The work of saxophonist Julius Hemphill hasn't had the sort of resurgence that he would have enjoyed had he been around to see it. Many of his recordings remain out of print, including his masterpiece Dogon A.D., which is tied up in a legal dispute over rights. There's been no box set and even his repertory band, the Julius Hemphill Sextet, smoldered and seems nearly to have extinguished.

The sextet did to seem keep working under his lead after illness prevented him from playing, and released a second record of his pieces after his death in 1995. Tim Berne, who has been fighting to release Dogon on his Screwgun label, reissued two great recordings under the name Blue Boye. And the World Saxophone Quartet - the group he founded and worked with for twelve years - dedicated Requiem for Julius to him in 2000.

Tzadik has issued a properly austere volume of the saxophonist's compositions. Marty Ehrlich, who kept the Sextet alive after its founder's death (and who along with Berne is one of Hemphill's most faithful disciples) produced One Atmosphere, which presents three significant works for three very different groupings of musicians. From the playing to the packaging to, of course, the music itself, it's a disc that befits a jazz innovator never quite given his due.

A few years before his death, Hemphill had been talking about arranging Charles Mingus' compositions for string quartet (and indeed from the four horns of WSQ to the six of the sextet, Hemphill was one of the few in jazz who could make ensembles of like instruments really cook). The Mingus project seems either lost or never realized, but the title track of this disc hints at what we might have heard. It received its premiere at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City in 1992, performed by Ursula Oppens and the Arditti Quartet. Here, Oppens reprises it (all the pieces on the disc are newly recorded) with the Pacifica String Quartet. At just nine minutes, it's a powerful work, showing hints of classicism but moving into Hemphill's more familiar terrain by the end.

Ehlrich revives "Savannah Smile," a tune from 1978 that Hemphill wrote for his trio with cellist Abdul Wadud. Erik Friedlander sits in for Wadud, ably playing the strong, heavy lines while Pheeroan Aklaff keeps time behind the drums.

The major piece on the disc is Water Music for Woodwinds, a sprawling, four-part, 30-minute suite for septet. The rolling, in-and-out-of-time horns, the gentle unison lines and the sweet flute statements make this the most recognizably Hemphill music here. It pulls together the serenity and the swing of his sax ensembles and frames them in a nearly perfect arrangement. And while the post-Julius sextet lacked luster at times, this group (with Berne, Ehlrich, Sam Furnace, Robert DeBellis, JD Parran and Hemphill's WSQ-mate Oliver Lake) plays with passion. Although it was composed in 1976, it is perhaps Hemphill's most cogent statement for multiple horns.

The energy is unusual for a posthumous dedication (at least on record), but even more unusual is that the collection works as a whole. The chamber piece begins in elegy but soon starts to swing. The trio picks up the baton, but Ehlrich sticks to the flute, building nicely from the strings and leading to the feature presentation. Surprisingly, One Atmosphere is one of Hemphill's best records.