Henry Threadgill
"I call up that the greatest thing to take happened has been George Floyd." What?
As an artist, Henry Threadgill has never shied abroad from provocation. The music he's made over his 50-yr career challenges listeners' ideas of rhythm, harmony, class, and timbre. This, however, is—to say the least—an unexpected assertion. Specially from the 78-year-old multi-reedist, composer, and bandleader, whose personal manner is unfailingly gentle and cognitive (not to mention a little playful).
Just afterwards the initial shock, information technology'due south clear that Threadgill is talking about the aftermath of Floyd's 2020 murder past a Minneapolis police officeholder: protests, activism, and the United States' public reckoning with race and inequality. That, to him, has been overwhelmingly positive.
"It'south kind of like the civil rights movement," he says, speaking past telephone from his abode in New York. "Of a sudden, in the music globe, all of these women composers, composers of color, and LGBTQ composers are being recognized. Look, I went concluding Oct 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 5 drape calls! And George Floyd, he was definitely a goad."
Witting 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 too released Poof, a 2021 album by his quintet Zooid—the band's first since 2016'southward 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, y'all know. It never really gets in the way," he says. "I recollect everybody wants to be recognized for what they practise. But what really matters are the awards that are closer to the basis: from the musicians and the public. Considering that'southward who we play music for."
He'south doing enough of that in the present moment too. Currently, Threadgill is preparing new arrangements of Zooid pieces for a 2022 fine art exhibition in Paris; rehearsing a new composition for a pair of February multimedia performances at Brooklyn's Roulette; writing a new committee for Zooid, two string quartets, and percussionist Ross Karre of the International Gimmicky Ensemble (Water ice); and standing 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'south output; the Chicago native is a pillar of that city's Association for the Advocacy of Creative Musicians (AACM), which encourages musicians to take a holistic view of the arts. All the same he isn't just contributing soundtracks to visual and performing artists' piece of work: Threadgill also has 2 books beingness published in 2022. One is a drove of photographs and written reflections of New York during COVID; the other, cowritten with Brent Edward Hayes, is an autobiography. One time 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 lone differentiates it from whatever other: flute and alto saxophone (Threadgill), audio-visual 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 past 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 to the lowest degree 1979's X-75 (which featured four reeds, iv basses, and vocals). Simply that's only the most superficial of Zooid'south 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. Then it is with the band: Threadgill supplies the bones compositions, but he asks the musicians to piece of work both collectively and individually to help create new definition and contour for every performance. Thus, while Threadgill's proper name is higher up the ring's, each of its players is a fundamental 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 i instance, spotlights Ellman. Though he interacts at points with Davila, Hoffman, and Kavee, he is unquestionably the lead phonation throughout the track.
"Henry picks people to be in the group that he has organized religion in, and that take 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 practise with the music itself; he's got a lot to say almost describing the overall piece. Just otherwise, you just have to effigy out how to make information technology work and make music out of it—and how to go far 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 calibration. Asked to elaborate on his system, Threadgill demurs. "It's besides long and complicated," he says. "It's really far too much data for any kind of short conversation." Pianist Myra Melford, who studied limerick with Threadgill, takes a crack at it instead.
"Say you have three notes: C, G, East," she explains. "The intervals in there are a perfect 5th, and a pocket-sized tertiary, and a major third. I could transpose this figure by a major third, or past a modest 3rd or a perfect 5th. I could play it backwards and take some of the aforementioned intervals. Things like that. You're creating permutations from these ideas as a way of developing the material."
If you tin acquire that organisation, adds Ellman, merely about annihilation inside 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, 'And so y'all're doing it right.'"
Then at that place's the rhythmic matrix. Threadgill is renowned (and highly influential) for his complex and frequently overlapping beat out cycles that make a tune's pulse both palpable and impossible to count.
Davila notes, "In that location's so much detail to the interior of the rhythm. Elliot," he says, addressing his drumming analogue in the band, "y'all expect through his music and it's numbers. It's but numbers. I'll look at his stuff and I'm like, 'Yo! What is that?'"
"That's truthful!" Kavee confirms with a laugh. "I'chiliad doing these fourth dimension cycles with different bar lengths, and I deal with them every bit sets of numbers. Say a cycle lasts 31 beats; there are bars of four, v, vii inside that cycle. I can play them every bit written, or I tin can rearrange them, every bit long as they add together upward to 31."
Threadgill likewise takes a modular approach to limerick. Pieces usually have multiple sections; he keeps them fresh past creating new juxtapositions for each functioning. Zooid'due south 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 ring to know the repertoire from the within out, which in turn requires exhaustive rehearsal.
"We rehearse so much, it's similar boot army 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 fourth dimension we become to the recording session we've nailed information technology."
Threadgill doesn't see the big bargain with all that rehearsing. "That's what you're supposed to do!" He chuckles. "Sun Ra's group, Duke Ellington'due south group, all these people apposite all the fourth dimension! 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 i might call its de-gentrification: a mass exodus, and a baroque one.
"With COVID, you got to remember, they had to allow half the Metropolitan Opera go! One-half!" he says. "And there was a limited amount of people they could continue on the Broadway shows. They have condominiums and co-ops—I'one thousand talking nigh the new, young people in New York—with mortgages that all of a sudden they couldn't pay."
Threadgill institute his neighborhood crowded with things he hadn't seen there in years: moving trucks and "For Rent" signs. As he walked the streets, he besides started seeing the detritus of lives left behind.
"Why would $five,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 considering there were no homeless people. They put all the homeless people in a hotel then they could keep them alive!" This, he notes, was different from what he'd seen after the last mass exodus, the White Flying of the 1960s and early '70s: "That left the homeless people behind. This wasn't reminiscent of that; information technology was reminiscent of a ghost town!"
Information technology was an overwhelming spectacle, and Threadgill responded by taking photographs of what he saw. He likewise started writing, both abstruse poetic responses to the imagery ("a kind of automated writing") equally well every bit what ultimately became a novella. Finally, he collected all of information technology in a book titled Migration, or the Return of the Cheap Suit. "Underneath the title information technology says, 'Pictures, words, and,'" he says. "I'k not claiming to be a photographer or a writer. I'm using words and I'thousand using photographs."
Notwithstanding these new pursuits weren't enough on their own for Threadgill. His work demands a complex, layered presentation. And then he incorporated the words and images into a multimedia spectacular to take place over two nights at Roulette.
Really, information technology's two multimedia spectaculars: "One" and "The Other 1." Each night volition begin with a different xviii-minute flick of a performance by a Threadgill ensemble, both at different galleries and with different pieces of music. (These, likewise, accept complementary titles: "Plain as Plain in Plain Sight" and "Plain as Plain just Different.")
Following each motion picture will be a live performance of a new piece, "Of Valence," past a special 12-slice ensemble: piano; violin; viola; 2 cellos; tuba; tenor saxophone; two alto saxophones, with 1 alto doubling on clarinet; ii bassoons; and a percussionist working with trap drums and electronics. While the ensemble plays the slice—dedicated to drummer Milford Graves, amongst jazz's many losses during the pandemic—Threadgill will sit backside a revolving set of full-trunk masks, offering readings from Migration also as vocalizations both alive and recorded onto tape loops.
"I'm merely doing vocal work," he says, adding with a laugh, "This will be my debut doing vocalese."
"Everybody'south got a cellphone that they don't pay for, and some expensive gym shoes, but they say, 'Oh! Twenty dollars! That's likewise much for a record.'"
Migration isn't Threadgill'south only forthcoming stab at publishing. Summertime 2022 will run across the issue of Easily Slip into Another World, an autobiography that Threadgill assembled with the assistance of author 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'due south 1970s "loft jazz" movement, in which Threadgill was a participant.
"I've been doing oral histories," says Edwards, a professor of English language and comparative literature at Columbia University. "Henry was one of the beginning musicians I interviewed. We met and talked a couple of times, and then he actually suggested—he was the starting time to say it: 'Let'due south do a full oral history. Not merely an interview almost 1976 and my sense of the downtown scene in Manhattan, but let'southward sit down and do a thorough series of interviews most 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. "Nosotros really took our time going through the diverse stages of his life," Edwards says. "Of course, one'southward memory doesn't piece of work in a linear, chronological style, so nosotros jumped effectually a little fleck, merely we progressed upwards to the nowadays, including his evolution as a composer and an instrumentalist and the diverse groups that he'southward led. He'due south 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 once more the musician who suggested a more ambitious undertaking. "Maybe we should do something formally with this," he said. "Not but record a bunch of interviews only put it together and formalize it." He didn't want other voices to exist woven in and out of the narrative, as in Featherbrained Gillespie'southward To Be or Not to Bop or Randy Weston'due south African Rhythms. "I want it to exist my story, in my vocalization."
In a parallel to his compositional work, Easily Slip into Another Earth—titled afterward Threadgill'due south 1987 album with his then Sextett—is synthetic in a modular mode, with parts interchanged and reordered. "I'thousand 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."
Every bit for Threadgill, he appreciates the platform to say some things about not just his own life, but the music industry—and its audiences. "We take created a culture of accept and don't pay," he says. "They got more money than nosotros ever saw, young people practise. Everybody's got a cellphone that they don't pay for, and some expensive gym shoes, simply they say, 'Oh! Twenty dollars! That's too much for a record.'
"I remember, nosotros would salvage our money to buy albums when I was a kid. Ane child would become information technology and everybody would rush to their firm. 'He got Factor Ammons!' We'd all say, 'What?' And go tearing down the street to their house and ring the bell. Nosotros were in grammar school. Nobody had a job, nosotros would either salve our pennies or infringe from each other. 'Man, give me a quarter, volition you? For 25 cents more than I can go that record.' It was fun!"
All this is but Threadgill'southward piece of work that's in the tin can. At that place's more than even so to come.
In June, he has an engagement at Detroit'south Orchestra Hall. Zooid, Water ice percussionist Ross Karre, and two cord quartets will premiere a new piece of work—so new that Threadgill has yet to write a note. "I take to start!" he reminds himself. "I got a lot of work to exercise on that. I'grand running behind because of this [Roulette] multimedia piece. Just I'll get it done. Information technology'll come together; I'm not worried about that."
He'southward 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. "So when I was in California, I met Danae and I told her most Hope, and the three of u.s. got together and it was love at outset sight!"
Threadgill has been working with dancers always since his days in Chicago. He's on new ground when he combines music and dance with Mattes' sculptures, which feature big expanses of hand-shaped clay structures. The three found an unlikely common bond, yet: improvisation.
"I exercise process pieces," Mattes explains. "I create the form, which is like a huge bowl, and so I create walls and structures. So I pour liquid clay into the interior of the form, and and then there'due south this moment where the construction could completely dissolve or it could concord. So much water has to leave the body of the clay to have the incoming clay, and then when that starts to happen, at that place'south this fine line where it's almost gelatinous, so you have the exterior walls, let'south call them, where structures are absorbing the h2o, and information technology's almost neither liquid nor solid form."
"I remember asking Henry, 'Am I doing this right?' He said, 'Did I say you lot were doing something wrong?' I said, 'No.' And he said, 'Then you're doing it correct.'"–Liberty Ellman
That's when the dancers come up in. They will movement about the clay, both following Mohr's choreography and improvising in response to the environment and to Threadgill'southward music. (The ring, featuring members of Zooid and Ice, volition be unseen during the performance.) "Actually they're completely covered in dirt at i indicate," Mattes says. "They are very claylike themselves." Embodying the music, they will also make up one's mind the final form of the sculpture, whether through footprints, torso impressions, or air pockets.
"While they button a form away from its original place, it's all going to be integrated into the motivations of the music. Information technology's an incredible thing to witness," Mattes says.
The project has been delayed due to COVID, simply Threadgill is adamant to run across information technology through. "I don't care how long it takes, information technology'south gonna happen," he says. "I'm committed to that."
That commitment is par for the form with an artist like Threadgill, who has already created a lifetime's worth of piece of work that is thoughtful in its spontaneity, disciplined in its costless forms. Process is a part of his art as well, equally much in developing his compositions as in his improvisations. Like his argument about George Floyd—or a troupe of dancers rolling around in clay—what initially seems baldly provocative reveals itself to carry 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'southward and so inspiring."
Henry Threadgill: Exist Always Out
Source: https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/henry-threadgill-continues-challenging-colleagues-listeners-and-himself/
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