Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Pt. 12: Henry Threadgill's Quest
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To say that the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and woodwinds player Henry Threadgill's engagement with music is omnivorous does an injustice to his curiosity and openness to every kind of musical listening and performance. Reading his terrific new-ish memoir Easily Slip Into Another World, co-written in elegant prose with Brent Hayes Edwards of Yale, one is struck how his sense of music as a quest pervades every page. In fact, the way the title of the book shows up in the text gives us a clue about the nature of Threadgill's relationship to music. In one early section he talks about how much he loved the juke box at his father's bar (was it a bar, I can't quite recall?). As one song would go to the next, often across styles and moods, the young Henry marveled at how easy it was "to slip into another world." The songs were more than songs to him, they were places to go to, emotionally and aesthetically. Music was of existential importance to him.
Said another way, what I really took away from the early pages of the book was the power and beauty of love as a motivating force. It's love that carries you through a lifetime's commitment to an art form, or anything, really. I found the youthful Threadgill's love for music and especially the musicians who create it to be quite profound, even moving me to tears at one point. I guess it got at the essence of what I think it means to be truly alive. In the Southside Chicago community where he grew up, he found teachers and mentors, as well as jazz jam sessions that he attended whenever he could, including when he was underage.
The young Threadgill's main jazz hero was Sonny Rollins; indeed he loved him so much he stenciled Sonny's name on the outside of his tenor saxophone case. But the nature of his adoration is telling, and reveals a lot about how the matter of influence manifests in Threadgill's life in music. You see, Threadgill worshiped Rollins, but he didn't want to sound anything like him. In fact, throughout his whole career Threadgill resolved to not be explicitly influenced by anyone, which is why, for example, he never transcribed the solos of favorite performers. This is a curious case, as most young musicians seek to emulate the sound of their idols. Thus a million Bird imitators in the 50s. What then was the impetus for the young Henry's worship? I think it was Rollins' persona as the artists' artist. Maybe this was after Sonny famously retreated from performing life and would practice every night on the Brooklyn Bridge, in '59 and '60. Jazz as heroic, solitary quest. Jazz as a vision quest. Or, more simply, jazz and the jazz life as its own quest. Later, in the 70s, when Threadgill formed his trio, Air, with drummer Steve McCall and bassist Fred Hopkins, he was searching for a way to conceptualize the trio in such a way that it would sound full even without a chordal instrument like the piano, he drew inspiration from Rollins' great pianoless trio of the late 50s. But only in the sense of Rollins' aesthetic commitment. He knew he was not a tenor man in the heroic mode like Sonny; it wasn't case where he was going to be out front blowing with enough force to level any obstacles in his path. No his way would be to make orchestral complexities be implicit in his arrangements.
One thing stenciling Sonny Rollins on his horn case did was to make known that he was into jazz and serious about it. Older musicians would see him with his calling-card case, and say, hey kid, why don't come down to our jam session? But, as I mentioned in the lede, he played so much more than jazz. He played in parade bands and made good money that way (and later incorporated the tuba into his core instrumentation). He played in polka bands for all the Chicago Poles. He played in R & B and soul bands and apparently could bring the house down. He played a lot of blues. I think he was in the house band at a club where all the heavyweights played. Muddy Waters, you name it. In the most compelling case, he even went on the road with a famous sanctified, Holy Roller preacher, people rolling in the aisles and speaking in tongues and having the devil cast out, like that. His jazz peers were mystified, but he loved it. It's not clear in what way he "believed," but the point was the music. He also was an arranger for military bands. Later, when Threadgill went on to become one of our greatest composers, all of these sounds were in there, often in ways known only to him. The sounds are inside the DNA of his music, but we only perceive the outward organism.
But back to jazz. It must be said that Threadgill matured in one of the great jazz communities ever. Take a look at who studied with Captain William Dyett at the local DuSable High School. Just a few names include Nat King Cole, Johnny Griffin, Von Freeman, Gene Ammons, Dinah Washington. Then there are those from DuSable who went on to play with Sun Ra, such as John Gilmore and Pat Patrick, as well as many who would become part of the collective that had a huge influence over the course of jazz over the last 60 years, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), such as Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, and the aforementioned Fred Hopkins. Perhaps the most important figure for Threadgill in the AACM was the cofounder of the collective, the pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams. He set a standard for seriousness and ambition for the music that led everybody forward. There intent was to create music at the very highest levels, beyond category. And they succeeded in defining what jazz would become mostly because they were not concerned with creating jazz. Just the music, always the music. Ultimately as I read about Threadgill's experiences in Chicago, I kept wondering what could cause such a confluence of so many like-minded and artistically ambitious persons. Is it the local/regional culture? Is it a commitment to collective intelligence and consciousness? Is it that there are so many role models and mentors? Or might it be -- and this is my favorite -- a matter of reincarnation? Might it be that all these individuals chose to manifest in that time and place precisely to experience and thrive in that community, demonstrating the creative potential of humanity?
Through it all, Threadgill studied classical performance and composition at the university/conservatory level. As he described it, his interest was to see how composers solved problems in their compositions, how they would get from here to there, juggling complexities of harmony and structure and motivic development. He studied all the modernists like Stravinsky. Later in the book he describes, in considerable detail, how he was inspired by the method of Edgard Varese, who based his music not on chords, but a system of intervals. Threadgill developed his own intervallic system, though truth be told, when reading I had a bit of trouble understanding how it worked! But, hey, he's the genius, not me. One of his teachers was a highly-accomplished African-American flautist who had been kept out of the major symphonies because of racism. Here's a subtle point I want to underscore. The racism manifested in putting up barriers to his performance of, say, Bach or Beethoven, because of his race. Today, the critical theorists claim that Bach's music is in and of itself racist, because it reflects white supremacist European culture, and therefore a black person shouldn't even want to play it. But for Threadgill, the point was to master all of the great music of the world, period. I like that attitude.
Another huge inspiration for Threadgill was his participation in the Chicago and New York experimental theater scenes. In a way it seems like this was the thread or stream of experience that was/is closest to his heart. He is an experimentalist. Another huge factor for him was his experience in the Vietnam War. Wow. Just setting music aside, his chronicle of his time there is engrossing. I'm not a student of the genre, but this has to be one of the best accounts out there. It left its scars on him, physically and emotionally, but it never lessened his commitment to music. Maybe it strengthened it. Musically speaking, he was seriously influenced by the music of the people of the hill tribes, called the Montagnards, made with gongs and bamboo xylophones. Upon returning to the states, Threadgill made his own instrument hybridizing those inspirations using hubcaps. He called it the hubkaphone. And if our list of influences and inspirations isn't already long enough, we can connect this practice of devising your own instruments to the American experimentalist Harry Partch.
Well. I haven't even come close here to exhausting all the musical influences, collaborations, and cross-currents that characterize Threadgill's life in music. But let's close with a look at how he derives ideas for his compositions. The ideas don't come from all those musical experiences. Those provide the building blocks of tone, texture, attitude, rhythm, instrumentation, and so on. The actual compositional ideas come more from wanting to replicate or reproduce in musical form the dynamics or systems that play out both in society and in the natural world. The latter figures in the most telling section on composition that Threadgill includes in the book, a section I was grateful for. For much of the book, he said stuff like it really doesn't matter for me to explain anything, because the meaning of the music is formed in the listener's mind. True enough. But I'm the kind, obviously, that wants to know how music gets made. So, in 2009, Threadgill had a December residency at the Aaron Copeland House in upstate New York. He began observing a vine outside one of the windows, and saw how, even as most of the leaves were dying, some were green and thriving. Each morning he would check to see the ways it was changing. "The composition kept changing," he said. "and their was a rhythm to the changes, even if I couldn't predict what was going to happen when." And then, he gets explicit about how this simple phenomenon found life in his creative pursuits. Let's let Threadgill tell it.
None of this is surprising from a botanical point of view. Changing seasons isn't like flipping a light switch. Nature is filled with peculiar little pockets of resiliency and recognition: some things that seem determined not to die, and others that seem to let themselves go prematurely. But this mundane observation affected my compositional process, because I started playing with contrasts between areas of contrast between areas of activity in the music I was writing, too: shifting contrasts between developments in the foreground, the middle ground, and background of the soundscape. Motifs that lingered "too long" until they came to be highlighted in relief against their surroundings.
This is to say, for me,musical experimentation isn't a matter of finding new content -- I was never trying to depict the falling leaves in sound -- but is instead a way of finding a formal instigation from an entirely unrelated source through a simple practice of observation. Making myself look elsewhere. It was as though watching that bush provided a way of making myself go out on a limb.
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