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What piece of art changed your life? How did it affect you?
Hearing Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. for the first time was a life-changing experience for me. It was the first so-called avant-garde jazz recording that seemed to fuse all of the different musics that I was listening to into one. I was listening to a lot of funk and r&b as well jazz, and this recording seemed to have it all while still being totally original. The writing really spoke to me as well.
I was quite fortunate to be able to study extensively with Julius several years later, when I began playing saxophone.
Saxophonist Tim Berne and his band, Snakeoil, recently played An die Musik, and An die proprietor Henry Wong reports that the show was "splendid," and the same can be said of Berne's new Snakeoil disc for ECM. And you can sublime to that assessment as Berne strolls uptown with downtown swagger and backalley daring. Let's hope his association with ECM continues.
