The Hard Blues

In February 1972, then 34-year-old alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill went into Archway Studio in St. Louis and recorded four tracks with three like-minded other musicians.  They pressed three of the tracks onto vinyl on Hemphill's own Mbari label as Dogon A.D. and released only 500 copies.

The world is still catching up on what happened. Copies of that original release of 500 LPs now sell for $338 to $542, if you can find one at all.

The music can be classified as "free jazz" and rightly so.  The compositions, especially the title track, consist of extended improvisations framed by short composed sections.  But the playing lacks a lot of the dissonant, atonal cacophony associated with much free jazz.  Instead, Hemphill and his cello player (no bass) get locked into a groove and in the title track, they ride that groove for nearly 15 minutes, with trumpeter Baikaida Yaseen briefly jumping onboard.  Drummer Philip Wilson is admirably restrained, allowing a lot of empty space in the sound to give the piece a cool late-night feel.

Clive Davis' Arista Records re-released the album to wider distribution in 1977, and I first heard the track Dogon A.D. on Boston University's NPR station WBUR around that time on d.j. Steve Schwartz' late-night jazz show. Sometimes he'd play the track as the last selection of the evening before the station succumbed to overnight silence.  

A CD version of the album was finally released in 2011 and included The Hard Blues, the fourth track from that 1972 session.  Prior to the CD release, the 1972 version of The Hard Blues only appeared on Hemphill's 1975 album, Coon Bid'ness.  Although there are other albums by Hemphill that have different versions of The Hard Blues, none compare to his original version with cellist Abdul Wadud. The 2011 CD rightly and finally reunites all four tracks from the St. Louis session onto one album.

The album, especially the complete CD version, is one of my all-time favorites.  AllMusic gave the original album 5 out of 5 stars, and said "This important music is better to be heard than described."

However, that's easier said than done.  Both the vinyl and CD versions have long been out of print.  The album is not available on Spotify, Amazon Music, or other streaming site.  Fortunately, an upload of the track exists on YouTube with reasonable sound quality.  But that's been about it. I've searched online but I'm not about to shell out $500 for a vinyl copy.  I've lurked in share threads and even sniffed around the dark web and couldn't find anything.

But last week, by a miraculous stroke of luck, I found the CD available for free download, and as lossless FLAC files at that.  I'm ecstatic to finally have all four tracks in my personal collection once again.

Here's the funny thing, though.  There are two relatively short tracks sandwiched between Dogon A.D. and The Hard Blues on the album. They're not bad tracks by any means, but are somewhat forgettable compared to the protean masterpieces surrounding them.  But on listening to my new acquisition, I was surprised how well I knew those two tracks, how familiar they were to my ears.  I can only draw one conclusion - sometime in the late 70s, I must have owned a vinyl copy of the Arista LP version.

During the 70s, street vendors in front of Boston University buildings used to sell used LPs at quite reasonable costs, usually a dollar per album.  My guess is that I bought a copy back then (if I saw it on sale, how could I pass?) and played it several times, but then it got "lost" somewhere in my vinyl collection, or disappeared during one of my frequent moves from apartment to apartment, or got sold as I transitioned my collection from vinyl to CD.  I could have sworn I never owned a copy, but there's no denying my familiarity that those two "minor" tracks, a familiarity that couldn't have been based on radio play or other medium.

Anyway, last February marked the 50th anniversary of the recording of Dogon A.D., which to me still sounds as startlingly fresh as it did on WBUR radio in 1977.