Threadgill, Henry

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    Henry Threadgill’s Musical Spring Is Varied and Extreme. Like He Is.

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    The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has released a memoir, “Easily Slip Into Another World,” and a new album, “The Other One.”Even as a child, Henry Threadgill liked to experiment.In this Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and saxophonist’s new memoir, “Easily Slip Into Another World,” he recounts a youthful attempt to fly from a window using a “contraption” of his own devising.He managed to escape the ensuing, predictable crash without breaking any bones, but the young Threadgill did earn a reputation for daring in his Chicago neighborhood. His mother’s response — “Henry, why do you have to be so extreme?” — became, as he writes, “the refrain of my childhood.”That same question may have occurred to a few listeners. But Threadgill, 79, has done plenty of soaring, on stages, over the years: composing music intended for social dancing, and pieces for orchestra and string quartet in which players are encouraged to improvise. He has also led some of the most widely acclaimed ensembles in the past half-century of American jazz.

    kronosquartet · Henry Threadgill – SixfivetwoAppropriately, he has an interdisciplinary spirit. In addition to his book — written with Brent Hayes Edwards and published by Knopf earlier this month — Threadgill is engaged in a flurry of additional artistic activity, including a new album, “The Other One,” out on Pi Recordings.Scored for a 12-piece ensemble and recorded live at Roulette last year, Threadgill’s chamber music on this release impressed me immediately, as I wrote when it was performed. Those concerts also featured multimedia elements, which Threadgill incorporated into a documentary film that provides a fuller look at the material. That movie, which he produced and edited with D. Carlton Bright, screened at the Museum of Modern Art in late May.Both the show and the film helped Threadgill scratch a long-held creative itch. In a recent interview, he recalled having been impressed by Alban Berg’s opera “Lulu,” which, in an unusual touch for its period, makes dramatic use of a short film at its midpoint. (“That’s one of my favorite operas,” he said. “Love ‘Lulu!’”)Threadgill said that when he produced the staged version of “The Other One,” he realized: “Now is my chance to integrate art, poetry, photographs — everything — into one piece.”This can be a lot to keep up with. But as in his childhood, Threadgill comes by his extreme approach to artistic production honestly.That much was clear earlier this spring when I met him at one of his favorite spots: a combination coffee shop and plant store in the East Village. At one point, as I was peppering him with questions about his mutability, he gestured to consumers throughout the store.Threadgill writes in his new book, “I find that the less I say about my music, the better.”Rahim Fortune for The New York Times“It has to do with cognition,” he replied. “What do we really see or observe? All these people are different sizes, but it’s the same bone structure.”Put another way, all his work is connected, even if he’s not going to get into the DNA of it all with you at the drop of a hat. As he writes in his book, “I find that the less I say about my music, the better.” (And at another point: “Music is about listening. Nothing I say can mean anything once you start to listen.”)Still, a question or two may linger. For example, doesn’t the piano music that kicks off “The Other One” flirt in a surprising way with noirish harmony? And doesn’t that represent something of a break with much of his output this century, which has been conceived outside major/minor composition?

    The Other One by Henry ThreadgillWhen I brought that up, Threadgill said, with a touch of good-natured evasion: “These tonal centers, they don’t really mean anything. I love harmony and stuff. But it’s kinda like looking at those flowers over there. You keep scanning; you never really stop.”Fair enough. This piano music — laced as it is with those recognizable tonalities — doesn’t simply resolve there. At the end of that opening section, two saxophones enter with staggered lines that hustle into a more frenetic state of mind. That’s the more recognizable, recent sound world of Threadgill’s music, driven by a quasi-serialized use of intervals, that has most often been performed by his core ensemble, Zooid.Subsequent sections in “The Other One,” like the track titled “Mvt I, Sections 6A-7A,” sound more like the Zooid recording of “In for a Penny, In for a Pound,” which won Threadgill his Pulitzer.

    The Other One by Henry ThreadgillStill, there’s a sense of that language being developed on the new album, particularly in the music for strings, which is featured during much of “Movement II.” “I’ve been able to expand the language,” Threadgill said. “I have a whole ’nother freedom now, where I’m moving.”

    The Other One by Henry ThreadgillHe then leaped from his seat, seeking a piece of paper from the shop’s employees. On the scrap, he began to diagram some of the modernist composer Edgard Varèse’s ideas about flipping musical intervals — an approach he also describes toward the end of “Easily Slip” — and showed how he was building on Varèse’s example in “The Other One.”After Threadgill filled up the paper with sequences of intervals and melodic phrases — the latter built from a pattern, like Morse Code, of long and short phrases — he moved to toss his notes in the trash.I stopped him. Preserving Threadgill’s working methods is no small matter. Throughout “Easily Slip,” there are tantalizing references to recordings of vintage orchestral performances that have yet to be made available to the public. Some important collaborations, such as concerts with Cecil Taylor, ‌have not been preserved on fixed media at all.Threadgill is thinking about fixing some of these problems. One orchestral recording in his possession may eventually see the light of day on a website, currently under construction, called Baker’s Dozen, a portal that he also plans to offer to other artists who have valuable unreleased tapes in their possession. (He mentioned the pioneering Minimalist Terry Riley as someone who might wind up providing material for the site.)“The Other One” is a majestic addition to Threadgill’s discography, but its film version deserves a wider airing, too. It captures his sense of humor, which tended to emerge during this show whenever he was discussing photographs that he took of possessions abandoned in New York City streets early in the pandemic. He is currently sending the documentary to various festivals, he said, “to see what kind of credits we can pick up.”Other projects in the works, as ever, seem bound to have an unconventional slant. Threadgill said that he has been impressed by the strides that collaborators and acquaintances like Anthony Davis and Terence Blanchard have had in mainstream opera, a world he says isn’t really for him.Instead, Threadgill is planning what he called a “corrupted oratorio,” featuring two choirs: “a traditional choir and a gospel choir,” plus piano and organ, and other instruments as it develops. “I don’t like preconceived forms, you know?” he said. “I like to create new forms.” More

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      Long Play Rises to the Top of New York Classical Music Festivals

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      This weekend of concerts, organized by Bang on a Can, has quickly but assertively ascended to the rank of destination event.Long Play has been around only since last year, but it is already the most important classical music festival in New York City.And, based on the 15 concerts I attended during its second edition, which unfolded and overlapped in spaces around Brooklyn from Friday through Sunday, this festival by the Bang on a Can collective could even stand to get a little bigger.Capacity crowds amassed at Pioneer Works to hear Meredith Monk’s ensemble collaborate with the Bang on a Can All-Stars; at Roulette to hear the Philip Glass Ensemble; at the Mark Morris Dance Center to hear a new repertory group investigate music from the early 1990s by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill. These in-demand sets couldn’t fit everyone who wanted to hear them, but with two or three other events always close by, nobody was truly left out in the cold.Before Long Play, Bang on a Can had spent three decades presenting one-day marathon concerts. But the scope of this organization’s ambition has reached a new level, and it is an untrammeled joy to experience.Meredith Monk, center, performing with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars as part of her set on Friday.Peter Serling @lotsopikturesFor example, on Saturday afternoon at Public Records, the JACK Quartet performed a version of “Prisma Interius VII” by the young composer Catherine Lamb. Previously conceived for violin and synthesizer alone, the piece was recast here for the dreamy, collaborative ability of the JACK players to hold precise microtonal harmonies. Staggered entries of droning pitches steadily created complexly sour motifs that tended to plunge downward. Where Lamb switches up her patterns with melodic ascents, the players savored the opportunity to make this often static music sing out.From there, you could race over to the big crowd forming at Roulette for Glass’s music, or stay put to enjoy Xenakis’s “Tetras” as well as “rag′sma,” by the JACK violinist Chris Otto. Although I’ve enjoyed those pieces on recordings, I felt a need to check in on the Glass Ensemble. The composer was present in the audience but no longer performs with this band, so this was an opportunity to hear the group’s veteran music director, Michael Riesman, lead younger players like the saxophonist Sam Sadigursky.When interpreting the composer’s landmark “Glassworks” album from 1982, the ensemble brought a bass-heavy thump that reflected real love for the “Walkman” mix — created in its time “for your personal cassette player,” a way for Glass to put his music in a useful dialogue with contemporary pop styles (a lesson that the Bang on a Can crew took to heart in their own careers).Conrad Tao, left, and Tyshawn Sorey playing the music of Morton Feldman at Roulette.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNext, at the BRIC House Ballroom, I heard a performance by the saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who is known for his fusion of avant-garde jazz and London club music, but here stuck to flutes, as part of a serene South Asian-influenced quartet led by the vocalist (and sometime bassist) Ganavya. Call it another sign of an aesthetically confident festival: Here, artists are not required to stay in expected lanes.Early Saturday evening, Roulette hosted the symphonic, brawling, experimental, tuneful big-band music of David Sanford; slightly overlapping, in the BRIC lobby, was the Momenta Quartet’s presentation of Alvin Singleton’s string quartets. Sanford, one of my favorite living composers, conducted his own music, in which you can hear his taste for artists as wide-ranging as Helmut Lachenmann and Charles Mingus.

      A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordI stayed for Sanford’s entire set before watching the Momenta players handle the climactic, interlocking figures from Singleton’s third quartet with an acrobatic ease; after that, they brought Romantic feeling to the fourth. This varied sequence of music by two living Black composers, ecstatic on its own terms, also put the lie to claims that you’ll sometimes hear from bigger institutions that say they are retreating from “classical music” in an effort to appeal to new audiences.The composer Henry Threadgill, second from the right, was in the audience for a program of his music.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWhen programmers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Lincoln Center say such things — fewer string quartets, like Momenta, more electric bass, as in Sanford’s band — you can understand the point, and maybe even agree with it in principle. But with the Long Play festival, Bang On a Can replies: “Why not both, and why not back to back?”Also on Saturday night, I caught a performance at Public Records by the trio Thumbscrew, with Mary Halvorson on guitar, Michael Formanek on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. In addition to Thumbscrew’s own vibrant compositions, the trio also let loose a wild take on Mingus’s “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk.”This kind of wide array was on offer all weekend. The next day, I traveled from a set of electronic music by the composer Ash Fure to a quartet performance led by the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan.

      ANIMAL_LONGPLAY from Ash Fure on Vimeo.Though visually arresting, an environment combining art installation and avant-house-music light show, Fure’s new concept — a kind of thumping club from hell — seemed starkly limited as musical matter compared with thrilling past chamber works on the album “Something to Hunt.” Half an hour later, at BAMcafé, Brennan’s quartet interpreted languid-then-convulsive pieces like “Space for Hour,” from her recent album “More Touch”; her electronically outfitted vibraphone playing belongs in a conversation with the Ash Fures of the world.

      More Touch by Patricia BrennanFrom there, I enjoyed the first 75 minutes of a radical yet sensitive take on Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories,” with Conrad Tao on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. This is originally a piano solo, yet Sorey’s skittering cymbal work was closely attuned to the score, his floor toms tuned to highlight the densest chordal moments in Tao’s interpretation of the notated material.I would happily have stayed for the final minutes but needed to rush to hear a band playing the music of Threadgill’s Very Very Circus outfit. The guitarist Brandon Ross, the tuba player Marcus Rojas and the drummer Gene Lake were all veterans of that ensemble; here, they brought works like “Little Pocket Size Demons” to life in the company of younger players, including the guitarist Miles Okazaki.From left, Brandon Ross, Marcus Rojas, Yosvany Terry, Gene Lake, José Dávila, Ron Caswell and Miles Okazaki performing Threadgill’s music at the Mark Morris Dance Center.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThreadgill isn’t likely to play the Very Very Circus music himself again, but he was in the audience on Sunday to appreciate the birth of a new repertory band in his honor; he soaked up applause from his seat, just as Glass had.The weekend was so rich, it hardly mattered that Sunday night’s planned closing set, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had to progress without the participation of the group’s sole remaining founder, the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, who tested positive for Covid-19 before the gig. Hutchings bravely stepped in on short notice, and the potent, anchoring work of the percussionist Famoudou Don Moye recalled some of his first recorded performances with the group, after he joined in the early 1970s. Hutchings didn’t try to sound like Mitchell, but instead gave listeners a taste of the brawny, insistent tenor sax sound that we hadn’t heard the previous day in his appearance with Ganavya.Such is the strength of Long Play. When a veteran headliner has to drop out, there’s still something else to savor. And when a veteran like Meredith Monk does hit the stage — as she did for Friday night’s opening concert — she is apt to bring a new vigor to vintage works like her “Tokyo Cha Cha,” which she performed, complete with choreography, for nearly 20 grooving, ethereal minutes.Pray that this festival continues, and that it expands. It should become a destination event; and if it does, it’s going to need some bigger rooms — or a bigger schedule — to serve a public that is already showing that it wants to hear all of this music. More

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      Review: Henry Threadgill’s Music From Two Perspectives

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      At Roulette, the composer and his ensemble performed a pair of multimedia sets based on a single composition.The most reductive observation I can provide about the composer and improvising multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill’s activity at Roulette this weekend is that he debuted some truly exciting new chamber music. Because he offered a lot more, too.His multimedia programming stretched across Friday and Saturday, each evening running more than two hours. While the first set was titled “One” and the second — in playfully nonspecific fashion — was called “The Other One,” both contained takes on his composition “Of Valence,” for three saxophones, two bassoons, two cellos, along with a tuba, a violin, a viola, piano and percussion.Threadgill, 78, has long deployed playfulness, ambition and unusual configurations in his work. His 1979 album “X-75 Volume 1” engaged a nonet of four basses, four winds and one vocalist.In 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for the double album “In for a Penny, in for a Pound,” which put the spotlight on Zooid — his late-career group that includes a tuba, acoustic guitar, cello, drums and Threadgill’s own flute and alto saxophone. Players in that ensemble improvise over quasi-serialized sequences of intervals (befitting a composer who in conversation is as likely to bring up Elliott Carter as Duke Ellington).

      In for a Penny, In for a Pound by Henry ThreadgillBut this weekend’s shows were something new. The tuba player Jose Davila, the cellist Christopher Hoffman and pianist David Virelles are some of Threadgill’s closest collaborators, and capable of lending marching-band panache to his most contrapuntally complex music. Joining a larger group, their sound drew directly on the Zooid language — and some of its freer applications, as heard in Ensemble Double Up — while the multimedia cast a new light on this composer’s late style.

      Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus by Henry ThreadgillThose multimedia elements included collaged photographs of street debris that Threadgill took during the mass exodus from New York at the beginning of the pandemic, projected onto a screen; live recitations of prose written to accompany the images; looping, pretaped vocal choirs, with all parts voiced by Threadgill; and video essays that cut between footage of yet more chamber music and the composer’s droll sermonizing about smartphones and distraction.Threadgill didn’t pick up an alto saxophone or a flute for live performance, though the video did feature him on bass flute. His instrumental contributions were limited to a pair of brief piano-plus-vocal moments, which were affecting in their vulnerability but a touch too tentative to come across as secure. (His pretaped choirs were more vocally assured.)Henry Threadgill conducting his ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOtherwise, he focused on conducting the 12-player ensemble. On Saturday, they sounded as though in lock-step with his every surprise rhythmic feint — producing an obliquely danceable, straightforwardly joyous Threadgillian energy.At one juncture, in the second hour of both nights, a string trio of the cellist Mariel Roberts, the violist Stephanie Griffin and the violinist Sara Caswell played staggered lines that seemed to tease traceable canonic patterning, but which remained melodically and rhythmically independent. It was tightly plotted, and resisted easy parsing; yet it didn’t sound much like Zooid’s zigzagging interplay.A new sheen came from electronically manipulated cymbal tones, courtesy of the drummer Craig Weinrib. (The transducers he used to manipulate those metallic timbres were a tribute to the late percussionist Milford Graves, to whom the music was dedicated. The performances as a whole were dedicated to the pioneering critic and musician Greg Tate, who died last year.)The ensemble at Roulette.Wolf DanielThese droning metallic timbres stood in subtle, ghostly contrast to the vibrato sound production of the string trio. Next, the tenor saxophonist Peyton Pleninger developed a solo from downward-plunging motifs in the strings. As he built up a frenetic, improvisatory energy from melodic cells, the string players began treading into extended technique, with scraping, at-the-bridge bowing and lightly plucked pizzicato.Alongside Weinrib at his drum kit, some crying alto sax figures from Noah Becker inspired beautiful portamento lines from Griffin’s viola, as well as the entry of both bassoonists playing brooding long tones at first, before turning to peppery, explosive bursts. The gradual swelling of instrumental forces continued; on Saturday, this section contained a galvanic sense of swing, even through Threadgill’s successive, minute changes in tempo.Sometimes, when you wanted the groove to keep going, a quickly arcing exclamation from the ensemble and surprise jolt in the rhythm would bring everything to a dramatic, unexpected finish — at which point Threadgill would, for example, go back to reciting sections of his prose against projections of paintings by his daughter, Nhumi Threadgill. Or he would sit near the stage while some video played, showing Henry Threadgill moving various talismans around a horizontally resting mirror. In tandem, a voice-over track delivered the composer’s observations about contemporary life.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIf Threadgill’s spoken or sung texts stopped short of narrative, they were by turns gripping or humorous as cultural criticism. One laugh-out-loud video involved him recalling both his and a barista’s annoyance at a coffee house customer who, immersed in texting, couldn’t manage to get out an order.But while the audience was invited to join the composer in grouchy irritation, this wasn’t the sole purpose of the vignette. Instead, this morsel harmonized thematically with Threadgill’s broader concerns about what we throw away too easily, including our attention. When his spoken text referred to rat populations and their proximity to outdoor diners, his pretaped vocal choir started to chant about something “crawling up my leg.” Such lighthearted moments had a way of balancing out the text’s more serious attributes — not least about the nature of inequality in New York, before and during the pandemic.While the precise placement of videos and spoken texts changed from night to night, the musical sequence was largely the same. The advantage of Saturday’s set was its increased tightness — in the ensemble as well as in the multimedia transitions. If some form of this vibrant chamber orchestra music makes it to a recording, it should be accompanied by documentation of the experience in the hall (similar to the way a studio recording of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium J” contained a video of its semistaged premiere, also at Roulette).Threadgill thanks an appreciative audience with a broad grin.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Of Valence” occasionally approached being too much to take in during a single sitting, so it was good that Roulette booked the show for two nights. This longstanding, farseeing venue in Brooklyn is the only place in the city with the chops to pull off a crisp presentation of Threadgill’s multimedia, as well as the willingness to let this composer go for it all.Henry ThreadgillPerformed on Friday and Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn. More