Jazz Articles about Marty Ehrlich

About Marty Ehrlich

Album Review

Marty Ehrlich: Open Air: The Complete Saxophone Quartet Compositions Of Julius Hemphill

Read "Open Air: The Complete Saxophone Quartet Compositions Of Julius Hemphill" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
November 4, 2026

Julius Hemphill's saxophone quartets reveal a compositional imagination as resourceful as it is distinctive. In assembling all of Hemphill's known works for the format, reedman Marty Ehrlich brings a remarkable body of music into sharp focus, foregrounding the harmonic ingenuity and structural precision that can be obscured by extensive improvisation. Hemphill, best known as a founding member and principal composer of the World Saxophone Quartet (WSQ), wrote consistently for reed ensembles from 1977 until his death in 1995. ...

Album Review

Jason Robinson: Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef

Read "Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef" reviewed by Keith Flint

by Keith Flint
October 18, 2026

From a single note a song takes form. From a single seed a tree grows. Consider Yusef Lateef's own words from “Where Are The Goodies?" Spheres: Stories by Yusef Lateef (Fana Publishing, 1976), “To find out in a hurry whether the roots are where the rich dirt is, look up at the tree and see if the branches are soulful." His writing was as evocative of spirituality and human communication as it was given to compositional foundations and creative ideation. ...

Album Review

Marty Ehrlich and Julius Hemphill: Circle the Heart

Read "Circle the Heart" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
April 9, 2026

As a teenager in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1970s, young multi-instrumentalist Marty Ehrlich encountered the Black Artists Group, the pathbreaking musical collective co- founded by Julius Hemphill in 1968, and he eventually came to work closely with Hemphill for many years. Hemphill, himself an accomplished multi- instrumentalist on alto, soprano sax and flute, was an invaluable mentor for Ehrlich, particularly starting in the late 1970s when both musicians were working in New York City. Then, when health problems began ...

Album Review

Marty Ehrlich Trio Exaltation: This Time

Read "This Time" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro

by Alberto Bazzurro
May 27, 2025

La prima cosa che ci colpisce--e ci sorprende, anche--di questo album è il fatto che un polistrumentista di regola vorace come Marty Ehrlich vi si dedichi praticamente a senso unico al sax alto, con la sola eccezione di “This Space, This Time," in cui passa al tenore, lasciando tuttavia in un angolo tutto il resto del suo vasto armamentario strumentale. Poi il linguaggio, certo attualissimo, ma non spinto in avanti come in altre occasioni, con portati tematici molto ...

Radio & Podcasts

Marty Ehrlich's Trio Exaltation, Loot, Enemy & Cosmic Ear

by Maurice Hogue
April 21, 2025

The much respected woodwind master, Marty Ehrlich, has a thing about trios--he feels a trio is a perfect vehicle to get to the essential core of music. Ehrlich has fronted several great trios with the most recent being Trio Exaltation. The 2018 debut of that band with bassist John Hébert and drummer Nasheet Waits was met with much acclaim and now they're back with This Time. It's terrific and it's the feature in this episode of One Man's Jazz. Actually, ...

Album Review

Andrew Hill Sextet Plus 10: A Beautiful Day, Revisited

Read "A Beautiful Day, Revisited" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro

by Alberto Bazzurro
November 13, 2024

Registrato dal vivo al Birdland dal 24 al 26 gennaio 2002, il materiale di questo doppio CD (nonché doppio vinile) raggiunge oggi i quasi 83 minuti di durata, aggiungendo, rispetto all'edizione originaria uscita pochi mesi dopo il concerto, un'alternate take inedita del brano che intitola l'album e una versione ampliata di “11/8," riposizionando nel contempo i nove brani complessivi in quanto a “ordine di apparizione." Ne vien fuori un'opera che possiamo tranquillamente definire monumentale, anche proprio per la ...

Album Review

Andrew Hill Sextet Plus Ten: A Beautiful Day, Revisited

Read "A Beautiful Day, Revisited" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 21, 2024

The heyday of pianist Andrew Hill (1931-2007) happened during his hang with Blue Note Records, where he released ten albums between 1963 and 1970, including 1964's Black Fire, a splendid quartet session featuring saxophonist Joe Henderson; 1964's Point Of Departure), that featured a freewheeling sextet that included Henderson, multiple reedist Eric Dolphy and trumpeter Kenny Dorham; to Passing Ships (1969), with an exuberant multi-horn group that included trumpeter Woody Shaw, trombonist Julian Priester and flutist Joe Farrell. For those with ...