A Blues Surrealist

Julius Hemphill’s music uses stark, lyrical abstraction and svelte dissonances to confront the vicissitudes of black American life.

“I like to make things,” the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill told an interviewer from the Smithsonian in 1994, a year before his death from diabetes. “It might not equate to the great American novel…but I can hold your attention for a little while.”

for the full New York Review of Books review, click HERE