This one is again from MODERN DRUMMER. Hemingway is a true giant in the improvisational field. He’s worked with everybody. He’s also a very serous composer.

The Perfect World of Gerry Hemingway

by Michael Bettine

With nearly 100 recordings to his credit, drummer/composer/bandleader Gerry Hemingway has toured and /or recorded with Leo Smith, Kenny Wheeler, Derek Bailey, Oliver Lake, Georg Græwe, Ernst Reisinger, Ivo Perelman, and many others. From 1983-1995, alongside pianist Marylin Crispell, and bassist Reggie Workman, he was a member of famed saxophonist Anthony Braxton’s celebrated Quartet. BassDrumBone, his trio with trombonist Ray Anderson and bassist Mark Helias, has worked together for 22 years.

Watching Hemingway play is often akin to watching a painter paint. He works with texture and shade to bring out the nuances in the music. Using sticks, brushes, mallets, and hands, he coaxes subtleties from his instruments. To further enhance the sound, he will play woodblocks, small cymbals, or pieces of metal on top of his drums and cymbals to create new sonorities. A length of plastic tubing inserted in a drum’s air hole allows him to change the pitch of the drum by blowing air into it.

While living in New Jersey, the bulk of his touring activities have been in Europe. But recently, he has been more active back home in the States. “I’ve had two lovely tours here recently. One was with (saxophonist) John Butcher, and the other with (synthesist) Thomas Lehn who I have a bit of a track record with. We’ve just had a double CD (Tom & Gerry) released on Erstwhile Records. It’s real representative of some work we did a few years ago. So we went back out and did 11 gigs in a row. An intense schedule driving, but we really got into it with a little more intensity than the previous tour. Tom’s playing is quite special. He’s an analog synthesist based in Cologne, Germany. He uses an English Synthi, which is sort of a version of the old Mini Moog. It’s a very cool little box with a modular patch bay.”

The other duo, with British sax player John Butcher, again covers a wide range of sounds in an improvisational context. “He has a very strong repertoire of extended techniques on his instrument. He’s playing both soprano and tenor. An incredible player. I worked with him once, and we’ve known each other for a long time, but had not really worked together at all. He called me ostensively looking for help with a solo tour. I told him I’d help on one condition: that we do it together. So I ended up doing these two back-to-back tours in America and it worked out well. I got a lot [from the tours]. It felt like each night we were digging deeper and deeper.”

Concurrent with his active performing schedule has been his career as a composer. This has included compositions for the various groups he plays in, as well as works for both chamber and symphonic groups. As a composer, he has received grants/commissions from the Holland Festival and NPS radio of the Netherlands, Arcadian Arts, the Parabola Arts Foundation, fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation on the Arts, and most recently, his biggest and most prestigious award: “The biggest news is I’ve been selected for a Guggenheim Foundation grant. So I’ve just gotten it. And the project that I proposed, and will be composing, is for an orchestra piece and three improvisers. The improvisers in this case being (pianist) Georg Græwe, (cellist) Ernst Reisinger, and myself. So the composition should be finished around May, 2001. I’m already starting to look for possibilities of getting it performed. So that’s the biggest piece on my agenda that will be dominating a lot of my time between now and then. It’s a prestigious grant that supplies me with more or less half a year’s income to spend the time composing it. It’s obviously a very serious piece of music.”

“I’ve composed one piece for orchestra before (a commission for the Kansas City Symphony), for myself and orchestra. That piece (Terrains) has been recorded twice now, the second of which I’m fairly pleased with. It’s not an easy thing to get an orchestra piece released. The German Kölner Rundfunk Orchestra recorded the second one, the revision of the First Concerto. It came out very well, but it will need some negotiations to get the tape available. And I may do it again, depending on where I can muster the forces to perform and record it one more time. I’m also looking for performances of the piece in general. It’s only been performed a few times and it would be nice to do it a bunch more.”

“I was the concerto soloist and my part was sort of improvised—organized improvisation. I had specific things I knew I would do, but it wasn’t a set written out part. And I used electronics that were put together specifically for the piece, a sampler with the drum set. It was a very nice piece. It was the first piece for orchestra, and I expect the second one to be perhaps a little bit more fluid and mature in terms of orchestral writing. Writing for an orchestra is like after writing for a speed boat, writing for a yacht. It’s a much more cumbersome thing to move around, but a far grander and more expansive vehicle. The possibilities are quite rich.”

So how does a drummer become an orchestral composer? The age old question asks which came first, the chicken or the egg? “My composing career and my drumming career are concurrent. They were always interlocked. As long as I’ve been drumming professionally, I’ve been writing music. I started writing when I was about seventeen. So it’s not like a drummer writing pieces—I’m a composer and a drummer. Frankly, the composing is where the real developmental work goes on, where I’m working out new ideas and concepts, and developing different approaches that tend to filter back into my work as a player. I get a sense of where I’m going with technique and ideas, materials and content mostly through my composing process. The pieces I’m working on are what drive me to develop, in a more rigorous way, new ideas and material for the instrument. And then again, also when playing, things come up as they do when doing more improvising. Those sometimes feed back into the composing process. So it’s a two-way operation obviously.”

Working extensively in both composing and improvisation, Gerry has found common ground in both areas that also feeds ideas back and forth. “For me, they’re peas in a pod to some degree. When I use the phrase digging deep, it’s my way of saying that with the kind of players I’ve done improvised music with, I scour every resource for every available means of expressive possibility. With improvisation, the first gig or two tend to be easy, then the hard work begins, not necessarily of coming up with something new every night, but developing something that does push one beyond the more available resources. Somehow that becomes part of the process. And there’s some stumbling and failures with the hard work to make it come together. Ultimately, the rewards are great when things begin to change into new areas that surprise both players.”

“Now as a composer, or as a performer playing composed music, this experience of working in improvised music becomes invaluable. Speaking as a composer, improvisation has given me an understanding of the relationship to an intuitive process that is more or less my path as a composer. I’m not a systemized composer, with predictable elements. I tend to work in an intuitive way. I more or less compose what I hear, and the more I work in the improvised domain, it’s expansive to my ability to hear more things as a writer. And both of these feed my skill as an interpreter of composed music. When I approach someone else’s composition, I’m often bringing to it a sense of orchestration. By my playing I can suggest things or help things in a particular kind of way that is how I look at things. So if there is some open ended improvisation in a piece, I might tend to shape that in terms of various options, or as a player think in an orchestrated way about how I might be able to bring out the best in the composed material. That’s just the way I think, and I see it filtering into various projects I do. And I often work with people who are like minded in this regard.”

Another random aspect of the compositional process that Gerry finds, is the equipment he uses on tour. By economic necessity, he travels with only his cymbals and a bag of small percussion. Drum sets are of the rental variety and vary in type and quality at every gig. “The reality is I’m not an equipmentaholic. It’s almost comical. Often in touring I perform on other instruments. The new thing with touring in America is that it’s allowed me to perform on my own instruments. My set is a combination of old 60’s Ludwig and Gretch drums. It’s a 14X20 Ludwig bass drum with an 8X12 tom, a 14X14 Gretch floor tom, and an old Ludwig aluminum snare. The hardware is pathetic and light weight, but it works. My equipment is pretty old and beat up. I’ve played the bass drum since I was a kid—it was my first drum set. It’s not a matter of laziness that I haven’t gone out and bought something shiny and sparkley, but I find that the more you play an instrument, the more it becomes a part of you and begins to sound as you envision sound. Drums aren’t a Stradavarous by a long shot, they’re just plywood. But they do take on a sound. Everyone thinks it’s the wood, or the skin, the rims—it’s everything. The whole thing hangs together in a certain way that produces a certain sound.”

“Now my understanding of that comes into play when I use a rental set, which is the majority of the time. I bring my cymbals of course, and my small percussion. I tend to play my strikers into the ground, as I tend to wear my sneakers until they have holes in them. I’m not fussy about drum sticks being snappy and new. In fact, I kind of like them beat up. Now with the rental instruments I actually have an interesting process in how I approach them. I sometimes get very interesting drum sets that I think sound quite a bit better than my own in a certain way, and sort of please me as a player in ways my own don’t provide. The first thing I do is just play the floor tom with my fingers—just play it. I listen to it for quite a while, and don’t tune it at all. I listen to what it says to me, so that I don’t necessarily demand the instrument to become what I envision it to be.”

“I tune into it in terms of what it can say. I have a standard way of tuning the instruments the way I like it. I tend to go low, to give the instrument as much earth as possible. So I’m looking for the bass drum to speak as low as it’s going to. But sometimes I see that a bass drum is stuffed full of pillows, and if I feel like pulling out all the stuffing and letting it ring is a good idea, I might go for it. But often I don’t. I’ll leave it stuffed because that seems to be what it’s about. And I work with that sound. It’s quite a bit different from my normal sound. Sometimes I get instruments that are pretty much geared for the rock vein, and I just use it as it is. I actually enjoy the variety of things those instruments can do that are different than what I normally do. Those in some ways inspire me to try different directions, or allow for different articulations to occur than with my own instruments. So parts of my playing become amplified, and parts become more subdued. It’s a matter of finding a relationship with it and making it speak.”

“At the moment, I play all Istanbul cymbals. I have a 20” ride that I bought blind from a Turkish gentleman living in Amsterdam in 1985 or so. At the time I was playing a 20” K that I had bought as a kid, along with an 18” A Zildjian from my original drum set. I had a pair of Formula 602 Paistes that were magnificent hi-hats. They were wonderful until they finally broke on a session for Klaus Konig. So when I bought the 20” Istanbul, I also bought a pair of hi-hats. This was before anybody knew what Istanbul cymbals were. I gave this guy some money, as he was going back and forth between Turkey and Amsterdam buying cymbals for various players because they were digging the cymbals. So I got a very early 20” from him and these really nice hi-hats. Years later I was in Istanbul looking for an 18” crash to replace the A and I found one that went with the 20”. I bought that at the factory itself. I think that the alloy they use retains a few of the mysterious qualities of the Ks, the darkness, the directness. But they have a wider and more versatile set of harmonics.” 

So coming full circle from drumming and improvising, he now finds himself immersed in composing. “This orchestra piece, as far as composing, that will dominate the coming year and probably take me out of the performing loop for a while. Which is fine, so I can concentrate on this. The other main composing project that’s coming up is for Between The Lines, a company in Germany. They offered to do a recording—there’s no performance attached to it—there’s just a budget to do a recording and give it to them as a final product. For one reason it’s inspired me to take a leap in a new direction. I decided to take a chance and work in an area I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is vocal music. At first I conceived the project as a sort of sextet with vocalists, violin, cello, electric bass, and myself playing percussion and electronic percussion. Now I’m envisioning more musicians being involved. But the main issue is what I’m going to be writing are songs. They will be more akin to popular traditions these days. I got particularly inspired in this direction by (singer/songwriter) Ani Defranco. I think she’s absolutely incredible. I’ve been swallowing up her whole ouvré. And if I had more of a budget, I’d try to persuade her to produce the record. But that is probably beyond my financial means. I do plan to contact her along the way because I think she is a fabulous musician, singer, songwriter, guitarist, artist. I’m also particularly moved by the content of her work. It’s more or less the area I’m interested in writing about because I’m writing both the music and the lyrics.”

Even with his hands full composing, it’s likely that Gerry Hemingway won’t be able to stay away from performing for too long. He’s more apt to go out on a short tour here and there, keeping his mind open for new ideas and inspiration. You can keep up with his activities by checking out his web sight (which he maintains himself) at: www.geryhemingway.com