Summer books 1: Henry Threadgill

As a primer on how to grow up amid communities of creative musicians while asserting and developing your own individuality, Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip into Another World is exemplary. It also happens to belong, in my view, in the very highest rank of autobiographies by jazz musicians.

One of the great contemporary composers and bandleaders, Threadgill grew up amid the blues, the jazz and the black church music of Chicago in the 1950s, but with an ear open to European classical music. He’s old enough to remember the impact of the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Hearing the recordings of Charlie Parker made him want to play the saxophone.

He may be the only Chicago musician of his era to benefit from not having studied under Captain Walter Dyett, the venerated director of music at DuSable High School on the city’s South Side. Threadgill was enrolled at Englewood High, where he played in the school’s concert band but was constantly in trouble. Knowing that Dyett had taught so many of the people he really admired, such as Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin and Wilbur Ware, he applied for a transfer. Dyett looked at his disciplinary record and turned him down flat. When Englewood let him back in, he resolved to change his ways. I suppose the clearest proof of his success came in 2016, when he became the third jazz musician (after Wynton Marsalis in 1997 and Ornette Coleman in 2005) to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his composition In for a Penny, In for a Pound.

“Being rejected is the best thing that can happen to you, if you know how to think laterally,” he observes. “I ended up getting a much broader and deeper education.” The scope and volume of his work over the years is astonishing. Many musicians would have made an entire career merely out of the projects he undertook with dancers. Others would have invented the hubkaphone, as he did in 1970 after seeing a display of shiny chrome car hubcaps laid out on a stall in the famous Maxwell Street market, and settled for renown as the creator of the American version of the gamelan orchestra.

He could have pursued a life as an R&B musician, after touring with the Dells and the Chi-Lites in the ’70s, or in Latin music after working with the trumpeter Mario Bauzá in New York. He could even have stayed safely within the circle of Chicago’s AACM. Instead he formed one band after another, following the instinct to push things further. The trio Air, with the bassist Fred Hopkins and the drummer Steve McCall, was followed by many, many others, usually with unorthodox line-ups (e.g. four reeds and four double basses) and sometimes with strange names, such as X-75, Very Very Circus, Zooid and the 14 or 15 Kestra. (Oddly, his latest album, titled The Other One, is by something called the Henry Threadgill Ensemble.)

With the aid of the writer and academic Brent Hayes Edwards, Threadgill tells his story at a relaxed pace and with a depth of detail that is always compelling and never tiresome. The Vietnam section is a serious addition to the literature on that terrible war, from an unusual perspective: about drafted in 1966, thinking he’d done a smart thing by volunteering as a musician, a year later he was the Central; Highlands with his clarinet in one hand and a rifle in the other, encountering the Montagnards and experiencing the African American version of the horror and squalor familiar to some extent from Michael Herr’s Dispatches but here described with even greater clarity and revulsion. “I didn’t shed my war experiences when I got off that plane from Vietnam… Vietnam stayed with me, and it took me to some dark and twisted places even once I returned to Chicago.” But he had survived, and eventually the trauma receded.

Back in the world, his surreal encounter with Duke Ellington in 1971 — with the suggestion that he might have been momentarily lined up as the next Billy Strayhorn — is a Murakami short story in itself. His description of a gig with Cecil Taylor is both hilarious and enlightening: “I was completely befuddled. I was standing there wondering why what we were playing didn’t sound like the piece I remembered rehearsing.” Eventually he discovers, on the stand at Fat Tuesday’s, that “to play Cecil’s music, you had to get to a place where you could let the pieces reconfigure themselves as you went along. It was disconcerting in the moment, but the experience with Cecil impacted the way I came to think about my own bands. It’s important to keep your people a little bit off balance.”

The four pages on his grandfather, Luther Pierce, who often took him to the Maxwell Street market, explain something about Threadgill. Pierce worked in a steel mill but was also the family’s self-taught, trial-and-error electrician, cobbler, plumber, tailor, barber, carpenter, bedbug exterminator and medicine man. “He was resourceful — or reckless — to a degree I have never encountered in any other human being,” his grandson writes. “The most amazing thing about it was his nerve. I think he would have been capable of performing open-heart surgery on one of us had he considered it necessary. Whatever it took, he was ready to do it: nothing was out of bounds. And I suspect that a little of his spirit of radical experimentation rubbed off on me.”

His theory of intervallic harmony was developed for Zooid in the mid-’90s during a stay in Goa, reading about “maths and physics and astronomy and warfare, studying philosophical treatises, reading books about various musical systems.” It resembles George Russell’s Lydian chromatic concept or Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theory in that it clearly takes a lot of preparation for his musicians to become conversant with the new language, and — although there are several pages of explanation — it’s impervious to casual comprehension. But you’ll probably know it when you hear it.

Simultaneously, while reading Ulysses, he came up with the idea of a 1/4 metre: “James Brown used to talk about getting back to the one. He’d cajole his band, talking about it, calling for it, demanding it — stretching things out to build anticipation. That’s funk in a nutshell: that tantalising expectation of the downbeat. Here it is — and here it is again. With Zooid, the question is almost the opposite: what if you never get off the one? Everything is always the one.”

I’ve quoted at length from the book simply in order to give an idea of the richness contained within its 385 pages. Let’s finish with a piece of typical Threadgill wisdom, fashioned by the tools of thought and experience: “If you look at a book on the history of Western classical music, there’s centuries of background you can read about. Black music in America is relatively young. It’s still just the beginning. And it’s too soon to get upset and start making grand declarations about what you like and don’t like in terms of the directions the music is taking. You don’t have to like it all. What you have to recognise is that it’s not the end of the line. In another hundred years, assuming we’re still here, imagine how much more artistic information will have accumulated from Black music. And it’s not going to be the twelve-bar blues from now until the end of time.”

* Easily Slip into Another World: A Life by Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards is published by Alfred A. Knopf. The Other One by the Henry Threadgill Ensemble is out now on the Pi label.