Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body. —Oliver Wendell Holmes
Earlier last month, as part of SF Jazz Fest’s Leading Edge series, I had the fortune of watching Henry Threadgill’s live performance with Zooid , his current Sextet of recent years at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. Threadgill’s fame, I would reckon precedes him in a manner as only uniquely befitting as the music he arranges. I had not heard him even once but chose to attend the show based on various sources of promotional literature all alluding to his arch avant-garde improv status as being a mere distraction from the great composer he actually is. Without a clue as whether to tune my mood to a boppy, swingy or ragtime ensemble I embraced the challenge of learning on the fly that he was to be none of the above, yet all of them - one by one in sequence, sometimes overlapping, sometimes disparate - but above all like no other I had encountered. It takes a long time for a musician to sound like himself - or for a Paul Desmond to sound like a dry martini for that matter, and Threadgill, notwithstanding the wide and distinct range of sounds and underlying motifs, hosts no exception. Many weeks later as the tunes settled into a deep bass of humdrum and contentment at the back of my brain, triggered by a flurry of recollection, I dug pieces of his remaining body of work, discovering his Threadgillian music (of the Machiavillian kind of namesake) to be an entire genre, silently being defined by this one grand man of flute and alto-sax.
Comprising his Sextet, aside from his own flautist instruments were a cello and trombone to complement the drum set, bass, and the usual trumpet. With his unorthodox appointment of two drummers, it actually extended into a septet but reaffirmed the original configuration by operating as a single percussion. Elliot Humberto Cavee at the master drumset delivered a virtuoso performance, crafting a skilled mystique and self-implied constraint while constructing entire pieces starting and finishing between the cymbal and hi-hat. When did he indulge the bass, snare and tom drums he was surreptitious, intense and swift. Guitarist Liberty Ellman and Stomu Takeishi at the bass created conversational music to suit Threadgill’s themes, in as improv a manner as the master himself is regarded with. As for Threadgill, you can tell he knows how to play his mind's music just by the way he stands. Later on, Dan Bryant in his review at the Jazz Observer wrote about that October’s 80 minute performance as “an intellectual safari through dense jungles of crisscrossed sound and innovative musical textures.”
Bix Beiderbecke, the influential 1920s jazz cornetist and pianist quoted: "One thing I like about jazz, kid, is that I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?" Threadgill’s music notches the covert unpredictability of jazz to another level. He hosts a distinct predisposition for unusual instrumentation, and Zooid as it was named intentionally is all for representing what it means - a singular cell of a larger organism but one which moves independently of it. Very aptly, this describes the nature of his music, but even apart from that, Threadsgill’s music would have to be the Zooid to the larger being of avant garde jazz , more so for modern jazz in general. Pi Recordings, a New York based record label founded in 2001 with early recordings of Threadgill’s new music and dedicated to the motto of the uniquely innovative, informs of the systemic workings of Threadgill’s musical structure as: “The compositions are organized along a series of interval blocks comprised of three notes, each of which is assigned to a musician, who is free to move around within these intervals, improvising melodies and creating counterpoint to one another. The system provides the framework for open dialogue within the group while encouraging the musicians to seek new ways to improvise, away from a reliance on chord changes, scales or any of the clichés of certain “free” jazz”.
Indeed, the first 15 minutes of the performance can easily be spent getting accustomed to the mode of music rendition - solo spurts of single minded instruments, carrying their own contraptious melodies and musings , championing off in tangential directions - one beginning where another took off but with a completely detached intent, or sometimes seemingly none at all. Slowly but surely however, a coherent form emerges. An organization of harmony starts to appear binding loosely situated elements, followed by flirtatious syncopation that hastens its ascent to the coolest form of fractured funk you may have ever come across. The sounds are challenging, dissonant and choppy yet combinable to a language’s art form and communicative as very serious chatter can be sometimes in ways no other formal conversation can.
Threadgill himself has dwelled on his compositions to quote: "It’s a language; the musicians have to learn this language so that they can play this music, and we can play as a group, and accomplish a level of communication and ensemble cohesion, like a baseball team or a basketball team…. That communication is past anything you can see. You can’t see communication on a basketball team. If you can see it, it’s not a good team. It’s psychic…that’s the ensemble, an ensemble is always psychic."
All things said, Threadgill has still suffered the onslaught of many in previous years in retaliation to his primarily arcane and difficult compositions. At a 1992 jazz festival in Bombay, a man in the audience jumped up, shouting, "I did not pay to hear Bombay traffic noise!" To which Threadgill gladly affirms that it is supposed to be challenging and provocative. "My only hope is they'll have a reaction, and the reaction doesn't have to be positive," Threadgill says. "It could be negative. It's fine with me if I drive you away. That's as good as if I kept you there. If it was strong enough to run you away, then it's going to do something to you. It's going to make you think about something. It's going to make you feel something that you weren't feeling or thinking about before. And that's the whole idea."
Although sufficiently distinct, Threadgill’s musical innovation is often thought of as a precedent to the likes of Steve Coleman -also a distinct unique alto-saxo player generating his own musical rules and structures with a similar approach to modern developmental and spontaneous composition. Nonetheless Threadgill spawns a genre that could not be compared to anyone’s but his own. 'You know the number' from the Henry Threadgill Sextett rocked the ‘80s as did the exotic two tuba, two electric guitared Very Very Circus the ‘90s. His Make a Move band’s 1996 release 'Where’s a cup' and 'Everybodys mouth’s a book' (2001) transport you to the expansive sonic world of Threadgillian accents and space - a medley of mystery formulas and organized heterogeneous jam - every piece stands out , likewise every sound does.
As long as you've got your horn in your mouth, you're developing. —Zoot Sims