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PHOTO: HENRY THREADGILL (b. February 15, 1944)
Henry Threadgill
(b. February 15, 1944)
Biography by Chris Kelsey
The jazz vanguard has produced hundreds of notable improvisers but relatively few great composers. Saxophonist and flutist Henry Threadgill is both. Alongside fellow Chicagoans Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton, he ranks as one of the most original jazz composers to emerge from the 20th century. Threadgill's art transcends stylistic boundaries. He embraces the world of music wholesale, from ragtime, circus marches, classical, and bop to free jazz, reggae, and funk. He spent the 1970s in the groundbreaking experimental jazz trio Air with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall. They issued profoundly forward-thinking albums such as Air Time. Following, his Henry Threadgill Sextett issued six albums between 1982 and 1989, including Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket and You Know the Number. After the Bill Laswell-produced Too Much Sugar for a Dime in 1993, he founded Make a Move and the first incarnation of Very Very Circus. Both were featured on 1995's Makin' a Move. With Everybody's Mouth's a Book in 2001, Threadgill moved over to Pi Recordings. That same year he created the ongoing Zooid, and released Up Popped the Two Lips. 2015's In for a Penny, In for a Pound won him a Pulitzer Prize. He debuted the octet Ensemble Double Up on Old Locks and Irregular Verbs in early 2016. In 2018, Threadgill issued Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus, followed by Zooid's Poof in 2021.
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 to 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. Their 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 of them different. A pair of 2001 releases for Pi Recordings illustrated this particularly well. On Up Popped the Two Lips, his Zooid ensemble combined Threadgill's alto and flute with acoustic guitar, oud, tuba, cello, and drums -- an un-jazz-like instrumentation that nevertheless grooved and swung with great agility. Everybody's Mouth's a Book featured his Make a Move band, which consisted 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. In 2004, a live Zooid date entitled Pop Start the Tape, Stop was issued in limited edition by Hardedge. That same year, Threadgill played on Billy Bang's seminal Vietnam: Reflections.
Threadgill performed and rehearsed with both Zooid and Make a Move, but he didn't record again with either until late in 2008. Zooid cut sessions in November of that year, resulting in a pair of albums, This Brings Us To, Vol. 1 issued in 2009, followed by Vol. 2 in 2010. The collector's label Mosaic honored Threadgill by compiling his Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings in a deluxe, limited-run box set. Make a Move hit the studio again in late 2011. The sessions yielded the album Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry, Spp in June of 2013. In December, Threadgill, bassist John Lindberg, and drummer Jack DeJohnette played in Wadada Leo Smith's quartet for The Great Lakes Suites sessions -- released by TUM nearly two years later.
In May 2014, Zooid reconvened in a Brooklyn studio for two days. In August of that year, Threadgill played in DeJohnette's great AACM reunion quintet at the Chicago Jazz Festival, along with Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Larry Gray. The resulting album, Made in Chicago, was released by ECM in January 2015. In the spring, the previous year's Zooid sessions saw light as the double-disc In for a Penny, in for a Pound. The recording drew universal acclaim and topped the year-end jazz lists internationally. It also netted Threadgill the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The award was presented in April 2016, the same month that Ensemble Double Up (his new octet that included pianists David Virelles and Jason Moran) debuted with Old Locks and Irregular Verbs. In May, he received a Doris Duke Artist Award. In 2018, Threadgill returned with Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus on Pi.
He recorded with Zooid for 2021's Poof. In addition to his own alto sax and flute playing, the quintet included guitarist Liberty Ellman, tubist and trombonist Jose Davila, cellist Christopher Hoffman and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/henry-threadgill
Henry Threadgill
Henry 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 primarily upon the alto saxophone and the flute. 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. He later served in the Army, where he played with a rock band. 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, Sextett. The group actually had seven members: Threadgill, two drummers, bass, cello, trombone and trumpet. The seven albums the group recorded feature some of Threadgill's most accessible work, notably on the album You Know the Number. 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 and a drummer. 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. 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 Flute Force Four. Although Threadgill's musical roots are in jazz, the blues and gospel music, he is considered to be one of the premiere "creative" or avant-garde composers in music today. His compositions are truly American, often representing a melting pot of musical genres; at any given time you may hear cleverly mixed elements of traditional African music, Latin music, folk music, New Orleans brass and opera in addition to his more obvious influences.
His compositions can be a very complex affair, with textures so dense and intricate (and in later years so strictly scored) as to border upon being through composed. While this seems to be in contrast to the loose, improvisatory feel of much jazz, his best compositions still bring that feeling to the forefront. Threadgill has recorded or performed with many of the legends of the jazz avant-garde, including Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, David Murray and Bill Laswell.
THE ART MUSIC LOUNGE
An Online Journal of Jazz and Classical Music
Henry Threadgill, Master of Musical Mosaics
I’ve been wanting to write in some detail about Henry Threadgill and his complex, difficult yet fascinating music for a while now, but every time I’ve tried to get started something else has interfered. And one of the things that has interfered the most is the fact that Threadgill’s music is so extraordinarily complex and so unique that it takes extreme concentration just to listen to it, let alone write about it, and to do so—particularly without access to the scores—is frustrating and somewhat intimidating.
I brought up some of Threadgill’s music with the trio Air in my book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond, in which I surveyed the entire history of the interaction between classical music and jazz (click here to read it), but certainly not enough to do him justice. The reason was that, although Threadgill did indeed study composition at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, the music he produces is put together from jazz elements in a way that “speaks” jazz. The vernacular of his music is jazz; the way the elements are put together follow jazz principles; and although the finished products are extraordinary complex, and despite the fact that he has also written for large orchestras (particularly Run Silent, Run Deep, Run Loud, Run High), the finished results only bear a superficial resemblance to classical music in the way they are constructed. If Thelonious Monk, as Ralph Berton claimed, was the Stravinsky of jazz, Henry Threadgill uses principles found in Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Ligeti (perhaps particularly Ligeti) in a way that more closely resembles the more avant-garde work of Ornette Coleman, Michael Mantler and David Murray, while sounding like none of them.
It’s difficult, then, to describe the music of a particularly brilliant lone wolf who operates within his own specific musical universe. This doesn’t mean that it’s not necessary to write about him or impossible, just very difficult. The respected down beat critic John Litweiler summed it up best when he wrote, “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’.” Essentially, and I am in no way trying to pigeonhole his music by trying to describe it in its basics, Threadgill upsets the balance that exists not only in jazz but in all music in regards to the three principal elements, rhtyhm, melody and harmony. Whereas George Russell pulled the rug out from under the tonal system by declaring thatall music form Bach to Schoenberg, including jazz, was part of a continuum that could be defined by his Lydian Chromatic Concept, and whereas Ornette Coleman took one aspect of Russell’s concept—horizontal movement—to a new level by eliminating root chords and other signposts of tonality (which upset and alienated a great many traditional jazz musicians, though oddly enough, not John Lewis or Pee Wee Russell), Henry Threadgill works in small blocks of sound, sometimes thematic fragments, which he will then ask his musicians to play in the fashion of a round, with different players coming in at different places within the phrase or the beat. This in turn creates new melodic, harmonic and rhythmic forms. In a sense, it’s like taking three different takes of an Ornette Coleman composition and overlaying them, not in synchronization but delayed by a beat or a beat and a half one on top of the other.
Once you understand the principals, Threadgill’s music becomes easier to comprehend, but when I say “easier” I don’t mean that in the sense that modern-day retro bop is easy to comprehend. It’s more like saying that after a period of listening and study, Stravinsky’s late, thorny 12-tone compositions like Agon and the Requiem Canticles become easier to understand. No one is going to walk out of a Threadgill concert whistling tunes; they may not even be able to retain scraps of them to replay in the first place; but the totality of what Threadgill does will stay with you, however disturbing it may be to your expectations or musical sensibilities, for a long time.
Born in 1944, Threadgill studied not only composition but also piano and flute. An early member of the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Threadgill also studied the music of Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Luciano Berio and Mario Bauzá as well as the music of Bali, India, the West Indies and Japan. This is yet another reason, I think, why his finished music strikes me as not so much within a classical tradition as within a “world music” tradition. In addition to these sources, he filters his music through jazz, R&B and the blues to come up with compositions that are distinctly his own.
Since I have been unable to hear his Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, and cannot get a copy of his latest album for review, I cannot speak of these works, but I’m sure that they follow the principles of all his music I have heard. Threadgill never stands still, mind you—he refuses to rest on his laurels and doesn’t repeat, if he can help it, concepts or patterns he has already traversed—but there is a consistency in his inventiveness that makes every excursion into his music remarkable. Earlier I said that there are very few signposts of classical form (as such) in his music, but one of those is the insistence that most of the ideas presented be cogent, i.e., they must make sense somehow. There is very little in his music of the far-out explorations of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, though they must have been yet another group he heard while in that city, which prided itself on an amorphous journey through each piece. Threadgill’s music sounds so rigorously constructed that the listener almost feels surprised to discover the improvised solos within it.
A superb example of Threadgill at his best is All the Way Light Touch, an hour-long piece premiered on October 25, 2009 and aired on Roulette TV on April 14, 2010. You can watch and hear the performance here. I think one of the most attractive qualities of Threadgill’s music—and this piece is no exception—is that, despite its complexity, he often maintains a low volume level which draws the listener in. To some extent I think this is because he not only wants the audience to hear each thread of the music individually, but the participating musicians as well. More interesting, to me, is his consistently “quiet” orchestration. Threadgill rarely if ever uses upper-register instruments screaming away at any point in his music. Mostly he prefers to use, for instance, a real jazz guitarist rather than a distorted-sound blues guitarist (again, to promote clarity of execution and line), a cello (to enhance the texture, often playing high in its range, simulating a viola), and a tuba in place of a string bass (again, texture…ever since Gil Evans introduced the tuba to modern jazz back in the 1940s it has been a favorite instrument because of its inherently richer sound), although he does use a bass guitar. Threadgill himself on alto sax and flute provides in this work and others the most overtly “bluesy” sound, yet his innate sense of construction keeps him from squealing out-of-tonality licks for the sake of shock. He always stays within the parameters of the piece he has constructed, whether brief or, as in this case, lengthy, knowing how it is “supposed” to go even if the listener has no clue where it is headed.
Every so often in his extended works, as for instance around the 20-minute mark in All the Way Light Touch, Threadgill will relax the complex, multi-layered rhythm and come to what sounds to the listener like a standard 4/4, but this is an illusion. Threadgill’s meter is always an illusion. He never stays within one pulse for long, and within a minute or two of the listener feeling comfortable he or she will start feeling disoriented again…perhaps even more so than before, because they thought the rhythm was suddenly “normal” and now it’s not again, and you can’t even really tell at which point it changed. Threadgill morphs his beat-shifting gradually; indeed, there will probably be some listeners who won’t even notice, at first, that the band is no longer playing a straight 4 until it becomes so obvious that you can’t escape the change, by which time it is too late for you to realize that Threadgill has expanded his spider’s web of sound and that both you and his musicians are forced to run around the intersecting lines of the music in order to reach the center rather than cutting straight through to it. I can describe this music more technically though I wouldn’t dare attempt to without seeing a score, but this method of defining Threadgill’s operating methods is, I think, clearer for lay listeners to understand. One of Threadgill’s online comments explains the contradiction: “It’s funny when people say things like, ‘The section in 5/4,’ and I say, ‘I’d like to know where that was…I don’t know where you heard that,’ because basically I think in 1/4. Beat to beat, penny to penny, dollar to dollar…I don’t want any sense of meter because when you sense meter, you see and feel division.”[1]
This last statement by Threadgill is, of course, both true and a bit deceptive. He may indeed always think in terms of a single beat, but in performance the beats combine themselves in ways that, as I say, add up to more complex rhythms and layered meter. As another online commentator put it, “There is rarely a ‘1’ to be found anywhere.” In this specific piece Threadgill’s second alto solo, which begins at about 31:20 following a complex drum break, is one of the few times one hears him playing “outside” jazz in the sense I described it earlier; but again, Threadgill’s penchant for musical coherency keeps him from going too far off the deep end. He plays specific notes, no matter how distorted, and not just “sounds” or “emotions.” In other words, solo and composition remain all of a piece.
What I find even more fascinating about Threadgill’s music, and his basic aesthetic, is that he applies the same principles to his shorter pieces as to his longer ones. A good for-instance is his 2012 album, Tomorrow Sunny. Here, he presents us with individual pieces with separate titles, and they are fine and interesting pieces in themselves. Yet in a 73-minute live performance given at the Library of Congress on October 25, 2013 (click here to listen), Threadgill folded three of those pieces—A Day Off, Tomorrow Sunny and Ambient Pressure Thereby—into three others not of the same vintage but of the same general style (Chairmaster, To Undertake My Corners Open and Not White Flag) into a huge, continuous, single “performance piece.” And there is no cultural clash, so to speak, when this is done because of his consistency of approach. Threadgill’s music is essentially a huge chest full of Tinkertoys or Legos which he can mix or match at his whim and still come up with something valid and organic. And that is another reason (sorry, Henry!) why I can’t define his music as “classically oriented,” because no classical composer of any era has ever been able to do this.
Indeed, Threadgill has actually shifted and changed his composition style over the years. His earlier style, from the era of Too Much Sugar for a Dime, was much more funk-oriented and less complex, but he continued to morph and grow. He later took eight years off to create a new method of improvising in a group setting, which led to his most recent band, Zooid, named after a cell that is able to move independently of the larger organism to which it belongs. Interestingly, this change of aesthetic has led to a simplification of his composition methods. He now uses mostly “interval blocks” of three notes, each assigned to a different musician who is free to move around within them, improvising melodies and creating counterpoint against one another. This method may indeed sound classical to jazz critics who aren’t musically literate, but it is in effect an advanced version of the time-honored “chase chorus,” which has existed in jazz since the 1920s, brought into the digital era.
A final question, however, thus presents itself: Is Threadgill’s music all more or less similar? Does this ability to be interchangeable make it less individualistic? That’s a question every listener has to decide for him or herself, since everybody hears music differently. What I hear is a series of complex works that, because they lack definable melodic structure and because each of them is harmonically and rhythmically vague, can be tossed together like exotic salad ingredients into a bowl of iceberg lettuce. Threadgill’s music is a smorgasbord of different flavors and tastes that, like cilantro or pickled beets, completely change the flavor and texture of each musical salad. And you, as the auditor, may feel free to pour any flavor of mental salad dressing on to make it tasty for you.
— © 2016 Lynn René Bayley
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/arts/music/henry-threadgill-review.html
Critic’s Pick
Review: Henry Threadgill’s Music From Two Perspectives
At Roulette, the composer and his ensemble performed a pair of multimedia sets based on a single composition.
- Henry Threadgill
- May 22, 2022
- NYT Critic's Pick
The most reductive observation I can provide about the composer and improvising multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill’s activity at Roulette this weekend is that he debuted some truly exciting new chamber music. Because he offered a lot more, too.
His multimedia programming stretched across Friday and Saturday, each evening running more than two hours. While the first set was titled “One” and the second — in playfully nonspecific fashion — was called “The Other One,” both contained takes on his composition “Of Valence,” for three saxophones, two bassoons, two cellos, along with a tuba, a violin, a viola, piano and percussion.
Threadgill, 78, has long deployed playfulness, ambition and unusual configurations in his work. His 1979 album “X-75 Volume 1” engaged a nonet of four basses, four winds and one vocalist.
In 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for the double album “In for a Penny, in for a Pound,” which put the spotlight on Zooid — his late-career group that includes a tuba, acoustic guitar, cello, drums and Threadgill’s own flute and alto saxophone. Players in that ensemble improvise over quasi-serialized sequences of intervals (befitting a composer who in conversation is as likely to bring up Elliott Carter as Duke Ellington).
But this weekend’s shows were something new. The tuba player Jose Davila, the cellist Christopher Hoffman and pianist David Virelles are some of Threadgill’s closest collaborators, and capable of lending marching-band panache to his most contrapuntally complex music. Joining a larger group, their sound drew directly on the Zooid language — and some of its freer applications, as heard in Ensemble Double Up — while the multimedia cast a new light on this composer’s late style.
Those multimedia elements included collaged photographs of street debris that Threadgill took during the mass exodus from New York at the beginning of the pandemic, projected onto a screen; live recitations of prose written to accompany the images; looping, pretaped vocal choirs, with all parts voiced by Threadgill; and video essays that cut between footage of yet more chamber music and the composer’s droll sermonizing about smartphones and distraction.
Threadgill didn’t pick up an alto saxophone or a flute for live performance, though the video did feature him on bass flute. His instrumental contributions were limited to a pair of brief piano-plus-vocal moments, which were affecting in their vulnerability but a touch too tentative to come across as secure. (His pretaped choirs were more vocally assured.)
Otherwise, he focused on conducting the 12-player ensemble. On Saturday, they sounded as though in lock-step with his every surprise rhythmic feint — producing an obliquely danceable, straightforwardly joyous Threadgillian energy.
At one juncture, in the second hour of both nights, a string trio of the cellist Mariel Roberts, the violist Stephanie Griffin and the violinist Sara Caswell played staggered lines that seemed to tease traceable canonic patterning, but which remained melodically and rhythmically independent. It was tightly plotted, and resisted easy parsing; yet it didn’t sound much like Zooid’s zigzagging interplay.
A new sheen came from electronically manipulated cymbal tones, courtesy of the drummer Craig Weinrib. (The transducers he used to manipulate those metallic timbres were a tribute to the late percussionist Milford Graves, to whom the music was dedicated. The performances as a whole were dedicated to the pioneering critic and musicianGreg Tate, who died last year.)
These droning metallic timbres stood in subtle, ghostly contrast to the vibrato sound production of the string trio. Next, the tenor saxophonist Peyton Pleninger developed a solo from downward-plunging motifs in the strings. As he built up a frenetic, improvisatory energy from melodic cells, the string players began treading into extended technique, with scraping, at-the-bridge bowing and lightly plucked pizzicato.
Alongside Weinrib at his drum kit, some crying alto sax figures from Noah Becker inspired beautiful portamento lines from Griffin’s viola, as well as the entry of both bassoonists playing brooding long tones at first, before turning to peppery, explosive bursts. The gradual swelling of instrumental forces continued; on Saturday, this section contained a galvanic sense of swing, even through Threadgill’s successive, minute changes in tempo.
Sometimes, when you wanted the groove to keep going, a quickly arcing exclamation from the ensemble and surprise jolt in the rhythm would bring everything to a dramatic, unexpected finish — at which point Threadgill would, for example, go back to reciting sections of his prose against projections of paintings by his daughter, Nhumi Threadgill. Or he would sit near the stage while some video played, showing Henry Threadgill moving various talismans around a horizontally resting mirror. In tandem, a voice-over track delivered the composer’s observations about contemporary life.
But while the audience was invited to join the composer in grouchy irritation, this wasn’t the sole purpose of the vignette. Instead, this morsel harmonized thematically with Threadgill’s broader concerns about what we throw away too easily, including our attention. When his spoken text referred to rat populations and their proximity to outdoor diners, his pretaped vocal choir started to chant about something “crawling up my leg.” Such lighthearted moments had a way of balancing out the text’s more serious attributes — not least about the nature of inequality in New York, before and during the pandemic.
While the precise placement of videos and spoken texts changed from night to night, the musical sequence was largely the same. The advantage of Saturday’s set was its increased tightness — in the ensemble as well as in the multimedia transitions. If some form of this vibrant chamber orchestra music makes it to a recording, it should be accompanied by documentation of the experience in the hall (similar to the way a studio recording of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium J” contained a video of its semistaged premiere, also at Roulette).
Henry Threadgill
Performed on Friday and Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn.
https://50ftf.kronosquartet.org/composers/henry-threadgill
Program Notes
Sixfivetwo
(2018)
Henry Threadgill
(b. 1944)
Composed for
50 For The Future:
The Kronos Learning
Repertoire
Henry Threadgill composed Sixfivetwo, a 12-minute work for string quartet that includes opportunities for players to improvise. “The improvisational component is very important,” he said in an interview while describing his philosophy which guided the creation of this piece. “Kronos knows it's important and I know it's important. It's a shame that the classical concert world doesn't understand how important it is… Everything is about exploration. We get to where we are because of exploration. That's why improvisation is so important… We won't improve anything unless we have an improvisational approach to life.”
Composer Interview
Henry Threadgill discusses his musical background, his composition process, the piece he wrote for 50 for the Future, and more.
Artist’s Bio
Henry Threadgill
USA
Only three jazz artists have won a Pulitzer Prize. In spring
2016, Henry Threadgill joined Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis as
Pulitzer laureates, when he was honored for In For A Penny, In For A Pound, the latest album by Zooid, his unconventional sextet (reeds, acoustic guitar, cello, tuba, bass guitar, drums).
“Unconventional” describes not just Henry Threadgill’s music, but his life.
Born
in Chicago in 1944, Threadgill grew up on the South Side, where parade
bands and the blues filled the air. He played percussion, then clarinet
in the Englewood High School band, but switched to sax at 16. Idolizing
Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Lester Young, he
adored Fritz Reiner’s Chicago Symphony and avant-classical composers
like Luciano Berio. He was 17 when he joined the Muhal Richard Abrams’
Experimental Band, which later expanded into the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM); there he found like-minded
musical explorers.
When bebop broke, most swing players thought
it was nonsense and claimed boppers couldn’t play “real” jazz. The
members of what became the AACM faced a similar reaction. So Threadgill
performed at dances and parades, joined polka and Latin bands, sat in
theater pits, and raised the roof in churches. He played the blues at
joints like the South Side’s Blue Flame with local heroes like Left Hand
Frank. All the while, he kept studying Berio, Stravinsky, and Debussy.
In
1967, he enlisted in the Army as a clarinetist-saxophonist, was
upgraded to composer-arranger, and then shipped to Vietnam to join the
4th Infantry Division Band. Injured during the 1968 Tet offensive on his
way back from guard duty, he was sent home and honorably discharged
with two campaign ribbons. He returned home for Chicago and reenlisted
with what was now the AACM, but in 1970 left for the perennial lure of
jazz’s Big Apple, New York City.
For the next 40 years, while
Threadgill challenged bedrock ideas about jazz, he settled into New York
City, where he lives with his wife. Around the East Village, he’s a
familiar face on the streets and in the cafes; old friends like Philip
Glass and Allen Ginsburg and total strangers alike engage him in
animated conversation. But he regularly decamped for months at a time to
Goa to recharge his creativity in a faraway, very different world. That
openness to ideas and experiences has always been vital to who
Threadgill is and how his music works. As Charlie Parker put it, “If you
don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
It was in the
East Village—long a seedy, tumultuous haven for outsiders of all
types—that Henry Threadgill launched the unconventional concepts that
led to his Pulitzer-winning art.
AIR (Artists In Residence), his
1970s trio, reimagined ragtime without the piano—a lot like dropping the
electric guitar from rock. His 1980s Sextett, pairing complex
compositions and dynamic soloists, combined heft and agility, and
birthed the “little big band” sound. In the 1990s, Very Very Circus
stepped deeper into unorthodoxy, with two electric guitars, two tubas, a
trombone/French horn, drums, Threadgill’s alto sax and flute, and
frequent add-ons. With Make A Move, a fluid lineup mixing French horn,
tubas, electric and acoustic guitars, and cello, he began exploring the
approaches to composing and improvising that led to Zooid. From 2000 on,
Zooid became his primary vehicle.
As a composer and improviser,
Threadgill sees artistic process and product as inseparable, the essence
of jazz. Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus strove toward the same goal.
Rooted in that history, Threadgill’s solutions have taken radical new
tacks. For Zooid, the Pulitzer committee explained, “A set of three note
intervals assigned to each player…serves as the starting point for
improvisation.” Zooid’s musicians make in-the-moment decisions about
structure, shaping the work-in-process. The unpredictable results are
jazz’s “sound of surprise” updated for the 21st century.
After
decades of probing music, cult status, and critical acclaim,
Threadgill’s Pulitzer Prize caps growing high-culture recognition: 2016
Doris Duke Artist Award; 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award; 2008 United
States Artist Fellowship; 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is especially
proud of being the first black non-classical musician to get a Copland
House Residency Award. In July 2016, the annual Leadership Conference of
the Vietnam Veterans of America honored him with their Excellence in
the Arts award—a very special moment for the only Vietnam veteran ever
awarded a Pulitzer for music.
With his new lineups Ensemble
Double-Up (two pianos, two alto saxes, tuba, cello, and drums) and 14 or
15 Kestra: AGG, this consummate creative shapeshifter is upending
artistic expectations yet again.
Because of Henry's jazz background, improvisation is the big thing here. One of my favorite aspects of this piece is how much trust he puts in the performers. When a composer gives you the freedom to do whatever you want with the music, there's something magical that happens.
Sunny Yang
Cellist, Kronos Quartet
[1]http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-henry-threadgill-1-.html
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/henry-threadgill/
Henry Threadgill by Frederic Tuten
The Pulitzer Prize–winning jazz icon shares his personal history, musical origins, and the evolutionary leap his music will take in 2022.
Winter 2022
Henry Threadgill performing at the Public Theater in New York City, 1980. Photo by Barbara Weinberg Barefield.
[BOMB's performing arts features are supported in part by Select Equity Group]
For a long time, I’d see him with books under his arm walking quickly to or from the Tompkins Square Library on Tenth Street, where, I would later discover, we both lived a block apart. He always seemed to be wearing a different and marvelous hat and, unusual for our neighborhood, a sport jacket, perfectly fitting and a modest color. He was cool to an inch of his life. It may have been several months before we exchanged smiles.
For many years, I had spent time in a café on the corner of Tenth and First Avenue. It was a home for many of us in the neighborhood, especially in the back room, where it was warm and cozy and you could spend the morning writing to the whine of the espresso machine. He’d be at a table reading, not staying very long, and over time we’d smile and nod.
One spring day, twelve or more years ago, we sat at opposite tables on the café terrace—on the sidewalk, that is, but I like the snobby European twinge of “terrace.” He wasn’t reading. I felt that I could no longer stand wondering who he was, and I finally approached him.
He was Henry Threadgill, a musician, he said. And I was me, a writer. We had never heard of each other. After a while of little stuff, I asked who his favorite writer was. “James Joyce, for Ulysses,” he said without hesitation. “And you, for music?” he asked.
“Bach,” I said, “for everything.”
We did not need more glue than that. Soon it was as if we had known each other forever and were picking up our conversation from the day before
It has always stayed like that.
A few weeks later, Henry invited me to his concert at the Jazz Gallery. Henry primarily plays saxophone and flute, but his talents extend to many other instruments, including his famous hubcaphone, which he built from pipes and salvaged hubcaps. That night, Henry shaved notes—as Cézanne did forms—into planes and made silences into music. I did not have to wait for the performance to be over to realize that he was one of the most original and brilliant musicians and composers of our time.
—Frederic Tuten
Frederic Tuten: Henry, we know each other, but I don’t know your history.
Henry Threadgill: I grew up in Chicago in the 1940s and ’50s. My siblings and I used to come home from Sunday service and play church. I loved going to my mother’s mother’s church because it was a sanctified church where people go off and speak in tongues and get wild and all of that. Afterward, at home, we’d put on little stage shows and pretend to be the preachers and the singers.
FT: Did you ever perform with a church as a musician?
HT: Yes, I did. I met this minister out of Philadelphia named Horace Sheppard who had a troupe of the most talented people. We traveled and played music for holy ghost people—holy rollers. It was just like Billy Graham, but it was all Black. Horace would tell me, “Henry, I want you to walk down the aisle and play ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’ on your alto sax. When you get to the front of the church, I want everyone to be screaming. I want you to tear the place up.” By the time I’d get to the pulpit, people would be up on their feet screaming. Horace would run down the aisle and leap onto the stage, doing the split, and say, “Ride on, King Jesus!” (laughter) This was not a show. These were serious people, taking spirits out of people and stuff like that.
FT For how long did you do that?
HT A couple of years, from around age eighteen to twenty-one. I got drafted in 1966, and my views on religion changed after I got to Vietnam and met the indigenous people there. The US military used the Montagnard people as scouts. They could smell the wind and listen to the ground and say, “That’s an elephant not a truck.” In their village, there were no doors, and, from what I understood, the word lock did not exist for them. You could leave everything you had on the ground, and it would rot before others would even look at it. That changed me. I said, If the Montagnard aren’t “civilized,” then I’m with them.
FT Tell me about your parents.
HT I was named after both of my grandfathers. I’m Henry Luther Threadgill. My mother’s father was named Luther Pierce. My father’s father’s name was Henry Threadgill. He was one of the few Black men who worked for Al Capone. He was a bootlegger and drove liquor all over the country, all over Canada. He made enough money that he moved from Arkansas to Chicago.
My father worked for the mob and was a professional gambler. He ran casinos and stuff like that. He used to pick me up in a brand-new Cadillac every year. Everybody wanted to dress like my father. He was the sharpest man in town. He got all the women. But my father also loved jazz. He opened up a casino, and while he counted the money, he would give me a handful of nickels and say, “Hey, Moon. Go play some music.” (My father never called me Henry. He called me Moon.) There was nothing but jazz on the jukebox because that’s all he listened to, and he wasn’t going to be anywhere that didn’t have it. I got hooked on jazz right away.
FT It was illegal gambling?
HT Yeah. He worked for the Italians. And there were other guys just like him. They had broken up with their wives, but they all took care of their children. I remember this period when my father was taking bets from a funeral parlor, downstairs where the morticians worked. The kids would be upstairs where they held wakes, and we’d be running through with balls and jumping up onto the coffins. And my father would come up and say, “What you all doing here? Don’t you disturb any of these bodies.” (laughter)
I remember getting in some trouble because I was stealing and stuff, and my mother made me go stay at my father’s. He told me, “Moon, don’t ever do anything that you don’t have any talent to do. You ain’t got no talent if you go to jail.” I had a half brother, Russell, who got to the top of Golden Gloves boxing and then went for the championship. There, this guy beat him so bad. My father went down and told Russell, “Don’t ever call me again to pick you up with you looking like this. You don’t have the talent for this.”
My father had been everywhere and done everything and had more women than anybody I’d ever seen in my life, but he and my mother were still the best of friends. He had somebody bringing him reefers when he was taking chemotherapy in the hospital. My aunt told me he was taking bets until the night he died. She said they found him with money in his hand. That man was too much.
Henry Threadgill at the University of Chicago, 1972.
Photo by Frank Gruber.
Sextet performing at the Public Theater in New York City, 1980. Pictured from left to right: Craig Harris, Olu Dara, and Henry Threadgill. Photo by Barbara Weinberg Barefield.
FT Growing up in Chicago, were you exposed to a lot of live music?
HT Around 1958, when we were living on the South Side, my friend Milton Chapman told me about a big concert at Englewood High School. It was Chet Baker and Stan Getz with Frank Rosolino on trombone. I remember it cost about fifteen cents to get in. I was thirteen years old and stood near the stage. I unzipped my mouth and said, “Fucking Stan Getz and Chet Baker, man!”
FT Was that the first live jazz you heard?
HT I had already been to a lot of concerts. My mother took me to see everybody—Duke [Ellington], Louis Jordan, Count Basie. They all played in the major movie theaters in Chicago, and we’d be up in the balcony. Until I was about six years old, I had to stand on my seat so I could see down to the stage. My mother was into the arts, and she knew that music was going to be my thing. I think she always knew it. She supported me all the way.
FT When did you say to yourself, “I want to be a composer, a musician”?
HT From the very beginning.
FT How old were you?
HT Three. I taught myself. I used to sit at the piano every day and wait for boogie-woogie to come on the radio. Somebody like Albert Ammons would come on, and I’d try to play along. My hands were small, so I struggled. But I got it, and in the process I learned how to play the piano. Then, I wanted to understand how music was made. I’d listen to Tchaikovsky, Serbian music, Beethoven, hillbilly music, everything on the radio, and ask, How does somebody create this?
When I got older, my mother had me take piano lessons from Mrs. Holmes. I thought I’d been sent to hell. She was a church lady in a little round hat, and she came with the Bible, a music book, and a ruler. I’d keep one eye on the music and one eye on her ruler. When you do that, you’re going to make a mistake, and—pow! So I stopped coming home after school. I’d stay out shooting marbles or climbing trees, watching my house until Mrs. Holmes left, and then I’d go home.
Polish music and the music from Serbia had a big impact on me. One of the biggest Polish communities outside of Poland is in Chicago. And one of the biggest communities of Serbs outside of Serbia is in Chicago too. I grew up listening to their music. And—besides the blues—I listened to hillbilly music, because we had a whole community of Appalachian people. (singing) “I’m so lonesome, I could cry.”
I knew that the white people were ashamed of the hillbillies, because they didn’t wear shoes and didn’t go to school. But that music was the real white American folk music, and they were denying it, just like they were denying the people who made it. Then you see what happened? After a while, it became the Grand Ole Opry, and then it became country and western music, and then just dollar signs after that.
FT So you first learned to play music on the piano. When did you start playing other instruments?
HT I liked the sound of the tenor saxophone from listening to Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins, and Lester Young. I started playing at the end of my freshman year in high school, in about 1958, all the way into college. My music teacher had me learn clarinet, too, because in the big band era, all the saxophone players also had to play clarinet. Later, I became interested in playing the flute because of so many great flute players like Frank Wess, Sam Most, and Hubert Laws. Around 1969, I started playing flute seriously.
I remember when I was about fifteen, on Monday nights there were rehearsals at the Chicago School of Music. George Hunter used to run the band. He was a famous band director, and the band was full of successful musicians. They were all white. All men. They owned houses. They had boats. They would play in Woody Herman’s band, Les Brown’s band, and the Raeburn Boyd orchestra when they came to town. I walked in with my tenor sax one night, and they didn’t really pay me much attention. They kind of glanced, you know? Mr. Hunter looked at me, then he looked at everybody, and he said, “Okay, pull up 25, 36, 102, 509, and 700.” They had over a thousand arrangements. I hadn’t seen music written by hand before, only printed music. Mr. Hunter counted us off: “1, 2, 1-2-3-4.” Boom. I hit the first note and that was all. The notes were flying all over the place. I said, “What the shit? Oh man, this is bad.” Mr. Hunter took us into a slower piece. “1, 2, 3, 4.” Same thing. I only got the first note. He called his next piece. And I couldn’t get it. I was a teenager, and I was very self-conscious. I thought, They don’t like me because I’m a Black kid, so they’re just washing my ass out. But it wasn’t true. I just wasn’t at their level as a musician.
I put my sax in my case and slammed it shut. The whole place got quiet. When I left, I slammed the door so hard I almost knocked the glass out the window. I got home, stormed in the house, found my mother and my grandmother, and told them, “I’m moving to the basement.” I covered up all the windows and went downstairs to practice. I was devastated, completely fucking emotionally devastated. I didn’t think I was worth shit. They used to bring my food to the door and leave it on the floor. Kids would come around saying, “Henry doesn’t like us anymore. He never comes out to play.” My whole spirit had been broken. I had to find out what I was called to do in my life.
I started living in the basement probably in June. School started in September. The first Monday after that I went back to the rehearsals. Again, they didn’t pay me much attention, but I got my music out. “Pull up 19, 44, 16, 108. And 1, 2—” Boom. When they took off, I was right with them. I missed some stuff, but I had figured out how to stay with it even if I messed up. I heard these white guys say, “The kid is alright, huh?” (laughter)
If I had gone back there and failed again, that would have been too much. My teachers had told me: You haven’t failed when you make a mistake. You have to stumble forward. If you let a mistake register on you physically and emotionally, you’ll lose your position. But if you just stay with the program, you’ll be back in the saddle. You have to keep riding. Don’t let the horse throw you. Later, when they come back and play that piece again, you can say, “I remember you. You threw me before, but I’ll get you this time.”
FT Tell me about the hubcaphone. How did you make your own instruments from hubcaps?
HT Around 1970, I was driving down Maxwell Street in Chicago, and there was a place that sold nothing but hubcaps. I made a rack with metal pipes so that the hubcaps could lay on top. When I started playing it, the whole thing fell over. I didn’t even know how to play it. You had to dance to play it. About that time, I left Chicago and went to Amsterdam, where I lived with the painter Quan Tilting. He was way out there as a painter. He had built a platform with canvases on two sides. He would take two or three brushes in each hand, and whirl and jump and spin through the middle of the platform. I started practicing his painting movements. And that’s how I figured out how to play the hubcaphone.
FT How did you start your own group? For example, how did you start Zooid?
HTZooid is the most recent group. My first group didn’t even really have a name. It was just the Henry Threadgill Ensemble. And then I had a group doing music and theater happenings. I started working with avant-garde theater in the early ’70s. I did a couple of shows with Arnold Weinstein, worked in guerrilla theater in San Francisco, and with Shirley Mordine’s dance company. And then came this theater director who wanted me to use Scott Joplin rags and my own music for this production. The theater company had moved into this hotel, The Diplomat, where you had country western people living, a former hillbilly star, and a woman who had been in theater and was still dressing up in the same costumes she used to wear when she performed on stage, like she was reliving the past. The Italian mob had control of the liquor store, and behind it was a gambling place. The people in the theater company studied the weird characters in there, and then they wrote a script called Hotel Diplomat. When the mob came and threatened the director, Don Saunders, he changed the name to 99 Rooms. That was the birth of my group Air, and after that, it was history. Air was the group that was famous. We just took off. The critics demanded that we be recorded. We didn’t have to ask anybody for a recording contract.
FT That’s almost unheard of.
HT I know. That was unbelievable. We came to New York from Chicago in ’75, and I later started another group called the Sextet—that was a seven-piece group. I kept that for a long time. We did a lot of recording and traveled all over Europe and other places. Then I had a five-piece group called The Windstream Ensemble. I did a lot of theater and dance work with that group at the Public Theater and other places. Then came Very Very Circus, which everybody knew all over the world. After Very Very Circus, came Make a Move. After Make a Move came Zooid. I’ve had that group for about fifteen years. I also had a dance band called the Society Situation Dance Band. That band was never recorded, and it was never supposed to be. It was for live performances where people could dance to it.
FT You’ve said you’re a different person with each instrument you play.
HT That’s right. I have to create a solo sound. There’s a lot of flute players, and I don’t want to sound like them. There’s a lot of alto sax players, and I don’t want to sound like them either. I’ve developed my own voice, and I use a different approach when I’m moving from one instrument to another. When I’m changing instruments, it should be another person coming to you. You just heard me coming to you as Maria Callas, now I’m Beverly Sills or Madonna or Beyoncé. (laughter)
FT What we’re really talking about is your drive to go forward, not to continue doing the same thing that you did well and that you got money for, but to do something that you want to do.
HT That’s in my nature. I feel I will literally die if I don’t go forward. Going back has always been a mistake for me, like when I went back to smoking or went back to this woman I had a bad time with. Why did I go back there?
FT When I was getting to know you, you told me Ulysses was one of your influences. I thought that was a pill.
HT I don’t get a lot of my information from music anymore. It comes from dance. It comes from theater. It comes from film. It comes from literature. It comes from painting. It comes from photography. I only listen to music for enjoyment. I’ve been looking at Albert Oehlen’s paintings, studying them for days, looking at their rhythmic possibilities. When I’m looking at a photograph, I’m looking at the light, at the background and middle ground and foreground. I can’t even think about that in terms of most music, you know.
FT Henry, did you go to college?
HT Of course. I started out at Woodrow Wilson Junior College. Then I went to University of Chicago for a while, then Manhattan University in Kansas. Eventually, I came back to Chicago, where I went to the American Conservatory of Music. I graduated in 1974, but I was a student there for about eight years.
FT That’s amazing.
HT I didn’t go to school to get a degree. I went to school to take every course that they had. I kept changing majors so I wouldn’t have to get a degree. I said, “You think I’m going to let you give me a degree in four years? You offer a hundred courses but I’ll have only taken fifteen of them. Keep your degree. I want every piece of information you got.“
Henry Threadgill. Photo by John Rogers. Courtesy of
FT Were you playing music and going to school at the same time?
HT Yeah. It was very difficult. I had trouble with a lot of professors at the conservatories. One professor said I’d never learn anything because I wouldn’t do what he wanted. I said, “I know you want me to prove that I can write a concerto. But I’ve analyzed every piece of music and I got the highest grades. Why do I need to prove it?” The dean didn’t know what to do with me. The great Stella Roberts was supposed to be retiring, but she said, “I’ll take him.” And she became my composition teacher.
Stella Roberts has been written out of history. When she was eighteen, she was accepted to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. So she went to Paris on a boat. She was a little country girl who didn’t know anything about reefers, nothing about gay people. But then she sailed to France with Man Ray, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland, and went straight to Gertrude Stein’s. (laughter) And who turned up? Picasso. She met Alice B. Toklas, Stravinsky, everybody. She was in that group, but she was a woman, and women just weren’t getting credit
You know why Stella Roberts was such a great teacher? Because she didn’t teach me anything.
Generally, when you walk away from great people, they’ve left their fingerprints all over you. You become the little Roy Lichtenstein and the little Mozart and the little Charlie Parker. But Stella Roberts was different. I’d come in and she’d be sitting there at the piano. I’d pull out my music and she’d put it on the piano. There was always a little spot that could be better or cleaned up, but would she comment on it? No. She would never criticize or even point it out. She knew I knew where it was. Once, she looked out the window and said, “Come here, Henry.” I helped her up, and we went to the window. She asked me, “You know who designed that building over there?” I didn’t. She said, “That’s Frank Lloyd Wright. Look in my cabinet, in the architecture section, and find the book on Wright and take it home.” The next time I came back, she said, “Do you know Ulysses?” I said no. She said, “Look in the cabinet.” We never discussed any of the books. I was like, Are you fucking kidding me? What does this have to do with what I’m doing? I’d try to figure out what I was doing musically that was parallel to the books—how they could inform me about the mistakes I made in my music. But even if I didn’t figure it out, I’d learn other things about literature and architecture. She took me back down the course of reeducation in those departments. What did Stella Roberts show me? She taught me to be the teacher.
FT She taught you how to teach yourself.
HT Exactly.
When I play music, I don’t know how it will touch the listener. There’s materiality in literature, painting, and photography, but not in sound.
FT Well, even if you can’t touch it, music vibrates in your body.
HT But it vibrates differently in each person’s body.
FT That’s true for painting too, though. Each person sees what he or she sees. We don’t know what they see.
HT But where the painter is trying to get something on the canvas, I’m trying to get off the canvas. The musical score is a form of calligraphy. You have to lift the music off the paper and put it in the air. It’s not like the word acoustic. You pronounce it the same way all the time. Acoustic is acoustic is acoustic is acoustic. But music is a matter of idiom and style and different folkways.
I want to enjoy music the way the novice enjoys it, and not because I have more technical information than somebody else—that’s not enjoying music because then you’re explaining it, and you shouldn’t have to explain music.
I don’t play down to people; I play up to people. If you play down to people, you don’t have respect for people. I have a high opinion of people, so I play up to people.
FT I write for the kind of reader that wants to read me, and I hope that they like it.
HT: There lies the big difference between literature and music. Words are definite. Notes have no meaning at all. Music has no meaning at all. Songs with people singing are suggestive at best. If you take away the words, what does it mean? Each person will get something different.
My objective with Zooid, and with all of my groups, is to make music. I take what I write to the rehearsals, and if somebody plays it wrong, I say, Wait a minute. Go ahead and play that wrong again, because you did something right. You know what I’m saying? A rehearsal is an exploration. I don’t care what I’ve written. In rehearsal, I throw it away or turn it upside down. I move this over here and that over there. I don’t care because my objective is to make music.
FT That’s all that matters.
HT Years ago when I was working for the University of Chicago hospital, I learned something about the value of making mistakes.
FT What were you doing there?
HT I collected tests the doctors ran on patients and took them to the labs. I was about nineteen or twenty. I was working full-time and going to school part-time, trying to save enough money to go to the conservatory in the fall. Eventually I got caught not being in school full-time, and got drafted.
One day, a guy brought me down to the research lab, where they had animals and were growing things in petri dishes. This guy told me it’s only through mistakes that we progress. All great discoveries have come through mistakes. Without mistakes, we’d remain in the same place. That’s how I compose music. You try to come up with the best solution, the best order for the music to be taken in by the musicians. But when you get into rehearsal, the work, the exploration, really begins.
FT What are you working on now?
HT I’m getting ready to make another turn with my work. I’ve been lucky in my musical life; I only change when I find the material to make a change. I’ve now found a way to advance rhythmically through Morse code. That communication system is dot–dash, but dot–dash is not enough. Two notes are considered a dyad. You need three elements, because harmony is always three notes. So you need dot–dash–dot. There’s a short phrase, and there’s a long phrase, and then there’s another short phrase; Morse code uses letters, but I’m saying those are phrases.
FT Is that a rhythmic system?
HT It’s rhythmic design.
FT How does that translate into performance?
HT Here, let me show you an example. I’ll write, “Mary hates Fred. Fred doesn’t care what Mary’s opinion is. Mary tells Fred to fuck off.” Can you see this? “Mary hates Fred.”
FT Oh, good. I’m glad I found out.
HT That’s short. Then you say, “Fred doesn’t care what Mary’s opinion is.” That’s long. “Mary tells Fred to fuck off.” That’s shorter. Short, long, short. You following me? It’s rhythmic design. That’s what I’ve taken from Morse code.
FT How does the improvisational aspect fit into the design?
HT I’m going to attach it to the body, to the musician’s own meter. Nobody has done this. It is the new frontier. This is going to take me all the way.
FT Okay, so explain.
HT I will record the heartbeats of four musicians for twenty seconds each, and then put that in a continuous loop so they can keep hearing it.
FT They’re listening to their heartbeat as they’re performing.
HT Right. And then what they’ll play will be both written and improvised, according to what they hear coming from their body. The improvisation has guidelines, and a lot of that is the rhythmic design. Or they have to stay within parameters: I’ll tell one musician that the only intervals they can play are a minor second, a major third, an augmented fourth, and a sixth. I’ll tell another musician, “You can play a major second, a minor third, a fifth, and a seventh.” Those are the only intervals they can use to play a short phrase, a long phrase, and then a short phrase.
It’ll be my job to make it work, to create the synthesis. I’ll examine the differences between these four musicians’ heartbeats. Is it like finding the medium or the mean? What is the difference between my heartbeat and your heartbeat? I’ll be making decisions coming out of the organic aspect of each person’s body. It’s not just made up. It’s real, because it’s you. It is you.
FT It’s biology as music.
HT Yeah. And, you know how clothing is made in a factory? One person makes this part, another person makes that part.
FT An assembly line.
HT But it’s not going to fit together like a normal shirt. My hand might be coming out my knee, and my foot might be coming out my ear. (laughter) It’s still my body. It’s still the same body parts. Only the positions have changed.
FT Like a Picasso painting.
HT Exactly. It worked because nothing had changed. Everything was just reassembled.
This is all going to be at Roulette, right down the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for two days. May 20 through 21, 2022. It’s a multimedia piece, starting with films that I made a couple of years ago in the Tilton Gallery and Luhring Augustine. The performance will open my film, Plain as Plain in Plain Sight. The second night will open with my other film Plain as Plain, but Different.
I’ve written a book called Migration and the Return of the Cheap Suit, and during the performance, the text and photographs from the book will be projected on a screen. The first part of the book is about people who left the city willingly. The second part of the book is about people getting evicted. I took the photographs last year when this COVID-19 thing hit us, and all the yuppies were moving out of the East Village. Every day, I’d go out for my evening walks and see all this stuff the yuppies were leaving in the street: fabulous women’s shoes, $4,000 speakers. It was money in the street. There were moving trucks everywhere.
At Roulette, I’ll project the pictures I took of all that onto the screen. Then I’m going to perform the text. I’ll read some to you, and how I might improvise it: “Now we sing the coming of empty space, the unwanted shifting.” Now, for the performance: “Now we sing the coming of empty space. It’s not about what’s crawling up my leg, or something wet going down my back. Empty space. It’s about the unwanted, unwanted, unwanted, shifting.” I’ve also been working on synthesized choruses. I’m going to sample my voice to create a choir effect. Solo, duet, or trio.
FT Henry, this is an evolution for you, right?
HT Yes, it is.
FT You’ve built your work over all these years, and now you see another thing. You’re in a state of grace.
HT I’m lucky. I’ve been fortunate with this. I’ve always feared that a day might come when there won’t be another move for me on the chessboard. I started out doing one thing in music and I took it as far as I could go.
I didn’t change for novelty’s sake. I changed when I used up all the information I had. Then I had new ideas that took me to the next place. That’s my musical history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels; a collection of short stories, Self Portrait: Fictions; and My Young Life, a memoir. His fiction, art, and criticism have appeared in Artforum, BOMB, the New York Times, Vogue, Granta, Harper’s, and elsewhere. Tuten is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
jazz
free jazz
chicago
saxophone
HENRY THREADGILL IS THE 2016 RECIPIENT OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN MUSIC
http://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/henry-threadgill-b-f…
Saturday, December 12, 2015
HENRY THREADGILL (b. February 15, 1944): Legendary, iconic, and highly versatile musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, ensemble leader, and teacher
HENRY THREADGILL IS THE 2016 RECIPIENT OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN MUSIC
http://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/henry-threadgill-b-f…
Saturday, December 12, 2015
HENRY THREADGILL (b. February 15, 1944): Legendary, iconic, and highly versatile musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, ensemble leader, and teacher
From the album OPEN AIR SUIT (1978) by the trio ensemble known as AIR
"Card Two: The Jick Or Mandrill's Cosmic Ass"
(Composition and arrangement by Henry Threadgill)
AIR is:
Henry Threadgill - alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, flute
Fred Hopkins - bass, maracas
Steve McCall - drums, percussion
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4St23cJN5A
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V4St23cJN5A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Henry Threadgill (Air) - Card Two: The Jick Or Mandrill's Cosmic Ass
Henry Threadgill: Alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, flute
Fred Hopkins: Bass, maracas
Steve McCall: Drums, percussion
Henry Threadgill - "Bermuda Blues" from the 1986
Threadgill/ Hopkins/ McCall - "Keep Right On Playing Thru The Mirror Over The Water"
(Composition and arrangement by AIR)
Henry Threadgill/ Fred Hopkins/ Steve McCall - "Live Air", Black Saint, BSR 0034 CD, 1980.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/arts/music/henry-threadgill-pulitzer-prize-penny-pound.html?_r=1
Music | Critic’s Notebook
At Last, a Box Henry Threadgill Fits Nicely Into: Pulitzer Winner
by NATE CHINEN
April 18, 2016
New York Times
Henry Threadgill, who on Monday was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music, is a composer and bandleader of intense, unyielding originality, nobody’s idea of a compromise. An alto saxophonist and flutist with a distinguished career in the post-1960s American avant-garde, he has amassed a body of work with its own functional metabolism, perpetually humming in a state of flux. He has certain affinities with, but no particular allegiance to, the jazz tradition.
“In for a Penny, in for a Pound,” Mr. Threadgill’s award-winning album, is a suite-like composition released on two discs by Pi Recordings last year. It’s an intricate and thoroughly enigmatic piece of music, but above all it stands as a showcase for his longtime flagship, Zooid. (The group takes its name from a biological term for a cell that is capable of movement independent of its parent organism.) From the first moments of the title track, which opens the album, you experience a distinctively slanted feeling, the byproduct of an unstable but carefully coordinated form of counterpoint. The music has formal rigor and forward pull, but it doesn’t provide an orienting framework, or any clear distinctions between composition and improvisation.
When Mr. Threadgill got the call on Monday that he had been awarded a Pulitzer, he was beyond surprised.
“I was speechless,” Mr. Threadgill, 72, said in a telephone interview. “I said, ‘What for?’”
Asked how he categorized his music, or where it falls on the jazz-avant-garde continuum, he demurred.
“I create what I create,” he said. “When I’m fortunate enough to create a work, that’s the end of it in my mind. Where it’s placed, where it goes, what people say about it, that is really not my department. I’m in Lingerie, I’m not in Hardware, you know?”
If you do call him a jazz composer, he is the third to be awarded a Pulitzer in the history of the awards; Wynton Marsalis was awarded for his oratorio “Blood on the Fields” in 1997 and Ornette Coleman was awarded for his album “Sound Grammar” in 2007.
Mr. Threadgill is a longtime resident of the East Village. He has been a musician of multidimensional interests since his youth in Chicago: He had formative experience in marching bands and with a traveling Church of God evangelist, before joining the first wave of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In the mid-1970s he formed a trio, Air, that was one of the most celebrated groups to emerge from that cohort. (His other groups have included the Henry Threadgill Sextet and Very Very Circus.)
Last year, in addition to releasing his own album, he took part in a 50th anniversary celebration for the association, presenting a new chamber piece and appearing on “Made in Chicago,” an ECM album featuring his fellow members Muhal Richard Abrams on piano, Roscoe Mitchell on saxophones and Jack DeJohnette on drums.
That’s a council of elders, with longstanding bonds between them. “In for a Penny, in for a Pound” puts Mr. Threadgill more in a position of authority, though he wields it lightly. The album features the extravagantly sensitive interplay among his band mates: Liberty Ellman on acoustic guitar, Jose Davila on trombone and tuba, Christopher Hoffman on cello and Elliot Humberto Kavee on drums. Zooid has been a working unit for more than 15 years, its rapport honed through extensive workshopping and rehearsals.
During a series of conversations in 2009, members of the ensemble described Mr. Threadgill’s methodology as intimidatingly complex but also deeply intuitive. He explained it as “a serial intervallic language” ruled partly by mathematical principles and inspired, obliquely, by the 20th-century composer Edgard Varèse. But part of the magic in the music is that its predetermined structures give way, unpredictably, to various sorts of spontaneous digression.
“For people who listen to jazz music in the traditional sense, it’s easier to follow the form if you know the piece,” Mr. Ellman said. “But Henry isn’t really concerned with that formality. In this music we have a lot of through-composed things, and we might play one section in a piece, and there might be room for a solo in that particular section, or there might be two or three solos before we go back to the written material. Every piece has a completely different form.”
Mr. Threadgill wrote four concerto-like movements for “In for a Penny, in for a Pound,” each designed to spotlight a member of Zooid. (Mr. Ellman’s is “Unoepic (for guitar).”) But each piece, and the album’s two other tracks, is as likely to feature digressions from someone other than the featured improviser.
He happens to have another album out as of this month: “Old Locks and Irregular Verbs,” featuring the new group he calls Ensemble Double Up, whose members include Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Davila. Divided into four parts, it’s another statement of grave but wriggling purpose, just as easy to picture in Pulitzer contention. What that illustrates, among other things, is the abundance of Mr. Threadgill’s restless creative energy. Becoming a Pulitzer winner should be welcome validation for him, but it seems unlikely that he’ll be resting on any laurels.
Michael Cooper contributed reporting.
Sir Simpleton
"Sir Simpleton"
X-75 Volume 1 is the debut album by Henry Threadgill released on the Arista Novus label in 1979. The album and features four of Threadgill's compositions performed by Threadgill with Douglas Ewart, Joseph Jarman, Wallace McMillan, Leonard Jones, Brian Smith, Rufus Reid, Fred Hopkins and vocals by Amina Claudine Myers. The Allmusic review by Brian Olewnick states, "Henry Threadgill's first album as a leader immediately plunged into experimental waters. He utilized a nonet the likes of which had certainly never been heard before and probably not since... Threadgill's massive talent for mid-size band arrangements is immediately apparent... As of 2002, X-75, Vol. 1 was unreleased on disc and, even more disappointingly, there was never a "Vol. 2." But Threadgill fans looking for a link between Air and his Sextett owe it to themselves to search this one out".
Track listing
All compositions by Henry Threadgill
- "Sir Simpleton" - 6:26
- "Celebration" - 13:21
- "Air Song" - 10:21
- "Fe Fi Fo Fum" - 13:00
Recorded at CI Recording Studios, New York City on January 13, 1979
- Henry Threadgill - alto saxophone, flute, bass flute
- Douglas Ewart - bass clarinet, piccolo, flute
- Joseph Jarman - soprano saxophone, flute
- Wallace McMillan - piccolo, alto flute, tenor saxophone
- Leonard Jones - bass
- Brian Smith - piccolo bass, bass
- Rufus Reid - bass
- Fred Hopkins - bass
- Amina Claudine Myers - vocals
The Henry Threadgill Sextet – "When Was That?"
Olu Dara - cornet
Craig Harris - trombone
Henry Threadgill - alto, tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute, bass flute
Brian Smith - piccolo bass
Fred Hopkins - bass
Pheeroan akLaff - drums
John Betsch - drums
Tracklist:
1 Melin - 00:00
2 10 To 1 - 03:40
3 Just B - 15:10
4 When Was That? - 19:35
5 Soft Suicide At The Baths - 29:57
All compositions by Henry Threadgill. Recorded at Sound Ideas Studios, NYC, on September 30 and October 1, 1981.
About Time Records – 1982.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/henry-threadgill-9-plus-essential-albums
Building a Jazz Library
Henry Threadgill: 9 Plus Essential Albums
PHOTO: Henry Threadgill (center) Courtesy Julie Gulenko
by Steve Cook
July 25, 2022
AllAboutJazz
The beauty of Henry Threadgill is how he upends the idea that listeners need to 'get' music to enjoy what they hear.
More people should listen to the music of Henry Threadgill. Without any actual statistics at hand, it's safe to say that one could consider his market to be niche. Yes, many jazz fans know him as a long-established creative force. He even won a Pulitzer. But he probably does not ring a bell among the many more who know jazz through legacy artists with curated, major label back catalogs or newer performers with huge-selling breakthrough albums—often, but not always, vocalists. It should not be this way as Threadgill's music is uniquely exciting and just plain fun.
Thankfully, we live in a relative golden age to listen to him. Albums by Threadgill and his ensembles have been released by more than ten labels, most of them small independents. With disparate entities involved with their care, building a jazz library with his albums used to require a patient, piece-by-piece approach. Scouring used records stores and crate digging do have a certain appeal. Besides the episodic sense of accomplishment it brings, the process can take you to new places and introduce you to new people and friends. But one would not expect such resolute determination from those yet to sign on for all things Threadgill. With the benefit of specialty reissues, online retailers, streaming services and digital sales platforms, collectors and the curious can now get their hands and ears on most of the albums mentioned below in one fashion or the other with relative ease. Any future Threadgill completists inspired by this BAJL entry may need to make periodic checks of Discogs and Ebay to fill some gaps, but Threadgill's work is now remarkably discoverable compared to an earlier time.
Threadgill's discography has many doors through which to enter. All of them and where they go merit attention. With this being said, to present 9 Plus Essential Albums intends neither to snub nor to vacillate. Given his deliberate playfulness with words and numbers, it would seem out of place to make a Top Ten, too. Readers are invited to share their own Threadgill "essentials" in the comments section below. Preferred outlets and stratagems for building a Threadgill library are heartily welcomed.
Zooid
Poof
Pi
2021
Zooid
In for a Penny, In for a Pound
Pi
2015
Threadgill's work with his longest running band, Zooid, provides as appropriate a place as any to introduce people to him. For as much as he seems to change, Zooid could be just a new variation on his long-running interest in jazz bands as classical chamber groups—or maybe it should be the other way around.
Critic Stanley Crouch noted "Third Stream elements" (i.e., melding of classical and jazz) in the work of his first band, the trio Air with Threadgill (alto saxophone, flute, bass flute), Fred Hopkins (bass), and Steve McCall (drums). The first lineup he led, with which he recorded X-75 Volume 1 (Arista/Novus, 1979), included three additional players on reed and wind instruments, four bassists and a vocalist. Jon Pareles' New York Times review of Subject to Change (About Time, 1985) highlighted his then-current Sextet, which also included Threadgill, two drummers, trumpet, trombone, cello and bass as "the world's most compact orchestra" and "a lineup that's more flexible than a campaign promise." His next steps, Very Very Circus and Make a Move, employ similarly rich instrumentation atypical for jazz. Zooid on Poof consists of Threadgill, two artists from the unit's inception— Liberty Ellman (acoustic guitar) and Jose Davila (trombone, tuba)—along with Christopher Hoffman (cello) and Elliot Humberto Kavee (drums, percussion).
A 2021 review of Poof by Michael J. West on the Bandcamp website presents a valuable discussion of how the album takes cues from classical concertos in the group's orientation and execution (it comes recommended). It also cogently describes how Zooid adheres to unique rules for how musicians play off each other and improvise as an organic whole with some structure but ultimate openness to where things go. Threadgill and his bandmates have, in effect, devised their own way that music "makes sense" akin to the work of artists like Arnold Schoenberg, known for his twelve-tone technique, and later-career Ornette Coleman and his harmolodic ideas.
Despite the headiness that the preceding discussion implies, the beauty of Henry Threadgill is how he upends the idea that listeners need to "get" music to enjoy what they hear. Blending composed and improvised music played by a veritable mini-orchestra with unique-for-jazz instrumentation, Poof twists, turns and surprises with ingenious beats, pulses, and grooves. Is it jazz? While it may depart from common conceptions of it, the jazz press, clubs and listening public still claim him. In its running length, able to fit on one LP or a side of a 90-minute cassette, Poof shows a restraint that could be another Threadgill hallmark. While compact discs allow for more music to be included, even after the CD's arrival Threadgill rarely goes beyond LP-era constraints. There is a time for all good music to go "poof."
In for a Penny, In for A Pound, the album for which he won the Pulitzer, is a double shot of Zooid, completely aware of itself as such, and it is essential Threadgill. Its two-LP-length construction allows the featured instruments more room to shine in their settings. With each disc beginning with an introduction not built around a featured player, the overall work achieves a balance in its more-is-more presentation.
The Pi albums referenced throughout this BAJL entry are generally available from major online retailers and digital sales sites, specialty online retailers, the label itself (company webpage and Bandcamp) and streaming platforms. A brick-and-mortar store may even have some in stock. Some, but not all, have LP releases.
Plus album: Zooid, Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry, Spp (Pi, 2012). This may best present Threadgill as composer of songs for Zooid, not to mention just how swinging they can be. Like Poof, it drives home a less-is-more aesthetic in its running length.
Ensemble Double Up
Old Locks and Irregular Verbs
Pi
2016
Threadgill may not seem like an inviting composer/arranger for players outside the ranks of Zooid. But this is not the case. A 2019 performance by Zooid with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble of the piece "Pathways" commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, well demonstrated the elasticity of the unit's membrane to incorporate new voices. It may have taken some rehearsal, but they more than pulled it off.
Old Locks and Irregular Verbs provides another witness to Threadgill methods taken up by non-regulars. Originally commissioned and performed in 2014, the album honors the memory of friend and colleague Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris—someone who also brought avant-garde insight to composing for large ensembles. As a Threadgill album, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs is unique in that he sits out the performance itself.. With regard to instrumentation, the alto saxophones, tuba, cello and drums are, of course, de rigueur, with two members of Zooid in this mix. The twin-firing pianos of Jason Moran and David Virelles make the album special within the Threadgill discography. With its moving, elegiac conclusion the entire work achieves a sonic uniqueness, reverence and emotional heft that bring to mind Miles Davis' 32-minute ambient Duke Ellington homage "He Loved Him Madly."
Plus albums: 14 or 15 Kestra: AGG, Dirt... And More Dirt (Pi, 2018); Ensemble Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus (Pi, 2018). Released in the same year, they likely cannibalized themselves in the year-end critics' lists.
Wadada Leo Smith
Great Lakes Suites
TUM
2014
A colleague from Threadgill's early-career with the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Wadada Leo Smith is another jazz artist who gets Pulitzer consideration for ambitious work. On its own merits, this majestic two-CD recording with Smith, fellow AACM alum Jack DeJohnette (drums) and John Lindberg (bass) is a consummate work of art expressive of the state of creative music and avant-garde jazz in the 21st century. The nature of the quartet setting also provides a great chance to take in Threadgill as a preeminent saxophonist-flautist, like Charles Lloyd and Sam Rivers. For those unfamiliar with the deep resonance of the bass flute, Threadgill casts a spell with it to open "Lake Erie."
Releases from the Finnish TUM Records label are not available on streaming platforms or as downloads, but specialty online retailers, like Squidco, as well as the major ones are often good bets to find them.
Plus album: Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago (ECM, 2015). Another reunion with AACM veterans, including Roscoe Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams, that carries 1960s experimentalism forward into the 21st century. As an ECM release, it is widely available.
Very Very Circus
Too Much Sugar for a Dime
Axiom
1993
Threadgill spent the first half of the 1990s working with Very Very Circus, a group noted for combining electric guitars and tubas. Co-produced by Bill Laswell, Too Much Sugar for a Dime doubles and even triples down on guitars and tubas with strings and more. The eclectic mashup results in an album that could be on a list of essential jazz albums of its decade. Vijay Iyer's piano trio rendition of the album's "Little Pocket Size Demons" on Accelerando (ACT, 2012) testifies to its lasting impact on musicians operating in its wake.
A promotional version of the out-of-print CD with just two of its tracks was once more common in used record shops than the record itself. Now one can download it all from Laswell's Bandcamp page. It is also among the Threadgill titles on Pandora. Upon their releases, two box sets, The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air (Mosaic, 2010) and The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note (Black Saint, 2010), improved the availability of Threadgill's work generally, including much by Very Very Circus. While these sets are harder to come by now, the individual albums included among them have migrated to major streaming and digital sales sites.
Plus album: Make a Move, Everybodys Mouth's a Book (Pi, 2001). One of two albums by this short-lived group, Pi Recordings made it their co-inaugural release with Zooid's Up Popped The Two Lips (Pi, 2001).
Henry Threadgill Sextet
Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket
About Time
1983
David Murray
Ming
Black Saint
1980
Air
Air Lore
Arista/Nous
1979
A dominant narrative about jazz in the 1980s concerns major record labels' embrace of neo-traditionalists, a.k.a. the Young Lions, and the impact of this backing relative to the avant-garde's commercial and artistic prospects. Threadgill stands out for having spent time with Novus, a division of Arista (and he was on Columbia for three albums in the 1990s), but he also recorded with the smaller labels that signed his fellow adventurers from Chicago and then New York. Sharing a common interest in jazz and traditions, the three albums grouped together here reframe expectations about artists' relationships with the past.
Threadgill made six albums with his seven-piece band with two drummers known as either the Sextet (three albums on About Time Records) or the Sextett (three albums on Arista/Novus). Opening with just its two percussionists, Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket should resonate immediately with the Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers faithful. From there the album displays the broad musical palette for which Threadgill is known. Drawing from classical, jazz, blues, funerals, fanfares, marches, the circus, etc., its heart and genius lies in an expansive embrace of what constitutes tradition.
Released in 1980, David Murray's Ming set a high and influential bar for the next decade of jazz. The octet that recorded it included a who's who of the downtown NYC scene. Besides Murray (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet) and Threadgill (alto saxophone), the octet included Steve McCall (drums) of Air; Butch Morris (cornet), to whom he paid tribute with Old Locks and Irregular Verbs; and Olu Dara (trumpet), a member of the Sextet for two albums including Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket and father of Nas. The Stanley Crouch-penned liner notes hit on the strands of Mingus, Ellington, and Parker throughout. He even refers to Dara's playing as having the "New Orleans nobility of Armstrong."
As it draws from and respects the past, Ming brings to the fore the avant-garde impulses embedded within tradition. Air Lore accomplishes a similar feat reinterpreting rags by Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin. If the idea of an experimental, piano-less trio riffing on Morton and Joplin seems audacious, the album makes the case for jazz's origins as invigoratingly new themselves. Among the contemporaneous praise the album received was a DownBeat Critics Poll win for album of the year.
The conditions by which the individual albums on the Mosaic and Black Saint/Soul Note boxes are available digitally, discussed earlier, make Ming and Air Lore similarly easy to hear and buy. The same goes for the Sextett material on Arista/Novus. Of the three About Time Sextet records, only two have ever seen CD release, both of which were available, for a time, on iTunes. The specialty retailer Dusty Groove can be helpful for acquiring either of these and the LP-only Subject to Change. Fingers crossed that one day all three make their way to Bandcamp, like Laswell's Axiom albums.
Plus album: Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions (Douglas/Casablanca, 1977; Knit Classics, 1999). An enduring compilation of the creative voices in 1970s jazz centered in downtown NYC including Threadgill and Air, Murray, Dara and more. Originally released as five LPs, the set saw rerelease in 1999 on three CDs. It has been available on Spotify but is not currently. The Discogs site, a repository of album information and a marketplace, should list used copies for sale.
Air
Air Time
Nessa
1978
Air released nine albums in its original lineup with Threadgill, Hopkins and McCall. The group reconstituted as New Air in the early 1980s, first with Andrew Cyrille and later Pheeroan AkLaff on drums, with whom the band released two more albums. With such consistent output, all worth hearing, Air deserves recognition as one of the most significant groups of the 1970s along with, among others, Keith Jarrett's American and European quartets and the hugely successful fusion acts launched from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew band.
With the trio originally being connected to one another through the AACM, it was fitting that Chuck Nessa, a champion of the collective who recorded early, important work by the Art Ensemble of Chicago and its members, recorded this album with Air. Compared to other items in their discography, Air Time presents not just each member's instrumental prowess but their compositional gifts, too. The Hopkins composition "G.v.E." stands out for the potentially insidious bass work that threads the piece together. The track also showcases the unique Threadgill instrument the hubkaphone, a construction of hub caps, with which he recorded only once after Air, on the Zooid LP Pop Start the Tape, StoP (Hardedge, 2005).
The Nessa Records website has Air Time available for sale as CD or limited edition LP. Dusty Groove, again, can be a resource.
Plus album: An intrepid high school marching band could get a lot of people on their feet drawing from "Card Two: The Jick or Mandrill's Cosmic Ass" from Open Air Suite (Arista/Novus, 1978). I will leave it at that.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005nrn
Radio 3
BBC
Henry Threadgill’s mixtape
Jennifer Lucy Allan speaks to jazz saxophonist, flautist, bandleader and composer Henry Threadgill about his musical journey, and the mixtape he has crafted for the show.
One of only three jazz artists to have won a Pulitzer Prize, Threadgill has been called ‘perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation’ by The New York Times.
He was born in Chicago in 1944, and after dabbling in percussion and clarinet he took up the sax aged 16. Soon after, he joined Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band, which later expanded into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
For over forty years, he has been celebrated as one of the most forward-thinking composers and multi-instrumentalists in American music. Throughout his career he has led critically acclaimed ensembles, including the 1970s trio AIR (Artists In Residence) with fellow AACM members, the Henry Threadgill Sextett and the boundary-pushing Very Very Circus. His longest running band and now primary music-making vehicle is Zooid, the Pulitzer-Prize winning ensemble with which he continues his explorations into improvisations and polyphony.
For this Late Junction mixtape, Threadgill guides us through some of his musical inspirations, from Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman, to Edgard Varèse and James Joyce.
Produced by Katie Callin and Jack Howson.
A Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 3.
Last on
Music Played
-
Henry Threadgill Sextett
The Devil Is On The Loose And Dancin' With A Monkey
- Rag, Bush And All.
- Novus.
-
Henry Threadgill & ZOOid
Off The Prompt Box (Exordium)
- In For A Penny, In For A Pound.
- Pi Recordings.
-
Sonny Rollins
Alfie's Theme Differently
- Sonny Plays Alfie.
- His Master's Voice.
-
Julia Wolfe
Lick
Ensemble: Bang on a Can.- Classics.
- Cantaloupe Music .
-
Edgard Varèse
Density 21.5
Performer: Jacques Zoon.- Varèse: The Complete Works.
- Decca.
-
Howlin’ Wolf
Smokestack Lightning
- Moanin' In The Moonlight.
- Chess.
-
Alban Berg
Lulu / Act 2 - Filmmusik
Orchestra: Orchestre de l'Opéra de Paris. Conductor: Pierre Boulez.- Lulu.
- Deutsche Grammophon.
-
Muhal Richard Abrams
Charlie In The Parker
- 1-OQA+19.
- Black Saint.
-
Ornette Coleman
What Reason Could I Give
- Science Fiction.
- CBS.
-
Henry Threadgill & 14 Or 15 Kestra: Agg
Part IV
- Dirt... And More Dirt.
- Pi Recordings.
Broadcast
- Thu 6 Jun 2019 23:00BBC Radio 3
https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/henry-threadgill-continues-challenging-colleagues-listeners-and-himself/
Henry Threadgill Continues Challenging Colleagues, Listeners, and Himself
The NEA Jazz Master and Pulitzer Prize winner, has a new album with the Zooid quintet, a plethora of new multimedia projects, and two books
“I think that the greatest thing to have happened has been George Floyd.” What?
As an artist, Henry Threadgill has never shied away from provocation. The music he’s made over his 50-year career challenges listeners’ ideas of rhythm, harmony, form, and timbre. This, however, is—to say the least—an unexpected assertion. Especially from the 78-year-old multi-reedist, composer, and bandleader, whose personal manner is unfailingly gentle and cerebral (not to mention a little playful).
But after the initial shock, it’s clear that Threadgill is talking about the aftermath of Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer: protests, activism, and the United States’ public reckoning with race and inequality. That, to him, has been overwhelmingly positive.
“It’s kind of like the civil rights movement,” he says, speaking by phone from his home in New York. “All of a sudden, in the music world, all of these women composers, composers of color, and LGBTQ composers are being recognized. Look, I went last October to Alice Tully Hall for a concert of Missy Mazzoli, John Adams, and Anthony Davis. A woman, a white man, and a Black man; all three American composers. The place was packed! People went crazy—they got five curtain calls! And George Floyd, he was definitely a catalyst.”
Conscious as Threadgill is of history, as an improvising musician he thrives on being present in the moment. As it happens, this moment is a remarkable one for him. In 2021 he was honored as an NEA Jazz Master, the U.S.’s only formal national recognition for jazz musicians. He also released Poof, a 2021 album by his quintet Zooid—the band’s first since 2016’s In for a Penny, in for a Pound became the third jazz work ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Such honors are wonderful, Threadgill concedes, but he doesn’t let them go to his head. “I just put it out of my mind, you know. It never really gets in the way,” he says. “I think everybody wants to be recognized for what they do. But what really matters are the awards that are closer to the ground: from the musicians and the public. Because that’s who we play music for.”
He’s doing plenty of that in the present moment too. Currently, Threadgill is preparing new arrangements of Zooid pieces for a 2022 art exhibition in Paris; rehearsing a new composition for a pair of February multimedia performances at Brooklyn’s Roulette; writing a new commission for Zooid, two string quartets, and percussionist Ross Karre of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE); and continuing work on Passages, a long-in-the-making collaboration with sculptor Danae Mattes and choreographer Hope Mohr.
Multimedia projects are a frequent part of Threadgill’s output; the Chicago native is a pillar of that city’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which encourages musicians to take a holistic view of the arts. Yet he isn’t just contributing soundtracks to visual and performing artists’ work: Threadgill also has two books being published in 2022. One is a collection of photographs and written reflections of New York during COVID; the other, cowritten with Brent Edward Hayes, is an autobiography. Once again, Threadgill keeps a toe in the past while planting himself in the present.
Released in September, Poof marks 21 years since Zooid’s 2000 debut. The band’s instrumentation alone differentiates it from any other: flute and alto saxophone (Threadgill), acoustic guitar (Liberty Ellman), cello (Christopher Hoffman), tuba and trombone (Jose Davila), and drums (Elliot Humberto Kavee). There has been some variation across the years. Until recently, Zooid was a sextet with bass guitarist Stomu Takeishi; he was preceded by Tariq Benbrahim, an oud player. Neither version of the band brought it closer to convention.
Threadgill is very sensitive to timbre. Indeed, he has experimented with unique orchestrations since at least 1979’s X-75 (which featured four reeds, four basses, and vocals). But that’s only the most superficial of Zooid’s unique qualities.
The word zooid refers to a type of biological cell that is part of and connected with a larger grouping of cells, but can also move, function, and live independently of that grouping. So it is with the band: Threadgill supplies the basic compositions, but he asks the musicians to work both collectively and individually to help create new definition and contour for every performance. Thus, while Threadgill’s name is above the band’s, each of its players is a key presence.
Poof underlines this situation. Like predecessor In for a Penny, the album is a set of “concertos,” each of its five tracks a feature for one member of the band. “Now and Then,” for one example, spotlights Ellman. Though he interacts at points with Davila, Hoffman, and Kavee, he is unquestionably the lead voice throughout the track.
“Henry picks people to be in the group that he has faith in, and that have a unique voice that he wants to add to what he’s doing,” the guitarist says. “He’s very specific about what he wants to do with the music itself; he’s got a lot to say about describing the overall piece. But otherwise, you just have to figure out how to make it work and make music out of it—and how to make it sound like it belongs inside of his world.”
His world includes an idiosyncratic musical language based on intervals: the distance between the notes in the tempered scale. Asked to elaborate on his system, Threadgill demurs. “It’s too long and complicated,” he says. “It’s really far too much information for any kind of short conversation.” Pianist Myra Melford, who studied composition with Threadgill, takes a crack at it instead.
“Say you have three notes: C, G, E,” she explains. “The intervals in there are a perfect fifth, and a minor third, and a major third. I could transpose this figure by a major third, or by a minor third or a perfect fifth. I could play it backwards and have some of the same intervals. Things like that. You’re creating permutations from these ideas as a way of developing the material.”
If you can learn that system, adds Ellman, just about anything within it is fair game. “I remember showing up in the beginning, and kind of doubting whether I was doing what he wanted me to do,” the guitarist says. “I remember asking him, ‘Am I doing this right?’ He said, ‘Did I say you were doing something wrong?’ I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Then you’re doing it right.’”
Then there’s the rhythmic matrix. Threadgill is renowned (and highly influential) for his complex and often overlapping beat cycles that make a tune’s pulse both palpable and impossible to count.
Davila notes, “There’s so much detail to the interior of the rhythm. Elliot,” he says, addressing his drumming counterpart in the band, “you look through his music and it’s numbers. It’s just numbers. I’ll look at his stuff and I’m like, ‘Yo! What is that?’”
“That’s true!” Kavee confirms with a laugh. “I’m doing these time cycles with different bar lengths, and I deal with them as sets of numbers. Say a cycle lasts 31 beats; there are bars of four, five, seven within that cycle. I can play them as written, or I can rearrange them, as long as they add up to 31.”
Threadgill also takes a modular approach to composition. Pieces usually have multiple sections; he keeps them fresh by creating new juxtapositions for each performance. Zooid’s Paris concert, part of an exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce’s Pinault Collection, will feature pieces from their catalogue, reworked in exactly this fashion. It requires the band to know the repertoire from the inside out, which in turn requires exhaustive rehearsal.
“We rehearse so much, it’s like boot camp,” Davila says. “For Poof, we rehearsed at least once a week for the two months before the record; he already had the music written, and we got together just to touch the music and get used to working together, workshop it. And then he always does a gig right before the recording, so by the time we get to the recording session we’ve nailed it.”
Threadgill doesn’t see the big deal with all that rehearsing. “That’s what you’re supposed to do!” He chuckles. “Sun Ra’s group, Duke Ellington’s group, all these people rehearsed all the time! That’s how you get good!”
A resident of Manhattan’s East Village since the early ’70s, Threadgill has had a front-row seat for the neighborhood’s gentrification. In 2020, he had a similar view of what one might call its de-gentrification: a mass exodus, and a bizarre one.
“With COVID, you got to remember, they had to let half the Metropolitan Opera go! Half!” he says. “And there was a limited amount of people they could keep on the Broadway shows. They have condominiums and co-ops—I’m talking about the new, young people in New York—with mortgages that all of a sudden they couldn’t pay.”
Threadgill found his neighborhood crowded with things he hadn’t seen there in years: moving trucks and “For Rent” signs. As he walked the streets, he also started seeing the detritus of lives left behind.
“Why would $5,000 speakers be sitting out and nobody was taking them? Why would a Panama hat worth $400 be sitting out on the street? Well, one reason is because there were no homeless people. They put all the homeless people in a hotel so they could keep them alive!” This, he notes, was different from what he’d seen after the last mass exodus, the White Flight of the 1960s and early ’70s: “That left the homeless people behind. This wasn’t reminiscent of that; it was reminiscent of a ghost town!”
It was an overwhelming spectacle, and Threadgill responded by taking photographs of what he saw. He also started writing, both abstract poetic responses to the imagery (“a kind of automatic writing”) as well as what ultimately became a novella. Finally, he collected all of it in a book titled Migration, or the Return of the Cheap Suit. “Underneath the title it says, ‘Pictures, words, and,’” he says. “I’m not claiming to be a photographer or a writer. I’m using words and I’m using photographs.”
Yet these new pursuits weren’t enough on their own for Threadgill. His work demands a complex, layered presentation. And so he incorporated the words and images into a multimedia spectacular to take place over two nights at Roulette.
Actually, it’s two multimedia spectaculars: “One” and “The Other One.” Each night will begin with a different 18-minute film of a performance by a Threadgill ensemble, both at different galleries and with different pieces of music. (These, too, have complementary titles: “Plain as Plain in Plain Sight” and “Plain as Plain but Different.”)
Following each film will be a live performance of a new piece, “Of Valence,” by a special 12-piece ensemble: piano; violin; viola; two cellos; tuba; tenor saxophone; two alto saxophones, with one alto doubling on clarinet; two bassoons; and a percussionist working with trap drums and electronics. While the ensemble plays the piece—dedicated to drummer Milford Graves, among jazz’s many losses during the pandemic—Threadgill will sit behind a revolving set of full-body masks, offering readings from Migration as well as vocalizations both live and recorded onto tape loops.
“I’m only doing vocal work,” he says, adding with a laugh, “This will be my debut doing vocalese.”
“Everybody’s got a cellphone that they don’t pay for, and some expensive gym shoes, but they say, ‘Oh! Twenty dollars! That’s too much for a record.’”
Migration isn’t Threadgill’s only forthcoming stab at publishing. Summer 2022 will see the issue of Easily Slip into Another World, an autobiography that Threadgill assembled with the assistance of writer and scholar Brent Hayes Edwards. The project came out of another long-term one that Edwards has been working on: a history of New York’s 1970s “loft jazz” movement, in which Threadgill was a participant.
“I’ve been doing oral histories,” says Edwards, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. “Henry was one of the first musicians I interviewed. We met and talked a couple of times, and then he actually suggested—he was the first to say it: ‘Let’s do a full oral history. Not just an interview about 1976 and my sense of the downtown scene in Manhattan, but let’s sit down and do a thorough series of interviews about my life.’ And who’s going to say no to Henry Threadgill when he says that?”
That initial conversation took place around 2010. It led to multiple, hours-long conversations spanning a decade. “We really took our time going through the various stages of his life,” Edwards says. “Of course, one’s memory doesn’t work in a linear, chronological fashion, so we jumped around a little bit, but we progressed up to the present, including his development as a composer and an instrumentalist and the various groups that he’s led. He’s had a very long and varied and complex career.”
As Edwards worked to transcribe the interviews, calling Threadgill to fill in gaps and elaborate on ambiguous passages, it was again the musician who suggested a more ambitious undertaking. “Maybe we should do something formally with this,” he said. “Not just record a bunch of interviews but put it together and formalize it.” He didn’t want other voices to be woven in and out of the narrative, as in Dizzy Gillespie’s To Be or Not to Bop or Randy Weston’s African Rhythms. “I want it to be my story, in my voice.”
In a parallel to his compositional work, Easily Slip into Another World—titled after Threadgill’s 1987 album with his then Sextett—is constructed in a modular mode, with parts interchanged and reordered. “I’m trying to give it some of the formal experimentation that his music has, but not lose the idiosyncrasy and the power of his voice,” Edwards says. “He’s charismatic, funny, and a great raconteur of his own life! He’s such an incredible talker, and you don’t want to lose that.”
As for Threadgill, he appreciates the platform to say some things about not just his own life, but the music industry—and its audiences. “We have created a culture of take and don’t pay,” he says. “They got more money than we ever saw, young people do. Everybody’s got a cellphone that they don’t pay for, and some expensive gym shoes, but they say, ‘Oh! Twenty dollars! That’s too much for a record.’
“I remember, we would save our money to buy albums when I was a kid. One kid would get it and everybody would rush to their house. ‘He got Gene Ammons!’ We’d all say, ‘What?’ And go tearing down the street to their house and ring the bell. We were in grammar school. Nobody had a job, we would either save our pennies or borrow from each other. ‘Man, give me a quarter, will you? For 25 cents more I can get that record.’ It was fun!”
All this is just Threadgill’s work that’s in the can. There’s more still to come.
In June, he has an engagement at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall. Zooid, ICE percussionist Ross Karre, and two string quartets will premiere a new work—so new that Threadgill has yet to write a note. “I have to start!” he reminds himself. “I got a lot of work to do on that. I’m running behind because of this [Roulette] multimedia piece. But I’ll get it done. It’ll come together; I’m not worried about that.”
He’s also involved in a tripartite collaboration with California sculptor Danae Mattes and choreographer Hope Mohr called Passages. “Hope has been a big fan of my music and she just called me out of the blue and said she hoped we could do something together,” Threadgill recalls. “Then when I was in California, I met Danae and I told her about Hope, and the three of us got together and it was love at first sight!”
Threadgill has been working with dancers ever since his days in Chicago. He’s on new ground when he combines music and dance with Mattes’ sculptures, which feature large expanses of hand-shaped clay structures. The three found an unlikely common bond, however: improvisation.
“I do process pieces,” Mattes explains. “I create the form, which is like a huge basin, and then I create walls and structures. Then I pour liquid clay into the interior of the form, and then there’s this moment where the structure could completely dissolve or it could hold. So much water has to leave the body of the clay to accept the incoming clay, and then when that starts to happen, there’s this fine line where it’s almost gelatinous, so you have the exterior walls, let’s call them, where structures are absorbing the water, and it’s almost neither liquid nor solid form.”
“I remember asking Henry, ‘Am I doing this right?’ He said, ‘Did I say you were doing something wrong?’ I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Then you’re doing it right.’”–Liberty Ellman
That’s when the dancers come in. They will move about the clay, both following Mohr’s choreography and improvising in response to the environment and to Threadgill’s music. (The band, featuring members of Zooid and ICE, will be unseen during the performance.) “Actually they’re completely covered in clay at one point,” Mattes says. “They are very claylike themselves.” Embodying the music, they will also determine the final form of the sculpture, whether through footprints, body impressions, or air pockets.
“While they push a form away from its original place, it’s all going to be integrated into the motivations of the music. It’s an incredible thing to witness,” Mattes says.
The project has been delayed due to COVID, but Threadgill is determined to see it through. “I don’t care how long it takes, it’s gonna happen,” he says. “I’m committed to that.”
That commitment is par for the course with an artist like Threadgill, who has already created a lifetime’s worth of work that is thoughtful in its spontaneity, disciplined in its free forms. Process is a part of his art as well, as much in developing his compositions as in his improvisations. Like his statement about George Floyd—or a troupe of dancers rolling around in clay—what initially seems baldly provocative reveals itself to bear nuanced, carefully considered ideas, presented in shrewd and innovative ways.
“He’s continuing to develop his ideas and evolve all the time, and trying all these new things,” says Melford. “He’s so inspiring.”
Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 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.
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…
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(I had really wanted to ask Threadgill about Vietnam, but didn’t know how to start that conversation. Go on to part two.)
Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 2)
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.
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Listen:
Audio Player
https://ethaniverson.com/four-hits-and-the-ultramodern-blues/
Four Hits and the Ultramodern Blues
Henry Threadgill is one of our most important living players and composers. Unfortunately, critics and establishment grant-givers understand this better than most conventional jazz players or jazz students. Full context for this anomaly is given in part three.
Threadgill could have won more hearts in the general jazz populace if he had continuously performed his most charismatic tunes. Of course, this is the last thing that Threadgill wanted to do. “I figured out a long time ago that going back for me is always a mistake,” he says in part one.
Thanks to his continuous forward motion, there’s an overwhelming amount of Threadgill music to explore. Buried in the onslaught of thousands of recorded compositions there is surely something for everybody.
For me, Threadgill’s genius is most obvious in the work of his Sextett, the group of seven players Threadgill led during the 1980’s and documented on When Was That?, Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket, Subject to Change, You Know the Number, Easily Slip Into Another World, and Rag, Bush, and All.
Four Sextett pieces I can’t do without:
“Soft Suicide at the Baths” from When Was That? is a long, melancholy D major dirge that should be sung and played everywhere music is made. Threadgill is in the lead with clarinet, singing out the tune four times, gradually getting wilder and looser and then subsiding. Sometimes the trombone plays or it doesn’t, or the trumpet plays or it doesn’t, or the cello. By accompanying above and below the tune at non-intuitive moments, the sudden lack of the trombone, trumpet, or cello can have the effect of a negative image. Only Henry Threadgill orchestrates this way. Some of mystery is unquestionably inadvertent: during the loudest chorus, the band falls helplessly out of sync, still blowing strong (and wrong). He talks more about his rehearsal techniques in part one.
“Theme from Thomas Cole” from You Know the Number. “A” is homophonic and vaguely “classical” in F-sharp minor, “B” is a rare example of successful counterpoint in jazz. All the musicians play the parts cleanly, without any raggedness or smudging. But there is almost always a soloist who is blowing ragged lines against the pure texture. Threadgill’s playing in particular is quite irrational. It is impressive that a man can write such elegant music and then deface it so casually.
In the first “A” there is only cymbals. In “B” each drummer is assigned one of the lines of counterpoint. It’s not an easy tempo but it never drags: nice work from Reggie Nicholson and Pheeroan Aklaff.
The last time through “A,” Threadgill varies his pecking “dee-dee-dee-dee” figure for the first time (at 5:45). This tiny moment of entropy presages the brief horn calamity that starts the coda. A sonorous C-sharp 7 is eventually agreed on except in the bass: Fred Hopkins swoops down to pound on his low F-sharp. This moment (a prolonged V dominant over i) is found in any piece of Beethoven but hardly ever appears in jazz. The tension is gratefully released in a satisfying blare of pure minor.
“Silver and Gold Baby, Silver and Gold” from You Know the Number. Like “Soft Suicide,” “Silver and Gold” is mysterious dirge with a slithering microtonal Hopkins introduction. But here the harmonic language is more complex, almost Ellingtonian.
Diedre Murray is unnervingly scored at the top of her instrument. The weird staccato note in the melody sounds like a mistake, but it is exactly the same on the reprise. At about a minute into the track, Threadgill gets a few bars of Johnny Hodges-like statement, and you can almost hear the words, “Silver and Gold, Baby! Silver and Gold…”
The second chorus features an abstract Threadgill solo. The accompaniment of Murray and Hopkins (switching between arco and pizzicato) marks the tune’s harmony but doesn’t lock up anything like a piano player would. Threadgill’s last two impassioned notes—almost an operatic appoggiatura—ties up his solo perfectly (4:07). The third chorus reprises the tune with Murray an octave down, although the band makes it only halfway through before getting stuck on a dolorous vamp for Threadgill to preach over.
“Black Hands Bejeweled” from Easily Slip Into Another World. In part one, Threadgill talks about writing everything out for the two drummers in the Sextett. Hard to imagine, but in this piece I hear that the toms are tuned almost like a scale and that there is a “thickness” to the beat that is quite unusual.
Threadgill played with Mario Bauza, and “Black Hands” should be picked up by an ultra-savvy dance or wedding band. The composer moves through mediant movement like a standard 19th-century opera composer: The tune is in G, then B-flat, then E. I adore the tiny bass melody, “G, A, B, D,” that calls the tune out on to the floor. Tricky phrase lengths! The musicians can’t rely on just having a good ear: they need to be staring at their charts to know which version of the cheerful off-beat line to play. Nice solos from the ensemble, too.
If “Soft Suicide at the Baths” explores a certain kind of sadness to its fullest expression, “Black Hands Bejeweled” pursues a kind of perverse but genuine joy to the farthest mark.
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During the Sextett years, Threadgill was almost really famous. Some of the records came out on a major label and he was even the subject of a Dewar’s Profile. But then that group disbanded, and none of his groups since have achieved quite the same level of traction. Perhaps part of the problem was the ascent of the Young Lions. As I have written before on DTM, Henry Threadgill is the musician that could have really helped the Lions integrate the past with the present in a surreal and unforced way. But as far as I know, no post-Marsalis straight-ahead players have a relationship with Henry Threadgill. (Maybe that is just beginning to change…)
Another relevant aspect to Threadgill is how he doesn’t seem to have a clique. While he came out of the AACM, he is not tied to that aesthetic any more than anything else. He just loves to make weird and fun music that shows no regard for category.
That’s another way I wish Threadgill had been more influential: The jazz world was awfully cliquey for a time.
Threadgill is above those concerns. He never needed to be part of the jazz world, then or now. Jazz’s loss is general music’s gain, I guess. He confidently asserts that high-level classical composers know about him and his work, and I believe he is right.
I’m sure a few of those composers are working on decoding the system Threadgill is using for Zooid. The last two records on Pi, This Brings Us To Vol. 1 and 2, showcase this latest atonal language, a language that definitely gets a certain sound out of the music. I admit that I could use the occasional non-language piece to offset the encroaching web! But, again, Threadgill never looks back, and he’s hardly the first great composer to settle into a dauntingly abstract, granitic late music.
One piece really caught me:
“Polymorph” from This Brings Us To Vol. 2. The point about the web is counterpoint, and Zooid specializes in having the five members hang out in different areas, each a voice in charge of slowly mutating harmony.
The first minute is a medium burn tune, then the solos begin. I love the tuba two octaves above the bass! Threadgill’s muttering, barely played improvisation is cool, but the most intriguing solo may be by Stomu Takeishi. He and Eliot Humberto Kavee gather some steam, leading to a fierce final full band sequence that celebrates the blues.
The blues is in everything that Threadgill has ever done. That’s one reason he is so important, and also why he has been able to transcend genre. In part one, Threadgill says, “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 fine, but plenty of lesser American artists say the same type of thing with far less successful results. Threadgill’s natural blues sensibility keeps him grounded in something real. The conclusion of “Polymorph” is thrilling because the magician’s cape swirls out of the frame just enough for us to perceive that real blues in an unadulterated form.
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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.
