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Henry Threadgill performing at the Sweet Basil jazz club, New York City, 1983
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Then there was the album’s centerpiece, “My Rock,” a haunting torch song for the
Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. It opens with a gorgeous legato passage played by the
cellist Diedre Murray, accompanied by the droning plucked notes of Fred Hopkins’s
bass and the drums of Pheeroan akLaff and Reggie Nicholson. After a sudden brief
interruption by the horn section, Puthli addresses the listener: “Open your eyes…
you’re in another world/passed yourself on the way.” She evokes this unfamiliar
place, this vertiginous loss of self, with languid insinuations, then cries and shrieks as
Threadgill plays wildly expressive pirouettes on alto saxophone, full of frenzy and
yearning, and accompanied by lush, seductive harmonies. The song has the garish
expressiveness of Weimar cabaret, the pulpy eroticism of noir.
Threadgill is one of American music’s great Romantics and a lifelong seeker of the
sublime. He once called a piece “Go to Far,” as if “far” were the name of a
destination. He has resided there ever since he was a child, when he designed a
“flying machine” and jumped out the window of a second-floor apartment in Chicago.
He fell into the branches of a tree and then onto a garage. Even as he recovered from
his injuries, he wanted to try again. “Why do you have to be so extreme?” his mother
asked him. As Threadgill explains in his delightful new memoir, Easily Slip into
Another World, the entire purpose of musical composition, as he sees it, is to create a
radically new “sound world.” Since he emerged on the scene in the early 1970s,
Threadgill has switched sound worlds every decade or so, with a frequency,
willfulness, and refusal of nostalgia rivaled only by Miles Davis. In an era in which
musicians increasingly appear onstage armed with manifestos of righteous intent as
well as their instruments, he continues to insist on the liberating force of musical
abstraction, its power to free composers and audiences alike.
Threadgill’s music—particularly his work with the Sextett, arguably his greatest
ensemble—is somewhat reminiscent of Mingus’s stormy 1960s suites and of the
historically minded, ironical arrangements that Archie Shepp created for his early
Impulse albums. But Threadgill has drifted much further from jazz, a term he avoids
and which has become less and less applicable to his art. Its range of references is
breathtaking, encompassing any “ingredient” that serves his purposes. Yet for all his
allusions to historical styles from New Orleans rags to calypso and tango, Threadgill’s
music does not traffic in pastiche or postmodern irony. On the contrary, it has a
ferocious sense of conviction—even, or rather especially, when he’s at his most
irreverent. What unites his various sound worlds is his imagination, by turns
whimsical and incendiary, raw and sophisticated, exuberant and death-haunted.
This is art music that celebrates the ritual power of social music, its relationship to
dance, parades, religious observance, mourning, and other forms of collective
pageantry.
It’s also a showcase for what has strangely become the most overlooked of
Threadgill’s gifts: his extraordinary sound and phrasing on saxophone, clarinet, and
flute, which are as distinctive as his writing. Threadgill has an ability to conjure an
intense, often agitated sense of urgency. He never allows you to rest, because he never
settles into a groove or plays a familiar lick. His sound is a permanent antidote to
complacency.
To write this book, Threadgill turned to Brent Hayes Edwards, a professor of
literature at Columbia University and a gifted scholar of jazz and black aesthetics.
Their collaboration is a Threadgillian study in contrasts: a working-class striver
turned bohemian who lives between the East Village and Goa, Threadgill sees himself
as a man of the streets and, unlike many of his peers, has never taught at a university;
Edwards, two decades his junior, is the son of a federal circuit court judge, born into
the black professional elite and fluent in the contemporary academy’s most rarefied
idioms. The voice, as in most coauthored memoirs, is a composite. Threadgill’s slight
drawl—a southern residue that has lingered in the speech of many black Chicagoans
of his generation—is missing here, and he speaks with greater formality than in
interviews. But his outlook comes through with irresistible pungency, and Edwards
has captured his vision and given form to his artistic path with the elegance, rigor, and
meticulousness that characterize his own scholarship.
Of Threadgill’s intimate life—his relationships with the mothers of his three children,
his offstage dealings with other musicians—we learn very little. He often seems more
determined to refute misconceptions about his art than to shed light on it. Threadgill,
who once dreamed of forming a funeral band, insists that he’s never written a dirge,
even though some of his greatest pieces are slow-moving, solemn tunes whose titles
invoke death, such as “Cremation” and “Soft Suicide at the Baths.” As for the
inspiration behind his famously wacky titles—“Salute to the Enema Bandit,” “Paper
Toilet,” “The Devil Is on the Loose and Dancin’ with a Monkey,” “Jenkins Boys,
Again, Wish Somebody Die, It’s Hot”—he coyly asserts that they’re “another source
of stimulation,” not secrets to be deciphered, and that “ultimately the listener gets
more when the stimulation is not explained.”
That may be true, but it’s fascinating to learn that the last title is an oblique allusion
to stories he heard as a child: in the cotton fields, he was told, plantation workers were
given a day off only when a white person died; his grandmother always said “That’s
the Jenkins boys” whenever it was hot outside.
Threadgill’s caginess, his refusal to provide “a listening guide” or satisfy the reader’s
“desire for transparency,” is understandable, if hardly promising for a memoir. Lurid
tales of the “jazz life” have a long history, often pandering to the voyeurism of white
audiences. As a black artist, Threadgill knows that his memoir will likely be shelved
alongside books like Miles, Davis’s notoriously profane autobiography, written with
the poet Quincy Troupe, in which heroin addiction, hustling, and sexual cruelty at
times eclipse the subject of music and creativity, rather than alongside the memoirs of
classical composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass, which would clearly be his
preference. But Threadgill’s resistance to the confessional may have other, more
personal origins. “I don’t go back,” he remarked in an interview at the Library of
Congress. “Going back has been destructive in my life.” Nonetheless, Easily Slip into
Another World gives us a spirited, often picaresque account of Threadgill’s life as a
composer and the forces that shaped his imagination.
It opens with a tribute to his great-grandfather Peyton Robinson. Born in the 1870s,
during Reconstruction, Robinson acquired some of the best land in Alabama,
defended it with a gun on his hip, and called no white man sir. According to family
lore, Robinson and his brother left for Chicago after killing a group of whites who’d
tried to cheat them. “My great-grandfather simply refused to play by the rules. ‘Fuck
the rules’—that was his attitude: ‘I make the rules.’” Whenever Robinson came over
to visit his great-grandson, looking “like some apparition from another century” in his
three-piece wool suit and top hat, the young Threadgill “loved to think that I came
from such a singularity—from an ancestor who seemed to move through the world
entirely on his own terms.” There’s a lot of Peyton Robinson in his great-grandson.
Threadgill was born in 1944 on the South Side of Chicago to a mother who worked as
an accountant at a local bank and a father who ran a gambling house. His parents
separated when he was seven, and a few years later he moved with his mother to a
mixed neighborhood in Englewood, between 59th and 60th Streets. They were only
the second black family on the block, and he soon learned never to cross 59th Street.
“It was all white on the other side of that street,” and when he and a friend wandered
into a wood factory to gather scraps to make toys, they were chased by a mob of
whites who “came out like hunting dogs.” Threadgill also recalls being shot at by the
police when, as an adolescent, he broke into someone’s home with a group of friends.
He realized early on that he would have “experiences a white kid would never have.”
Threadgill, however, wasn’t there for the launch, since, under the influence of a pious
woman he was seeing at the time, he’d gone on the road with a revivalist band led by
the traveling preacher Horace Sheppard. (He also traded in his tenor sax for an alto,
since it sounded closer to the human voice.) Threadgill made good use of his time in
church. His work with Sheppard, as well as in blues, mariachi, and polka bands,
forced him to develop the ability to move an audience and imbued his sound with its
sinewy physicality, its ecstatic, vocalized fervor.
His belief in keeping musical doors open was not shared by the US Army. In the
summer of 1967 Threadgill was asked to create a medley of patriotic anthems for a
gathering of military, political, and religious leaders. He wrote a series of
arrangements with the “angularity and dissonance” that he loved in the music of
Stravinsky and Thelonious Monk. Less than eight bars into the performance, the
Catholic archbishop cried out, “Blasphemy!” For this “musical peccadillo,”
Threadgill was sent to Vietnam and reassigned to the 4th Infantry Division in Pleiku.
By September, he was playing for platoons, with his rifle close at hand; at one
concert, the band was ambushed by North Vietnamese fighters. During the Tet
Offensive, a jeep in which he was traveling tumbled into a ravine and flipped over; his
herniated discs left him with pain that “still takes me back to Pleiku.”
The war “reshaped my insides,” Threadgill writes, and left him “fucked up.”
(“Demons from the war,” he admits, cost him his first marriage, to Cathy Slade, the
mother of his son, Melin.) Yet it had some unexpected benefits. Among the
indigenous people known as Montagnards, he discovered a community that had
achieved “what seemed clearly to me to be a higher level of ethical achievement” than
the church people he’d known back home. The battlefield also temporarily “solved
the age-old American race problem.” Touring South Vietnam with a mixed-race band,
Threadgill experienced a rare kind of “matter-of-fact cross-racial solidarity.” Once he
returned, it vanished again, like a mirage in the jungle.
Vietnam forever altered his relationship to sound. “One of the main ways that war
transforms you has to do with your sense of hearing,” he writes. It’s not just the
“sounds of helicopters and distant howitzer fire,” but “the voices of the Montagnards,
or the unfamiliar pattern of rain on a triple-canopy jungle.” Unlike the late violinist
Billy Bang, who made a pair of moving albums about his experiences in the war
(performed by fellow veterans including Threadgill), he has never written a piece
about Vietnam. But his music has always been marked by a bewildering simultaneity
of expression, unexpected eruptions and collisions, moods that shift between wariness
and aggression, and forms of counterpoint that demand intensified focus from the
listener. Threadgill says that he’s found inspiration in studies of trench warfare that
focus on “multiple levels of engagement: some things going on above ground and
other things happening in tunnels. As I saw firsthand in Vietnam, tunnels can be
hidden mazes.” He designed the hubkaphone to recreate the sound of the gongs he
heard in Montagnard villages. Motifs evocative of military music, often distorted by
dissonance, recur in his work. To lift a phrase from the philosopher Louis Althusser,
the war is an “absent cause” of Threadgill’s sound—present not as content, but as
form.
By then Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman had established the Art Ensemble of
Chicago with Malachi Favors and the trumpeter Lester Bowie; Anthony Braxton had
recorded his epochal solo saxophone album, For Alto; and the trumpeter Wadada Leo
Smith was developing a new approach to improvisation, based on equal units of sound
and silence.
(Threadgill remembers stopping by Smith’s apartment and finding him poring over
Anton Webern scores.) The musicians of the AACM sought not merely to create new
music but to recast the terms in which it was discussed. “Green as most of us were,”
Threadgill recalls, “we weren’t intimidated at the idea of having to become the
historians and explicators of our own creativity.”
In 1972 he created one of the AACM’s most successful bands, Air (originally called
Reflections), with the bassist Fred Hopkins and the drummer Steve McCall. Hopkins,
who’d taken up his instrument after seeing Pablo Casals on television, had the deep,
reverberating sound of Chicago bass players like Wilbur Ware and an exceptional
bowing technique. McCall, a decade older than Threadgill, had played with Dexter
Gordon and Marion Brown and could alternate fluidly between dexterous bop
drumming and avant-garde percussion.
Yet Air ultimately made a name for itself because of its ingenious glosses on popular
forms. Its signature album, Air Lore (1979), featured Threadgill’s arrangements of
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton, originally written for a theatrical production in
Chicago. Witty, soulful, and propelled by McCall’s crisp, shimmering drumming,
Air’s covers were joyous exercises in reimagination, discovering tunes within tunes,
shifting tempo in the manner of a parade band. Air reconnected the black avant-garde
to a vanished world of jazz before bebop, providing—as Threadgill and McCall wrote
in an early program note—a “broad musical experience which is historical, and yet
contemporary in nature.”
Air won a following in the loft scene in New York City, where Threadgill and his
bandmates relocated in the mid-1970s. But by the end of the decade he craved “other
colors,” which required a larger ensemble with “a thickness, a density in the sound.”
This search eventually led to the creation of his Sextett, the group he led throughout
the 1980s. The Sextett’s seven members were organized into four sections, as in a
symphony orchestra: brass (trumpet and trombone), strings (bass and cello), winds
(saxophones, flute, clarinet, all played by Threadgill), and percussion (two drummers,
one playing right on the beat, the other just behind, so that the beat would feel “as big
as all outdoors”).
The sumptuousness of its sound owed much to the cellist Diedre Murray, whose
playing led Threadgill to “fall in love with the possibilities of the instrument.” Murray
and Hopkins gave the Sextett its deep bottom, its affinity with early-twentieth-century
black string bands, as well as a searing, occasionally bombastic romanticism. And on
albums like When Was That? (1982), Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket (1983),
and Rag, Bush and All (1989), Threadgill composed some of the most memorable
pieces of his career: the ruminative adagios often described as dirges, fanfares and
marches, alluringly dissonant abstractions, bustling calypsos inspired by his travels in
the Caribbean, and humorous reworkings of Dixieland jazz and swing.
Threadgill’s next group, Very Very Circus, formed in the early 1990s, was an even
more radical departure from the tradition.
Instead of a bass, he used two tubas, each paired with electric guitar, “running along
parallel to one another but doing completely different things.” The wind instruments
—Threadgill’s alto saxophone and flute; trombone or French horn—could then
“either move on both rails at the same time or else bounce from rail to rail.”
On albums like Too Much Sugar for a Dime (1993), the layering of sounds—the
electric guitars of Brandon Ross and Masujaa, the tubas of Marcus Rojas and Edwin
Rodriguez, and Gene Lake’s drums—is dense, churning, and hypnotic, inspiring some
of Threadgill’s most exciting improvisations. In “Little Pocket Size Demons,” the
opening track, his playing on alto sax has a kind of mirthful fury, as if he were
pushing his way through enemy lines. The aim of Very Very Circus, he says, was to
evoke the feeling of “dancing on a live wire,” and as I recall from its concerts in New
York at the time, you could almost taste the music’s audacity, its invigorating sense of
danger. It was sometimes so dense that you couldn’t take it all in—at least not
simultaneously. But that “sheer too-muchness” was precisely the effect Threadgill
was after. “As any kid can tell you,” he writes, “the thrill of the circus has everything
to do with how much is going on: lions and tigers and elephants and bears and clowns
and acrobats and the flying trapeze.”
Threadgill continued his exploration of electric textures in his next band, the quintet
Make a Move, with Brandon Ross, Stomu Takeishi on five-string fretless bass, J.T.
Lewis on drums, and Tony Cedras on accordion and harmonium, only now it was the
carnival, not the circus, that the music conjured, with an inviting and somewhat
ominous sensuality. In the transfixing tango “100 Year Old Game,” on the
album Where’s Your Cup? (1997), one of his strongest of the decade, he and Cedras
echo each other’s lines with a fluency and complicity that rivals Threadgill’s work
with Murray. But Threadgill soon came to see his new group as “the last step” in his
search for a music “beyond the confines of diatonic harmony…. I knew that ship was
going to sink. So I was looking for a life vest…. I finally found it in Goa.”
He’d been drawn to the former Portuguese colony ever since his first visit in the early
1990s, when an old woman came up to him and said, in English, “You belong here,”
before disappearing into the bushes. Not long after, at a café in Bombay, he met his
wife Senti, a singer from Nagaland, a small state in northeast India on the border with
Myanmar. They bought a mansion in Goa, where they raised their daughter,
Nhumengula, born in 1996.
In his first few years in Goa, Threadgill read books on astronomy, composed, and
savored the wonderful improbability of his new life, which made him ever more
aware of “how parochial we are” in the West—not least in musical conservatories. He
composed arresting pieces for instrumentalists with whom he didn’t perform and
began to experiment with non-Western instruments, including the pipa, a four-string
plucked lute from China, and the oud. He also returned to his study of the music of
Varèse, under whose influence he began to develop a system of musical organization
based on “intervallic relationships”—sets of intervals derived from three-note chords
—rather than on tonal centers. “I didn’t invent anything,” he marvels.
While the themes in his music for Zooid share the astringency of his writing for the
Sextett and Very Very Circus, they’re considerably stripped down. The pieces on In
for a Penny, In for a Pound, which earned Threadgill the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for
Music, are concertos in multiple sections, rather than traditional song structures.
Rhythmically intricate grooves go by like waves, interspersed with discrete events
involving different permutations of the various instruments (cello, guitar, and tuba;
saxophone and drums; drums and cello): “zones of intensities,” in Varèse’s words.
The contrapuntal textures that Threadgill creates here are often ravishing, and there’s
a remarkable sense of plenitude, even in the music’s sparest moments (for example,
Kavee’s unaccompanied, richly atmospheric solos), because we sense the presence
behind it of a powerful orchestral imagination.
As singular as Zooid’s music is, it contains traces of Threadgill’s earlier bands, such
as the use of tuba (Very Very Circus) and cello (the Sextett). The more skeletal pieces
hark back to Air works like “Subtraction,” with its focus on space and timbre. What
you won’t hear in Zooid is the kind of “bottom” that Fred Hopkins’s bass provided,
ensuring a feeling of “the one,” the downbeat. Threadgill says that he’s no longer
interested in “that tantalizing expectation of the downbeat” but rather in what happens
“if you never get off the one.” The result is an even more radical declaration of
independence from traditional jazz—a more thoroughgoing subtraction—than
“Subtraction” achieved. Fortunately the music is saved from academicism thanks to
the bluesy, expressively hoarse tones of Threadgill’s alto sax, especially on slower
pieces that recall his adagio works for the Sextett.
I confess to being ambivalent about his recent orchestral compositions. The Other
One has recognizably Threadgillian elements—taut, off-kilter arrangements for horns
and strings; asymmetrical grooves and hockets; the syncopated murmur of José
Davila’s tuba—and there is, as ever, a formidable sense of confidence and mastery on
display. But the music suffers somewhat because Threadgill isn’t there to give it
focus, and as fine as the soloists are, it leaves the impression of a looser, semi-
improvised version of the work of mid-century atonal composers like Ralph Shapey,
who conducted the Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players when Threadgill
attended their concerts as a young man. The song titles—“Sections 1–2,”
“Section 12B (Violin Interlude),” etc.—have none of Threadgill’s trademark wit, and
the music doesn’t initially appear to have much more.
I had always thought that Threadgill’s achievement as a composer lay in his orchestral
flair, his storytelling gifts, his reinventions of vernacular forms, and his majestically
gritty saxophone playing. But in his memoir, he takes a curiously more academic
view, characterizing his career as a search for new systems of musical organization,
culminating in his intervallic breakthrough. Composers often understand their
intentions very differently from their admirers, and Threadgill is hardly the only
composer to have tired of the major-minor scale or to seek to ground his music in an
orderly and rationalized system: consider Schoenberg or
Threadgill’s AACM colleague Anthony Braxton. Through the intervallic method, he
has created a unique form of process music whose form is its content, based on
interlocking grooves and a resistance to harmonic resolution. It’s a sturdy foundation
for a new school of improvisation, and to Threadgill, who’s understandably proud of
his creation, “this sound world still feels boundless: an open area of possibilities to
explore.”
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