Henry Threadgill Explores the Contrary By Makin’ a Move and Carrying the Day in Chapter 6.1 of THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES
The Landfill Chronicles — Conversation on Music Elevated to a State of Art (the conversation memoirs by Dan Ouellette published at Medium)
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Landfill Chapter 6, Part 1 of 4 Parts
Henry Threadgill Explores the Contrary by Makin’ a Move and Carrying the Day
PRELUDE
In 1997, I spent part of a day hanging out in Oakland with Henry Threadgill who was in town for a five-night engagement with his Make a Move band at Yoshi’s jazz club at Jack London Square. It was a memorable connect for me.
He was a contrary jazz hero then who went on to push the musical boundaries, garnering the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his album In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Four years later he was recognized as being an NEA Jazz Master. Impressive indeed.
His contrary ways befuddled major record companies, but since 2001 Henry has found his true home at Pi Recordings which embraces the brilliance of his extraordinary music.
Twenty-five years after our Oakland convergence, I return to the scene with the iconoclast — my reflections and conversations from Henry’s Makin’ a Move period.
Chapter 6 of The Landfill Chronicles arrives in four parts.
THE BUG GROOVE
In 1997, sitting in the passenger seat of my beat-up 1974 Volkswagen bug, Henry Threadgill reminisces about a 1990 recording session he had almost forgotten about.
“You kidding, it’s out?” Henry exclaims when informed that the Flutistry CD by Flute Force Four — the flute quartet he co-piloted with James Newton — has finally been released on Italy-based Black Saint Records. “That’s great news. I’d love to see what it looks like. That’s a lot of hard music, and we had to play it live first at the Verona festival in Italy. Now, when was that, 1990?”
Henry explains that the midnight-to-dawn rehearsal in the basement of an Italian hotel posed a formidable challenge for the new quartet member Felecia Magdaluyo who was brought in at the eleventh hour for the date. Yet, the foursome’s enthusiasm buoys for the final takes.
While we’re navigating through the maze of one-way and no-left-turn streets in downtown Oakland en route to a catfish lunch at a waterfront restaurant, I ask the 53-year-old iconoclastic composer/bandleader if the seven-year wait for the release of the disc has been frustrating. “No, you just got to let those things go unless you want to punish yourself,” he replies with the poise that only a veteran jazz musician who has been raked over the coals by recording industry bigwigs could possess. “It doesn’t usually take this long, but you have to understand that these kinds of things are going to happen. You’re not in control.”
No kidding. The maverick maestro recently received the news that Sony/Columbia pulled the plug on his contract after three brilliant, but slow-selling CDs — Carry the Day, Makin’ a Move and Where’s Your Cup?
In 1994 when the major label signed Henry, prominent trade magazines such as DownBeat, Jazz and Musician covered the event as a coup for adventurous, free-thinking and free-wheeling music. Steve Berkowitz, at the time Columbia’s A&R rep, was quoted as saying that the label was sincere in wanting Henry to be Henry.
In all the feature articles on the singular Henry Threadgill, writers described him as the champion of the unorthodox, the quintessential outsider, outspoken nonconformist, a virtual genre unto himself and one of America’s best-kept cultural secrets. Most celebrated the signing yet also wondered how long the experiment would last. As it turned out, not long.
“People in high places at the label should have spoken up,” Henry says, with an angry razor edge in his voice. “They knew who I was. This was no fishing expedition. They knew they couldn’t suggest to me that I do a Gershwin album. The label got a whole lot of attention for signing me, but I believe they had already made a decision that the deal was dead. When I signed, the divorce papers were already being drafted.”
Henry laughs, then growls, “If you’ve been around as long as I have, you know not to get your expectations up too high,” he says. “They cut heads off at record companies, you know, from presidents all the way down the ladder to secretaries and janitors. When I discovered that, I said, wait a minute, Henry, don’t be tripping — walking in the door under the title of artist doesn’t protect you.” He pauses, then grins. “It’s a funny business.”
DIET OF DIVERSE MUSIC
Henry knows this well. He’s been a lifer in striving for musical originality and artistic integrity — two callings more often than not at odds with the commercial goals of the record industry.
Born in Chicago in 1944, Henry grew up with a diet of diverse music, including Mexican, gospel, European folk and classical. He was playing boogie-woogie piano by the age of six and took up the saxophone in high school. One of his first professional jobs as a musician was playing gospel with traveling church evangelists. He gigged in blues groups, marching bands and ethnic music ensembles playing polka and mariachi. He studied clarinet, piano and composition at the American Conservatory of Music and was a key figure in the Chicago-based AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Music) movement of radical jazz in the ‘60s.
In 1972, Henry founded the trad-to-free trio AIR with bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall (the group was originally formed to bring new life to a batch of Scott Joplin tunes) and re-envisioned the group as New Air in 1982 with Heroin Ayliff and later Andrew Cyrille doing the drumming chores.
Also during the ’80s, Threadgill began to explore more unusual ensemble configurations to give voice to his increasingly complex and wonderfully strange compositions. He formed X-75, which included four bassists, four reeds and a vocalist, and his Sextett (actually a septet) with two drummers and cellist Diedre Murray.
Then came his Very Very Circus ensemble full of tubas, trombones and guitars.
Most recently, Henry reveals his Make a Move band. This latest group to be documented on disc may be relatively tame instrument-wise (the leader on alto saxophone and flute, Brandon Ross on electric and classical guitars, Tony Cedars on accordion and harmonium, Stoma Takeishi on 5-string fretless bass and J. T. Lewis on drums). But the Make a Move project displays plenty of Henry’s penchant for adventure from a compositional point of view. In other words, don’t expect to hear any of the seven classical, world and folk-infused tracks from Where’s Your Cup?, Henry’s 1996 Columbia swan song, on a mainstream jazz radio station anytime soon.
On the disc, Henry shatters the calm and jars the status quo. Attentive listening is required as he and his crew avoid predictable head-solo-head jazz formulas in favor of charting musical journeys that are at once brimming with joy and eerily unsettling.
There are accordion drones, whimsical helixing saxophone and guitar lines, tumultuous drumming, anguished sax screams, lyrical tango-meets-reggae dances. Tempos accelerate, meters shift, timbres bloom and dissolve. While Henry eschews the spotlight in lieu of letting his simpatico band interpret his compositions, the most gripping moment on the CD arrives when he leads his cohorts out onto the serrated edge with lacerating alto saxophone exhalations.
Henry’s music is compelling, even when he and his collaborators are playing instruments as seemingly unthreatening as flutes. Case in point: the abovementioned Flutistry. The triumphant CD is a feast of flutes, ranging from piccolo flute to bass flute, all of which color the magical soundscapes. The recording features two of Henry’s captivatingly lyrical, jarringly harsh, playfully sweeping and ebulliently beautiful compositions. The flute quartet on “T.B.A.” sounds like a flock of birds twittering, chirping and warbling, and his “Leap Nosebor” (Paul Robeson spelled backwards), inspired by watching parakeets in a zoo, also takes wing with flute soars and swoops.
SONG AS THE UNDERLYING GRAVITY
In the liner notes of his album, Song Out of My Tree, recorded in 1993 and released the following year by Black Saint, Henry set out to explain his latest work of art. He opened with a rambling discourse, then finally crystallized his thoughts in what proved to be a poignant statement on the state of jazz: “The underlying gravity is about Song. Very very strong sense of Song. Not song as an excuse to do something else or a pale platform for dead technique…This recording is not an attempt to be retro or stylistic in any certain way.”
Henry’s manifesto? Move over young lions intent on preserving a jazz canon and make way for a composer revitalizing jazz with a spirit of border-busting adventurism.
That CD is a forward-looking, freedom-loving collection of deeply personal, vibrantly spiritual songs. Only two of the five pieces include a drummer while Henry, content to don the composer’s hat and set aside his sax momentarily, bows out of two of the numbers. He experiments with unusual sonic textures, composing for alto and soprano guitars in two pieces (one of which features Ted Daniels on eerie-sounding hunting horns) and on another brilliantly meshing the sounds of two cellos, accordion and harpsichord together.
The tunes ebb and flow with unfolding melodies as well as stretches of quiet instrumentation followed by torrential downpours of notes. “Gateway” undergoes melodic twists and turns and at one juncture erupts into a charged free-for-all where all the instruments speak their languages simultaneously. The bird-like flittering and nibbling by the three guitarists on “Over the River Club” leads to a frenzy of dissonant piano jabs by Myra Milford. The superb “Grief” is a swirling, scratching, wailing descent into the depths of anguish. Only the title tune, with its soulful organ flourishes by Amina Claudine Myers, bluesy guitar lines by Ed Cherry and a ragged alto solo of ecstasy by Henry, consistently maintains a swing and groove. Otherwise, it’s brave new territory with surprises around every corner.
“When I write music, I want something powerful to come at people,” says Henry, sipping a glass of chardonnay and waiting for his catfish dinner plate to arrive. “And it don’t have to fit no categories. How can you deal with a broad range of thoughts and emotions if you stay locked into one road? I open up my music completely. Keep it wide open. I like the idea of engaging the listener by making music that’s not passive. I like playing for people who have a broad diet. Otherwise, it’s like someone who only eats hot dogs. I think it’s ridiculous that people discriminate against a broad spectrum of music, stuff like opera, punk rock, country.”
END
Upcoming next week: Chapter 6, Part 2
Henry takes the road with Very Very Circus
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