Gerry Hemingway Quartet - The Whimbler

Clean Feed 40

With this latest offering for what might seem a standard-fare freebop quartet (reeds, brass, bass, percussion), drummer Gerry Hemingway retains the fluid swing, drive and humor that infused his early groups with trombonist Ray Anderson and/or altoist Tim Berne – this, in spite of the fact that his Guggenheim fellowship has afforded him the opportunity to record orchestral works, and his long tenure in the cooperative Anthony Braxton quartet captured simultaneous creation and destruction of walls between structured compositional and improvisational roles. The Whimbler, Hemingway’s second recording for Lisbon’s Clean Feed label, features a front line of semi-regular cohorts in tenorman Ellery Eskelin and bassist Mark Helias (who, with Hemingway and Ray Anderson, formed the BassDrumBone trio in the early ‘80s), along with trumpeter Herb Robertson, for a program of nine Hemingway compositions that evenly display the fruits of the percussionist-composer’s evolution.

“The Current Underneath” adds something slightly unexpected to the proceedings in Helias’ electric bass, providing a funky underpinning against a fluid, minimalist marimba/trap set vamp and a lilting tenor/trumpet theme that would not have sounded out of place on Andrew Hill’s Passing Ships (Blue Note), a densely layered composition that both stacks and weaves its subtle grooves thus sparing one’s brow. The single-note fade out, in fact, I am sure comes from somewhere on Wayne Shorter’s Schizophrenia (Blue Note, 1968). The follower, “Pumbum,” begins as fractured collective interplay, the fleet and facile tenor of Eskelin mating with darting trumpet lines, Hemingway’s brushes and a walking Helias ease the dog-and-gnat play into a loose boppish theme, every half-chorus or so a manner of playful collective rebellion ensuing. The delicate, tense theme of “Curlycue” yields to a loping off-meter walk, Eskelin’s earthy classicism given stretching room on the album’s longest track (indeed, most pieces are pronounced in their collective horn interplay), so too Helias’ soft, woody upright tone. Yet Hemingway’s compositions are a sure mating of disparities that, in hands other than his cohorts,’ might become obvious to the point of grotesques, but as on the title track, they are subtle: a twangy, almost cloying funk bassline is merged with an unabashedly jagged theme, its brief initial calls becoming additive lengthy lines that gradually pull apart. The care with which Eskelin and Robertson approach this material, never straying too far out in their improvisations and always keeping in a close, darting interplay retains both the integrity of the compositional framework (which, if not narrow, is at least always visible) and of spontaneity – even the rough-hewn seams are bridged together by necessity, gruff tenor and pointillistic brass stabs elemental if not formal.

All this is not to say that The Whimbler smacks of exercise and tiptoeing – to be sure, the music is far from a painstakingly-assembled miniature of what ‘creative music’ means – damned if the opening two tracks do not set any die-hard follower of line-walking, much less bar-walking freebop through a joyous modal maze. But the care with which disparity is approached – that is, making it seem less like conceptual tug-of-war and more like the natural pulse of human activity, and of life.