A suite of four pieces for saxophone, trumpet, and percussion, with titles stylized as “#One,” “#Two,” “#Three,” and “#Four.” The scores appear in Music Manuscript Notebook 1 (MM1); trumpet parts for these works appear in Music Manuscript Notebook 5 (MMN5). (Note that there is also a score for a different piece titled #3 in the archival collection.) Of these four compositions, “Four” seems to have been frequently performed as a free-standing piece, as there are additional parts and arrangements in the archive. The archive includes recordings of all four pieces in materials from Lee Kaplan and Baikida Carroll.
From Marty Ehrlich: These works were composed most likely composed around 1976 or 1977. Baikida Carroll included “#Four” in his listing of pieces that were in the repertoire of the Hemphill quartet in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Tim Berne and I attended a concert in downtown Brooklyn where Hemphill performed these pieces with Lester Bowie on trumpet and Don Moye on percussion. This may have been the premiere performance of this suite. The concert was sponsored by Arthur Custer, a composer with whom Hemphill would have worked in his role as executive director of BAG. Custer, who left St. Louis in 1970, was the director of MECA (Metropolitan Educational Center for the Arts), an arts program for high school and younger students that met in the warehouse building used by the Black Artist Group (BAG). This is where I met Malinké Elliott, J.D. Parran, and other members of the BAG, as well as numerous other artists.