If you only know Julius Hemphill from the World Saxophone Quartet, you're missing the stranger, better stuff. He grew up in Fort Worth playing rhythm and blues gigs, which is why his alto never lost that fat, vocal, almost preacherly tone even when the music around it got abstract. Then he landed in St. Louis in the late 1960s and fell in with the Black Artists Group, a collective doing for the Midwest what the AACM was doing in Chicago — mixing theater, poetry, and free improvisation with a serious interest in African American history and form. That combination of raw blues feeling and rigorous compositional thinking is the whole story of Hemphill.

The record to start with is Dogon A.D. (1972). It's just a quartet — Hemphill on alto and flute, Abdul Wadud on cello, Baikida Carroll on trumpet, Philip Wilson on drums — but it doesn't sound like anything else from that period. The title track rides a loping, almost funky groove that never quite resolves, while Hemphill's writing keeps pulling the band sideways into dissonance and back. Wadud's cello is key here; it's not a novelty, it's doing the work a bass usually does but with more bite and more voice, and the interplay between the two of them became one of Hemphill's signature sounds for the rest of his career.

In 1976 Hemphill helped start the World Saxophone Quartet with Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, and David Murray — four saxophones, no rhythm section, which forced all of them to think like composers and arrangers every second they were playing. Hemphill wrote a lot of the group's best material and gave it a structure that kept the free playing from turning into noise for its own sake. He left the group in 1989, worn down by touring and disagreements over direction, and the band carried on without him, which tells you something about how collective that project really was even with his fingerprints all over it.

After leaving, Hemphill kept writing large, ambitious pieces — saxophone ensembles, a few multimedia and theater works, music that was more interested in form and narrative than in blowing sessions. He wasn't chasing attention with any of this; by the early 1990s his health was declining, he'd lost a leg to complications from diabetes, and he kept composing anyway, often for a saxophone sextet that let him keep exploring the ensemble-writing ideas that mattered most to him. He died in 1995, not especially famous outside of serious jazz circles, which is a shame because almost nobody wrote for horns the way he did.

What you're listening for with Hemphill is the tension between composition and freedom — pieces that feel loose and bluesy on the surface but are actually tightly constructed, with real harmonic logic underneath the squawks and smears. He never abandoned the blues, he just complicated it. If you want a way into American avant-garde jazz that doesn't feel like homework, start with Dogon A.D. (1972) and let that cello-and-alto conversation pull you in.