LOCAL ARTISTS
Established jazz musician and Texas State Professor of Practice Hank Hehmsoth has achieved a great deal in his long musical career, but his talents don’t stop at the stage; he is also a talented physical artist as well, using Procreate on his iPad to bring vibrant pieces to life, many of which are inspired by jazz, of course.
Hehmsoth’s dad taught him how to play piano when he was around two to three years old, and his love of music took off from there.
“I was actually reading music before I was reading English. So it’s like my first language,” he said. “I grew up playing classical music with [my father], and he stuck me in college when I was 12 years old. He said, ‘That’s all I can teach you.’ So I had all this advanced stuff up front, and my degrees were in classical piano. I had this great artist in residence at UT, and I put on an all-Beethoven Sonata concert. I thought that was going to be really great, until the point where I realized I didn’t want to just practice all the time and come out and play once or twice a year.”
Hehmsoth was intrigued and drawn to the novel elements of the jazz genre; paired with the ability to play more shows, it was a desirable combination.
“Every time you play, you’re improvising, and it’s never the same,” he said. “It never gets repeated, so it’s always fresh.”
He noticed that there were things that jazz pianists could do that he didn’t know, which was something he felt he needed to address.
“I went to New York and studied jazz and came back,” Hehmsoth said “I’ve been playing jazz now for 50 years.”
He and a friend John Mills had always admired each other’s music and decided to start a band called Double Vision, which has a monthly show at the Elephant Room, located at 315 Congress Avenue in Austin. They’ve been playing in each other’s bands for 40 years.
And those are not the only creative endeavors Hehmsoth has stuck to for decades; He has been working at Texas State University in jazz piano and composition for 28 years now.
“I just got promoted to a full Professor of Practice, which is kind of a unique position,” Hehmsoth said. “I’m not actually an academician. I’m just a player who’s been successful. So when you get hired as a professor of practice, they hire you to tell students and teach students about what it’s really like out there in the real world and how to make it outside of school.”
Throughout his music career, he has had several storied achievements, including playing saxophone on the theme music for the Academy Award winning film Arthur, being the pianist for the Austin symphony, appearing on David Letterman and playing piano for the live-concert shows of the the movie “La La Land,” to name a few.
Hehmsoth has now expanded to physical art mediums as well. Though he could always draw, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he started to take his pieces to the next level. He was still sketching; but those were scanned and uploaded into Adobe Illustrator, so he could “play” with his work.
“Then just over Christmas, I got an iPad Pro and a program called Procreate … and then an Apple pencil. And I really love that,” Hehmsoth said. “I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff from just 2025 that I’ve been doing exclusively that way because it’s so clean; and I could do it in my bed, on my iPad at two in the morning and work on stuff.”
Hehmshoth has had several art shows recently and some upcoming exhibits as well. He had an exhibit from April to June called Winging It, which was at the Walkers’ Gallery located in the halls of the San Marcos Activity Center on 501 East Hopkins Street. He had two original works in the show, which were part of a series he calls Time, Space, Fabrics.
“That explores the intersection of my music and my artwork,” he said. “The theme of the show, Winging It, seemed to be exactly what I do. The theme was about birds and flight and improvisation, so that kind of lined up perfectly with jazz.”
Hehmsoth also has a show currently in the Walker’s Gallery called Expressions of Freedom, which runs until Aug. 23.
“I have a piece called The Reach for Innocence, and that’s a kind of celebration of the childhood freedoms to dream. And another one is called Thought Races, which is [about] the chaos of free thinking in creativity,” he said. “Both of them kind of explore freedom in different forms, but it’s [a representation of] imagination and identity and expression.”
Hehmsoth is also a writer and publishes his pieces in a couple of magazines.
“One’s called the Jazz Journalist Association and the other is All About Jazz,” he said. “I just had my fourth article to come out in All About Jazz last week. I write about jazz history, and I just finished this article on the jazz legacy of Harlem.”
Read Hehmsoth’s articles at allaboutjazz.com/ articles-by-hankjazz.
