Roi Boyé and the Gotham Minstrels by Julius Hemphill (Sackville)

JULIUS HEMPHILL’S extraordinary multitracked “audiodrama” was recorded in Toronto in March 1977, but its imaginative setting is a Gothic sonic vision of New York City, full of what Hemphill called “phantasmagorical associations” which provoke “anguish and other human emotions within that range.”

So what was an alto saxophonist born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1938 and tutored by his great clarinet-playing townsman John Carter, doing, writing and recording such a fiercely original work about a huge cosmopolis so far from his home city?

Hemphill played in R&B bands, did his stint in the US army and blew saxophone in Ike Turner’s band before moving to St Louis, where he helped form the Black Artists Group, started a working band and a record label Mbari on which he cut his first album, Dogon, in 1972.

He settled in New York from 1974 and became a key figure in the avant-garde jazz loft scene.

In 1976 Hemphill became a founding member and the leading writer/arranger of the World Saxophone Quartet.

Always an innovator and the protagonist of a host of revolutionary musical projects, his final years involved a constant struggle against a chronic heart condition.

His work often had a keen political edge, such as his Chile/New York album of 1980.

He died in 1995 after a life of pushing many a jazz boundary.

The Roi Boyé and the Gotham Minstrels double album is starkly adventurous. It is a solo work of jazz theatre, but one in which prepared tapes are as essential as the palette of sounds of the alto and soprano saxophones and flute that Hemphill plays throughout the recording.

In his sleeve notes he writes that “the environmental sounds and verbal images are peculiar to various landmarks and locales within the New York area.”

And he goes on to particularise the New York Subway, where “the sounds merge to form a specific cacophony; the larger stations amount to urban caverns that, during the pre-dawn hours when there is hardly any passenger traffic, allow the most minute sound to swell to awesome proportions; footsteps become the voice of a whip barking.”

And this was 1977, still not very long after some of the worst racist violence of the civil rights struggle and three years after the massacre at Attica prison in New York State, ordered by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, one of the richest men in the world.

Sounds that are echoes of these events, as well as those in Latin America and south-east Asia, where the US government’s burtal interventions and atrocities were still ripe and murderous, burst from the gut of Hemphill’s horns.

It is not the pseudo-heroics of Batman but the ghosts of Vietnam that hover over this Gotham City.

This “audiodrama” has no subtitles or demarcation of separate tracks. From its first notes and the double-tracked duo between alto saxophone and flute, it is an evocation of New York’s propensity for the blues, which seem to be seeping from its very brick and asphalt in one man’s troubled palaver between two levels of consciousness.

Yet the extraordinary dialogue of sounds is much more than a colloquy within the self.

For the living city is the prime protagonist, the vast city itself and its swathe of peoples, overground and underground, on concrete and in the air, in the multiplicity of people who live within, of all origins, of many histories, of a plethora of struggles.

Or those, who like the urban butterflies that Hemphill watches, “that don’t flutter, that don’t fly.”

After a pause, he blows a sweltering alto solo, almost Parkeresque, accompanied by the gradually increasing sound of the subway and a shout of “42nd Street: Watch the closing doors” before the discourse of horns continues.

It could be London, it could be Paris, it could be Toronto — it is the cosmopolis speaking.

Or it could be Manchester, or Liverpool, for the only comparable album which I know was recorded in Liverpool and the voices are the saxophones of Phil Hargreaves and Caroline Kraabel.

Where We Were: Shadows of Liverpool, the album’s called, and the city’s sounds are everywhere.

But Hemphill’s solo album is that of a pioneer, an urban explorer from black Texas who found macabre and beautiful sounds in a faraway city that had become a new home for thousands of his people. As such, it is a work of prophetic and perturbing truth.