Greater Harmony

“This is a voice right out of them cotton fields, out of the neighborhood.”

n the concluding section of Marty Ehrlich’s gold-standard booklet notes for (New World), a seven-CD extravaganza culled from the 180 audio and visual documents contained in the Julius Hemphill Archive at NYU’s Fales Library, Ehrlich reminds us that Hemphill (1938-1995)—with whom he collaborated closely for a decade, and whose music he played and organized posthumously with the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Sextet—“would never