Friday 11 September | 8:45pm | Royal City Mission
A Collection of Solo Works for Drums, Electro-Acoustic Materials, Spoken Word, and Song
with video projections by Beth Warshafsky
Gerry Hemingway . drums, electronics
photo by Ziga Koritnik, 2026
This is a fifty minute solo program by Gerry Hemingway, originally conceived and assembled for film during the lockdown period of the pandemic. This performance incorporates the projected visual art from my long time visual art collaborator, Beth Warshafsky.
“In the arena of what matters to me as an artist, the platform of solo performance is where I remain most willing to risk failure in order to touch a new possibility. Different streams of creative output in solo work have developed progressively over the years including multi-instrumentalism, extended techniques, interaction with electro-acoustic elements and extending my percussive vocabulary with my voice. My solo work is mostly composed in the sense that I organize and refine what I improvise to better shape the listening experience. However, I equally explore the “not-knowing” space in performance. More recently I have taken on a completely different path as an artist – that as a singer/songwriter which I will represent with a rendition of a traditional piece derived from Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “900 Miles From My Home” at the end of the program. To me songs, as well as stories, which I also include, represent a composite experience for the audience – all interrelated – all parts of a whole. Finally, this performance features three stand alone videos from Beth Warshafsky, with whom I have been collaborating with four decades. They include a piece she did for solo bowed cymbal, “Calling You,” which weaves memory and time together, as well as some excerpts from a very long work entitled “For Rashied”.
The program includes:
Solo for Cymbal (visual art Beth Warshafsky)
There is a Fire in my House
Tyrolienne Variations
Calling You (visual art Beth Warshafsky)
For Rashied (visual art Beth Warshafsky)
900 Miles From My Home
Gerry Hemingway has been creating and performing solo and ensemble music since 1974. He has led a number of quartet & quintets since the mid 80’s as well as being a member of a wide array of collaborative groups including BassDrumBone (whom celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2017), Brew w/Reggie Workman & Miya Masaoka, a trio with Georg Graewe & Ernst Reijseger, the Swiss based WHO trio with Michel Wintsch and Bänz Oester, Tree Ear with Sebastian Strinning and Manuel Troller, as well as numerous duo projects with Izumi Kimura, Marilyn Crispell, Samuel Blaser, Thomas Lehn, John Butcher, Ellery Eskelin, Jin-Hi Kim, a o. Mr. Hemingway is a Guggenheim fellow and has received numerous commissions for chamber and orchestral works. He is well known for his eleven years in the Anthony Braxton Quartet, his ongoing participation in projects with Reggie Workman including the collective trio Brew, along with his work with some of the world’s most outstanding improvisers and composers including Cecil Taylor, Mark Dresser, Anthony Davis, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, Frank Gratkowski, Simon Nabatov and many others. He currently lives in Switzerland having joined the faculty of the Hochschule Luzern between 2009 and 2022.
Beth Warshafsky is an artist whose work spans drawing, video, animation, live projection, photography, and text-based work including artist’s books. She often collaborates with musicians and dancers and is interested in the correspondences between sound, image, and movement as well as text and image. Her early background as a painter informs her approach to video, composition, and design. Her work moves between the amorphous boundaries of still and moving images in physical and digital spaces.