HENRY THREADGILL (b. February 15, 1944): Legendary, iconic, and highly versatile musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, ensemble leader, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI  NATAMBU

FALL, 2015

VOLUME TWO            NUMBER ONE 

JIMI HENDRIX 

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

LAURA MVULA
October 10-16

DIZZY GILLESPIE
October 17-23

LESTER YOUNG
October 24-30
 
TIA FULLER
October 31-November 6
 
ROSCOE MITCHELL
November 7-13

MAX ROACH
November 14-20
 
DINAH WASHINGTON
November 21-27

BUDDY GUY
November 28-December 4

JOE HENDERSON
December 5-11

HENRY THREADGILL
December 12-18

MUDDY WATERS
December 19-25

B.B. KING
December 26-January 1

http://www.jazz.com/encyclopedia/threadgill-henry-luther

Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians:

Threadgill, Henry (Luther)

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill is an iconoclast and individualist. These qualities are evident in his penchant for hybrid groups, his ability to cross musical boundaries, and collaborations that blend music with poetry, dance, and theater. He has shown a consistent interest in blurring the lines between composition and improvisation.


Threadgill often cites Jelly Roll Morton as a model, and he performs on saxophone, flute, and clarinet, as well as percussion and other instruments. He was one of the earliest members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization founded in Chicago in 1965.


Unlike many of his AACM peers, he has always preferred ensemble work, and has never recorded an entire unaccompanied solo project. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. His daughter, Pyeng Threadgill, whose mother is dancer and choreographer Christine Jones, has established her own career as a singer.


Early Life and Musical Training

Threadgill was born on February 15, 1944, in Chicago, where his extended family included an aunt who studied classical piano and voice, and an uncle, Nevin Wilson, who played bass in pianist Ahmad Jamal’s trio, and was a close friend of bassist Wilbur Ware.


The checkerboard of ethnic groups in Chicago’s city blocks provided Threadgill encounters with the music of Poland, Yugoslavia, Mexico, and country-and-western music. He encountered classical music on the radio and at school, and remembers finding himself absorbed in Tchaikovsky. He heard gospel music at church, and was impressed by the theatricality of religion. He also heard the blues and other black music at the Maxwell Street flea market.


He attended Chicago’s Englewood High School. Other Englewood alumni include AACM members Steve McCall and Roscoe Mitchell, bassist and trombonist Louis Satterfield, and saxophonist Donald Myrick, who would later gain fame as a member of the Phenix Horns, the permanent horn section of Earth, Wind, and Fire.


Threadgill credits Myrick as an influence and mentor during these formative years. At Englewood, Threadgill began playing the tenor and then baritone saxophones, inspired by local players including John Gilmore, Gene Ammons, Von Freeman, and Clifford Jordan. As a young teenager, Threadgill attended rehearsals and performances of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, and was impressed by the uniqueness of the bandleader’s musical and organizational approach.


After high school, Threadgill played with Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) marching bands in parades, as well as with blues, mariachi, gospel, and polka bands. He also enrolled at Wilson Junior College, which is now Kennedy-King College. There he met musicians who later joined him to create the AACM, including Joseph Jarman, Richard ‘Ari’ Brown, Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, and Roscoe Mitchell.


Jack DeJohnette, Eddie Harris, Bunky Green, and Betty Dupree were also students at Wilson with Threadgill. With the encouragement of faculty member Richard Wang, these students formed a music club, and invited Muhal Richard Abrams, the AACM’s future first president, to perform at the school.


Threadgill and other members of this cohort soon joined Abrams’s music workshop, now known as the Experimental Band, which laid the groundwork for the AACM. Every member was expected to compose music, with a part for every musician in the ensemble, regardless of instrument. Threadgill recalls first creating a piece for the Experimental Band around 1962, adding momentum to the composing he had begun in high school.


In the following decade, Threadgill built on his experience from Wilson at Governors State University and then at the American Conservatory of Music (ACM), where he ultimately received a degree in flute performance and composition. He studied clarinet there, and remembers learning pieces by Poulenc and Hindemith. Stella Roberts, Threadgill’s composition teacher at ACM, had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.


‘I wasn't in those programs to get [a] degree; I was there just to take everything they had,’ Threadgill later told Gene Santoro. This attitude of immersing himself in any possible musical experience remained Threadgill’s modus operandi in any setting.


He toured the U.S. with Philadelphia-based evangelist Horace Shepherd in 1963 and 1964. In the late 1960s, he toured with gospel singer Jo Jo Morris. With Shepherd, especially, he remembers being fascinated by the ability of the group’s highly trained musicians to shift gears based on the emotional trajectory of the service, making each performance unpredictable and unique.


The AACM was founded in May of 1965, and Threadgill was among its earliest members. But like many of his AACM colleagues, he had to leave Chicago for military service in 1966. He first worked in the Army as a musician and arranger’until, he claims, his arrangement of a patriotic song struck Army brass as disrespectful, and he was sent to Vietnam. Threadgill’s stint in the army however introduced him to top-notch musicians and allowed him to dedicate much of his energies to music.


He returned to Chicago in 1968 and joined the AACM Big Band, and also worked with Philip Cohran, one of the AACM’s four original founders. Cohran had by then moved away from the collective, and what he saw as its tendency to be too ‘out,’ and founded the Affro-Arts Theater.


Threadgill visited New York City in 1969, but soon returned to Chicago, where he recorded for the first time with Muhal Richard Abrams’s all-AACM quintet in the summer of that year, on the album Young at Heart, Wise in Time.


Career As a Leader


In early 1970s Threadgill turned his energies towards composing for and leading groups of his own. The first of these was Air, a trio with Fred Hopkins on bass, and AACM founder Steve McCall on drums. Threadgill played saxophones and the hubkaphone, a found-sound percussion instrument he built out of hubcaps.

Initially called Reflection, the trio was formed for a one-time event’a 1971 centennial celebration of ragtime composer Scott Joplin’s birth, held at Chicago’s Columbia College. Columbia also commissioned Threadgill to score for modern dance performances at this time.


The trio renamed itself Air after moving to New York in 1975, where many of the AACM members had also moved. The three worked more or less as a collective, both musically and organizationally, although the bulk of the composed material was Threadgill’s.

Air toured widely and recorded nine albums together, the best known of which is Air Lore in 1979. The album was a rare exception to the original-music-only credo of the AACM, but a return to the trio’s roots, which included arrangements of Joplin rags and two Jelly Roll Morton pieces. A reconfigured trio, New Air, recorded two albums in the mid-1980s.

As Air’s members became increasingly busy in New York, Threadgill embarked on larger-scale projects under his own name. The first was X-75, which, like many of his endeavors to come, brought together unlikely combinations of instruments, often in pairs or even multiples. In X-75, Threadgill used four basses including a piccolo bass, four woodwinds and a vocalist. The group recorded only one album, X-75 (vol. 1).


Threadgill worked widely in New York, with the David Murray Octet and Bill Laswell’s collective, Material. He then put together another ensemble that would be his most visible effort for several years’the Henry Threadgill Sextet, or Sextett, as he sometimes called it.


The group featured instrument pairs, which allowed him to compose for sections of strings, brass and percussion: bass and cello, trumpet and trombone, and two drummers. These three pairs combined to create the sound of Threadgills sextet.’ Threadgill was the one-man woodwind section, playing alto saxophone, clarinet, and various flutes. This ‘little orchestra,’ as he called it, allowed him to experiment with Ellingtonian cross-sectional voicing.

Threadgill’s broad range of experiences contributed to a rich compositional palette for the Sextett across its six album and eight years together. The group recorded fight songs, calypsos, gospel, and blues swirled with odd-metered post-modern classical structures, with the energy of free jazz. The two drummers played a central part in the ensemble, often introducing pieces or spelling the horn players with high-energy duos, like a parade band percussion section.


The early 1990s saw the end of Threadgill’s Sextett and the birth of the Very Very Circus, an ensemble composed of his reeds, a French horn, two guitars, two tubas, and drums. He also began to receive numerous nominations and awards in jazz magazine critics and readers polls.


His composition and arranging projects for others multiplied, and even his own albums featured chamber music-like pieces on which he did not play. One of these is 1993’s Song Out of My Trees, where a quartet of graduated acoustic guitars teamed up with pianist Myra Melford.

Wider critical reception led to a major-label contract with Columbia Records in 1995, which did not last long. ‘When I signed,’ he told writer Dan Ouellette, ‘the divorce papers were already being drafted.’ Gradually, the Very Very Circus gave way to Make a Move’guitar, accordion (or vibraphone), electric bass, drums, and Threadgill’s saxophone.

Zooid was Threadgill’s next hybrid group. It included guitar, oud, cello, tuba, and drums, along with the leader’s woodwinds. Always known for thorough compositional organization, Threadgill began in this group to employ improvisational strategies based not on chords but on sets of intervals, making it difficult even for well-trained ears to predict the frequency of cyclic repetition.


Over the years, much of Threadgill’s work has gone unrecorded, sometimes by choice. He has always preferred the interaction and unpredictability of group performances to solo work. His twenty-some-member Society Situation Orchestra has performed infrequently in the U.S. and abroad. For Threadgill, the group’s chief function is to provide live music for dancing, not to be documented.

He also leads the WindString Ensemble, which includes saxophone, violin, viola, cello, and tuba, another section-based group he calls 3+3: three cellos, tuba, drums, and his flute and saxophone, and a marching band.


In 2001, he organized a multimedia event centered on the poetry of Derek Walcott, with dancers, visual art, spoken word, and music composed for an octet. He has written pieces for chamber orchestra, saxophone quartet, for organ and orchestra, and an ensemble he conducts called Aggregation Orb, which includes French horn, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, acoustic guitar, oud, tuba, hand drums, drumset, vibraphone/marimba, and vocals.


Threadgill’s versatility can best be summed up in his own words. ‘I do music, period’ Jazz. European orchestral music. American religious music, white and black. Parades. All types of functional music. All music, period. All of it.’

Instrumentography 

Alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, clarinet, flute, alto flute, baritone flute, bass flute, percussion, hubkaphone, hub ‘T’ wall, Chinese musette, Eastern banjo, gongs, percussion, little instruments, cymbal gongs, finger cymbals, gong, garbage can bottoms, handbells, plumbing brass, rhythm sticks, hackbrett, vocals.


Selected List of Commissioned Works and Other Performances:

Solo alto saxophone piece played by Anthony Braxton at an AACM recital c. 1969.


‘RSVP,’ with Mordine & Company, at Columbia College, Chicago, c. 1971.


‘May the Angels Take You into Heaven on Earth,’ for Quintet for Strings and Woodwinds, Carnegie Hall, 1983.
 
‘The Android That Terminated Hugh-Pinkston Sells and Committed Suicide,’ New York


Art Institute (Wind-String Ensemble), 1984.

‘Premier Piece, Second Quintet,’ Carnegie Hall, 1985.


‘Thomas Cole, a Walking Dream’ (The New York Shakespeare Festival), 1985.


‘Run Silent, Run Deep, Run Loud, Run High,’ the Brooklyn Academy of Music/Next


Wave Festival (conducted by Hale Smith), 1987.


‘Flores y Animales,’ with Mordine & Company, at Columbia College, Chicago, c. 1989.


‘Background for Saxophones,’ commissioned by the Rova Saxophone Quartet, 1989.


‘Mix for Orchestra,’ commissioned for the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra (Max Roach, soloist; conducted by Dennis Russell Davis), 1993.
 
‘he didn’t give up/he was taken,’_quartet for baritone voice, violin, alto saxophone, and piano. _Text by Thulani Davis. Recorded on Mitchell’s release Pilgrimage (Lovely Music, 1995).


‘Veryation for Organ and Orchestra’ (conducted by Petr Kotik), 1997.


‘On Walcott’ (European tour), 1997, (New York City), 2001.

‘And Yet’ for orchestra, performed by the S.E.M. Ensemble at Brooklyn’s Willow Place Auditorium (conducted by Petr Kotik), 2001.

 
‘Peroxide,’ an ‘evening-length work’ commissioned by the Miller Theatre at Columbia


University (dedicated to the Columbia’s 250th anniversary), 2003.


Discography:

As a leader:

With Air:

Air Song (Why Not, 1975)

Live Air (Black Saint, 1976)

Wildflowers 1 (Douglas, 1976)

Air Raid (Why Not, 1976)

Air Time (Nessa, 1977)

Open Air Suit (Arista/Novus, 1978)

Live at Montreux 1978 (Arista/Novus, 1978)

Air Lore (Arista/Novus, 1979)

Air Mail (Black Saint, 1980)

80’ Below ‘82 (Antilles, 1982)

With X-75:

X-75 volume 1 (Arista/Novus, 1979)

With New Air:

Live at the Montreal International Jazz Festival (Black Saint, 1983)

Air Show No. 1, featuring Cassandra Wilson (Black Saint, 1986)


With the Henry Threadgill Sextet (or Sextett):

When Was That?(About Time, 1981)

Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket (About Time, 1983)

Subject to Change (About Time, 1984)

You Know the Number (RCA/Novus, 1986)

Easily Slip into Another World (RCA/Novus, 1987)

Rag, Bush and All (RCA/Novus, 1988)

With Very Very Circus:

Spirit of Nuff ‘ Nuff (Black Saint, 1990)

Live at Koncepts (Taylor Made, 1991)

Too Much Sugar for a Dime (Axiom, 1993)

Carry the Day (Columbia, 1995)

Song Out of My Trees (Black Saint, 1993)

With Make a Move:

Where’s Your Cup? (Columbia, 1996)

Everybody’s Mouth’s a Book (Pi, 2001)


With Zooid


Up Popped the Two Lips (Pi, 2001)

Pop Start the Tape, StoP (Hardedge, 2003)

With other artists or on compilations:

Muhal Richard Abrams: Young at Heart, Wise in Time (Delmark, 1969).

Chico Freeman: Morning Prayer (Why Not, 1976)

Roscoe Mitchell: Nonaah (Nessa, 1977)

Anthony Braxton: For Trio (Arista, 1977)

Muhal Richard Abrams: 1-OQA+19 (Black Saint, 1977)

Frank Walton: Reality (Delmark, 1978)

Roscoe Mitchell: L-R-G/The Maze/S-II Examples (Nessa, 1978)

David Murray Octet: Ming (Black Saint, 1980)

David Murray Octet: Home (Black Saint, 1981)

David Murray Octet: Murray’s Steps (Black Saint, 1982)

Material: Memory Servess (Celluloid, 1981)

Material: The Third Powers (Axiom, 1991)

Various Artists: Amarcord Nino Rotas (Hannibal, 1981)

Billy Bang/Craig Harris: Hip Hop Be Bops (ITM, 1993)

Sly & Robbie: Rhythm Killerss (Island, 1987)

Bahia Black: Ritual Beating Systems (Axiom, 1991)

Kip Hanrahan/Paul Haines: Darn It!s (American Clave, 1992)

Kip Hanrahan/Paul Haines: A Thousand Nights and a Night (Shadow Night - 1) :(American Clav’, 1994 ‘ 1996)


Various Artists: Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus (Columbia, 1992)

 Sola: Blues in the East (Axiom, 1994)

Leroy Jenkins: Themes & Improvisations on the Blues (CRI, 1994)

Abiodun Oyewole: 25 Years (Rykodisc, 1996)

Flute Force Four: Flutistry (Black Saint, 1997)

Jean-Paul Bourelly: Trance Atlantic - Boom Bop II (Challenge, 1997’2001)

Jean-Paul Bourelly: Boom Bop (Jazz Magnet, 1999)

Douglas Ewart and Inventions Clarinet Choir: Angles of Entrance (Arawak, 1998)

Ejigayehu ‘Gigi’ Shibabaw: Gigi (Palm Pictures, 2001)

Lucky Peterson: Black Midnight Sun (Dreyfus Records, 2002)

Billy Bang: Vietnam: Reflections (Justin Time, 2004)

Dafnis Prieto: Absolute Quintet (Zoho Music, 2006)


Contributor: Greg Campbell

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/03/henry-threadgill-outstanding-composer.html

Saturday, February 15, 2014

HENRY THREADGILL: Outstanding Composer, Bandleader, and Multi-Instrumentalist On His 70th Birthday

HENRY THREADGILL
(b. February 15, 1944)

http://vimeo.com/10933418

Roulette TV:
HENRY THREADGILL & ZOOID
from Roulette Intermedium PLUS
2011

Henry Threadgill's Zooid performs “All The Way Light Touch” - commissioned by Roulette with funds by the Baisley Powell Elebash Trust.
Henry Threadgill is one of the great musical masterminds of the past quarter century - a composer, arranger, and innovator who transcends genres in contemporary music. A multi instrumentalist whose principle axes include alto sax and flute, Threadgill emerged from Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Tonight He presents "All the Way Light Tough" with his band Zooid commissioned by Roulette with funds by the Baisley Powell Elebash Trust and is a special shooting for the next edition of Roulette TV.

“It would be difficult to overestimate Henry Threagill’s role in perpetually altering the meaning of jazz..…He has changed our underlying assumptions of what jazz can and should be.”

Henry Threadgill, is both a composer and multi-instrumentalist. He studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He co-majored in piano and flute, along with composition. He has had a music career for over forty years as both a leader and as a composer.
Threadgill’s music has been performed by many of his long lasting instrumental ensembles, including the trio Air, the seven-piece Sextett, Very Very Circus, twenty-piece Society Situation Dance Band, X-75, Make a Move, Aggregation Orb, and his current group Zooid. He has recorded many albums as a leader of various ensembles.

Henry Threadgill’s works for large orchestras, such as ˜Run Silent, Run Deep, Run Loud, Run High” (conducted by Hale Smith), and “Mix for Orchestra” (conducted by Dennis Russell Davies) were both premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987 and 1993 respectively. Pi Recordings is excited to announce the release of an important new recording, This Brings Us To, from Henry Threadgill with his band Zooid. Threadgill is one of the most highly respected composers / conceptualists in music today: He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a United States Artist Fellowship in 2008. An early member of the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Threadgill continues to hold fast to that august organization’s tenets: keeping an open mind to all creative possibilities and continuing to seek new challenges. He has intensively studied the music of everyone from Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Luciano Berio to Mario Bauzá, along with the music of Bali, India, the West Indies and Japan and filters all of these and other influences through jazz, R&B and the blues to come up with compositions that are distinctly his own.

This Brings Us To is the first release from Threadgill since 2001’s Everybodys Mouth’s a Book (Pi01) and Up Popped the Two Lips (Pi02). He has spent those eight years, the longest time between releases in his career, creating and perfecting a new system of improvisation in a group setting. A zooid is a cell that is able to move independently of the larger organism to which it belongs, an apt description of the musical language that Threadgill has developed for this band. The compositions are organized along a series of interval blocks comprised of three notes, each of which is assigned to a musician, who is free to move around within these intervals, improvising melodies and creating counterpoint to one another. The system provides the framework for open dialogue within the group while encouraging the musicians to seek new ways to improvise, away from a reliance on chord changes, scales or any of the clichés of certain “free” jazz. The music is coupled with complex rhythms, another distinctive aspect of all of Threadgill’s music. He was among the first in jazz to use constantly shifting meters, which creates a layered rhythmic effect, while maintaining a steady pulse. Despite its rhythmic intricacy, his music maintains a grooving, funky vibe, even though there is rarely a “1” to be found anywhere. This quality, later co-opted by Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson and the M-Base Collective, has had a profound effect on much of the music and the drumming styles that one hears in jazz today.

http://www.mosaicrecords.com/prodinformation:

 
Talk to Henry Threadgill about the influences in his music, and he is drawn to talk about food. Or patterns of light in the sky. Or a building across the street from a rehearsal studio. Talking about an instrument's role in a composition, he is likely to mention not the rhythm of the drums, but the tuning, and a discussion about harmony becomes a question of how much white and red to add to the painting. He is not trying to be pretentious or profound. He is telling you how his mind works to create the things he hears.
Henry Threadgill was a founding member of the now legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) of Chicago, but before and since he has been a founding member of the Henry Threadgill college of making music that matters. And to Threadgill, all music matters - Charlie Parker and street marching bands and Poulenc and Balinese dance. Now, this first big collection of his music provides an opportunity to hear how those ideas collided, entwined, and rainbowed across an almost uninterrupted span of nearly 20 years.
 
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Henry_Threadgill/

HENRY THREADGILL

The jazz avant-garde has produced dozens of notable improvisers (not surprisingly, since improvisation is arguably the music’s defining element) but relatively few great composers. Henry Threadgill is a member of that exclusive club. With his fellow Chicagoans Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams, he’s one of the most original jazz composers of his generation. Threadgill’s art transcends stylistic boundaries. He embraces the world of music in its entirety, from ragtime to circus marches to classical to bop, free jazz, and beyond. Such might sound merely eclectic in the telling, but in truth, Threadgill always sounds like Threadgill. A given project might exploit a particular genre or odd instrumentation, but whatever the slant, it always bears its composer’s inimitable personality. Threadgill is also an alto saxophonist of distinction; his dry, heavily articulated manner is a precursor to that of a younger Chicagoan, the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman (no coincidence, one would suspect). Threadgill took up music as a child, first playing percussion in marching bands, then learning baritone sax and clarinet. He was involved with the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) from its beginnings in the early ’60s, collaborating with fellow members Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell and playing in Muhal Richard Abrams’ legendary Experimental Band. From 1965-1967 he toured with the gospel singer Jo Jo Morris. He then served in the military for a time, performing with an army rock band. After his discharge, he returned to Chicago, where he played in a blues band and resumed his association with Abrams and the AACM. He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in music at the American Conservatory of Music; he also studied at Governor’s State University. In 1971 he formed Reflection with drummer Steve McCall and bassist Fred Hopkins. The trio would re-form four years later as Air and would go on to record frequently to great acclaim. It’s 1979 album Air Lore featured contemporary takes on such early jazz tunes as “King Porter Stomp” and “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” prefiguring the wave of nostalgia which was to dominate jazz in the following decade. Threadgill moved to New York in the mid-’70s, where he began forming and composing for a number of ensembles. Threadgill began showing a love for unusual instrumentation; for instance, his Sextett (actually a septet), used a cellist, and his Very Very Circus included two tubas. In the mid-’90s he landed a (short-lived) recording contract with Columbia, which produced a couple of excellent albums. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s Threadgill’s music became increasingly polished and sophisticated. A restless soul, he never stood still, creating for a variety of top-notch ensembles, every one different. A pair of 2001 releases illustrates this particularly well. On Up Popped the Two Lips (Pi Recordings), his Zooid ensemble combines Threadgill’s alto and flute with acoustic guitar, oud, tuba, cello, and drums — an un-jazz-like instrumentation that nevertheless grooves and swings with great agility. Everybodys Mouth’s a Book features his Make a Move band, which consists of the leader’s horns, with vibes and marimba, electric and acoustic guitars, electric bass, and drums — a more traditional setup in a way, but no less original in concept.

by Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide

http://aacm-newyork.com/henrythreadgill.html

Henry Threadgill--Composer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader has been a seminal figure in the vanguard of contemporary instrumental music since the early-70's. He has created a body of music that includes more than 150 recorded works which, while firmly rooted in America's Great Black Music tradition, often integrate forms and instruments historically associated with chamber or orchestral music. It's no surprise that Threadgill won Best Composer honors in Down Beat's International Jazz Critics Poll in 1990, 1989 and 1988, when he placed in 11 categories and had two albums nominated as Record of the Year. A more remarkable tribute to his talent and craft is the fact that he received the composer award in 1988 and 1989 from Down Beat's Readers as well.

Threadgill's music has been performed by some of the most acclaimed and adventurous instrumental ensembles of the past two decades: the trio Air, which emerged from the core membership of Chicago's visionary cooperative the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.) to become one of the most influential bands of the '70s and early '80s; the resourceful seven-piece Sextett he formed in the early '80s and led through the advent of the '90s; such speciality units as X-75, his 20-piece Society Situation Dance Band and his Marching Band; and his current group, Very Very Circus. He has also received diverse commissions ranging from music for small ensembles such as the Roscoe Mitchell and Rova Saxophone Quartets, to larger works for the American Jazz Orchestra "Salute to Harold Arlen", the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Born in Chicago in 1944, Threadgill began playing music when he was five, inspired by an aunt who was a classical pianist and vocalist. He started taking piano lessons when he was nine and picked up the saxophone when he entered high school, starting out on tenor and additing the alto when he began playing in a church band. He cites tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Wardell Gray as early influences, followed by Gene Ammons, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins. Saxophonists Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman were later inspirations on alto. Threadgill continued his formal musical education at Wilson Junior College and received a degree in flute and composition from the American Conservatory of Music. It was at Wilson that he first met Muhal Richard Abrams, an important mentor whose Experimental Band of the early-'60s would evolve into the A.A.C.M. Threadgill played with Abrams band briefly, but eventually decided to concentrate on playing in church orchestras, dance bands and college ensembles before going into the army where he was a musician in the infantry in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.

After returning to the U.S., Threadgill finished his service based near St. Louis where he spent most weekends with Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill and other members of another cooperative, the Black Artists Group (B.A.G.). Upon his discharge in 1969, he returned to Chicago, sought out Abrams, joined the A.A.C.M. and met bassist Fred Hopkins and percussionist Steve McCall. The three formed the trio Air in 1972 and the ensemble went on to record a dozen critically-acclaimed albums and tour throughout North America, Europe and Japan before disbanding in 1985.

Threadgill moved to New York City in 1975 and quickly became an integral and influential member of creative circles flourishing in lower Manhattan's lofts and clubs. He also began connecting with writers, poets, dancers, actors and artists active in the "downtown" scene, an experience he cites as a major influence on his development as a composer and musician. Black musicians began to be invited to partecipate in different projects and began working with dance and theater companies and Threadgill would write music for them that was instrumental but not necessarily jazz; it could be whatever he wanted it to be, whether that meant improvised or composed. He still looks to dance and theatre - as well as to the worlds of radio, film and video - for inspiration and stimulation today. Feeling the general climate for music in New York has become more conservative in recent years, Threadgill is constantly taking advantage of opportunities to take his band out on the road. His two "Great American Tour" found him visiting more than two dozen cities in the U.S. and Canada with the "Sextett" in 1984 and "Very, Very Circus" in 1991 and he performs annually at leading jazz festivals in North America, Europe and Japan.

Threadgill sees himself as an artist in a state of constant change, and views his creative process as an ever-evolving one. "I don't perceive what I'm doing in a finite sense, but on a certain level my music can be seen as part of a continuum", he explains. "Take the groups I've worked with, for example. "Air" came about a personal way when three people who played certain instruments made a creative connection. With the "Sextett", I consciously wanted strings, brass and percussion - the three components of an orchestra - represented so I chose the instrumentation first and found the people later. With "Very, Very Circus" I'm looking for a whole different type of texture, something similar to what Miles Davis was doing when he "went electric" and recorded "Bitches Brew", or what Ornette did when he formed the group "Prime Time". But I've also combined the tuba, one of the earliest instruments in jazz and the forerunner of the bass, with the electric guitar, a comparatively recent instrument. So in "Very, Very Circus" I've got a new ensemble that can look both forward and backward and pay its respects to various traditions while building upon them. This is what I hope my music has always done and will always continue to do".

http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/05/aacm 

 

Compositions of New Jazz: AACM Essentials

May 15, 2015 

by Britt Robson

Red Bull Academy

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM, was founded in Chicago on May 8, 1965. As it passes its 50th birthday, it is not an exaggeration to say that the organization changed the shape, texture and attitudes of contemporary jazz. 

More importantly, the AACM fostered a feisty DIY ethos, especially among iconoclastic musicians loath to lose control of their vision. Created in the cauldron of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, it was unabashedly political in its approach to race relations. But these beliefs fed into a daily commercial practicality that involved banding together to control the means of production – the ensembles, venues, compositions, marketing, all were created from within. 

The AACM planted its flag outside of New York City, long the Mecca of mainstream jazz. Its Chicago roots unearthed a jazz informed by blues, gospel and the chitlin’ circuit as well as bebop, swing and Euro-classical musics. Performance art and Afrocentric ritual and rhythms became part of a fierce and glorious atmosphere of experimentation. 

What follows is a chronological list of ten essential records by musicians integrally associated with the AACM. It is meant to be only superficially comprehensive, skimming signature highlights from a wide swath of incredible yet foundational music. One could easily choose different projects to document the primacy of Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, and other AACM members. My selections are based on a blend of personal taste, depth of influence, and breadth of history. Unfortunately, in some cases, availability was also a consideration – in this modern age of digital and wireless accessibility, too many landmark recordings are “out of print.” 

But don’t let that discourage you. These are just some of the shinier, heavier pieces of valuable ore in the mother lode that is the AACM. The deeper you dig, the richer you will become. 

The Roscoe Mitchell Sextet - Ornette

Roscoe Mitchell - Sound

This 1966 album is the landmark beginning of innovation and influence for AACM member recordings. It delivers a delicious foretaste of the acerbic whimsy and kinetic chemistry that alto saxophonist Mitchell, trumpeter Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors would soon showcase in the Art Ensemble of Chicago. 

“Ornette” bookends dissonant blues around a cartoon stampede of horns (including tenor Maurice McIntyre). “The Little Suite” unveils the disparate instrumentation – Bowie on harmonica and flute, Mitchell on clarinet, McIntyre on cello, a raft of bells, whistles and other percussion from Alvin Fiedler and the rest of the sextet – that would become common to avant garde jazz. And “Sound” creates the sparse, capacious canvas that allows notes singular status, and silence its own riffs and accents – another foundational influence that to this day perches on the cutting edge of jazz. 

Anthony Braxton - (840m)-Realize-44M-44M (Composition 6 E)

Anthony Braxton - 3 Compositions of New Jazz

It was a weighty toss-up whether to name this 1968 album or Braxton’s torrid, horn-shredding solo performance, For Alto, from a year later, as the more essential. 3 Compositions gets the nod because of the inclusion of AACM founder Muhal Richard Abrams on piano, along with the dynamic duo from St. Louis, trumpeter Leo Smith (later adding Wadada to the beginning of his first name) and violinist Leroy Jenkins. 

Yup, no “rhythm section” per se, although the indefatigable Abrams and percussion by group members provide those parameters when necessary. This is a rich stew of pungent, gnarly horn passages, sections beholden to Arnold Schoenberg and other early 20th Century composers, and a vivid harbinger of the renegade intellectualism that Braxton has now pursued on scores and scores of subsequent recordings.

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Fanfare for the Warriors

How and where to honor the Art Ensemble of Chicago on this list was a real quandary. If the five-disc chronicle of their group and individual-member beginnings, 67-68, was still in print on the Nessa label, it would be included. But no single disc definitively captures the rambunctious daredevilry, humor, theater and conceptual majesty of the most celebrated ensemble to emerge from the AACM.

Fanfare for the Warriors, from 1973, contains a plangent version of Roscoe Mitchell’s hallmark “Nonaah,” and signature works by Joseph Jarmen (the fire-spitting title track) and Lester Bowie (“Barnyard Scuffel Shuffel,” which jumps from moody piano to cacophony to horn-driven bop swing). Muhal Richard Abrams guests on piano. Because it is a relatively rare studio recording, and on a major label, it sounds better and contains fewer sight gags and caterwauling than the many live albums of the time – but is still feistier and more coltish than their later mature works on ECM. It opens with poetry and closes with jovial group vocals. And it holds up really well over 40 years later. 

Air - Air Time

The trio Air provided a breakthrough forum for the compelling contemporary composer Henry Threadgill, who has a gift for writing puckishly compulsive songs that feel like group improvisations. The symmetry that the flautist-reedist Threadgill established with drummer Steve McCall (one of the four original founders of the AACM) and bassist Fred Hopkins, was elastic, the playing frequently spare and yet ever virtuosic. 

All Air discs are worthwhile, and many are partial to Air Lore, which hauls Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton into the avant garde of jazz, but Air Time may be their most consistent and representative effort. It includes “G.v.E.,” sprung from Hopkins’ interest in the bass zither in the music of Berundi, which is also is the best showcase for Threadgill’s notorious hubkaphone, a collection of differently-pitched hub caps. Threadgill’s “Keep Right On Playing Thru the Mirror Over the Water,” was originally part of a suite for percussion and reveals McCall to be a master of timbre and group timing. There’s never been another ensemble quite like Air.

George Lewis - Homage to Charlie Parker

Formalism and structure are not what come to mind when you think about the AACM, but innovative rigor is embedded in the organization’s DNA and 1979’s Homage to Charlie Parker is the crowning example. Lewis is a trombonist-composer-conceptualist who also authored the definitive history of the AACM, A Power Stronger Than Itself. 

Musicologists revel in how “Blues” is gracefully unfurled via four simple but shifting diatonic choruses harmonically based on the blues. The other 18-minute piece that comprises the disc is the title track, which, like the first, is as beautiful and delicate as a sunrise, the opposite of Bird’s blitzkrieg bebop (Lewis explains the connection in the liner notes). The quartet includes pianist Anthony Davis, Douglas Ewart on reeds and percussion, and Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizers, with Lewis also deploying various electronics in addition to trombone. They cup this distinctively creative, deeply spiritual music in their hands as a humble offering

Amina Claudine Myers - Circle of Time

Pianist-composer Amina Claudine Myers went through venerable bop masters Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt before hooking up with AACM titans Lester Bowie and Muhal Richard Abrams in the ’70s and ’80s. 1983’s Circle of Time takes the piano trio format to church and the fields, massing gospel, blues, jazz and soul into rich clumps of African American history. 

Myers displays her ample piano chops on the modal bop churner, “Louisville,” and the intensely arpeggiated “Christine.” Her vocals range from the luxuriating repetition of “Plowed Fields” to the shrewdly restrained gospel testimony of “Do You Wanna Be Saved” (where she doubles on organ and piano) to the declamatory vocalese liberties taken on the closing title track. She is ably supported by drummer Thurman Barker and bassist Don Pate, whose bowed intro highlights “Clock.” Circle of Time is in the middle of her career sweet spot, which includes Salutes Bessie Smith (1980) and Jumping in the Sugar Bowl (1984)

8 Bold Souls - 8 Bold Souls

8 Bold Souls is probably the most underrated and criminally under-recorded ensemble relative to their talents in the AACM pantheon. What makes the well-named octet so distinctively crisp and versatile is the writing of leader Edward Wilkerson Jr., whose arrangements wring forth surprising sonorities that can be piquant or plush, the mood flipped from searing to indolent with remarkable élan, sometimes within a single song, as on “The Hunt” and “Dervish.” 

This 1986 eponymous debut reveals an ensemble fully bloomed, with Wilkerson deploying the tuba of Aaron Dodd and the cello of Naomi Millender in odd places years before it became a “new music” trend. “Shining Waters” imitates a swing-era big band thrillingly run amok via Dodd and clarinetist Mwata Bowden, whereas “Through the Drapes,” is as thick and dark as its title implies. If you can’t dredge up a copy of the disc (it has been in and out of print a few times), check out the lively Ant Farm (1994) on Arabesque, or the highly praised Last Option (2000) on Thrill Jockey, which sadly stands as the ensemble’s swan song. 

Muhal Richard Abrams - One Line, Two Views

More than anyone, Abrams is the polestar of the AACM, an original founder and the first President of the organization. There is a surfeit of viable options in his vast catalogue that could be included here, from his auspicious debut Levels and Degrees of Light (1968) through his raucous big band album Blu Blu Blu (1990) and into SoundDance (2011). But 1995’s One Line, Two Views, is the masterwork, the giant seine that captures the composer-pianist’s enormous breadth of style, timbre, scale and mood. 

Working with a ten-piece ensemble, Abrams glides from the dense orchestrations of “Textures 95” into the harsh swing of “The Prism,” with trumpeter Eddie Allen quoting “Tequila.” “Hydepth” melds the sonorities of acoustic bass and bass clarinet and becomes a showcase for Marty Ehrlich on the latter instrument. Rapid-fire piano and accordion ignite a fanfare for Abrams’ recently deceased colleagues on “Tribute to Julius Hemphill and Don Pullen,” and “11 Over 4” features violinist Mark Feldman prancing over some bruising horns. The extended closer, “Ensemble Song,” has impressionistic strings, percussion and spoken-word prose and poetry before closing with some Crescent City blues.

Nicole Mitchell

Nicole Mitchell - Hope, Future and Destiny

Mitchell’s ascendance on the Chicago jazz and arts scene assuaged any trepidation over the AACM’s capacity for rejuvenation. Hope, Future and Destiny was a part of an onstage production involving dozens of local actors and musicians and the songs were a glorious stylistic gumbo. While both traits are consonant with AACM tradition, Mitchell has more of a New Age and less scabrous bent to her Afrocentrism that goes down like a cool drink of water. Her clarion flute is tagged by rippling trumpet from Corey Wilkes on “Wondrous Birth.” Trombonist Tony Herrera and Mitchell’s entire Black Earth Ensemble swagger and swing with a dollop of P-Funk on “Curbside Fantasee,” then slip into Sweet Honey in the Rock mode on the vocal harmonies of “For Daughters of Young Love.” The appropriately-named violinist Savoir Faire is another standout, especially on the gorgeous “In the Garden.” Mitchell became the first female president of AACM from 2009-10 and continues to cut sprawling, ambitious multi-cultural projects. 

Jack DeJohnette - Ten Minutes

Jack DeJohnette - Made in Chicago

Made in Chicago ties up this collection of essential recordings with a resplendent bow. It features three AACM icons – Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, with whom DeJohnette went to junior college on Chicago’s south side in the early 60s, and Muhal Richard Abrams, who mentored them all. Bassist Larry Gray rounds out the quintet, which was handpicked by DeJohnette and opened the 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival with this stunning debut performance. Mitchell’s circular, repetitious “Chant,” has the saxophonist roaring without cease and keening alongside Threadgill in spellbinding fashion, with Abrams, just weeks from his 83rd birthday at the time, hammering chords while DeJohnette and Gray bend and apportion it all into lyricism. All four Windy City legends contributed songs just for this occasion, then closed with a six-minute group improvisation entitled “Ten Minutes.” The gig was so successful that the Made in Chicago ensemble have forged ahead with more tours and planned albums. Ditto the magnificent AACM.

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The Do List

Composing the Future: A Talk With Jazz Titan Henry Threadgill

Henry Threadgill. (Photo: Maurice Montoya)

by Andrew Gilbert  

February 2, 2015

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Event Information

New Frequencies Fest

Straddling both classic and modern jazz.

Feb. 5-7, 2015

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

• Details and tickets

As a young musician coming up in Chicago’s vibrant mid-1960s arts scene, Henry Threadgill helped found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM, a forward-thinking collective that embraced a vast continuum of black music. He’s been a creative force ever since, a dauntingly prolific composer and bandleader whose output is far too vast and varied to summarize. 

In a rare Bay Area appearance, Threadgill kicks off Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ New Frequencies Fest on Thursday, Feb. 5, with the West Coast debut of Double Up, a new ensemble he created to perform his homage to a kindred spirit in musical exploration, the late Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris. In keeping with Threadgill’s longtime use of unusual instrumentation, Double Up features pianist David Virelles, alto saxophonists Curtis Macdonald and Roman Filiu, drummer Craig Weinrib, tuba player Jose Davila, and cellist Christopher Hoffman. 

While Threadgill himself is a formidable alto saxophonist and flutist, he doesn’t play in the new band. He’s quick to point out that he’s not using Double Up as a vehicle for “conduction,” a semaphoric system of graphics and gestures that Morris devised to spontaneously steer an improvising ensemble. Rather, Threadgill sees himself as the musical director who can step in to provide guidance as necessary.

“I keep track of things in case I might need to respond in the moment, but I’m not doing a conduction,” says Threadgill, now 70. “Butch and I didn’t do the same thing, but we shared a lot of the same aesthetics. We had a real natural kind of relationship and hit off from the very beginning. We lived in the same neighborhood, so it was easy to have a coffee together and discuss musical issues or anything.” 

Pianist Myra Melford, a professor of music at UC Berkeley, a YBCA artist-in-residence and the New Frequencies Fest curator, studied with Threadgill when she moved to New York in the mid-1980s, and still considers him a primary influence. “Ninety percent of the way I compose comes from the instruction I got from Henry years ago,” she says. “I gradually realized that many of his ideas aren’t unique to him, but because he’s self-taught and came to them on his own, they’re filtered through the AACM sensibility of experimentation and making it your own.” 

Part of what makes Threadgill such a fascinating artist is that he continually discovers new ways to investigate musical problems. From the celebrated 1970s trio Air, a band that was equally at home navigating Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton tunes as engaging in free but tuneful improvisation, to the sonic density of Very Very Circus, a brass-heavy combo with two tubas, trombone and French horn, he’s crafted music that draws on sources far beyond jazz. 

“From the time I started teaching myself to play the piano as a child, trying to learn to play boogie-woogie, I was always thinking as a composer,” Threadgill says. “I wanted to know, ‘How do you do something like this?’ Not play something like this, but create something like this. It’s the same for my interest in other art forms. How do you write that piece of poetry, make a film like that? Where does all the information come from? I wasn’t just interested in the execution.” 

When Threadgill talks about a “broad range,” he’s using his own restless curiosity as a measure.

 

Threadgill’s impact within the jazz world has waxed and waned over the decades, but today it seems more pervasive than ever, especially when looking at the most celebrated left-of-center jazz musicians in their thirties and forties. Drummer Dafnis Prieto, pianist Vijay Iyer, and pianist Jason Moran—all recipients of MacArthur “Genius” Fellowships—cite Threadgill as a primary influence. Last September, Moran staged Very Very Threadgill, a sold-out, two-day festival in Harlem focusing on his music. 

Double Up pianist David Virelles moved from Toronto to New York in 2007 to study with Threadgill, joining a coterie of brilliant Cuban players who have gravitated to his music. Not only is Threadgill generous with information, Virelles says, he’s also always eager to hear artists looking for something new. 

“Henry is a very open person,” says Virelles, who returns to the Bay Area on March 29 for an SFJAZZ performance by Polish trumpet great Tomasz Stanko. “He’s a very curious person, always looking to expand himself and learn. You see him out at shows in New York, meeting people and staying in the loop. I think he does that to stay fresh and keep an ear to the ground, to stay connected to what’s happening.”

Virelles himself is a perfect example of how Threadgill draws inspiration from the contemporary scene. Tuba player Davilla and cellist Hoffman are carryovers from Threadgill’s previous band Zooid, but in a striking departure, Double Up is his first combo ever to feature a pianist. He’s been thinking about writing for the instrument for quite a few years, and “all the sudden I had the right musicians around me, people I admire like Matthew Shipp, Jason Moran, Craig Taborn, Vijay Iyer, and David,” Threadgill says.

“That’s five young pianists right there. All these cats knew a lot about what I do. They were available and working in such a broad range. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but you have to wait until the conditions are right. You try to launch something at the wrong time, and it’ll fail because of the weather, or there aren’t enough tuba players available.” 

When Threadgill talks about a “broad range,” he’s using his own restless curiosity as a measure. Over the years he’s composed for dance, theater, orchestras, chamber ensembles and solo instruments. When he describes growing up in Chicago, what’s striking is how even as a teenager he was open to all art forms. He studied piano, flute, and composition at the American Conservatory of Music, and haunted the Chicago Symphony, following scores as Fritz Reiner conducted. When straight-ahead jazz musicians shut him out because of his unorthodox ideas, he found work playing in blues, gospel, polka, and Latin dance bands. 

“When people close one door, you look around to see how many other doors exist,” Threadgill says. “That’s the door I want to go through, that I live for. When they close it in your face, once you get over the fact that all is not lost, you start to see all the other options.” 

Explore: Arts

http://www.jazzpolice.com/content/view/11297/117/

Henry Threadgill's Zooid at the Village Vanguard, 7/29-8/3     
by Ronaldo Oregano      
27 July 2014
Jazz Police

“The jazz avant-garde has produced relatively few great composers. Henry Threadgill is a member of that exclusive club.”  All Music Guide 

Henry Threadgill © Maarten Mooijman (mmpicture.nl)

As a groundbreaking alto saxophonist, composer and conceptualist, Chicago-based Henry Threadgill has been in a league of his own for decades. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since the ‘60s, Threadgill played with Muhal Richard Abrams’ pioneering Experimental Band and organized the heralded group Air starting in 1975. Threadgill also led such unique and stimulating ensembles as his Sextett, Very Very Circus, and Make a Move. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a U.S. Artist Fellowship in 2008, Threadgill recently recorded This Brings Us To with his exciting, genre-pushing Zooid ensemble. Henry Threadgill's Zooid featuring Henry Threadgill on flute, bass flute, and alto sax; Liberty Ellman on guitar; Christopher Hoffman on cello, Jose Davila on trombine and tuba;  and Elliot Kavee on drums will perform on Tuesday, July 29th through Sunday, August 3rd at the VIllage Vanguard. 

One of the leading composers and arrangers in avant garde jazz, Threadgill came to prominence in the 1970s leading ensembles with unusual instrumentation and often incorporating a range of non-jazz genres. He was one of the original members of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) in his hometown of Chicago and worked under the guidance of Muhal Richard Abrams before leaving to tour with a gospel band. In 1967, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and  was discharged in 1969.
Upon his return to Chicago he rejoined fellow AACM members Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall, forming a trio which would eventually become the group Air, one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed avant-garde jazz groups of the 1970s and 1980s. In the meantime, Threadgill had moved to New York City to begin pursuing his own musical visions, which explored musical genres in innovative ways thanks to his daringly unique group collaborations. His first group, X-75, was a nonet consisting of four reed players, four bass players and a vocalist.

In the early 1980s, Threadgill created his first critically acclaimed ensemble as a leader, Henry Threadgill Sextet (actually a septet; he counted the two drummers as a single percussion unit), which released three LPs on About Time Records. After a hiatus, during which Threadgill formed New Air with Pheeroan akLaff replacing the late Steve McCall on drums, Threadgill re-formed the Henry Threadgill Sextett (with two t's). This group recorded three CDs on the Novus Records label. The six albums the group recorded feature some of Threadgill's most accessible work, notably on the album You Know the Number.

The group's unorthodox instrumentation included two drummers, bass, cello, trumpet and trombone, in addition to Threadgill's alto and flute. Among the players who filled these roles were drummers akLaff, John Betsch, Reggie Nicholson and Newman Baker; bassist Fred Hopkins; cellist Deidre Murray; trumpeters Rasul Siddik and Ted Daniels; cornetist Olu Dara; and trombonists Ray Anderson, Bill Lowe and Craig Harris.

During the 1990s, Threadgill pushed the musical boundaries even further with his ensemble Very Very Circus. In addition to Threadgill, the group's core consisted of two tubas, two electric guitars, a trombone or french horn, and drums. With this group he explored more complex and highly structured forms of composition, augmenting the group with everything from latin percussion to French horn to violin to accordion and an array of exotic instruments and vocalists.

Threadgill composed and recorded with other unusual instrumentations, such as a flute quartet (Flute Force Four, a one-time project from 1990); and combinations of four cellos and four acoustic guitars (on Makin' A Move).

By this time Threadgill's place amongst the upper echelon of the avant-garde was secured, so prolific in fact that he was signed by Columbia Records for three albums (a rarity for musicians of his kind). Since the dissolution of Very Very Circus, Threadgill has continued in his iconoclastic ways with ensembles such as Make A Move, Zooid and Make A Move included guitarists Brandon Ross and James Emery and drummer J.T. Lewis. Zooid, a sextet with tuba (Jose Davila), acoustic guitar (Liberty Ellman), cello (Christopher Hoffman), drums (Elliot Kavee) and acoustic bass (Stomu Takeishi) has been the primary vehicle for Threadgill's most current compositions throughout the 2000s.

The Village Vanguard is located at 178 7th Ave S in New York
Call (212) 255-4037 or visit www.villagevanguard.com for more information.
 

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/henry-threadgill-mn0000673638/biography

HENRY THREADGILL

Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey

 

 

The jazz avant-garde has produced dozens of notable improvisers (not surprisingly, since improvisation is arguably the music's defining element) but relatively few great composers. Henry Threadgill is a member of that exclusive club. With his fellow Chicagoans Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams, he's one of the most original jazz composers of his generation. Threadgill's art transcends stylistic boundaries. He embraces the world of music in its entirety, from ragtime to circus marches to classical to bop, free jazz, and beyond. Such might sound merely eclectic in the telling, but in truth, Threadgill always sounds like Threadgill. A given project might exploit a particular genre or odd instrumentation, but whatever the slant, it always bears its composer's inimitable personality. 

Threadgill is also an alto saxophonist of distinction; his dry, heavily articulated manner is a precursor to that of a younger Chicagoan, the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman (no coincidence, one would suspect). Threadgill took up music as a child, first playing percussion in marching bands, then learning baritone sax and clarinet. He was involved with the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) from its beginnings in the early '60s, collaborating with fellow members Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell and playing in Muhal Richard Abrams' legendary Experimental Band. From 1965-1967 he toured with the gospel singer Jo Jo Morris. He then served in the military for a time, performing with an army rock band. After his discharge, he returned to Chicago, where he played in a blues band and resumed his association with Abrams and the AACM. He went on to earn his bachelor's degree in music at the American Conservatory of Music; he also studied at Governor's State University.
 
In 1971 he formed Reflection with drummer Steve McCall and bassist Fred Hopkins. The trio would re-form four years later as Air and would go on to record frequently to great acclaim. It's 1979 album Air Lore featured contemporary takes on such early jazz tunes as "King Porter Stomp" and "Buddy Bolden's Blues," prefiguring the wave of nostalgia that would dominate jazz in the following decade. Threadgill moved to New York in the mid-'70s, where he began forming and composing for a number of ensembles. Threadgill began showing a love for unusual instrumentation; for instance, his Sextett (actually a septet), used a cellist, and his Very Very Circus included two tubas. In the mid-'90s he landed a (short-lived) recording contract with Columbia, which produced a couple of excellent albums. Throughout the '80s and '90s Threadgill's music became increasingly polished and sophisticated. 

A restless soul, he never stood still, creating for a variety of top-notch ensembles, every one different. A pair of 2001 releases illustrates this particularly well. On Up Popped the Two Lips (Pi Recordings), his Zooid ensemble combines Threadgill's alto and flute with acoustic guitar, oud, tuba, cello, and drums -- an un-jazz-like instrumentation that nevertheless grooves and swings with great agility. Everybodys Mouth's a Book features his Make a Move band, which consists of the leader's horns, with vibes and marimba, electric and acoustic guitars, electric bass, and drums -- a more traditional setup in a way, but no less original in concept. 

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3492700078.html 


Henry Threadgill
Saxophonist, composer
 
Developed Eclectic Musical Tastes
Boosted “Great Black Music”
Acclaim at Last
Selected discography
Sources

“As a kid, I wanted to learn how to play all this great A music, the way these great people had been doing it,” jazz composer, bandleader, and performer Henry Threadgill told Down Beat’s Howard Mandel. “It wasn’t in my head to have a Mercedes.... To grapple with the music was enough.” Winner of numerous awards in Down Beat’s International Critics and Readers Polls, including top composer, he has led his own groups—Air, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, and Very Very Circus, among others—to probe all possibilities of sound.

Threadgill, an alto saxophonist and multi-reed player who finds that even hubcaps can be rhythmic, is a first generation member of the 1960s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Although the renowned artist has graced mass media magazines in Dewar’s Profile Scotch advertisements and the stage of the Metropolitan Opera as a musician in Porgy and Bess, since his days with the AACM, Threadgill has admirably maintained the organization’s original quest—to create “great black music.”

“Threadgill’s way to the forefront of contemporary creative music has always been oblique and circuitous; he’s a collector of musical styles,” appraised Kevin Lynch in Down Beat, “and an explorer who constantly stops to observe the surrounding world.” Mandel conjectured, “Threadgill’s originality of sound seems to render him” too contemporary “for regular employment in taverns that showcase jazz, though his music is based in gospel, the blues, and parade marches, as well as his serious research into what’s beyond.” The unconventional composer, who includes funeral dirges in his repertoire, envisions a workplace in any of life’s settings. He told Gene Santoro in The Nation, “I’d like to put a band in a funeral parlor and work there.”

Developed Eclectic Musical Tastes

Born on February 15, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois, Threadgill was raised in the bleak atmosphere of the ghetto, but music brightened his household and surroundings. Exposed to country music on the radio and to classical music by an aunt who studied to become an opera singer, Threadgill developed eclectic tastes at an early age. “My grandmother took me to churches where there was music, record shops had speakers outside so you walked down the street hearing music, bands played, and still play, at the Maxwell Street flea market,” he related to Mandel. “Even at grammar school, teachers played records during rest periods, good music we would cool out and sleep to.”

For the Record…

Born February 14, 1944, in Chicago, IL; married; children: one daughter. Education: Received B.M. from American Conservatory of Music; attended Governors State University.

Jazz saxophonist and composer. Member of sextet that included Roscoe Mitchell, early 1960s; performed with Experimental Band and Heritage Ensemble, early 1960s; member of Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), early 1960s; toured with gospel singer Jo Jo Morris, 1965-67; formed trio Reflection, 1971, reformed as Air, 1975; led Henry Threadgill Sextett, Windstring Ensemble, and Society Situation Orchestra, mid-1970s; composed score for Diggers, National Public Radio, mid-1980s; performed at Carnegie Hall, New York City, mid-1980s; appeared in Metropolitan Opera production of Porgy and Bess, New York City, mid-1980s; appeared in print advertisements for Dewars, 1988; formed ensemble Very Very Circus, early 1990s—.

Addresses: Record company —Axiom Records, 825 8th Ave., New York, NY 10019.
 
While in grade school, Threadgill studied piano and marched in street bands as a percussionist. Jazz great Charlie Parker’s recordings inspired him to learn to play the saxophone. In high school, he played tenor and baritone sax in the marching band. Threadgill mastered alto saxophone, clarinet, and flute while he performed with local rhythm and blues groups in his spare time. After a stint in the Army, he spent 11 years taking university courses, including flute, piano, and composition at the American Conservatory of Music and at Governors State University. “I was never interested in a degree,” Threadgill confessed to Mandel, “I was interested in the catalog.”

Playing gospel music while traveling the gospel circuit with church musicians and evangelists, Threadgill procured his first professional experience. He alternated his education with blues sessions on Sundays and jazz sessions on Mondays and performed in any mix of gigs—V.F.W. bands, marching bands, polka bands, and light classical orchestras—to earn his daily bread. Disenchanted with bebop, the prevalent jazz form of the early 1960s, Threadgill commented to Santoro, “Bebop couldn’t service me: it didn’t have anything to do with people standing up for their rights, it didn’t have anything to do with the Vietnam War, didn’t have anything to do with the Gray Panthers, the Black Panthers.” The musician thus joined the free jazz movement, performing in a sextet with Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman as well as Phil Cohran’s Heritage Ensemble and Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band.

Boosted “Great Black Music”

“Notes per se became less important than the effects that could be conjured up through instrumental sounds—any sounds, from bleeps and blatts and burps to childlike whimpering and sobbing sighs and whinnying overblown shrieks,” wrote Santoro, characterizing the radical bent of the AACM in Chicago during the sixties. Threadgill joined the nonprofit organization, an outgrowth of Abrams’s Experimental Band—which sponsored performances and recording sessions—late in the decade.

Fashioning a double-tiered string of auto hubcaps into a percussion instrument, Threadgill sired his own version of composition that coincided with the AACM’s “new movement” in Great Black Music. “In the AACM what was happening was an expression of what I was about, and the moment,” he recounted to Mandel. “I knew that it expressed the times... the revolution in America, God is dead, America shooting down its kids, the [Vietnam] War, the questioning of traditional philosophies.... I was tied into that moment.”

Threadgill formed the trio Reflection with percussionist Steve McCall and bassist Fred Hopkins in 1971 and kept McCall and Hopkins when he reformed the group under the name Air in 1975. “It is a different kind of fusion music,” Charles Mitchell observed in Down Beat about the “beauty” of the threesome in concert. Though the group made several albums, including Air Song, Air Raid, New Air, and Air Show No. 1, Threadgill garnered more popularity after his move to New York City in the mid-1970s.

In New York he led the Windstring Ensemble and the Society Situation Orchestra and formed the Henry Threadgill Sextett, which had seven members; the two drummers functioned as one component of Threadgill’s outfit. Threadgill released several albums, including When Was That?, Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket, and Subject to Change, that merited approval, but they were recorded on minor labels and received little publicity during the mid-1980s.

Acclaim at Last

In 1987 Threadgill’s sextet saw its first release on a major record label. You Know the Number, on RCA Novus, was followed the same year by Easily Slip Into Another World. Placing in 11 of Down Beat’s International Critics and Readers Polls in 1988, Threadgill won top composer honors as well as passage out of the relative obscurity of the previous decades with the widely acclaimed Easily Slip Into Another World. ’The album is a brash, swaggering vindication of the tradition that regenerates itself in a dialectic of individual imagination and democratic dynamism,” cheered Lynch. “It’s music of the moment that echoes familiar images of the past with the elemental eloquence of myth.”

Further accolades came from Eric Levin in People: “The emotions that Threadgill’s music expresses are not only diverse, they color, comment upon and compound each other as his compositions strut, shimmy, and tumble along.” Bill Milkowski concluded in Down Beat, ’The guy’s prolific and important.... Maybe with this wider exposure, more people will be able to appreciate Henry Threadgill’s genius.”

Viewing his music as “a reflection of social reality,” Threadgill disclosed to Santoro that he is mystified by any revival of traditional jazz: “It’s funny to see a lot of musicians involved with music that’s older than they are... where they’re playing stuff that isn’t relevant today.” The progressive jazz musician closed the decade of the 1980s championing invention with the release Rag, Bush, and All, a romp that John Ephland described in Down Beat as “everybody running.... All that running lands them in the sky.”

Threadgill then opened the 1990s with a new album, Spirit of Nuff... Nuff, by his new group Very Very Circus. Planning a book and film documentary to highlight his 1991 U.S. tour, a performance of which was captured on the LP Live at Koncepts, Threadgill offered his mix of jazz, blues, gospel, Southern brass, and European classical music to more offbeat locales, including churches, hospitals, town squares, and zoos. “I want to give music to people in parts of this country I can’t ordinarily get to,” the innovative musician divulged to Suzanne McElfresh in Down Beat. “When you bring music to them, you make our country smaller in a good way. You break down isolation; everyone gains.”

Due to release an album entitled Too Much Sugar for a Dime in 1993, the well-respected Threadgill, having entered his fourth decade in the business, has played an integral role in the world of jazz music. Reviewing Very Very Circus’s live album in 1993, Musician correspondent Tom Moon praised Threadgill’s ensemble: “Very Very Circus, one of the most flexible and interactive small groups currently working, is heard melding brusque funk horn lines, jittery Latin rhythms and complex orchestral counterpoint into an invigorating compositional assault on the knotty Live at Koncepts... an album that defines this year’s true zeitgeist.”

Selected discography

X-75 Volume 1, Arista-Novus, 1979.

When Was That, About Time, 1982.

Subject to Change, About Time, 1986.

You Know the Number, RCA Novus, 1987.

Easily Slip Into Another World, RCA Novus, 1987.

(Contributor)Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus, Columbia, 1992.

Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket, About Time.

Rag, Bush, and All, RCA Novus.

With Air
 
Air Song, Why Not, 1975.

Air Time, Nessa, 1977.

Air Lore, Arista-Novus, 1979.

Air Mail, Black Saint, 1980.

80 Degrees Below ’82, Antilles, 1982.

Air Show No. 1, Black Saint, 1986.

Air Raid, India Navigation.

New Air, Black Saint.

With Muhal Richard Abrams

Young at Heart, Wise in Time, Delmark, 1969.

Nonaah, Nessa, 1977.

1-0QA+19, Black Saint, 1977.

L-R-G, The Maze, S II Examples, Nessa, 1978.

With Very Very Circus

Spirit of Nuff... Nuff, Black Saint, 1991.

Live at Koncepts, Taylor Made, 1992.

Too Much Sugar for a Dime, Axiom, 1993.

Sources

Down Beat, August 1983; July 1985; March 1986; June 1987; July 1988; August 1988; February 1989; July 1989; April 1991 ; February 1993.

Musician, January 1993.

Nation, July 18, 1987.

People, May 30, 1988.

Pulse!, December 1992; February 1993.

Spin, February 1993.

—Marjorie Burgess

http://arsnovaworkshop.org/events/henry-threadgill%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cbackground%E2%80%9D-saxophone-quartet-jeff-parkermike-reed-duo-06-13-2011

 
Venue: The Maas Building1325 Randolph Street
Philadelphia, PA Map
Price: $10 General Admission/$60 Festival Pass (link in event description)

Sponsored by:

Composer Portrait: Henry Threadgill has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Music Project.
Monday, June 13, 2011 - 8:00pm

Henry Threadgill’s “Background” (for saxophone quartet) + Jeff Parker/Mike Reed Duo

AACM | Great Black Music

Ken Thomson, baritone saxophone
Peter Hess, tenor saxophone
Evan Rapport, alto saxophone
Jeff Hudgins, soprano saxophone

Please join Ars Nova Workshop for a special double-header featuring New York City's Collide Saxophone Quartet performing early AACM member Henry Threadgill's work, "Background," and a duo performance by young AACM members and Chicagoans Jeff Parker and Mike Reed. Between sets there will be a public discussion led by jazz writer and educator David Adler, who will talk with tonight's musicians about ther involvement with the AACM.

AACM Festival Passes for admission to all five events are available for $60. You can purchase them here.

Collide Saxophone Quartet - who last performed in Philly for ANW's Composer Portrait: Tim Berne in December, 2009 - unites four multi-reed players vital to the New York scene who create, adapt, interpret and perform works for saxophone quartet and improvisations that draw on the entire sound world of the instrument while building a new repertoire to shatter old conventions. Since their founding in 2003, they have collaborated with So Percussion to perform Dutch maverick Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union," composers Michael Gordon and Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang, and performed the US premieres of Tim Berne's "Repulsion" and German woodwind maestro and composer Gebhard Ullmann's "Hell und Bunt." Collide has re-envisioned classic music by Igor Stravinsky, Jimmy Giuffre, Sun Ra, and Roscoe Mitchell. Members also perform regularly with Bang on a Can All Stars, Alarm Will Sound, American Composers Orchestra, Slavic Soul Party, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, and Balkan Beat Box.

Joining the AACM in the late-1960s, composer-performer Henry Threadgill worked alongside Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Steve McCall, and Roscoe Mitchell. Over the years he has worked with Fred Hopkins, Leroy Jenkins, David Murray, Billy Bang, and the ensemble Air, and has led many pioneering creative music ensembles, including Make a Move, Very Very Circus, the Henry Threadgill Sextet, and Zooid, which has released two highly celebrated albums on Pi Recordings. One of the most original jazz composers of his generation, Threadgill’s art transcends stylistic boundaries and embraces the world of music in its entirety, from ragtime to circus marches to classical to bop, free jazz, and beyond. A given project might exploit a particular genre or odd instrumentation, but whatever the slant, it always bears its composer’s inimitable personality.

Jeff Parker, guitar
Mike Reed, drums

Young members of the AACM, both guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Mike Reed represent the organization's ongoing mission to nurture creative musicians who radically push toward new sonic horizons. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Parker is well known for his work with post-rock innovators Tortoise, and has worked alongside Rob Mazurek, Joshua Redman, Chad Taylor, Sara Smith, Fred Anderson, and Ken Vandermark.

A member of the AACM since 2005 and chairman since 2009, Reed has worked with Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell, Josh Abrams, Jason Roebke, Jason Adasiewicz, Jeb Bishop, and Dave Rempis, and leads several creative ensembles, including People, Places and Things, whose 2010 LP, Stories and Negotiations, placed on the year-end lists of The New York Times, NPR's A Blog Supreme, Village Voice, Chicago Reader, and The Examiner. Also an active concert organizer in Chicago, Reed is the director of the Pitchfork Music Festival, the co-founder of Hungry Brain's Sunday Transmission Series, and involved with both the Umbrella Music Festival and the Chicago Jazz Festival. Reed was named Chicagoan of the Year for Jazz (2008) by the Chicago Tribune and in the 57th annual Downbeat critics poll was distinguished as "Rising Jazz Star.”

Public Discussion with David Adler

David R. Adler is an adjunct lecturer in jazz history at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College. He writes on music, politics and culture from his home in New York, covering jazz for JazzTimes, Philadelphia Weekly, The New York City Jazz Record. His work has also appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Down Beat, Time Out New York, City Arts, Jazziz, The New York Times, The New Republic Online, Slate, and Signal to Noise.

http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/1675  

“A Door to Other Doors”: Improvisation and Creation Sound

Henry Threadgill Interviewed by Daniel Fischlin (Guelph Jazz Festival, Friday September 9, 2011)

Audio clip of interview with Henry Threadgill

 

Henry Threadgill is one of the great original, iconoclastic voices in American music, and sits comfortably with other major voices from the U.S. and elsewhere: from Charles Ives through to Aaron Copland and Elliot Carter; from Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler through to Anthony Braxton and John Zorn; from Igor Stravinsky through to Edgard Varèse and Luciano Berio.

A breathtaking multi-instrumentalist and improviser and an absolutely original compositional voice, Threadgill has seamlessly integrated being at the forefront of creative improvised musicking with genre-bending swoops of the musical imagination that have anticipated and shaped new directions in the music throughout his 40-year career leading cutting-edge ensemble after cutting-edge ensemble. 

Not only has his music integrated new sounds––from Venezuelan drumming to South African accordion and harmonium and the self-made hubkaphone to a rich variety of worlds musics that encompass Bali, India, Japan, South America, and Africa––Threadgill’s music has also reflected on and fully absorbed avant-garde classical musics, but also the music of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton. In the latter case when you hear Air playing standards from these composers on Air Lore, the depth of insight into what they had to say and how they remain relevant in the here and now is profoundly moving and revelatory. Threadgill’s music is full of unexpected energies, melodic angularities that take us in new directions, kinetic pulses that unleash cumulative imaginative forces and passions that mark truly great music.

Threadgill’s unique sonic imagination always invariably asks us to think differently about what is musically possible, what unexpected directions the moment might yield as we move forward musically through uncharted spaces in the human imagination.

A student at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago (with Stella Roberts), then at Governor’s State, then in Kansas at the Manhattan School, and then at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge (Mass.), Threadgill has a formidable musical formation. One of the original members of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) in his hometown of Chicago working with Muhal Richard Abrams, Threadgill also served a stint in Vietnam (which he has called a “war that nobody understands” [Terkel 163]) as a member of the Infantry Band. In the late ‘60s, Threadgill went on to co-found Air (along with Steve McCall and Fred Hopkins), one of the truly great trios of all time, renowned for its death-defying feats of sonic exploration and its exceptional capacity to generate intense timbres and textures in complex structures while leaving great open spaces of space and time in which the improvisations, collective interplay, and deep listening gathered force and meaning.

Since then, Threadgill has led any number of exceptional ensembles including X-75, a nonet consisting of four reeds, four basses, and a singer, the infamous Sextett (actually a septet), Very Very Circus with its unique voicings featuring the interplay between two tubas and two guitarists (but also featuring interventions by all sorts of other musical voices), and, most recently, Zooid, which Threadgill led in a highlight performance of the Guelph Jazz Festival that took place on the day after this public interview was conducted.
In the case of Zooid, Threadgill has spent over 10 years working with the group, creating and perfecting a new system of improvisation in a group setting. A zooid is a cell that is able to move independently of the larger organism to which it belongs, an apt description of the musical language that Threadgill has developed for this band. The compositions are organized along a series of interval blocks comprised of [a minimum of] three notes, each of which is assigned to a musician, who is free to move around within these intervals, improvising melodies and creating counterpoint to one another. The system provides the framework for open dialogue within the group while encouraging the musicians to seek new ways to improvise, away from a reliance on chord changes, scales or any of the clichés of certain “free” jazz. (“This Brings Us To, Vol. 1” n.p.) 

And as Threadgill has stated, “I have completely left the major minor system in favour of a chromatic way,” a new system of making music created to “facilitate collective improvisation along the lines of early jazz” (Johnson n.p.). 

 

Across all these groups Threadgill has produced an astonishing range of music that defies genre and category and challenges us to think beyond cliché, conformity, and stagnation. For an excellent overview of Threadgill’s work through these ensembles, the recent release by Mosaic of The Complete Novus and Columbus Recordings of Henry Threadgill and Air is a must-listen along with Hank Shteamer’s must-read overview of the recordings. Shteamer’s notes are full of insights into the creative trajectory that the anthology charts (even though it is far from complete, omitting, for instance, recordings from the later ‘80s 18-piece ensemble Society Situation Dance Band). So, with regard to the transitional group X-75, Threadgill notes how “I just thought about winds and strings. That was the thing with the AACM––it did away with the whole idea of a format … The objective was to make music and to try to make it the best you could creatively. And a lot of times the best way to do that is to throw away a lot of formats, because they make you do things that you don’t necessarily want to” (Shteamer, The Complete Novus and Columbia Recordings “Liner notes” 5). The stubborn independent streak that defines Threadgill’s approach to music cannot be separated from the creative and philosophical underpinnings of the AACM or indeed from the experimental scene that was rapidly evolving during Threadgill’s youth in Chicago. 

Threadgill has made and continues to make rigorous, challenging, spiritually profound, uncompromising music in a day and age where doing so is no easy task. Nate Chinen opines that “Mr. Threadgill, 65, has long been one of the most thrillingly elusive composers in and around the jazz idiom: a sly maestro of unconventional timbres, bristling counterpoint and tough but slippery rhythms. His output, like that of his fellow multi-reedists Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, can veer toward contemporary classical territory, though it rarely settles there” (Chinen n.p.). 

And Studs Terkel’s preface to his 1988 interview with Threadgill cites Howard Reich, the Chicago Tribune jazz critic, who says “It would be difficult to overestimate Henry Threadgill’s role in perpetually altering the meaning of jazz . . . He has changed our underlying assumptions of what jazz can and should be” (161).

In the interview that follows Threadgill covers aspects of his personal history as a youth growing up in Chicago, his first contact with the AACM and other experimentalist musicians in Chicago, his thoughts on the connections between improvised music and the Civil Rights Movement, and an extended reflection on the importance of improvised music and its pedagogy. Conducted in public before a large audience of Guelph Jazz Festival goers, Mr. Threadgill was eloquent and impassioned, especially in his appeal to improve access to quality musical education in North America and in his dismissal of the attempt to impose European musical structures on African American forms of musicking based on replication as opposed to creation. 

Threadgill’s take on what he resolutely calls creative improvised music is resoundingly anti-nostalgic, and marked by a refusal to stay put or to be easily pigeon-holed into reductive musical categories. Yet at the same time the interview reveals Threadgill as keenly aware of musical histories and key people in those histories. Scott Joplin. Charlie Parker. Sun Ra. Phil Cohran. Leo Wadada Smith. Amina Claudine Myers. Muhal Richard Abrams. These influential figures in the development of improvised musicking all find a place in the narrative of the interview.
The “door to other doors” metaphor that Threadgill unleashes in the interview’s discussion of Charlie Parker and his influence struck me as an apt way into Threadgill’s creative, no-holds-barred, freedom-seeking approach to musical discovery. In Threadgill’s epiphanic encounter with Parker, the seed is set for a relentless will to explore and open musical doors as they present themselves, perhaps the key underlying premise that grounds all truly improvisatory creation. 

Improvisation, then: a door to other doors. 

Testimony to the infinite swarm (from the Sanskrit svárati, “it sounds, it resounds”) of creation.

Improvisation: creation sound resounding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interview:

Daniel Fischlin: It’s an honour to welcome Henry Threadgill here at long, long last to the Guelph Jazz Festival. I’ve just been looking at pictures of the last time Henry played Toronto back in the early ‘90s taken by long-time Toronto jazz photographer Barry Thomson at the Bermuda Onion on Bloor, so it’s been far too long. 

I’m going to start the interview by asking about your family, Henry. I’m really interested in knowing where you came from and in how as distinctive a musical voice as you have came into being? I’m assuming there are personal histories and specific stories relating to family that contributed to your sonic imagination and I’m thinking in particular of your aunt, who was a singer who married a bass player?  But I’m also thinking there must be others in your youth who sparked you to become a musician and improviser?

Henry Threadgill: Well my aunt, my mother’s, she was the middle sister. There were about eleven, twelve kids, my mother has brothers and sisters about twelve of them, and my aunt was the first one to go off to college and she was going off to study opera, which was fairly unusual. We didn’t even know what the word meant. I was about three and she met my uncle, Nevin Wilson, who became my uncle, he was the bass player and I thought that the piano in my house, my mother and grandparents’ house was, actually I thought it was my aunt’s piano, and in fact it was my mother’s piano and my mother had studied piano and she never told me. Matter of fact, she never mentioned it until she read where I said that the piano belonged to my aunt and she got upset by it. 

My mother was always responsible for taking me to hear concerts when I was a kid, and now I know why because she had studied piano, that was one of the reasons: she liked music and she studied the piano. But I used to live with my aunt in Rockford, Illinois and at the time my uncle the bass player was playing about with Ahmad Jamal and so I would stay there and I was around a lot of that music that they were doing. I wanted to play bass because my uncle played bass, but when I would get up on a chair to play it, it would just hurt my hands so bad you know, and I would ask why I was having all these problems and he said I was going to have to wait to grow up to play bass and I said, “I guess I won’t play the bass if I have to wait to grow up.” 

I’d already been playing the piano from the time I was about three. I started playing because, like I said, it was in the house and radio. I was just having this conversation with someone outside in German here about how important radio was at that time, the amount of music growing up in Chicago that was on the radio, before television. So when I was three, I started teaching myself how to play boogie-woogie because boogie-woogie was the big thing and at that time the boogie-woogie pianist from Chicago, Albert Ammons, had big hits out. I could sit and play the piano for hours and no one would say anything because they knew where I was and I wasn’t getting into trouble and I was like a cow with a bell around his neck. So I discovered this music on the radio, boogie-woogie. 

But Chicago also had two of the largest European communities with the Polish community back in the railway yards: there were stop-yards in Chicago, and there was also the Serbian community. That Eastern-Europe music was quite different and I grew up listening to all of this Serbian music, Polish music, and hillbilly music. Besides the blues, and very little jazz, European classical music in Chicago at that time, you’d just have to entertain yourself with the radio. Where kids sit in front of the television now, we would sit in front of the radio and just go from station to station. But there was also the whole scene of gospel music that was born basically in Chicago and the particular churches that were in Chicago. I had heard of all the great singers in Chicago. Regular faces like Mahalia Jackson. I’d hear her just about every week. And that included people like James Cleveland and Clay Evans. I grew up around those people. They’d all sing in Chicago every week and we’d listen to them on the radio. So it was a lot of music to be exposed to as a kid and I didn’t have any decisions in my mind about playing music. I just liked it and I wanted to do it at the keyboard until I got to an age where I was able to talk my parents into getting me a saxophone. After I heard Charlie Parker I wanted a saxophone.

DF: I’d be very interested to know how you got in touch with the AACM and with Muhal Richard Abrams, who you really think of as a mentor. One of the things about him that was so interesting to you back then was that he was so original––you just couldn’t nail him down or pigeonhole his approach to improvisation and making music.

HT: Well I met Muhal when I was in junior college and we had a music club, and the music club was like a poetry club or science club. We’d invite scientists, we’d invite poets, didn’t matter what kind of music or poetry they made. So you might have a string quartet this month or a jazz trio next month or whatever, and we invited Muhal: I didn’t know him and I didn’t know how many people he was playing with, I only found out who all these famous people who were playing with him much later. So he came to the college and played and that’s where I met him. He invited me down to the Experimental Band. The Experimental Band is what preceded the AACM. That’s where all those musicians were, these musical heads (Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Steve McCall, and Donald Myrick) were gathered in the Experimental Band and trying out different music they were writing out. Muhal asked me to come down and play and said if I had anything for them to play, to bring some music along also. So that began my relationship with Muhal and that must have been maybe around 1963 or 1964 and then I went into the service in 1966 in Vietnam about the same time when the AACM was starting up so I missed the immediate start of it. So when I returned from Vietnam I came right back into the AACM. But I was there at the very beginning of it when it was called experimental music.¹

DF: Was that your first encounter with full-on improvisation, or had you already had encounters and were already playing improvised music?

HT: Oh I was already playing music when I lived in Chicago in Englewood on the south side of Chicago. Sun Ra, John Gilmore, Pat Patrick, they were all living over there. So Sun Ra might be right there in the meat market that only sold wild game––bears, possum––and at night, the owner of this place, the Greek guy, for some reason he was crazy about Sun Ra, would turn the meat market over to Sun Ra. So this friend and me, who liked to follow Sun Ra around, would be there at the meat market just about every night. And we were listening and figuring out what Sun Ra was doing. But we were already playing. We were learning so-called traditional jazz repertory and Sun Ra was the furthest thing from that. So I met Sun Ra before I knew Muhal probably when I was about fifteen or sixteen. Then I met Phil Cohran, the trumpeter for Sun Ra’s Arkestra, shortly after that. Phil Cohran was another one of the people that sparked and formed the AACM and ran the Afro-Arts Theatre. A number of great, great artists all came out of the Afro-Arts Theatre: Earth, Wind & Fire all came out of it, the Afro-Arts Theatre, so many great artists came out of that place, you had the AACM in one part of town and the Afro-Arts Theatre in another part. They had one organization and they split up on a philosophical basis, it was a philosophical difference and so it became the AACM and the Afro-Arts theatre in the ‘60s, that’s when that happened.

DF: Do you remember what the differences were that caused the split?

HT: I heard a lot of different things but I wasn’t there at the time. Like I said, I was in the service. But I would say that the Afro-Arts theatre had more parameters on the music and with the AACM people it was more wide-open. That was a matter of fact, there were lots of people when I came back about, might have been about thirty-five, forty people that had come into the organization, and after I’d been back a while it got down to be about fifteen of us because people couldn’t handle what the AACM was about––they couldn’t tolerate what somebody else’s ideas were and that was the whole thing, you know, you’d have to sit there in Afro-Arts and do exactly what somebody tells you to do and you could not comment on what they were doing and that’s very difficult when people have other ideas about something. So you had to put your own critical sense aside and there were all these people constantly being watched and people would come in and they’d have to leave because of that. So again, with the AACM it’s just a small group of people like Leo Wadada Smith, Anthony Braxton, Muhal, Amina Claudine Meyers, again who got together because we wanted a wide open approach to music, to what it was, and we were talking about calling anything “anything.” There’s no such thing as jazz and there was no such thing as to how things were supposed to go back then for us. Everything was put in front of you by one person and their vision of music and then the next person’s vision of music and so on and you were supposed to contribute. If you couldn’t give one hundred per cent to that person’s vision then you couldn’t stay.²

DF: I was dreading asking you a question about the philosophy of improvisation that you were exposed to when you were young, but you’ve just answered it. And I wasn’t sure whether you’d even want to get into it because I know it’s a touchy subject and I think there were things going on with Sun Ra as well because it was a different vision that Sun Ra had too.

HT: Yes, that’s a whole ‘nother approach, Sun Ra’s. It’s a singular world. There is no AACM school. There’s the world of Braxton. There’s the world of Leo Wadada Smith. There’s the world of Leroy Jenkins. These are all different worlds. You’re talking about something where you define people according to particular traits, characteristics, or parameters, but there are no particulars with the AACM. What I do is what I do and we didn’t necessarily share with each other. I’m gonna get ahead of your question because this all goes to the idea of the word “jazz,” and to what has happened in schools and universities that try to perpetuate jazz because they’ve forgotten the complete history. That history has something to do with the aesthetics of the art. When you go back to the very beginning of so-called “jazz” it’s an independent thing created by each individual and that’s the way it’s supposed to be made. If you go and study music in India there’s a way it’s made; in Bali there’s another way that it’s made; and there’s a way that it’s broken down in Europe. That’s the way it’s made––and yet we brought the European method over to America and tried to impose it on so-called “jazz music,” which is dead wrong. 

DF: There’s a really powerful streak of DIY (do-it-yourself) at work in the history of jazz not the least of which came out of the poverty, oppression, and racism that African Americans have had to deal with. What do you make of jazz education, which seems to only peripherally (if at all) get at the very conditions that made the music come alive?

HT: All of that great music that started in 1923 did not come out of any school or university. Schools and universities serve an important part for us in terms of training musicians: they can teach how to play an instrument effectively and they can teach you about a lot of world music. But they should not get in the way of teaching you about what you’re doing, not in terms of the music. Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Scott Joplin, they were never sitting up with a whole bunch of people being told that one plus one equals two, and I really take an exception to that approach to teaching music because you’ve gotten away from the actual way that the music was originally made. And so the music people think is so great, the further you go back they say these are all the jewels of jazz, but how was it made? So you look at all the academic degrees that these people have (nothing wrong with degrees) but you have people sitting up here in front of a podium telling you all how to negotiate this fence. So everybody knows in the same way: I say, “Okay, you run up to the fence and you raise your left leg and then bring your right leg over.” But if I left it to children they’d come and dive over the fence headfirst, or somebody else would grab one arm and flip herself over. That’s the aesthetics of how this music should be made. 

When you listen to music coming from the schools and universities, it’s like they’re all speaking the same language because they’ve all been taught like we’re in a Ford factory or something. That is really not the way for music to be perpetuated. European music worked out a system, a good system, good for the type of music they were doing. But you can’t import that system to all music––that’s a mistake. So you have to let each individual discover for himself what the art is. You don’t tell anybody anything. The role of the teacher should only be as a coach, not as an informer of information. All of the information is already in the student. If he gets it, good, and if he doesn’t get it, that’s still good; maybe he’s not supposed to get it, not everybody’s supposed to do everything. This music is not pop. It is art so not everybody’s supposed to do it. So I find this confusion about how to perpetuate the music through schools and universities is very damaging, very damaging.³
 
And if I stand up here and tell you what the sound should be or how to do this or that, or that “jazz” is so-and-so, or how to move from this chord to that chord, or if somebody tells you how to do something and you don’t really know how to do it yourself, then there’s something wrong. You’re doing what they told you to do when in reality you have to figure everything out for yourself. 

DF: So how did you come to understand this sense of personal voice and problem solving given that it very much defines the completely original approaches you’ve taken to writing and playing music?

HT: Learning this was a very difficult experience for me to live through. Growing up I was a very slow mover and I remember in high school there were some kids who were so technically advanced it would make me feel bad. I’d say, “God, look at how so-and-so can play,” and I’d be moping about it while they were just flying. But when I got through with junior college and into the conservatory I was finally able to relax because it was about art and not about economics: you could move at your own pace musically. Then I said, “Now I feel alright.” We didn’t even take exams: they prepared exams, like you know in six months the boards would come to you and say, “Mr. Threadgill, are you ready to take such-and-such?” I’d say, “No.” “Will you take such-and-such?’ I’d say, “No.” “Well, are you thinking of taking. . .” I’d say, “Make it three months.” Three months would come up and they’d ask, “You gonna take it?” And I would say, “No, make it another month.” Why? Because you’re supposed to know it not pass it.

DF: I want to change directions a bit, and ask you about the connection between the Civil Rights Movement and whatever you want to call it, not jazz, but creative musicking by African-Americans. There was an explosion of activity in the ‘60s around new musics being made by African-American musicians at roughly the same time as the Civil Rights Movement was happening. Do you see a connection there? 

HT: You know that’s very difficult for me. That was a time of radical change in America, you know. America was going through this very gradual change from about 1957 or ‘58, which were the years of the Civil Rights Bills enacted by Eisenhower after the bombings of schools and churches in the South.⁴ When you back up to ‘54, ‘52, or ‘51 America was really stiff and I mean the power of Protestantism was so pervasive and smothering, and the Civil Rights Movement sparked movements throughout America, coming from all kinds of ethnic and religious bases, farm workers, women’s rights, gay rights. Issues came into focus, and all kinds of things started coming up, and in the music too. 

This was a funny thing because when I first started trying to play so-called popular jazz music, I knew I’d never play the music as well as those people that played the music. I said to myself that I could never attain that level. And yet I knew that music had something important to do with your life––it had something to do with your social life and spiritual life. You can’t make music about some other time that you have never had anything to do with. I don’t believe in that type of art. You live in a time, you are informed by that time, and you get information that’s been in that time. Your art takes its form from that time.⁵ So when I remember back to that time during the Civil Rights Movement, we were playing, practicing these pieces of music that Charlie Parker did. So there was this kid who used to get more records than anybody, and we used to go to his house and listen, and Parker’s first record was Charlie Parker With Jay McShann And His Orchestra or something and we went and heard that and I said, “That’s it!” On that exact day I said, “The door has opened again.” I said, “This is the door,” and it was a door to other doors because before that I had a concept of what jazz was and we thought we had an idea of how wide it was or how big it was, and then all of a sudden another door opened, and that meant there were other doors to go through. As soon as I heard Parker I said, “This is it, this is where I step off the train,” and as a matter of fact the kids that I used to play with had a big split because they said, “Oh, no not that. We don’t like this.” And I said, “Well, so much for you all because I’m going this way.”⁶
 
DF: So when you went your own way in that split-up was there a problem with what everyone thought jazz should be, as opposed to what you were imagining it could be when you first heard Charlie Parker?

HT: This so-called jazz music that Parker opened the doors to for me has always been a problem in terms of description.⁷ In Duke Ellington’s book Music Is My Mistress there’s a very important question he asks about black music when he says, “Is this jazz?” Ellington said no, it’s just music and we should stop trying to define it as “jazz.” Ellington did not want to conform to any vogue or to be pigeonholed at all. You see there’s a lot of confusion about jazz because people haven’t thought back to the origins of it and how it was made. This is very important, how it’s made. It’s just mind-boggling when you look at the songbooks of Scott Joplin and you look at his opera Treemonisha, written in 1910. As an African-American composer, Joplin’s not sitting in some class, you know. And you have all of this incredible music that he writes. They discovered Treemonisha in the early 1970s and I was still in Chicago when they discovered it. And Joplin is sitting up in Kansas, writing this piece of music in 1910 and anticipates the very same musical devices as Arnold Schoenberg [the Austrian composer who developed the twelve-tone technique and whose music, along with jazz, was deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis]. Yet no one knew it and Joplin had never even heard of Schoenberg but wrote his opera about the same time as Schoenberg was formulating his influential twelve-tone compositional technique. So with Joplin you have this individual discovery being the individual discoverer that he was and that ties into the spirit of what I was saying earlier about learning for yourself as part of the aesthetics of this form of art. 

DF: Yes, and certainly one aspect that was informing Joplin’s music was his connection to improvisation through his own African-American heritage, no?

HT: Improvisation is one part of it; you can’t take improvisation out of it and yet you can’t describe improvisation either. Improvisation and the idea of improvisation keep getting bigger.⁸ This is something that we really need to try and get a better understanding of before it gets too far out of hand and everybody thinks they know what improvisation is and thinks that they can teach it and pass it on. I think that it’s not a successful job that is being done by musical institutions because they don’t really know what role they should play to teach students how to reproduce a sound in an instrument in the easiest, best way. Sure you need to teach me these kinds of technical things about playing an instrument, but don’t tell me how to really make any particular type of music. It’s always funny when you look and you see the classical orchestra and then you see these young jazz musicians have learned more and more of these classical methods and they all hold their instruments a certain way and they all look and sound the same. Go try to find a video of Cootie Williams playing the trumpet: [gesturing] the man has the trumpet up here, he’s got the trumpet down there, he’s got the trumpet over here, and what does it get down to? This is what it gets down to. Here’s the food. The food is good! Now here’s this other food and the person starts telling you what’s in the food and how they made it and all these other things and you say, well let me just taste the food, just let me see what it tastes like. So no one really cares how you do something, they only care about the end product. Nobody’s interested in whether you painted this painting with your toe, that you stepped on it, or how you wrote the book in a fit of delirium. Nobody really cares. All that matters is, “Is it happening?” Is it happening? Art is only about happening. There was a great young cello player in Chicago, he was named James Madison and he went to audition for The Cleveland Symphony. I forget who the conductor was. So the conductor comes in the door for the auditions and hears him and goes over and says, “Hire him right away,” and the assistants say, “You don’t know him . . .” But the conductor says, “Just hire him, any kid that can play like that, that’s all I want.” 

That story is basically what I’m talking about. Nobody really cares, you know. They don’t need a big story. Just let me hear what you’re doing, let me see what you’re doing, let me see what you write, show me what your dance is, you know, that’s the whole thing with this kind of music. So for the schools to be analyzing, there’s a problem. Don’t analyze––let the person analyze. Try to help a person out, keep coaching them, tell them this way and that way but don’t be giving them too much information. Students will beg you for information. They always want something they’re not supposed to have. That’s just being young—you think it’s going to unlock the secret for you or show you something. But it’s not going to show you anything. At a certain time in your life, you’ll have to meet it, the material, you’ll have to meet whatever it is that’s going to teach you anything. You’ll have to come to a crossroads about expressing yourself; otherwise all that study is not going to give you anything. I remember having instructors who would say, “Henry, take this book.” I’d go read it and I’d say, “It’s nice, but so what?” 

I remember when I first met Yusef Lateef. I was having a lot of trouble doubling on the flute at that time and I asked him—matter of fact we were playing with Muhal at the time; we were playing opposite, and Yusef was watching and I was listening to him and watching him and I asked him, “You know, I have been having some trouble working on some things on the flute,” and he said point blank, “You’ll just have to keep working on it.” I thought that was cruel and insensitive, and I remember saying, “You’re really not very sensitive to a young musician.” So he said again, “I think you’ll just have to keep working on it.” So these basic things about playing instruments, you can tell people how to develop a better touch on the piano and so on and you can understand other music from an analytical point of view. Yet some music defies being analyzed, I don’t really think, for instance, that you can analyze a lot of Indonesian music. You may get close to a mathematical notation of it but there are some things that go on in the spirit of playing that music that are entirely in music. All different ethnic groups and even individuals have a different spirit in their music. When you sit down and play Mozart it is not the same as when you play Brahms, yet both are German and European. So it’s always some kind of special way that people and different groups interpret things. 

Musicians . . .  I spent a lot of years in envy of the way they’ll come at a musical problem. If you’ve been to Cuba, the way they deal with rhythmic problems is a whole different way than in the south, South India in particular. Yet South India is really the extension of Africa because this is the part of India that was uncolonized: it was not Catholic, it wasn’t Buddhist, it wasn’t Hindu, it wasn’t Muslim, and it wasn’t Jewish. The Catholic part of India is in Goa and the Hindus and Muslims are in different regions as were the Buddhists. The bottom of India is pure African so that’s where the most complex rhythmic information is. Cuba is also a good example of how to deal with rhythmic problems but when you compare Cubans with the path the South Indians have taken, it’s a whole different kind of feel: you sense something on the beat and something off the beat and you say that’s wrong, but it’s not, it’s where they’re placing their information, placing the information a little ahead of time, a little back, a little forward, and right on top of it, and it can confuse you. 

But back to this education thing, we were talking about the young musicians that are living around New York, who’ve just moved down to the city with me, like Dafnis Prieto [the Cuban percussionist and winner of a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship]. Dafnis came from Cuba and started playing with me. I was actually astounded at his musical ability and control. And when I compared his skills with musicians I knew in the States, how they stacked up against him, well they stacked up very poorly. So they stacked up poorly because of what the schools were giving them and it made me think, I said next time I’m given a chance, next time I’m in Chicago I’m going to go and see the school curriculum of where I went to school. And I found that it was still the same. They hadn’t changed anything; they hadn’t discovered anything. So I asked Dafnis, “What was it like? You went to school in Havana [Cuba]?” He said he was very fortunate because everything was taken care of by the State. I said, “So how many days did you go to school?” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “How many days a week did you go to school?” He said, “Everyday.” I said, “Everyday?” I said, “Oh, so how long was your school day, like nine to five?” He said, “All day.” I said, “All day, every day?” He said, “Well, some guys might not go until twelve o’clock at night and come home early to Hall B and play guitar.” He said at six o’clock in the morning he might be playing with so-and-so and so-and-so. 

I said, “Well, that’s very interesting with all these guys coming together because they’re all the same age and so focused.” And when I look at their skills and compare their skills to other young musicians I say we’ve been badly underserved in this country. When you look at these Cuban kids, Dafnis can sit up and talk with this hand or talk with this other hand and have both feet dancing with two different rhythms, and there’s no reason kids in this country can’t do that. We have a distinction, do you know, we have the world distinction of having the worst rhythmic players on string instruments in the world? Did you know that?

DF: No.

HT: The United States has that distinction. That’s because they keep teaching the same thing over and over and over and will not change the curriculum. I found out that in Cuba, whatever you were studying you had to study a rhythmic instrument. So in the end what they’re looking for is total rhythmic independence that all four or five parts of you are independent. That’s not a big deal. You start a kid going off going to that school for four or five years, and you just work on that. If you work on just the independence of the kid’s voice, you’ve created a giant craftsman musician.

We were talking earlier about Elliott Carter and I was saying I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he was in Paris in the ‘30s with Nadia Boulanger. My professor wanted to send me to France to study with her but I knew that I didn’t want to go there because I thought I was too old to be learning French, and she had such a hard reputation. She beat Elliott Carter to death there! All of her students had to gather at her house regularly to sing music. So they’re all singing the music, there’s no piano, and they’re singing the most complicated, difficult contemporary music you can think—probably a lot of it was Debussy and Stravinsky. For me, that’s a really good thing to do in our schools if you want to develop a kid’s voice and create an independent voice. That’s all we really need to do. But they come out of the school now and they can’t read rhythm, they can’t hear, but they can play some instrument and replicate something. Replicate something!

DF: The music you’re making with Zooid is just out of this world, and I wanted to ask you about the pulse to it: it’s kinetic, it’s full of movement, and there’s so much space in it. Where is it all coming from?

HT: It’s the musicians that are creating that particular world. It’s how we collectively process the music when we’re working on it—it’s these personalities, these specific musical personalities that create the sound this way.

DF: So for people who are coming new to your music, what do you think they have to know?

HT: Nothing.

DF: Nothing?

HT: Nothing. I don’t believe you have to know anything about art. Some people won’t be able to engage with it. That’s just a reality in terms of any kind of art anywhere. They always say that art is universal. Art is really not universal. What they mean by universal is that all societies and groups make art. That’s what’s really universal, but an audience can’t always engage with certain things. It’s just not within its parameters to do that, you know. But I really don’t believe in ever telling people anything. I had one experience in high school with a literature teacher and a girl. And we had to write poetry. The girl came up in front of the class and she said, “This poem is about so-and-so, so-and-so . . .” and he said, “Stop.” He said, “Just read the poem. Don’t tell us what it’s about.” And I mean, people say to try to explain things to other people about art. It doesn’t work . . . that’s not the way it works. I don’t really believe in that. And then you get people sitting up with things in their head that they think should occur, rather than just letting people go with the flow. Yet I’ve found that people from all over the world can engage with your music and art because we travel all over the world and it’s certainly not just something that people in North America can appreciate, but people in all kinds of places.

DF: What’s been your impression coming to the Guelph Jazz Festival? It’s a festival that’s really unusual for so many reasons.

HT: Well, it’s pretty adventurous to have music around the clock! 

DF: Yes, this is the second year in a row now that we’re having the Nuit Blanche . . .

HT: They did this before?

DF: Yes, last year we did . . .

HT: That’s great! I like that because it breaks the whole pattern of when things should happen in time. People get so fixed about things. I like concerts at midnight, concerts at three o’clock, concerts at ten thirty in the morning! That’s good because it’s only going to last for a short period of time. That’s what I like about all this music crammed into a few days––it just breaks up all those listening habits.
DF: Thanks so much for gracing us with your music.
HT: It was my pleasure.

---

Notes

¹ Threadgill calls Muhal Richard Abrams a “fantastic leader, teacher, composer, musician. You can never trap him. You go after him, he goes out another door on you. He’s like a rabbit––he’s got a bunch of exits” (Terkel 163).

² This comment echoes what Threadgill has said elsewhere about the AACM, that the most exciting aspect of being a member of it was “The achieving of democracy, that is, giving one’s musical skills to the leadership of another musician even if one could not accept the other’s musical platform” (Oyama n.p.).

³ Threadgill has been consistently critical in recent interviews of musical education in the United States, arguing that many jazz musicians have a serious problem. They’ve got a problem because, first of all, they’ve been affected the wrong way by music schools and universities that interfere with the black music process. Just like the Chinese music process, the Balinese music process, the Indian music process: there’s [a] process by which art comes about. See, they’ve taken a European music process . . . but [the] European music process is not good for the Indian music or the black music or any other kind of music. (Hall n.p.)

On the subject of Black music, Threadgill insists

Black music is the result of an interchange between African music and the music from the rest of the world, not just European music, all music. Wherever there’s another culture that the African descendants that came to this country came in contact with, that becomes part of the language. Because the language that the African descendants have, they don’t have that language anymore; they lost that when they came here. So they set up like a new language. This is a new language that’s been created, out of bits and pieces of everything. So that’s an important aspect of jazz that nobody talks about. Now when you understand that principle . . . you should understand that you need to be studying all music, and all people and all things, not just this particular genre of music. It’s inconsistent with the whole history of it. (Shteamer The Wire n.p.)

⁴ In the following note I outline some of the key moments in the Civil Rights history the question references.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was passed on September 9, 1957. Written as a voting rights bill, it became the first civil rights legislation enacted by Congress in the United States since Reconstruction following the American Civil War. Following the historic US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1955), which eventually led to the integration of public schools, Southern whites in Virginia began a “Massive Resistance.” Violence against blacks rose there and in other states, as in Little Rock, Arkansas, where that year President Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered in federal troops to protect nine children integrating a public school, the first time the federal government had sent troops to the South since Reconstruction. There had been continued physical assaults against suspected activists and bombings of schools and churches in the South. The administration of Eisenhower proposed legislation to protect the right to vote by African Americans. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, an ardent segregationist, sustained the longest one-person filibuster in history in an attempt to keep the bill from becoming law. His one-man filibuster lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes; he began with readings of every state’s election laws in alphabetical order. Thurmond later read from the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington’s Farewell Address. His speech set the record for a Senate filibuster. The bill passed the House with a vote of 270 to 97 and the Senate 60 to 15. President Eisenhower signed it on September 9, 1957. (“Civil Rights Act of 1957”)

The 1960 Civil Rights Act came into being as a result of events that occurred at the end of 1958. Following the 1957 Civil Rights Act described above, Eisenhower introduced yet another civil rights bill in late 1958. The new Bill was in response to a streak of bombings against churches and schools in the South, though the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama on Sunday September 15, 1963 that killed four young girls had yet to occur. That latter bombing spawned memorable musical tributes by both John Coltrane (the song “Alabama” on Coltrane’s Live at Birdland recorded on November 18, 1963 was an elegy to the deaths of the young girls) and Nina Simone (whose song “Mississippi Goddam” was written in reaction to the racially-motivated bombings). The event caused widespread revulsion and radicalized a generation of young African-American activists including people like Angela Davis, whose family not only lived in Birmingham in the area known as Dynamite Hill (because it was so frequently the target of Ku Klux Klan bombings), but who was also friends with one of the victims and whose mother had taught another one of the young girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church (Davis states this in interviews that appear as part of the 2011 film written and directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975).

The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church itself proved to be a turning point for the Civil Rights Movement in the States, giving rise to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination against blacks and women (including racial segregation in schools, the workplace, and public service facilities) and ended irregularities in the voter registration process that discriminated against minorities. Though Eisenhower is not usually associated with civil rights issues, his contributions, including the 1957 Act, were part of the legislative changes that responded to growing public protests and indignation against the systematic racism faced by African Americans. In the case of the legislation Eisenhower introduced in 1958 in response to ongoing racially motivated attacks against Blacks, it only achieved passage as an Act in 1960, largely because both Republicans and Democrats were fighting for the so-called Black Vote.

The 1960 Civil Rights Act levied penalties against anyone found guilty of obstructing any citizen’s attempt to register to vote or any citizen’s attempt to enact his or her franchise. The 1960 Bill also created, importantly, the Civil Rights Commission. It is worth remembering that integrationist arguments were in themselves deemed to be denigrating by activists like Stokely Carmichael, who in 1966 argued,

Integration speaks to the problem of blackness in a despicable way. As a goal, it has been based on a complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, blacks must move into a white school. This reinforces among both black and white the idea that “white” is automatically better and “black” is by definition “inferior.” (cited in Panish xxi)

As Jon Panish shows, this attack on normative whiteness was echoed in some of Cecil Taylor’s (and others’) pronouncements in the same year:

There should be a boycott by Negro musicians of all jazz clubs in the United States. I also propose that there should be a boycott by Negro musicians of all record companies . . . We’re no longer reflecting or vibrating to the white-energy principle. The point is: we know who we are. We have a whole history of music in this country. (cited in Panish xxi)

Mazzola and Cherlin note that the situation with jazz in the early sixties was the impression that this music had been stolen from its mostly black creators by white companies, white intelligentsia, and white organizers. Shepp commented . . . that “Jazz” had become a commercial brand like “Coca Cola.” According to him, free jazz was also an attempt to liberate the music and its creative expression from packaged commercialism. In a Down Beat interview in 1965, he argued that “jazz is one of the socially and esthetically most significant contributions to America . . . it is against war; against Vietnam; for Cuba; for the liberation of the peoples of the world. This is the nature of jazz . . . Why? Because jazz is itself born from oppression, born from the subjugation of my people.” The community of jazz musicians progressively felt miserable and exploited. Ornette Coleman sums this up with his comment: “I am black and a jazzman. As a black and a jazzman I feel miserable.” (4)

Many of Threadgill’s observations, here and elsewhere, about imposing European musical on African American musicking resonate politically with these sorts of statements from the ‘60s. In short, beware the exploitation of jazz and the neutering of its creative potential via both commercialization and the willful ignorance about the historical conditions that generated African American creative improvised music.

⁵ In an interview conducted just before the Guelph Jazz Festival, Threadgill was even more explicit on this point:

Music is related in time. Music and all art [are] related to the period in which [they] occur. To the social circumstances, the spiritual circumstances and all those other pertinent circumstances that exist at a certain time . . . We got a lot of your people now, they [are] sitting up playing music, they’re playing very well on these instruments, because that’s one thing they’ve taught them very well . . . But they’re sitting up trying to become great at some music that’s older than me. (laughter) (Hall n.p.)

⁶ Elsewhere Threadgill says of Parker:

We made Charlie Parker a museum piece and made him a stylistic end. He didn’t finish. You can’t hardly pick up a book written on Charlie Parker and even see where they mention his interest in the music of Edgard Varèse. That’s where he was moving next. But you don’t see that in books on Charlie Parker. You got him classified in some little stylistic museum category. But he was a man in evolution; he was evolving. (Terkel 162)

This sense of forward movement in improvised musical practices is key to Threadgill’s overall outlook:

The tradition is one of going forward. It's not like something in terms of a repertory body of music that's reinterpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted. That's my understanding of the tradition that I'm a part of. It's one that goes forward. It's one that keeps extending itself. And it was just in my nature as a human being, you know. I wasn't going go over and over the same thing. (Hall n.p.)

⁷ Threadgill has said,

I don’t really like the word jazz; I prefer creative improvised music, because there’s confusion about what jazz means now. I think it’s lost its meaning and I don’t think it’s relevant anymore . . . and then people make films, documentaries, Ken Burns for one. He and the people that were his consultants, they give a picture of what they say jazz is and then exclude generations of people, whole schools and generations of people are excluded from it, and it’s played nationally and internationally, and it’s giving an idea of what jazz is. So that’s why I say that word has lost its meaning, you know. (Shteamer The Wire n.p.)

⁸ In a 2009 Wire interview with Hank Shteamer, Threadgill says of improvisation, real creativity needs to occur not by playing something that you been playing over and over again and playing some variation of it, but to create something in the moment, right in the moment. That’s creative improvisation. To be able to approach a musical terrain and you’ve got all these solutions for it, I don’t consider that creative at his point.

 

And in an interview with Ethan Iverson, Threadgill states:

I go into rehearsal to look for its [music’s] discovery. What’s on paper is a place to start . . . Now with Zooid, form is in process with me. Before Zooid I had been working on interior parts in advancing harmony, counterpoint and getting rid of the method of improvisation that has lasted for a long time. I needed to go another way with improvising to have people play more spontaneously. Well, now form itself is in a state of improvisation. These little things you were talking about, the “mistakes,” affect form. The same thing happens in research labs where most of the discoveries are made through mistakes. (Iverson n.p.)

And in a 2011 interview with David Adler, Threadgill reiterates, “In jazz the form has been treated as sacred. The form is not sacred with me” (Adler n.p.).

Works Cited

Adler, David R. “Henry Threadgill Be Ever Out.” JazzTimes. March 2011. Web. 8 November 2011.

The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975. Writ. and dir. Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011. DVD.

Chinen, Nate. “Master of the Mutable, in an Idiom All his Own.” The New York Times, 8 November 2009. Web. 8 November 2011.

“Civil Rights Act of 1957.” Wikipedia. Web. 8 November 2011.

Hall, Glen. “Henry Threadgill.” Exclaim.ca. Exclaim! September 2011: N. pag. Web. 8 November 2011.

Iverson, Ethan. “Interview With Henry Threadgill.” Do The Math 25 May 2011. Web. 8 November 2011.

Johnson, Martin. “A Man with His Own Vocabulary.” The Wall Street Journal, 9 November 2010. Web. 24 August 2011.

Mazzola, Guerino and Paul B. Cherlin. Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a Theory of Collaboration. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2009. Print.

Oyama, Richard. “Interview With Henry Threadgill.” Jazz Advance 25 October 2010. Web. 8 November 2011.

Panish, Jon. The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Print.

Shteamer, Hank. “Henry Threadgill Unedited.” The Wire 309 (November 2009): N. pag. Web. 8 November 2011.

---. “Liner Notes.” The Complete Novus and Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air. Stamford, Connecticut: Mosaic, 2010. Print.

Terkel, Studs. “Henry Threadgill.” And They All Sang: The Great Musicians of the 20^th Century Talk About Their Music. London: Granta Books, 2005: 161-63. Print.

“This Brings Us To, Vol. 1.” Pi Recordings. <http://pirecordings.com/album/pi31>. Web. 8 November 2011.

Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (through both its Major Collaborative Research Initiatives and Aid to Scholarly Journals programs) and by the University of Guelph Library.

ISSN: 1712-0624

http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-henry-threadgill-1-.html 

Interview with Henry Threadgill (1)

Thanks to Peggy Sutton for commissioning the following for Jazz on 3.  Steve Weiss was the engineer, Ben Gerrish did the transciption, and Bradley Bambarger supplied editorial assistance.

 HENRY THREADGILL

Part one is about music.
Part two is about Vietnam, and features audio:  You've got to hear him tell these war stories himself.
Part three is about music.
"Four Hits and the Ultramodern Blues" discusses five favorite tunes.
---

Henry Threadgill:  So, tell me something about your show.


Ethan Iverson:  We’re taping for the BBC radio program Jazz on 3.  I have interviewed Gunther Schuller, Keith Jarrett and Django Bates already.


HT:  How long ago did you interview Gunther Schuller?


EI:  About a year ago.  Do you know Gunther?


HT:  Yes, I met Gunther.  God, it’s been so long ago, and I haven’t seen him in years.  I met him when he was at Dartmouth.  I guess that was . . . maybe 1969 or '70 or something like that.  Richard Davis was there at that time.


EI:  Oh, right.  Another Chicago person.  So many great musicians out of Chicago.


HT:  Oh, yeah, you got a Midwest full of great musicians.


EI:  Gunther Schuller – that’s an interesting entry point.  You are unafraid of classical music resources.


HT:  Yeah. . .


EI:  Some jazz guys would feel that classical music was off-limits.


HT:  . . . I’m not jazz, though.


EI:  That’s right!


HT:  That was a period.  Cassandra Wilson just said that scatting belonged to a period that’s over, and it’s true.  The idea of jazz was a period, too, and if you allow the word to become bigger, it's always an expanding proposition.


You gotta remember something about black music in America.  People start in the wrong places in trying to put together the history of black music.  When you go back to the blues in the Delta, there was no prototype, there was no template, there was no European example on how to formulate anything.  The people just made that music from an aesthetic that they had that came with them from Africa.  They lost any containers or forms or approaches other than the aesthetic.  When you look, you see that there was no music that the slaves created basically prior to the Civil War.  Do you know the reason for that?


EI:  Sometimes they weren’t allowed to have instruments.
 
HT:  Well, they were playing banjo, they was beatin’ on the jawbone, it was just things that was scraped together. . . but their introduction to Western instruments came about because of the Civil War.


Remember the North and the South had bands; they had military bands in the North and the South, but these people weren’t professional musicians.  When the war was over, they came back to the places that they came from with these band instruments, but they weren’t playing them anymore; and this was the advent of pawn shops.  They dropped these instruments off in pawn shops because they were broke.  Now it was possible for anybody, a poor black, white, or anything else to pick up an instrument for a dollar, or fifty cents…a used instrument for fifty cents, so there’s a violin, there’s a trumpet in the window.


EI:  These were ex-military instruments?


HT:  Yes, these were band instruments.  You see that these band instruments are what the black musicians were playing at first.  Not the orchestral instruments, but the concert band instruments.  Because that’s what we had in America was the concert band.  That’s why we have pagodas set up for these concerts. Especially all across the Midwest.  (Not so much out here.)


EI:  Sure, the little town I grew up in Wisconsin had a pagoda.  That’s something you were supposed to do on a Friday night: cut the grass and then go see the band.


HT:  So, the introduction to these instruments is the beginning of learning how to move their musical thinking into that arena.  Right?


Now, the entire experience of the slave was one of assimilation.  Assimilation of anything!  It didn’t matter: Chinese, French, Spanish, whatever it was.  It was the acquisition of all information in systems and knowledge and communication.  And that was without discrimination. It was just grab hold of something and learn how to do it in some kind of way and put your thing through it.  Look at Scott Joplin.  He wasn’t really emulating anything from Europe.  At all!  As a matter of fact, when he wrote Treemonisha, it was simultaneous with the advent of Schoenberg’s sprechstimme, and sprechstimme was present in Treemonisha.

(Scott Joplin, finale of Act 1 to Treemonisha, "Confusion," composed in 1910)


And Joplin had no contact with Europe in any kind of way.  This guy’s totally isolated and he’s just making music from an aesthetic. 


For music -- in addition to drumming and rhythm and things like this -- there’s an aesthetic in African art.  And that aesthetic is so much different than the European in terms of form.  First of all, most African music has nothing to do with form.  They don’t deal in form.  You know like a sonata form or a fugue form?  They do not do it. It just happens, and that’s it.


EI:  It makes me think of someone like Pete Johnson.  I know you’re a boogie woogie fan!  Whatever Pete Johnson does exists in sort of an irreplaceable moment.  Technically and spiritually, his creation is much harder to play than any étude by Chopin.


HT:  It’s totally different.


EI:  It comes from a completely differently angle. I think that angle doesn’t get enough respect, actually.


HT:  Right!  Because there’s too much relating things back to the European format.  Look how long it took for what we call an American school of music.  You really don’t get to it until Charles Ives. 


EI:  Guys like Edward MacDowell don’t hold up that great today, no.


HT:  MacDowell and Horatio Parker and the rest were students of European music.  It took a very long time for the composers to turn to the folk elements.  That was also the basis of European music. Folk elements all around the world.  I don’t care how sophisticated it becomes, the folk element was the basis of any music.  And [pre-Ives classical composing] Americans were skipping that, right? 

But back to your question about what I use and what I’m not afraid to use:  I’m saying all these things to say that I’ve always understood how music got created here in America, and that I was under no obligation to do any particular thing.  I do exactly the way I feel, whatever I want to do.

That’s probably why I love Debussy so much.  He did exactly what he felt like doing, even though he was European.


EI:  To go back to this idea that jazz was a moment. . .


HT:  The word has to expand. See, we know nothing about all of the black classical orchestral writers.  They are just left out of history basically.  Somebody might have heard the name of William Grant Still or Ulysses Kay, but not really.  But something that has happened in my time that never existed before:  All of the composers know people like me and Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams. 

Grant Still or Kay, they tried to make their music fit into that European model.  And when I get a commission, they still make it fit into that European container, in order to get it played.  This has been going on for a long time.  But now, I don’t want any more commissions from American orchestras that are not ready to do what I want to do and go in the direction I’m going in...and learn something.

Because we don’t process music the way they process music, either.  We process music -- when I say "we," I mean improvising musicians; not all of them, but myself -- I approach it through the word the Germans use for rehearsing:  probe, which is in search of.  Not to read something straight through and go in like, well, everybody read it and everybody pay the permit to get up and go home.


EI:   And forget about the rhythm when you get one of those orchestras!


HT:   It sounds so square.   The reason for that is they’re still using a European model; they’re not getting up off of that and going with the other model.


We don’t play music with the size beat that they play it.  Our beat has a width to it.  They play right in the middle on the beat. Their beat is so thin it’s like tick, tick, tick.  Now when I had the Sextett, I used two drummers, and always had one drummer that played this far behind the beat and another drummer that played almost ahead of the beat.  So the beat is that wide, so you could lay information in quite differently. You got a lot of room for laying information, and that’s the same thing that happens in Latin music. 

Mario Bauza told me about the wrassling match when the modern jazz guys came in and tried to play with the Latin cats in 40’s.  The clave and the swing wouldn’t mix!  Bauza said that Charlie Parker could bring the music together, but as soon as Bird stopped the wrassling match would begin again.  Mario said that not even Diz or Dexter Gordon could do that, but Charlie Parker could.


When you play jazz and Latin music, you have to take the beat and the time from the drummer, not the conductor.  The conductor keeps those people in that narrow band, and that narrow band does not allow you to express anything. That only works with the European model.  Of course, that’s legitimate!  There’s nothing wrong with that.


EI:  Well, tell me about some of your drummers, like Steve McCall.


HT:  Oh, well, what can I tell you about Steve McCall? 


EI:   Anything you want.


HT:  Well, you have to be more specific.  I know a lot of things about Steve McCall.  He’s a great musician, an intuitive musician. 


EI:  I love how he tunes his drums; I think it’s a very beautiful sound out of the kit.


HT:  A lot of music that Air played called for certain tunings.  That’s why Air was able to have a certain dynamic.  With just reeds, bass and drums, in a very short period of time you’re not going to have much dynamic orchestrally – time or color wise.  And I’ve learned from being around Ahmad Jamal about the tuning of those drums.  And if you listen to the first Air record, you hear those different tunings that I’m using.  Steve, he had his own tuning when I didn’t have things called for specific tunings.  The way he personally played behind the beat.  I was never comfortable with people who played on the beat; I had to learn how to play with guys that rushed the beat, played ahead of the beat.  I was always comfortable with kind of a Midwestern thing behind the beat.  The way Lester Young played behind the beat.


EI:  I heard that Steve McCall really knew the street side of things.


HT:  He was the first one of us in Europe, and when Archie and all of them got there, he knew everybody.  He played with Archie Shepp, went to Africa with Don Byas. 

McCall was the oldest, I was in the middle, and Fred Hopkins was the youngest.  By the time we moved to Europe, he was a senior.  He had lived in Paris, he had lived in Holland.  He knew something about the Dutch, he knew a lot about the French and the Germans. 


EI:  Whenever I see a photo of Fred Hopkins, I think this is the most handsome man!  He really has a great look.


HT:  He is an incredible bass player.


EI:  For me, Fred Hopkins is essential for many of your greatest records.


HT:  You make music the same way you have baseball teams, football teams and basketball teams.  The same way.  That’s how its done, with some great key players.  The Duke Ellington Orchestra would not have sounded like that with just anybody in the orchestra.  Count Basie without Lester, Herschel Evans, or whoever was back there.  It's always that way.  With the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock, there were key people in that orchestra who made that sound.  It's just like sports – it's a team effort.  People forget that, and sometimes they'll just look at the leader’s name on the date.  The musicians realize the blueprint.  Their ability to open up your blueprint is what brings a work to life.


EI:  What was Fred Hopkins like as a person?  He looks so gentle in the photos.


HT:  He could be quiet, then he could be pretty wild – when he was having fun especially!  I met Fred when he was living next door to me, when I moved on 49th Street in Chicago.  No one knew who was; he was working in the A&P, bagging groceries and doing things like that.  I found out that he played when I heard him playing one day in the building next to me.  I passed him and wondered who was playing the bass because I liked the way he played.  We started talking at that time, and Steve came back from Europe and moved a little farther down the street.  I was doing things on the North Side of Chicago, like experimental dance companies and experimental theater groups.  Like when Grease and all that stuff came out on North Lincoln Avenue.  It was a pretty wild period, a great period for theater in Chicago.  All those things came to New York. This director asked me to write the music for a show called Hotel Diplomat, later called 99 Rooms.  He gave me two books of Scott Joplin music, a volume of piano music and a volume of songs.  He wanted me to use some rags in them, so I put the trio together.  The first day that we started playing, we played the rags that I started orchestrating.


So Fred developed a sound and a way of playing that was not coming from playing jazz standards or Broadway show standards.  Those weren’t his references, although he loved all the great bass players like Wilbur Ware.  Fred was from Chicago: if you come from Chicago, you have to love Wilbur Ware!


Part of how Fred developed his sound was working on the Joplin music.   There was nothing to listen to, anyway, for saxophone, bass, and drums playing rags.


EI:  It’s true that Hopkins has something in there like an older jazz, Pops Foster-type of feel.
Hopkins played with you in the Sextett as well.  What about Pheeroan Aklaff?


HT:  He and John Betch were the first two drummers in the Sextett.


EI:  I think Aklaff is someone who really understands how to bring pop and other grooves that feel really good and authentic in a sort of wild context.


HT:  That was the period when no one ever wrote about what I was doing with the drums.  That was more drum music I had ever written in my life, for those two drummers.  No one ever picked up that anything was written.


EI:  I noticed "The Theme from Thomas Cole."  The first minute or so there are absolutely no drums, there are only cymbals.  There was one specific snare drum hit from one of them, but otherwise, it's this blank canvas; so that when the other parts come in, it goes to a whole new level.  That's the sort of thing you are talking about, right?


HT:  Everything was written, just like every string part was written.  The drums were tuned so that I had all 12 pitches, because we also carried two concert bass drums, if you ever noticed that. . .


EI:  No.


HT:  Well, listen to those recordings.  Sometimes we used them, sometimes we didn't.  That means there are six drums for each set.  Bass drum, two floor toms, two upper toms.  So let's say a bass drum, two floor toms, snare, that’s four.


EI:  So you wrote out parts for both of them?  Wow!


HT:  Yes!


EI:  I didn’t realize it was that extensive.


HT:  Both sets were tuned so that chromatically I could get the entire scale.  One is tuned in fourths and the other tuned in fifths, because the bass is tuned in fourths and the cello is tuned in fifths.  So I can get almost the entire chromatic scale, minus one note.

Keep this in mind now that I told you about it when you listen to the Sextett records.  I think we were in Berlin and Roy Haynes said something like, “It wasn't a big band but it sounded big.”  We sounded big because of the orchestration.  The pre-orchestration is the sound of the drums themselves.  It was almost like having 10 timpani on stage, and when you have the bass with E, A, D, G, and the drums are tuned to those pitches too, you know what you have, don't you?  Sympathetic vibrations!  E-A-D is a huge note because it has been activated.  The open strings on the bass open can be like a sitar.  You listen to any records with two drummers playing, and then you listen to the Sextett record – see the width and size of the scale of the drums and how it impacts those instruments.  See how the instruments blend in with these drums. Did you listen to Rag, Bush and All? Everything is tuned, heavily tuned.  In Africa, the drums are tuned.


EI:  Live music is the best music, and I really wish I could have seen the Sextett live.  At least we have the records.  When you wrote for the group, did you write out a score, and then have a copyist do the parts?


HT:  I didn't have any copyist!


EI:  So you wrote a score and the parts for everybody.  That's a lot of music.  You must get up and write music everyday.


HT:  Well, no, I can only write at certain times, in order keep up with these instruments.  You know, you don't play for one week, your wife or your girlfriend knows; two weeks and you know; three weeks and everybody knows.  I have friends who can do both.  I can’t do both.  I have to do one at a time.  I write, and then I go to my instruments.  I can't keep up with the instruments if the writing becomes too demanding.


EI:  You wrote so much for that band.  Sometimes I hear an element on the records that suggests you are almost reading it in the studio.  Tiny structural errors and stuff like that.  Is it true that you would come into the studio with new music?

HT:  No, it's a way of processing music.  I go into rehearsal to look for its discovery.  What's on paper is a place to start.  I am playing, and then this guy plays this note wrong, and then I say, "Oh, really?  Just keep it like that.”  I say, let's start at measure two, and someone thinks I mean start on the second beat.  So I just say, "Hey, start on the second beat."  Also, when someone doesn’t play 'cause they forgot to come in.  Well, that's discovery.

EI:  That's the element you can’t get with classical musicians.

HT:  No one has ever written about that.  In orchestral music, the job of the conductor is to lift the music up off the paper, because it's not all on the paper.  Also, a good conductor deals with the acoustics of the room.  A poor conductor follows the metronome markings while disregarding the acoustical information.

A good conductor processes the hall.  I do the same thing, but I process the form.

Now with Zooid, form is in process with me. Before Zooid I had been working on interior parts in advancing harmony, counterpoint and getting rid of the method of improvisation that has lasted for a long time.  I needed to go another way with improvising to have people play more spontaneously.  Well, now form itself is in a state of improvisation.  These little things you were talking about, the “mistakes,” affect form.  The same thing happens in research labs where most of the discoveries are made through mistakes.

The European template is a different way of assembling and processing the music.  People keep that as a standard, but you can’t take the music that we are making and apply it to that standard.  They are two different worlds. This has been going on for a long time and has caused major confusion, where people would write things about what I am doing or what someone else is doing and say, “Is that a European method?"  No, it isn’t.  I gather information and then I process the way I process.  I come to rehearsal with much material that is written out, but that's only a starting point.  Everything is written out, but it also doesn’t mean a thing.   The music is totally modular because what is here can be here or what is here can be there because this is what we discover in discovery.

This is what needs to be brought out by music analysts and musicologists.

EI:  In this mutable music, the musicians are so crucial. Tell me about the cast in Zooid.

HT:  Christopher Hoffman is with us now, the cellist, he just joined as the sixth member.  The band started with Taruy Brevrey on oud, Dany Leon on trombone and cello, Liberty Ellman on acoustic guitar, José Davila on trombone and tuba and Elliot Kavee on drums. We rehearsed for a year before we appeared.  It was impossible to appear otherwise because when I left off with Make a Move, I had abandoned the major/minor system, and it appeared on the first Pi record with Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi.  So it took them a year to learn this language.  It wasn't about the difficulty about reading the notes – these guys could read fly paper, all of them -- but to learn the language and a type of independence.   Collective improvisation has been an important thing to me, always.  Now everything is truly independent; no one can really depend on anyone else.  I like harmony.  I haven't abandoned anything.  Counterpoint is there, but the harmony is an illusion.  You hear this harmony, but we aren't really playing it, and we aren't improvising on it. One piece of harmony can have as many as 14 faces.

EI:  What do you mean by that?

HT:  Let's say the sound of C, C-sharp, F-sharp; it can have the face of G, C, E-flat, maybe. It can have the sound of E-flat, F, E. It can have the sound of F-sharp, G-sharp, A -- because it comes from a family.  This family is like your biological family, like your brothers, sisters, mother and father all share DNA, it is the same thing.  This has nothing to do with major/minor substitution.

EI:  It must have to do with intervals.

HT:  It has to do with intervals, but interval groups that are born from two parents.

EI:  This sounds like tri-chords.

HT:  No, absolutely not.  C Major and C minor are the same thing.  One is feminine and one is masculine, in my world, so the mother creates so many children, and the father makes so many children. Between the two of them, I can get as many as 14 children.  Let’s stay with the idea of children.  There are three factors in this family.  You, your brothers and sisters, everybody has got one ear, brown eyes and a big thumb.  If 15 children, they got more than that.  Some of them got one ear, three eyes, a brown eye and a blue eye, you see what I'm saying.  That's why I said that one thing can have 14 manifestations of itself.  I'm speaking in terms of harmony, but it's true with everything that's moving, that you are listening to.

You have played some of my older music, but you haven't played anything recent music at the piano.

EI:  [To “audition” for this interview, I played a little bit of Threadgill music on the phone to him the previous day.]  I was trying to learn some of "Polymorph," but it was beyond me, and now I'm beginning to understand why.

HT:  Students from universities have studied some of my earlier work, but that was when I was writing in the major/minor system.  Now, when you start to follow the contrapuntal lines, you see that everyone is starting to play something different, moving in counterpoint.  They still have their freedom, but there is set of numbers of intervals, and everything that is happening is moving according to voice leading.  There is no random voice leading.  If there is no minor second and I play a minor second, I destroy the interior of everything.

EI:  It doesn't sound like 12-tone music, but is it spiritually aligned with having a system like that?

HT:  It has nothing to do with serialism at all.  In serialism, you have a series of notes.  Could be 12 notes, five notes, whatever the series is.  Well, this is a series of intervals; the first series is five, then four, and the next one is seven, and the next one three, and the next eight, and the next four, and every one of them is different and they exist for period of time.  The written music that's on the paper, everything is moving according to that.  Not necessarily every interval that is up there, but when we improvise, we can take a lot of liberties because that is what the musicians have learned how to do.  Now the players with me, they can do anything they want to do, because if you understand what you can and cannot do, then that means you can do everything since you understand those two things.

EI:  I can perceive order on the Zooid records, and it's interesting to hear that it's so well organized.  In a way, your music with Zooid reminds me of late Stravinsky, after he embraced composing with intervals in a non-major/minor kind of way.

HT:  Stravinsky used everything he found.

When you make art, you can't say “you can't use that” or “can't use this.”  It’s not like religion.  It's not like I am practicing a part of the Catholic liturgy, and then I’m over into some stuff from the Hebrew world and then I shoot over to Buddhism . Yes, people are going to object to that. . . I am listening to the way they organize sound in Bali and the way they organize sound in South India.  Whatever I can learn from that, I learn from that and integrate it.  See, with the American Experience, black people and Chinese people had the American spirit, but white Americans almost forgot about it!   They didn't have any information after they left Europe, other than imitating Europe. Finally, when you get into Appalachian-American and Hillbilly Music, which I grew up with, you see the beginning of the roots of the material of another experience in America.  Rock and Roll sprang up because new elements here were kind of being denied. 

America was isolated in the first place. We started to learn things and process things in their own isolated way, and everyone else in America was doing the same thing. Black Americans didn't look to Europe as a template.  The interesting people like Ives and Copland:  when you read their writing, they are saying what is going on in America, how America is thinking.  In their process, in the way they process, they are telling you about the thinking in America at that time.  How they were breaking out of a type of isolationism and also a type of imitation-ism as well.

EI:  Talking about Fred Hopkins, I have also been listening to Stomu on these Zooid records, and there seems to be a connection in the way that the bass sounds.  I think Stomu is a phenomenal bass player.

HT:  All of these players – I have been really lucky. This is one of the best groups I have ever had, ever.  It's quite incredible.  The dedication of these musicians to the music is 150% all the time. I have never had a group this size with this type of commitment.  These guys are at rehearsal on time or before me.  I don't write anything for Elliot [Humberto Kavee] anymore, maybe a note here and there.  It's very difficult to figure out what we're doing, too, because it sounds like we are playing in ¼.  That’s because I never allow the drums to play in the meter I am playing in. That won’t happen.

EI:  There is no downbeat.

HT:  You can't tell. You don't know.  It's funny when people say things like, "The section in 5/4,” and I say, “I'd like to know where that was,” and the band would say, “We would, too.  I don't know where you heard that!” because basically I think in ¼.  Beat to beat, penny to penny, dollar to a dollar.  I don't need drums to play in the same meter the band is playing in because that's really redundant.  In rhythm, they talk about secondary beat, the first beat, and the first accent and the secondary accent.  When you put meter against meter, that’s what you get.  So now you lose all meter, and that's really what I want.  I don't want any sense of meter because when you sense meter, you see and feel division. This is over, and this is coming next.  It gets in the way of the flow.  The flow is everything in film, everything in theater, everything in literature, everything in architecture, everything in dance, everything in music.

Boxing or barring music for me is over.  In bars of 4/4 to the next bar of 4/4 or bar 4/4 to bar of something else you feel the demarcation.  The demarcation has interrupted the flow.  It inserted itself into the picture in the form of some kind of physicality that takes away from the big picture. You want to see the forest, not the trees.

EI:  Tell me about the tuba.  You have had so much tuba in your music for so many years.

HT:  Well, after the period with Fred, I couldn’t find any more bass players.

EI:  I can understand!

HT:  Not that there weren’t bass players, but I couldn't find anybody that. . . You come to New York, and people are finished because they think that they've finished their process.  They come here not to woodshed with anybody.  We [Air] came here as a group and we woodshedded before we came.  We didn’t come here to get our stuff together.  We had gotten our program together and came here.  What I found very difficult in that stage of my life in New York was to get people spend time with as a group.  I was lucky with the Sextett, but I still had Fred  and I had Muneer Abdul Fataah before Diedre Murray. Unfortunately, Muneer he didn’t get a chance to record with us, he left to move to Europe.

[Back to tuba.]  This is what happened:  I formed in the Wind String Quintet.  The Wind String Quintet never got recorded; it's the oldest group I have outside of Air.

EI:  Was it related to the X-75 stuff?  No?

HT:  No.  When I first started writing for it, it was violin, viola, cello and bass, with me playing woodwind.  It didn't work with the bass, and I put a tuba.  The tuba was the only thing that had the material, the same material that I had in terms of the instrument.  The tuba can lock into the wind world in terms of orchestration!   I had four strings over there, and I had no sympathetic anything with them, no sympathetic material.  I didn't have no brass, no gold, whatever.  With the tuba, I had brass and that could lock in another kind of way.  Also, I didn't like the bass response time in this kind of context.  I did a lot of music for the Wind String Quintet; it started off with Bob Stewart. Marcus Rojas learned how to play. He didn't even improvise when I found Marcus; he came through the Wind String.  I had Marcus Garvey’s grandson in there.  I had all kind of players in there, great string players like Diedre Murray, Corey Dixon, and Leroy Jenkins.  I had three or four commissions from Carnegie Hall that most people don’t even know about.

EI:  Do you still have the scores?

HT:  Yes, I still have the scores and the tapes.

EI:  I hope those come out sometime.

HT:  We played Town Hall, and all over.  No one was ever gonna give me a recording date with that! It took us forever to get a recording date with the flute quartet.  In the jazz world, they went, "What is this flute quartet?" Took Bonandrini to allow us to make a record for him. [1990’s Flutistry by the Flute Force Four.] The Wind String group, I did a lot of theater and dance things with them over the years, and Tom Buckner always would put us on his Interpretation series.

So that tuba goes back to the Wind String Quintet. I wasn’t coming from the European concept of a String Quartet and adding woodwind. I was coming from some place else, and I was looking for a different kind of blend. It was already strange because the string quartet would have been two violins, a viola and a cello, but I had violin, viola, cello, bass, and then I took the bass out and replaced it with a tuba.

EI:  Sounds like with the tuba you get to move those strings around a bit more.

HT:  Yes, it can blend into the strings section. The bass can’t blend and go from section from section quickly like the tuba can.  It can go into the brass section and come out the wind section and go into the string section, and it sits in there like a ghost.

EI:  I have laughed many times listening to your records, listening to these high tuba parts, two octaves above the bass.  They bass and tuba can play close to each other or really far apart.

José Davila?  Where is he from?

HT:  He's Puerto Rican, but he is from Connecticut originally.  He grew up in New York after coming here, going to school in Connecticut.

EI:  He sounds great on those records.

HT:  And his trombone playing is on another world, all by itself.

Stomu played that acoustic electric bass.  When he first came, he was playing the electric bass, but I got him to start playing this acoustic instrument because of the sound, because it was a whole other sound.  I told him I can't have an electric sound where I am going, I don't want an electric sound.  (It can be amplified.)

I did electric with Very Very Circus and Make a Move, and I was finished with that.  I couldn’t drag that on over to this new sound.  I was hearing something, that's why I went to the oud.  I was trying to approach the expansion of the octave, with quarter tones.   We been working on expanding the octave for a little while, incrementally.  I’m not interested in what other musicians pick up from it, really, but I have a need for my palette.

EI:  It seems to me that you look forward, you move forward.

HT:  That’s the only place for me to look.  I figured out a long time ago that going back for me is always a mistake . I mean on every level: personal life, everything – going backward does not work for me, it's destructive.  All of my mistakes have been made going backwards. [laughs]
EI:  [checks time: 73 minutes.] That might have been the right note to end on unless you want to keep going...
---
(I had really wanted to ask Threadgill about Vietnam, but didn't know how to start that conversation.  Go on to part two.)

05/16/2011

http://www.mosaicrecords.com/prodinfo.asp?number=247-MD-CD&gclid=COSZ7a3Lh6gCFRphgwodWEghpQ 

Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air (#247)

Mosaic Records Limited Edition Box Set
Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air (#247) 

"I never change [groups] for any marketing reason or novelty reason. I only change when I've changed compositionally. When that happens, I start to hear instruments and orchestration, and I have to figure out exactly what's playing in my head. I gotta hear four, five, six instruments at once. What are these colors that I'm hearing? Is that a steelpan, or is that a harmonium? Is that a pipa, or is that an oud? Do I hear one cello or do I hear two cellos in here?"

—Henry Threadgil

Limited Edition: 5,000 copies
8 CDs -  $136.00

A First-Ever Opportunity To Experience Two Decades of Exceptional Artistry
Henry Threadgill & Air

Talk to Henry Threadgill about the influences in his music, and he is drawn to talk about food. Or patterns of light in the sky. Or a building across the street from a rehearsal studio. Talking about an instrument's role in a composition, he is likely to mention not the rhythm of the drums, but the tuning, and a discussion about harmony becomes a question of how much white and red to add to the painting. He is not trying to be pretentious or profound. He is telling you how his mind works to create the things he hears.

Henry Threadgill was a founding member of the now legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) of Chicago, but before and since he has been a founding member of the Henry Threadgill college of making music that matters. And to Threadgill, all music matters - Charlie Parker and street marching bands and Poulenc and Balinese dance. Now, this first big collection of his music provides an opportunity to hear how those ideas collided, entwined, and rainbowed across an almost uninterrupted span of nearly 20 years.

Its eight CDs are filled with music that was carefully imagined, deeply felt, and wonderfully executed.

The period begins in 1978 with Open Air Suit, hailed for its complexity and for the uncanny way musicians Threadgill (reeds and flutes), Fred Hopkins (bass) and Steve McCall (drums) could instantly communicate through improvisation, The set moves from three albums by Air and one by Threadgill's "X-75" to three on RCA with his seven-man Sextett and ends with his three albums for Columbia that are collages of styles, musical traditions and unlikely instrumentation, achieving accessibility, warmth and humor through his dark and mysterious sonic palette. Along the way it unveils for the first time ever, a completely unheard Arista/Novus X-75 session from 1979 featuring many of the biggest names associated with the avant garde.

Many of those names hailed from Chicago, where the AACM fulfilled a unique and important role.

A Chicago Breeding Ground

Beginning in the mid-1960s, around pianist Muhal Richard Abrams grew a cadre of musicians who defied all the odds to make music they cared about. There was no club or theater to provide the economic incentive or pervert the artistic intent. Frequently, there weren't even audiences whose appreciation or disregard could steer the course. The AACM's non-profit status allowed the musicians the freedom to make music simply for its own sake and for their opportunity to grow as artists. Among the most celebrated at the time (and since) were Anthony Braxton, Abrams, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Leroy Jenkins, and certainly the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famoudou Don Moye and Malachi Favors). Jack DeJohnette was an early member, as were Chico Freeman, Leo Smith, and Steve McCall. Threadgill had studied along with a handful of them as early as their time together at Wilson Junior College, which thrived with painters, writers, poets and free-thinkers.

In addition to composers and musicians, the organization funded music educators, and created a vital link to the community through its music outreach programs. The result was a primordial soup of experimentation, integrity, and support.

For Threadgill, whose music education had more to do with classical traditions than with jazz per se, it was a perfect breeding ground for the work he would do his entire life. The lively scene contributed to his attitude about making music; that it should always be alive, and nothing should ever be replayed. "You do something you know too well, you're not going to get excited," he told an interviewer. "You'll do what you know."

A Range of Tonal Colors
Threadgill's music through the two decades covered by our release is a distillation of all he has experienced, everything he has heard, and the full extent of his creative engine. Along with McCall and Hopkins, his Air cohorts, the musicians include Jarman, Douglas Ewart (reeds, flutes and piccolo); Rufus Reid (bass); Ted Daniel (trumpet, fluegelhorn); Bill Lowe (bass trombone); Frank Lacy (trombone, French horn, fluegelhorn); Dierdre Murray (cello); Amina Claudine Myers, Aisha Putli (voice). Other musicians join on a wide variety of wind instruments, stringed instruments, and percussion, running the gamut from piccolo guitars to bass flute to accordians, violins, harmonium, tubas and more.

Despite Air's exploration of traditional Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton compositions on what was the LP "Air Lore," the music is truly uncategorizable. But it is also comprehensible. Compositions might weave fragments of melody, but in uncommon sequences that defy what we typically regard as "song." Or instruments that usually lend support might be given the task of carrying the melody. Lines of eminently coherent music and voice exist without any obvious chord structure beneath them. And when it is time to solo, musicians work out, but work in as well, offering up their take on the tune's concept. This is no random mash-up of blowers and bashers, as some in the avant garde can appear to listeners. It is music that is composed, cleverly organized, and emotionally affecting.

This Limited Edition collection includes our exclusive, full-sized booklet with an essay and information about each session by Hank Schteamer and many photographs from the era. Featuring music originally released by Arista, RCA and Columbia, it provides the first opportunity to experience the continuum of Threadgill's development across such a wide time range in a package only Mosaic could amass. But this is Mosaic, which means the set won't be here forever - when we sell out, it will never appear again. Don't miss your chance to own one.

THE MUSIC OF HENRY THREADGILL:  AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. THREADGILL:

Henry Threadgill and Zooid:

https://vimeo.com/10933418

 

Roulette TV: HENRY THREADGILL // ZOOID

from Roulette Intermedium Plus 5 years ago  

Henry Threadgill's Zooid performs “All The Way Light Touch” - commissioned by Roulette with funds by the Baisley Powell Elebash Trust.

Henry Threadgill is one of the great musical masterminds of the past quarter century - a composer, arranger, and innovator who transcends genres in contemporary music. A multi instrumentalist whose principle axes include alto sax and flute, Threadgill emerged from Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Tonight He presents "All the Way Light Tough" with his band Zooid commissioned by Roulette with funds by the Baisley Powell Elebash Trust and is a special shooting for the next edition of Roulette TV. 

“It would be difficult to overestimate Henry Threagill’s role in perpetually altering the meaning of jazz..…He has changed our underlying assumptions of what jazz can and should be.” 

Henry Threadgill, is both a composer and multi-instrumentalist. He studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He co-majored in piano and flute, along with composition. He has had a music career for over forty years as both a leader and as a composer.

Threadgill’s music has been performed by many of his long lasting instrumental ensembles, including the trio Air, the seven-piece Sextett, Very Very Circus, twenty-piece Society Situation Dance Band, X-75, Make a Move, Aggregation Orb, and his current group Zooid. He has recorded many albums as a leader of various ensembles.

Henry Threadgill’s works for large orchestras, such as ˜Run Silent, Run Deep, Run Loud, Run High” (conducted by Hale Smith), and “Mix for Orchestra” (conducted by Dennis Russell Davies) were both premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987 and 1993 respectively.

Pi Recordings is excited to announce the release of an important new recording, This Brings Us To, from Henry Threadgill with his band Zooid. Threadgill is one of the most highly respected composers / conceptualists in music today: He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a United States Artist Fellowship in 2008. An early member of the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Threadgill continues to hold fast to that august organization’s tenets: keeping an open mind to all creative possibilities and continuing to seek new challenges. He has intensively studied the music of everyone from Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Luciano Berio to Mario Bauzá, along with the music of Bali, India, the West Indies and Japan and filters all of these and other influences through jazz, R&B and the blues to come up with compositions that are distinctly his own. 

This Brings Us To is the first release from Threadgill since 2001’s Everybodys Mouth’s a Book (Pi01) and Up Popped the Two Lips (Pi02). He has spent those eight years, the longest time between releases in his career, creating and perfecting a new system of improvisation in a group setting. A zooid is a cell that is able to move independently of the larger organism to which it belongs, an apt description of the musical language that Threadgill has developed for this band. The compositions are organized along a series of interval blocks comprised of three notes, each of which is assigned to a musician, who is free to move around within these intervals, improvising melodies and creating counterpoint to one another. The system provides the framework for open dialogue within the group while encouraging the musicians to seek new ways to improvise, away from a reliance on chord changes, scales or any of the clichés of certain “free” jazz. The music is coupled with complex rhythms, another distinctive aspect of all of Threadgill’s music. He was among the first in jazz to use constantly shifting meters, which creates a layered rhythmic effect, while maintaining a steady pulse. Despite its rhythmic intricacy, his music maintains a grooving, funky vibe, even though there is rarely a “1” to be found anywhere. This quality, later co-opted by Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson and the M-Base Collective, has had a profound effect on much of the music and the drumming styles that one hears in jazz today.

Aired on RTV: April 14, 2010
Performance: Oct. 25, 2009

Henry Threadgill's Zooid:

 

A rare Washington appearance from Henry Threadgill, "one of the most important living composers in and around the jazz idiom" (Nate Chinen) and a dazzling alto saxophonist and flutist with masterly improvisational skills.

Speaker Biography: At the edge of the jazz avant-garde since the early 1960s, composer-performer Henry Threadgill operates within a sophisticated, multi-sourced musical language developed over decades, since his early years with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. It's a language uniquely his own, one that his Zooid colleagues speak fluently.

For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feat...

Henry Threadgill and His Very Very Circus:

 

Too Much Sugar For A Dime: Henry Threadgill, Jhony Rudas, Miguel Urbina, Mark Taylor, Marcus Rojas, Edwin Rodriguez, Masujaa Gene Lake, Brandon Ross C. 1993 Island Records. Inc. All right reserved. NY. City.

Henry Threadgill & Zooid, "A Day Off":

From the 2012 release "Tomorrow Sunny/ The Revelry"

 

Henry Threadgill Sextett--"Just B":

   

Henry Threadgill - reeds
Craig Harris - Trobone
Olu Dara - Cornet
Fred Hopkins - bass
Brian Smith - piccolo bass
Pheeroan Aklaff - drums
John Betsch - drums

The Henry Threadgill Sextet--"Black Blues":

Track 3 from the 1983 album Just The Facts And Pass The Bucket, by The Henry Threadgill Sextet

 

Henry Threadgill Sextett--"Soft Suicide at the Baths":

From the 1982 Henry Threadgill Sextett album 'When Was That?'

 

Henry Threadgill-alto sax and composer
Olu Dara-trumpet
Craig Harris-trombone
Fred Hopkins-bass
Brandon Smith-piccolo bass
John Betsch and Pheeroan akLaff-drums

uploaded via http://www.mp32u.net/

Henry Threadgill & Make A Move - "100 Year Old Game":

From the 1996 release "Where's Your Cup ?"

 

Henry Threadgill's Society Situation Dance Band @ Fabrik, 1988:

 

Henry Threadgill's Society Situation Dance Band performs at Fabrik in Hamburg, Germany, on October 23, 1988. http://the-jazz-blog.blogspot.com/

AIR trio: "Card Two: The Jick Or Mandrill's Cosmic Ass"; Composed by Henry Threadgill:

 

AIR:
Henry Threadgill - alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, flute
Fred Hopkins - bass, maracas
Steve McCall - drums, percussion

Air - "Midnight Sun":

From the album Air Raid (1976), republished in CD in 2010.

 

A Conversation with Henry Threadgill:

 

Larry Appelbaum interviews composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill about his musical upbringing in Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the story of his life-changing experience in Vietnam, his groups Air and Zooid, and his approach to composition and improvisation.

Speaker Biography: Henry Threadgill is an American composer, saxophonist and flautist who came to prominence in the 1970s leading ensembles with unusual instrumentation and often incorporating a range of non-jazz genres. He has had a music career for over forty years as both a leader and as a composer.

Speaker Biography: Larry Appelbaum is a senior music reference librarian and jazz specialist in the Music Division at the Library of Congress.

For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feat...

Henry Threadgill & Make A Move - "Don't Turn Around":

From the 2001 disk "Everybodys Mouth's A Book"

 

Henry Threadgill - "I Can't Wait Till I Get Home":

From album 'Easily Slip into Another World', 1987

 

Henry Threadgill-Alto Sax
Fred Hopkins-bass
Fred Lacy-trombone
Rasul Saddik-trumpet
Diedre Murray-cello
Pheeroan Aklaff and Reggie Nicholson-drums

Henry Threadgill--"Little Pocket Size Demons":

 

Henry Threadgill-Composer and Alto Sax
Gene Lake-Drums
Mark Taylor-French Horn
Brandon Ross and Masujaa-Guitar
Edwin Rodriguez and Marcus Rojas-Tuba

"Little Pocket Size Demons" comes from the album 'Too Much Sugar For a Dime'

Axiom Records ‎– 314-514 258-2 - Released 1993.

Henry Threadgill ‎– Too Much Sugar For A Dime.
Alto Saxophone – Henry Threadgill.
Drums – Gene Lake.
Ensemble – Very Very Circus.
French Horn – Mark Taylor.
Guitar – Brandon Ross, Masujaa.
Tuba – Edwin Rodriguez, Marcus Rojas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Threadgill

Henry Threadgill

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Henry Threadgill
Birth name	Henry Luther Threadgill
Born	February 15, 1944 (age 71)
Origin	Chicago, Illinois, US
Genres	Jazz, avant-garde jazz
Occupation(s)	Musician, bandleader, composer, sideman
Instruments	Alto saxophone, flute
Years active	1960s–present
Labels	Arista/Novus, About Time, Black Saint, Columbia, Pi Recordings
Associated acts	Air, AACM, Muhal Richard Abrams, Billy Bang, Anthony Braxton, Craig Harris, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell
Notable instruments
Alto Saxophone

Henry Threadgill (born February 15, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American composer, saxophonist and flautist,^[1] who came to prominence in the 1970s leading ensembles with unusual instrumentation and often incorporating a range of non-jazz genres. He studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago co-majoring in piano and flute, along with composition. He studied piano with Gail Quillman and composition with Stella Roberts (1899-1988). He has had a music career for over forty years as both a leader and as a composer.

Threadgill's music has been performed by many of his long-lasting instrumental ensembles, including the trio Air with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall, the seven-piece Sextet, Very Very Circus, the twenty-piece Society Situation Dance Band, X-75, Make a Move, Aggregation Orb, and his current group Zooid. He has recorded many critically acclaimed albums as a leader of these ensembles with various record labels namely Arista/Novus, About Time, Axiom, Black Saint, Columbia and Pi Recordings.

Threadgill has had numerous commissions and awards throughout. He has composed music for theatre, orchestra, solo instruments, and chamber ensembles. His works for large orchestras, such as "Run Silent, Run Deep, Run Loud, Run High" (conducted by Hale Smith) and "Mix for Orchestra" (conducted by Dennis Russell Davies), were both premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987 and 1993 respectively. He has had commissions from Mordine & Company in 1971 and 1989, from Carnegie Hall for "Quintet for Strings and Woodwinds" in 1983 and 1985, the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1985, Bang on a Can All-Stars in 1995, "Peroxide" commissioned by the Miller Theatre Columbia University in 2003 for "Aggregation Orb", a commission from the Talujon Percussion Ensemble in 2008, a piece "Fly Fliegen Volar" commissioned and premiered at the Saalfelden Jazz Festival with the Junge Philharmonie Salzburg Orchestra in 2007, a premier of the piece "Mc Guffins" with Zooid at the Biennale Festival in Italy in 2004 to name some.

Threadgill, aside from being a remarkable alto saxophone player, is one of the most imaginative of jazz composers today. "He seems to be deliberately challenging the audience: My lyricism and mastery come complete with thorns and spikes, and I promise to yank the props out from under you,” quoted John Litweiler, longtime Down Beat jazz critic, in an article he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. Threadgill was one of the founding members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Chicago group that was free-form, you might say, in its philosophy and approach. Peter Watrous of the New York Times described Threadgill as "perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation." Recent concerts in Chicago have led the local critics to speak of him as a revolutionary figure, altering the manner in which jazz itself is going. Said Howard Reich, jazz critic of the Chicago Tribune, "It would be difficult to overestimate Henry Threadgill's role in perpetually altering the meaning of jazz..…He has changed our underlying assumptions of what jazz can and should be." – An excerpt from a chapter on Henry Threadgill in And They All Sang (2005) by Pulitzer-winning author and disc jockey Studs Terkel, a book about "forty of the greatest and most deeply human musical figures of our time".

Contents

• 1 Biography
  • 1.1 Early life and career
  • 1.2 The Sextet/Sextett
  • 1.3 Very Very Circus and beyond
• 2 Discography
  • 2.1 As leader
  • 2.2 With Air
  • 2.3 As sideman
• 3 References
• 4 External links

Biography

Early life and career

Threadgill first performed as a percussionist in his high-school marching band before taking up the baritone saxophone and later a large portion of the woodwind instrument family. He soon settled upon the alto saxophone and the flute as his main instruments.

He was an original member of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) in his hometown of Chicago and worked under the guidance of Muhal Richard Abrams before leaving to tour with a gospel band. In 1967, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, playing with a Rock band in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. He was discharged in 1969.

Upon his return to Chicago he rejoined fellow AACM members bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall, forming a trio which would eventually become the group Air, one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed avant-garde jazz groups of the 1970s and 1980s. In the meantime, Threadgill had moved to New York City to begin pursuing his own musical visions, which explored musical genres in innovative ways thanks to his daringly unique group collaborations. His first group, X-75, was a nonet consisting of four reed players, four bass players and a vocalist.

The Sextet/Sextett

In the early 1980s, Threadgill created his first critically acclaimed ensemble as a leader, Henry Threadgill Sextet (actually a septet; he counted the two drummers as a single percussion unit),^[2] which released three LPs on About Time Records. After a hiatus, during which Threadgill formed New Air with Pheeroan akLaff replacing Steve McCall on drums, Threadgill re-formed the Henry Threadgill Sextett (with two t's at the end). The six albums the group recorded feature some of his most accessible work, notably on the album You Know the Number.

The group's unorthodox instrumentation included two drummers, bass, cello, trumpet and trombone, in addition to Threadgill's alto and flute. Among the players who filled these roles were drummers akLaff, John Betsch, Reggie Nicholson and Newman Baker; bassist Fred Hopkins; cellist Diedre Murray; trumpeters Rasul Siddik and Ted Daniels; cornetist Olu Dara; and trombonists Ray Anderson, Frank Lacy, Bill Lowe and Craig Harris.

Very Very Circus and beyond

The CD Live at Koncepts captured the Very Very Circus group live during its earliest days, in 1991

 

During the 1990s, Threadgill pushed the musical boundaries even further with his ensemble Very Very Circus. In addition to Threadgill, the group's core consisted of two tubas, two electric guitars, a trombone or french horn, and drums. With this group he explored more complex and highly structured forms of composition, augmenting the group with everything from latin percussion to French horn to violin to accordion and an array of exotic instruments and vocalists.

Threadgill composed and recorded with other unusual instrumentations, such as a flute quartet (Flute Force Four, a one-time project from 1990); and combinations of four cellos and four acoustic guitars (on Makin' a Move).

By this time Threadgill's place in the upper echelon of the avant-garde was secured, and he was signed by Columbia Records for three albums (a rarity for musicians of his kind). Since the dissolution of Very Very Circus, Threadgill has continued in his iconoclastic ways with ensembles such as Make a Move and Zooid. Zooid, currently a sextet with tuba (Jose Davila), acoustic guitar (Liberty Ellman), cello (Christopher Hoffman), drums (Elliot Kavee) and bass guitar (Stomu Takeishi), has been the primary vehicle for Threadgill's most current compositions throughout the 2000s (decade).

Discography

As leader

• 1979: X-75 Volume 1 (Arista/Novus)
• 1982: When Was That? (Henry Threadgill Sextet, About Time)
• 1983: Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket (Henry Threadgill Sextet, About Time)
• 1984: Subject to Change (Henry Threadgill Sextet, About Time)
• 1987: You Know the Number (Henry Threadgill Sextett, Arista/Novus)
• 1988: Easily Slip Into Another World (Henry Threadgill Sextett, Arista/Novus)
• 1989: Rag, Bush and All (Henry Threadgill Sextett, Arista/Novus)
• 1990: Spirit of Nuff...Nuff (Very Very Circus, Black Saint)
• 1991: Live at Koncepts (Very Very Circus, Taylor Made)
• 1993: Too Much Sugar for a Dime (Very Very Circus, Axiom)
• 1993: Song Out of My Trees (Threadgill compositions and arrangements, although he doesn't play on all the tracks himself; Black Saint)
• 1994: Carry the Day (Very Very Circus, Columbia)
• 1995: Makin' a Move (half Very Very Circus, the other half performed by small ensembles of cellos, guitars and piano; Columbia)
• 1996: Where's Your Cup? (Make a Move, Columbia)
• 2001: Everybodys Mouth's a Book (Make a Move, Pi Recordings)
• 2001: Up Popped the Two Lips (Zooid, Pi Recordings)
• 2005: Pop Start the Tape, StoP (Zooid, Hardedge, LP only)
• 2009: This Brings Us to Volume 1 (Zooid, Pi Recordings)
• 2010: This Brings Us to Volume 2 (Zooid, Pi Recordings)
• 2012: Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp (Zooid, Pi Recordings)
• 2015: In for a Penny, In for a Pound (Zooid, Pi Recordings)

With Air

• 1975: Air Song (Why Not)
• 1976: Air Raid (Why Not)
• 1977: Live Air (Black Saint)
• 1977: Air Time (Nessa)
• 1978: Open Air Suit (Arista/Novus)
• 1978: Montreux Suisse (Arista/Novus)
• 1979: Air Lore (Arista/Novus)
• 1980: Air Mail (Black Saint)
• 1982: 80° Below '82 (Antilles)
• 1983: Live at Montreal International Jazz Festival (as New Air, Black Saint)
• 1986: Air Show No. 1 (as New Air with Cassandra Wilson; Black Saint)

As sideman

With Muhal Richard Abrams

• Young at Heart/Wise in Time (1969)
• 1-OQA+19 (1977)

With Anthony Braxton

• For Trio (Arista, 1978)

With Chico Freeman

• Morning Prayer (hynot, 1976)

With Roscoe Mitchell

• Nonaah (Nessa, 1977)
• L-R-G / The Maze / S II Examples (Nessa, 1978)

With Frank Walton

• Reality (1978)

With David Murray

• Ming (1980)
• Home (1981)
• Murray's Steps (1982)

With Material / Bill Laswell

• Memory Serves (1981)
• The Third Power (1991)

With Sly & Robbie / Bill Laswell

• Rhythm Killers (1987)

With Carlinhos Brown / Bill Laswell

• Bahia Black: Ritual Beating System (1991)

With Leroy Jenkins

• Themes & Improvisations on the Blues (1992)

With Kip Hanrahan

• Darn It! (1992) with Paul Haines
• A Thousand Nights and a Night (Shadow Night – 1) (1996)

With Billy Bang

• Hip Hop Be Bop (1993) with Craig Harris
• Vietnam: Reflections (2004)

With Sola

• Blues in the East (1994)

With Abiodun Oyewole

• 25 Years (1996)

With Flute Force Four

• Flutistry (1990, released 1997)

With Douglas Ewart

• Angles of Entrance (1998)

With Jean-Paul Bourelly

• Boom Bop (2000)
• Trance Atlantic – Boom Bop II (2001)

With Ejigayehu "Gigi" Shibabaw

• Gigi (2001)

With Lucky Peterson

• Black Midnight Sun (2002)

With Dafnis Prieto

• Absolute Quintet (2006)

With Wadada Leo Smith

• The Great Lakes Suites (2012, released 2014)

With Jack DeJohnette

• Made in Chicago (2013, Released 2015)

References

Allmusic

2. Giddins, Gary, and Scott DeVeaux (2009), New York: W.W. Norton & Co, ISBN 978-0-393-06861-0

External links

• Extensive interview from 1996 with Ted Panken, host of jazz and new music programs on the Columbia University radio station WKCR.FM
• Greg Sandow: Fried Grapefruit: The Life of Henry Threadgill Biography written in 1995 for Columbia Records, as part of the press kit for Threadgill's first Columbia album, Carry the Day.