness, is one of engaged alertness to the play of sound and play of mind, a special quality of mind adhering in the way free improvisation is constructed. The social state is a collective corollary of this, those minds, those ears, simultaneously engaged in a collective pursuit.
That musical construction is also a special social state in which the character of free improvisation privileges the listener. With the music freed of any master plan (no conductor’s score, no rehearsal familiarity, no penned addenda to individual parts, no choruses), the listener has a value beyond the norm, a more significant partnership in the assembly of meanings, the weighing of parts, the definition of the whole.

Tree Ear is a collective trio begun in 2013 with guitarist Manuel Troller and multi-reedist Sebastian Strinning. In February of 2016 the group performed and recorded in Altbüron, CH at Bau4. The record is entitled "Witches Butter" was released on LP, CD and downloadable formats on November 10, 2017 on Clean Feed Records. You can get a sense of the band's chemistry and breadth of its sonic offerings via this page  here.

In 2017 the collective trio BassDrumBone celebrated it's 40th Anniversary !!!!!! On November 15, 2016, our new double CD was released on Auricle Records. You can order it here, and at the from this site you have many options for ordering the CD including CD Baby, Amazon, Squidco, as well as digitally on iTunes & other sites. The Cd was recorded August 9 & 10, 2016 at Acoustic Recordings in NYC, and features 13 pieces. There are 7 trio pieces and three with our guest Jason Moran on piano, and another three with our second guest, Joe Lovano on tenor saxophone.

We invited these guests because this is a very special occasion. We have managed to survive 40 years with no departures or changes in our group. In 2017 we toured and performed in the US, Canada and Europe a total 40 performances. Now more than ever we can use your help with spreading the word. Again the comprehensive website: BassDrumBone.com - where you can also fond our YouTube Channel and a FaceBook Page, We hope to make a recorded offering to celebrate our 2022 45th anniversary ia little bit late in 2023. 

The summer of 2015 ended with three consecutive festival appearances with four different projects. In between performing at Saalfelden and the Groningen ZomerJazzFiets Tour I did a performance with Ellery Eskelin and Gary Versace at the Willisau Festival which has been since released on HatOLOGY in May of 2016. More info on this recording can be had here. I included this formation in my retrospective residency at the Stone, to give us an opportunity a month before this performance to give a spin on the material we would continue with in Willisau. Here is a piece from that earlier performance at the Stone that does not show up in the repertoire captured on this CD. You can get this CD from me directly as well here.

2 days prior to the Stone Residency in July/August 2015. I presented a 5-hour retrospective of my work on WKCR-FM in NYC. I have now made the broadcast available to you on this web site here. Jasper Hussong was the DJ and occassionally interviews me during some of the show. I give a 3 hour overview starting from early recordings in the 1970s and then present 2 hours focused on the various groupings that took part in the Stone presentation. Important to mention is that in the course of this presentation I play numerous unreleased recordings of projects from my extensive historical archive of performances (dating back to the 1970s) that were significant but never published.

On October 27, 2017, an overview of my work was broadcast on WDR3 (from Köln, Germany) in a program produced by Harry Lachner. The program is in German and can be downloaded here.

July 28 to August 2, 2015 - The Stone Residency presented a significant overview of my work on the occasion of my 60th Birthday year (the actual birthday is in March). Below was the line up for this event - if you click on "more info" next to any of the days it will send you to unique page about each event that offers some links to archival material. In February 2016 the documentation of this entire week has been made available on YouTube - click here to enter the entire (chronological) playlist. The documentation was post produced (months of work - 38 separate videos) from several cameras and multitrack audio. I plan to eventually offer an overview documentary of this week but for now you can visit any of the programs and hear and see this event for yourself. Individual links to the works performed from each night are provided below.

Tuesday July 28 - Re-Ensemble - duos, trios, quartets and quintets (more info)
Both sets (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3, Piece #4, Piece #5, Piece #6)
Anne LeBaron - harp , Earl Howard - electronics, alto & soprano saxophone, Georg Graewe - piano, Susan Alcorn - steel guitar, Gerry Hemingway - drums, mallets

Wednesday July 29 - Improvisations #1 - Trios (more info)
1st Set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3)
Anthony Coleman- piano, Marty Ehrlich - reeds, Gerry Hemingway - drums
2nd set (on YouTube Piece #1)
Sporty Brown Trio revisited - Rudresh Mahanthappa - reeds, Russ Lossing - piano, Gerry Hemingway - drums

Thursday July 30 - Compositions #1 - Songs & “Riptide” Quintet (more info)
1st set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3)
Songs with Lisa Sokolov - voice, Michel Wintsch - piano, Terrence McManus - guitar, Brad Jones - el/ac bass, Ellery Eskelin - tenor, Gerry Hemingway - drums, sampler
2nd set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3, Piece #4)
Gerry Hemingway Quintet - Oscar Noriega - clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, Ellery Eskelin - tenor saxophone, Terrence McManus - guitar, Brad Jones - el/ac bass, Gerry Hemingway - drums, harmonica, sampler
Friday July 31 Improvisations #2 - Brew & Anew (more info)
1st set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3, Piece #4)
Brew - Miya Masaoka - koto, electronics, Reggie Workman - bass, Gerry Hemingway - drums, sampler
2nd set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3)
Anew Quartet - Ned Rothenberg - bass, Michel Wintsch - piano, Mark Helias - bass, Gerry Hemingway - drums
Saturday August 1 Compositions #2 Solo & Quartet (more info)
1st set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3)
Solo Works and Interactive Collaborations with visual artist Beth Warshafsky and composer Sarah Weaver
Gerry Hemingway, drums and sampler, Beth Warshafsky - interactive visual projection
2nd set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3, Piece #4, Piece #5)
Gerry Hemingway Quartet - Herb Robertson - trumpet, Ellery Eskelin - tenor saxophone, Mark Helias - acoustic, electric bass, Gerry Hemingway - drums
Sunday August 2 Relationships in time (more info)
1st set (on YouTube Piece #1)
Trio New York- Ellery Eskelin - tenor, Gary Versace - organ, Gerry Hemingway drums
2nd set (on YouTube Piece #1, Piece #2, Piece #3, Piece #4)
BassDrumBone - Mark Helias-bass, Gerry Hemingway - drums , Ray Anderson - trombone

Two pieces of news regarding this long standing duo which began in the early 1990s. In May 2015 was the release of a new duo recording culled from performances of our 2013 European tour on Intakt recordings this follows are previous recording on Intakt "Affinities". You can see a little from one of the concerts of this duo in YouTube here. On our page from this site you can also see this and may other videos and here some tracks from the new CD.

Secondly we performed on the 20th edition of the Vision Festival on July 8, 2015 in NYC. The concert took place in the historic Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square Park, NYC, NY. This recently posted documentation and performance is wonderful, however the piano tuning was a challenge, and a challenge that Marilyn handles with amazing adaptability.

The WHO trio released a new double CD on Auricle Records in October 2014. The WHO Zoo is the product of two years of rehearsals and recordings of improvised music and offers a disc of both acoustic and "electric" material. The electric material primarily adds Michel's analog synthesis to the instrumenation but some other musical odds and ends also make it into the mix of this recording. The group completed a tour in Japan in February of 2015, which included the initial premiere of their next project for the WHO trio + String Orchestra.

CD/DVD released in February 18, 2014 - you can purchase direct from Auricle Records (click here)

WHO + 2: Gerry Hemingway's Music for Mixed Quintet - premieres a new extended work "LSD: A Suite in 4 parts"

In the latter half of May 2013 I premiered the long extended work (45 minutes) “LSD: A Suite in Four Parts” at the Schaffhausen festival in Switzerland. On the one hand, during the month of May in this year (2013) I was inspired by the rare presence of the New York guitarist and colleague of mine, Terrence McManus who had a month long residency in Willisau, Switzerland. I wanted to take advantage of having him in the vicinity to be able to rehearse more than I could with my "working" quintet which is based in NY (of which he is also a part). Another aspect that led to some of the choices I made for this project were dependent on where I could produce it, and the timing was such that the Schaffhausen festival was a primary focus for rallying support for this project. This festival is themed on featuring Swiss artists and I had performed on this same festival 12 years before, with a performance of the WHO trio The WHO trio has, since that time, continued evolving as a group. The most recent work has gone deeper and deeper into new terrains (we released a new CD in 2014 entitled "The WHO Zoo"), it made sense that this project should include this trio as it's centerpiece. I also knew I wanted to do a quintet modeled in part after a special "mixed" quintet project I had done in 1995 in NYC, and this included JD Parran on a mixture of wind instruments, Erik Friedlander-cello, Marilyn Crispell-piano and Mark Helias on electric and acoustic bass. Here are a few examples of that earlier project I posted recently on YouTube to help promote this current project. The music of this project was never released as I was unsuccessful in finding an interested producer.

Also on my mind since moving to Switzerland was that I wanted to come up with a project that I could involve the reed virtuoso and now fellow ex-pat Michael Moore in, aand this project provided the perfect opportunity. So all of these elements, eventually titled WHO + 2, Gerry Hemingway's music for Mixed Quintet, were in place before I composed any music, and as well I booked a second performance in Belgrade, Serbia on the same weekend. At first I thought I might revive some of the repertoire of this previous mixed quintet but slowly a process evolved over the course of the months leading up to the performance that led me to compose an extended suite of interconnected works. I knew that I wanted to compose partly out of what has been developing musically with the WHO trio, and so months before the first rehearsal of the quintet I took some sketches to Bänz and Michel that we experimented with so I could also learn what was possible in my thinking. I say that as I had been coming to some new considerations about rhythmic relationships based on experiments I had done in my teaching practice with subdivision. These experiments were in part, a new way of approaching my past fascination with multi-tempo work, mostly done in my quintets where I write works that managed 2 or 3 layers of speed simultaneously. Through the lens of subdivision I saw other possibilities now. I could imagine to train my musicians to be able to hear the beat divided in several ways at once. I will spare you of a more technical lesson, but you can probably imagine that this is not an easy thing to do. To me it is exciting territory as a composer, as it is a language I (and the WHO trio) know well as an improviser, and I am always interested in bringing these two worlds seamlessly together and indeed the results of this compositional and rehearsal process were for me quite compelling.
When I compose I am often interacting to some degree with what is present in my life at the time I am writing. An article about the 60th anniversary of Albert Hoffman's discovery of LSD came on the radio during this period, and his story of discovery, and the huge social impact his discovery had on my generation, let alone myself seemed very fitting. One of the things that was very parallel in what LSD provided it’s experiencer and as well this composition explored, was the varying states of perception. The drug LSD gave it's user the experience of looking at the familiar, say for instance a table, and seeing this table transformed into something that no longer conformed to what we previously understood to be a table. What was solid and fixed was now liquid and continually shifting. These experiential qualities were very similar to my musical concerns. You hear at the outset of the piece a conventional hip-hop beat, and it seems at first that everything is aligned in syncopation to that beat, but in fact each player relates to the drum part in a different way and in fact no one listens to the pulse of the drum beat in the way that the listener would assume. What results is that everyone is operating at slightly different speeds and this is how the perceptual idea of time and stasis is altered and developed. What is perhaps very interesting is the state that this creates in the player of this music, as it involved training all of us to focus on elements of time we maybe understood intuitively but now had to master competence at, so it could be played accurately. And this process yields very interesting results to the direction of improvisation, which like the table is constantly changing shape. Another influence was the art (very popular in the time of LSD usage) of the draftsman M.C. Escher. The first section of this suite is named after one of his pieces "Convex and Concave" and you will of course see the comparison to exactly what I am referring to when I say this composition is about perception.
The second section of this work is called "White Lightening" which has several meanings in this context. It came first from the fact that the wonderful country singer George Jones, whom I saw several times, and whose singing I strongly feel is exquisite beyond definition or genre, passed on. So in my own memorial for his departure I listened again to a great deal of his music, and his rockabilly hit "White Lightening" crept directly into my musical materials. It was to some degree ironic as White Lightening was also the name of a very popular form of LSD, even though its original name is for moonshine, home brewed alcohol during the times of prohibition.  

Three articles from the summer and fall of 2012 (all in German). The Jazz'N'More article (click here) is culled from three hours of interviews with Jürg Solothurnmann which among other areas of discussion focuses in some detail on the nature and collective process of how the Anthony Braxton Quartet organized it's music. The Jazz Podium Interview with Klaus Hübner (click here) focuses primarily on the quintet which toured in Europe during October and November of 2012, and that as well is the majority of the focus of the article with Markus Stegmayr for the Austria FreiStil magazine (click here) which was distilled from an interview given at the Saalfelden festival of 2012.

I am very active in managing two YouTube playlists. On the selected video playlist your will find videos I posted and/or someone else posted that I am involved in that I consider to be worth watching. The 2nd playlist is the complete Stone residency of 2015 which is 39 seperate videos I post produced from several cameras and a multitrack recording.

In early May of 2012 I participated in a very unique grouping of musicians which was the brainchild of Fred Hersch and Benoît Delbecq; a double piano trio. Fred Hersch & Benoit Delbecq-pianos, Jean-Jacques Avenel & Mark Helias - basses, Steve Arguelles and myself on drums with Steve also using his unique live sampling system. The tour included performances in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris and the Le Mans festival. It also included a recording session in Paris for an eventual release on Songlines Records. Benoît wrote the music that was performed and recorded in a suite like form. We will all miss Jean-Jacques Avenel who departed the planet in August of 2014. Here is a short promotional clip about the CD that was released on Songlines records, its called "Fun House".

On June 19th, 2012 Tzadik released the long awaited recording of Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser and myself performing compositions of Anthony Braxton. 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 occasion 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 produced the recording.

"Riptide" the last release of my quintet music with Oscar Noriega, Ellery Eskelin, Terrence McManus and Kermit Driscoll was released on July 6, 2011 on Clean Feed Records. Here is the press release for this recording which opens a whole new chapter of this ongoing platform for my composition (see quintet page for additional details). We toured in Europe in the fall of 2012.

This setting of my quintet 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, that spans twenty-six years, "Riptide" will serve as a wonderful introduction, and for those who have followed my past work will be more than delighted with this new quintet setting. With intelligent and insightful notes by writer Brian Morton and a year of my patient post production, this richly detailed recording went quickly out pf print but can be found from many digital sources.

Excerpts of the CD can be heard here Unfortunately this CD is out of print.

Downbeat Magazine's July 2011 Issue offered a feature article on my music by Ted Panken (read article here). The article manages to cover a lot of ground on my current work, which those of you familiar with this site know is no small task. I have Downbeat to thank for offering me wisdom as a teenager about musics I knew little about. Thanks to reading an issue back in the early seventies I discovered the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nessa records and a way to get the records I was growing increasingly curious about. Perhaps this article will do the same for others out there who are only beginning to discover the wide world of music we live in.

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.

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.

In September (08) a performance with Earl Howard and Anthony Davis was recorded for Roulette TV on September 28th. It is finally posted for viewing at Roulette's website [www.roulette.org]. There is a long list of recent performances on the TV page and you need to scroll down to next to the bottom of that list to find the performance. The piece features Earl's exceptional live sampling work, and his unique compositional way of utilizing the resources of extended vocabulary and transitional timbre structures.

I am delighted to report the release of "Clepton" on New World Records which occured in December (07). This project which is directed and primarily composed by synthesist Earl Howard features the title work which was refined and developed in the Sudwestfunk studios in the fall of 2006 and was in collaboration with the GRH trio (Georg Graewe, Ernst Reijseger, and myself). It combines Earl's synthesis and live sampling with pre-determined textures and improvisations in various orchestrations of the trio and Earl. Also included is a collectively improvised work and I am very happy to see included a duo with me and Earl that I recorded in 1987 in Rochester, NY called "Rosebud". On this work Earl is playing his first sample set up, the AKAI S-900 which was a classic sampler of the time. The work contains one of the most wonderful electro-acoustic crescendo's that I have ever heard or played.

You can find it in "How to get Recordings" or Auricle Records page on this site.