Interview with Henry Threadgill (1)

Thanks to Peggy Sutton for commissioning the following for Jazz on 3. Steve Weiss was the engineer, Ben Gerrish did the transciption, and Bradley Bambarger supplied editorial assistance. Part one is about music. Part two is about Vietnam, and features audio: You've got to hear him tell these war stories himself. Part three is about music. "Four Hits and the Ultramodern Blues" discusses five favorite tunes. Henry Threadgill: So, tell me something about your show. Ethan Iverson: Were taping for the BBC radio program Jazz on 3. I have interviewed Gunther Schuller, Keith Jarrett and Django Bates already. HT: How long ago did you interview Gunther Schuller? EI: About a year ago. Do you know Gunther? HT: Yes, I met Gunther. God, its been so long ago, and I havent seen him in years. I met him when he was at Dartmouth. I guess that was . . . maybe 1969 or '70 or something like that. Richard Davis was there at that time. EI: Oh, right. Another Chicago person. So many great musicians out of Chicago. HT: Oh, yeah, you got a Midwest full of great musicians. EI: Gunther Schuller thats an interesting entry point. You are unafraid of classical music resources. HT: Yeah. . . EI: Some jazz guys would feel that classical music was off-limits. HT: . . . Im not jazz, though. EI: Thats right!

HT: That was a period. Cassandra Wilson just said that scatting belonged to a period thats over, and its true. The idea of jazz was a period, too, and if you allow the word to become bigger, it's always an expanding proposition. You gotta remember something about black music in America. People start in the wrong places in trying to put together the history of black music. When you go back to the blues in the Delta, there was no prototype, there was no template, there was no European example on how to formulate anything. The people just made that music from an aesthetic that they had that came with them from Africa. They lost any containers or forms or approaches other than the aesthetic. When you look, you see that there was no music that the slaves created basically prior to the Civil War. Do you know the reason for that? EI: Sometimes they werent allowed to have instruments. HT: Well, they were playing banjo, they was beatin on the jawbone, it was just things that was scraped together. . . but their introduction to Western instruments came about because of the Civil War. Remember the North and the South had bands; they had military bands in the North and the South, but these people werent professional musicians. When the war was over, they came back to the places that they came from with these band instruments, but they werent playing them anymore; and this was the advent of pawn shops. They dropped these instruments off in pawn shops because they were broke. Now it was possible for anybody, a poor black, white, or anything else to pick up an instrument for a dollar, or fifty centsa used instrument for fifty cents, so theres a violin, theres a trumpet in the window. EI: These were ex-military instruments? HT: Yes, these were band instruments. You see that these band instruments are what the black musicians were playing at first. Not the orchestral instruments, but the concert band instruments. Because thats what we had in America was the concert band. Thats why we have

pagodas set up for these concerts. Especially all across the Midwest. (Not so much out here.) EI: Sure, the little town I grew up in Wisconsin had a pagoda. Thats something you were supposed to do on a Friday night: cut the grass and then go see the band. HT: So, the introduction to these instruments is the beginning of learning how to move their musical thinking into that arena. Right? Now, the entire experience of the slave was one of assimilation. Assimilation of anything! It didnt matter: Chinese, French, Spanish, whatever it was. It was the acquisition of all information in systems and knowledge and communication. And that was without discrimination. It was just grab hold of something and learn how to do it in some kind of way and put your thing through it. Look at Scott Joplin. He wasnt really emulating anything from Europe. At all! As a matter of fact, when he wrote Treemonisha, it was simultaneous with the advent of Schoenbergs sprechstimme, and sprechstimme was present in Treemonisha.

(Scott Joplin, finale of Act 1 to Treemonisha, "Confusion," composed in 1910) And Joplin had no contact with Europe in any kind of way. This guys totally isolated and hes just making music from an aesthetic. For music -- in addition to drumming and rhythm and things like this -theres an aesthetic in African art. And that aesthetic is so much different than the European in terms of form. First of all, most African music has nothing to do with form. They dont deal in form. You know like a sonata form or a fugue form? They do not do it. It just happens, and thats it. EI: It makes me think of someone like Pete Johnson. I know youre a boogie woogie fan! Whatever Pete Johnson does exists in sort of an irreplaceable moment. Technically and spiritually, his creation is much harder to play than any tude by Chopin. HT: Its totally different. EI: It comes from a completely differently angle. I think that angle doesnt get enough respect, actually. HT: Right! Because theres too much relating things back to the European format. Look how long it took for what we call an American school of music. You really dont get to it until Charles Ives. EI: Guys like Edward MacDowell dont hold up that great today, no. HT: MacDowell and Horatio Parker and the rest were students of European music. It took a very long time for the composers to turn to the folk elements. That was also the basis of European music. Folk elements all around the world. I dont care how sophisticated it becomes, the folk element was the basis of any music. And [pre-Ives classical composing] Americans were skipping that, right? But back to your question about what I use and what Im not afraid to use: Im saying all these things to say that Ive always understood how music got created here in America, and that I was under no obligation to do any particular thing. I do exactly the way I feel, whatever I want to do.

Thats probably why I love Debussy so much. He did exactly what he felt like doing, even though he was European. EI: To go back to this idea that jazz was a moment. . . HT: The word has to expand. See, we know nothing about all of the black classical orchestral writers. They are just left out of history basically. Somebody might have heard the name of William Grant Still or Ulysses Kay, but not really. But something that has happened in my time that never existed before: All of the composers know people like me and Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams. Grant Still or Kay, they tried to make their music fit into that European model. And when I get a commission, they still make it fit into that European container, in order to get it played. This has been going on for a long time. But now, I dont want any more commissions from American orchestras that are not ready to do what I want to do and go in the direction Im going in...and learn something. Because we dont process music the way they process music, either. We process music -- when I say "we," I mean improvising musicians; not all of them, but myself -- I approach it through the word the Germans use for rehearsing: probe, which is in search of. Not to read something straight through and go in like, well, everybody read it and everybody pay the permit to get up and go home. EI: And forget about the rhythm when you get one of those orchestras! HT: It sounds so square. The reason for that is theyre still using a European model; theyre not getting up off of that and going with the other model. We dont play music with the size beat that they play it. Our beat has a width to it. They play right in the middle on the beat. Their beat is so thin its like tick, tick, tick. Now when I had the Sextett, I used two drummers, and always had one drummer that played this far behind the beat and another drummer that played almost ahead of the beat. So the beat is that

wide, so you could lay information in quite differently. You got a lot of room for laying information, and thats the same thing that happens in Latin music. Mario Bauza told me about the wrassling match when the modern jazz guys came in and tried to play with the Latin cats in 40s. The clave and the swing wouldnt mix! Bauza said that Charlie Parker could bring the music together, but as soon as Bird stopped the wrassling match would begin again. Mario said that not even Diz or Dexter Gordon could do that, but Charlie Parker could. When you play jazz and Latin music, you have to take the beat and the time from the drummer, not the conductor. The conductor keeps those people in that narrow band, and that narrow band does not allow you to express anything. That only works with the European model. Of course, thats legitimate! Theres nothing wrong with that. EI: Well, tell me about some of your drummers, like Steve McCall. HT: Oh, well, what can I tell you about Steve McCall? EI: Anything you want. HT: Well, you have to be more specific. I know a lot of things about Steve McCall. Hes a great musician, an intuitive musician. EI: I love how he tunes his drums; I think its a very beautiful sound out of the kit. HT: A lot of music that Air played called for certain tunings. Thats why Air was able to have a certain dynamic. With just reeds, bass and drums, in a very short period of time youre not going to have much dynamic orchestrally time or color wise. And Ive learned from being around Ahmad Jamal about the tuning of those drums. And if you listen to the first Air record, you hear those different tunings that Im using. Steve, he had his own tuning when I didnt have things called for specific tunings. The way he personally played behind the beat. I was never comfortable with people who played on the beat; I had to learn how to play with guys that rushed the beat, played ahead of the beat. I was always comfortable with

kind of a Midwestern thing behind the beat. The way Lester Young played behind the beat. EI: I heard that Steve McCall really knew the street side of things. HT: He was the first one of us in Europe, and when Archie and all of them got there, he knew everybody. He played with Archie Shepp, went to Africa with Don Byas. McCall was the oldest, I was in the middle, and Fred Hopkins was the youngest. By the time we moved to Europe, he was a senior. He had lived in Paris, he had lived in Holland. He knew something about the Dutch, he knew a lot about the French and the Germans. EI: Whenever I see a photo of Fred Hopkins, I think this is the most handsome man! He really has a great look. HT: He is an incredible bass player. EI: For me, Fred Hopkins is essential for many of your greatest records. HT: You make music the same way you have baseball teams, football teams and basketball teams. The same way. Thats how its done, with some great key players. The Duke Ellington Orchestra would not have sounded like that with just anybody in the orchestra. Count Basie without Lester, Herschel Evans, or whoever was back there. It's always that way. With the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock, there were key people in that orchestra who made that sound. It's just like sports it's a team effort. People forget that, and sometimes they'll just look at the leaders name on the date. The musicians realize the blueprint. Their ability to open up your blueprint is what brings a work to life. EI: What was Fred Hopkins like as a person? He looks so gentle in the photos. HT: He could be quiet, then he could be pretty wild when he was having fun especially! I met Fred when he was living next door to me, when I moved on 49th Street in Chicago. No one knew who was; he was working in the A&P, bagging groceries and doing things like that. I found out that he played when I heard him playing one day in the building next to me. I

passed him and wondered who was playing the bass because I liked the way he played. We started talking at that time, and Steve came back from Europe and moved a little farther down the street. I was doing things on the North Side of Chicago, like experimental dance companies and experimental theater groups. Like when Greaseand all that stuff came out on North Lincoln Avenue. It was a pretty wild period, a great period for theater in Chicago. All those things came to New York. This director asked me to write the music for a show called Hotel Diplomat, later called 99 Rooms. He gave me two books of Scott Joplin music, a volume of piano music and a volume of songs. He wanted me to use some rags in them, so I put the trio together. The first day that we started playing, we played the rags that I started orchestrating. So Fred developed a sound and a way of playing that was not coming from playing jazz standards or Broadway show standards. Those werent his references, although he loved all the great bass players like Wilbur Ware. Fred was from Chicago: if you come from Chicago, you have to love Wilbur Ware! Part of how Fred developed his sound was working on the Joplin music. There was nothing to listen to, anyway, for saxophone, bass, and drums playing rags. EI: Its true that Hopkins has something in there like an older jazz, Pops Foster-type of feel. Hopkins played with you in the Sextett as well. What about Pheeroan Aklaff? HT: He and John Betch were the first two drummers in the Sextett. EI: I think Aklaff is someone who really understands how to bring pop and other grooves that feel really good and authentic in a sort of wild context. HT: That was the period when no one ever wrote about what I was doing with the drums. That was more drum music I had ever written in my life, for those two drummers. No one ever picked up that anything was written.

EI: I noticed "The Theme from Thomas Cole." The first minute or so there are absolutely no drums, there are only cymbals. There was one specific snare drum hit from one of them, but otherwise, it's this blank canvas; so that when the other parts come in, it goes to a whole new level. That's the sort of thing you are talking about, right? HT: Everything was written, just like every string part was written. The drums were tuned so that I had all 12 pitches, because we also carried two concert bass drums, if you ever noticed that. . . EI: No. HT: Well, listen to those recordings. Sometimes we used them, sometimes we didn't. That means there are six drums for each set. Bass drum, two floor toms, two upper toms. So let's say a bass drum, two floor toms, snare, thats four. EI: So you wrote out parts for both of them? Wow! HT: Yes! EI: I didnt realize it was that extensive. HT: Both sets were tuned so that chromatically I could get the entire scale. One is tuned in fourths and the other tuned in fifths, because the bass is tuned in fourths and the cello is tuned in fifths. So I can get almost the entire chromatic scale, minus one note. Keep this in mind now that I told you about it when you listen to the Sextett records. I think we were in Berlin and Roy Haynes said something like, It wasn't a big band but it sounded big. We sounded big because of the orchestration. The pre-orchestration is the sound of the drums themselves. It was almost like having 10 timpani on stage, and when you have the bass with E, A, D, G, and the drums are tuned to those pitches too, you know what you have, don't you? Sympathetic vibrations! E-A-D is a huge note because it has been activated. The open strings on the bass open can be like a sitar. You listen to any records with two drummers playing, and then you listen to the Sextett record see the width and size of the scale of the drums and how it impacts those instruments. See how the

instruments blend in with these drums. Did you listen to Rag, Bush and All? Everything is tuned, heavily tuned. In Africa, the drums are tuned. EI: Live music is the best music, and I really wish I could have seen the Sextett live. At least we have the records. When you wrote for the group, did you write out a score, and then have a copyist do the parts? HT: I didn't have any copyist! EI: So you wrote a score and the parts for everybody. That's a lot of music. You must get up and write music everyday. HT: Well, no, I can only write at certain times, in order keep up with these instruments. You know, you don't play for one week, your wife or your girlfriend knows; two weeks and you know; three weeks and everybody knows. I have friends who can do both. I cant do both. I have to do one at a time. I write, and then I go to my instruments. I can't keep up with the instruments if the writing becomes too demanding. EI: You wrote so much for that band. Sometimes I hear an element on the records that suggests you are almost reading it in the studio. Tiny structural errors and stuff like that. Is it true that you would come into the studio with new music? HT: No, it's a way of processing music. I go into rehearsal to look for its discovery. What's on paper is a place to start. I am playing, and then this guy plays this note wrong, and then I say, "Oh, really? Just keep it like that. I say, let's start at measure two, and someone thinks I mean start on the second beat. So I just say, "Hey, start on the second beat." Also, when someone doesnt play 'cause they forgot to come in. Well, that's discovery. EI: That's the element you cant get with classical musicians. HT: No one has ever written about that. In orchestral music, the job of the conductor is to lift the music up off the paper, because it's not all on the paper. Also, a good conductor deals with the acoustics of the room. A poor conductor follows the metronome markings while disregarding the acoustical information.

A good conductor processes the hall. I do the same thing, but I process the form. Now with Zooid, form is in process with me. Before Zooid I had been working on interior parts in advancing harmony, counterpoint and getting rid of the method of improvisation that has lasted for a long time. I needed to go another way with improvising to have people play more spontaneously. Well, now form itself is in a state of improvisation. These little things you were talking about, the mistakes, affect form. The same thing happens in research labs where most of the discoveries are made through mistakes. The European template is a different way of assembling and processing the music. People keep that as a standard, but you cant take the music that we are making and apply it to that standard. They are two different worlds. This has been going on for a long time and has caused major confusion, where people would write things about what I am doing or what someone else is doing and say, Is that a European method?" No, it isnt. I gather information and then I process the way I process. I come to rehearsal with much material that is written out, but that's only a starting point. Everything is written out, but it also doesnt mean a thing. The music is totally modular because what is here can be here or what is here can be there because this is what we discover in discovery. This is what needs to be brought out by music analysts and musicologists. EI: In this mutable music, the musicians are so crucial. Tell me about the cast in Zooid. HT: Christopher Hoffman is with us now, the cellist, he just joined as the sixth member. The band started with Taruy Brevrey on oud, Dany Leon on trombone and cello, Liberty Ellman on acoustic guitar, Jos Davila on trombone and tuba and Elliot Kavee on drums. We rehearsed for a year before we appeared. It was impossible to appear otherwise because when I left off with Make a Move, I had abandoned the major/minor system, and it appeared on the first Pi record with Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi. So it took them a year to learn this language. It wasn't about the difficulty

about reading the notes these guys could read fly paper, all of them -- but to learn the language and a type of independence. Collective improvisation has been an important thing to me, always. Now everything is truly independent; no one can really depend on anyone else. I like harmony. I haven't abandoned anything. Counterpoint is there, but the harmony is an illusion. You hear this harmony, but we aren't really playing it, and we aren't improvising on it. One piece of harmony can have as many as 14 faces. EI: What do you mean by that? HT: Let's say the sound of C, C-sharp, F-sharp; it can have the face of G, C, E-flat, maybe. It can have the sound of E-flat, F, E. It can have the sound of F-sharp, G-sharp, A -- because it comes from a family. This family is like your biological family, like your brothers, sisters, mother and father all share DNA, it is the same thing. This has nothing to do with major/minor substitution. EI: It must have to do with intervals. HT: It has to do with intervals, but interval groups that are born from two parents. EI: This sounds like tri-chords. HT: No, absolutely not. C Major and C minor are the same thing. One is feminine and one is masculine, in my world, so the mother creates so many children, and the father makes so many children. Between the two of them, I can get as many as 14 children. Lets stay with the idea of children. There are three factors in this family. You, your brothers and sisters, everybody has got one ear, brown eyes and a big thumb. If 15 children, they got more than that. Some of them got one ear, three eyes, a brown eye and a blue eye, you see what I'm saying. That's why I said that one thing can have 14 manifestations of itself. I'm speaking in terms of harmony, but it's true with everything that's moving, that you are listening to. You have played some of my older music, but you haven't played anything recent music at the piano.

EI: [To audition for this interview, I played a little bit of Threadgill music on the phone to him the previous day.] I was trying to learn some of "Polymorph," but it was beyond me, and now I'm beginning to understand why. HT: Students from universities have studied some of my earlier work, but that was when I was writing in the major/minor system. Now, when you start to follow the contrapuntal lines, you see that everyone is starting to play something different, moving in counterpoint. They still have their freedom, but there is set of numbers of intervals, and everything that is happening is moving according to voice leading. There is no random voice leading. If there is no minor second and I play a minor second, I destroy the interior of everything. EI: It doesn't sound like 12-tone music, but is it spiritually aligned with having a system like that? HT: It has nothing to do with serialism at all. In serialism, you have a series of notes. Could be 12 notes, five notes, whatever the series is. Well, this is a series of intervals; the first series is five, then four, and the next one is seven, and the next one three, and the next eight, and the next four, and every one of them is different and they exist for period of time. The written music that's on the paper, everything is moving according to that. Not necessarily every interval that is up there, but when we improvise, we can take a lot of liberties because that is what the musicians have learned how to do. Now the players with me, they can do anything they want to do, because if you understand what you can and cannot do, then that means you can do everything since you understand those two things. EI: I can perceive order on the Zooid records, and it's interesting to hear that it's so well organized. In a way, your music with Zooid reminds me of late Stravinsky, after he embraced composing with intervals in a nonmajor/minor kind of way. HT: Stravinsky used everything he found. When you make art, you can't say you can't use that or can't use this. Its not like religion. It's not like I am practicing a part of the Catholic

liturgy, and then Im over into some stuff from the Hebrew world and then I shoot over to Buddhism . Yes, people are going to object to that. . . I am listening to the way they organize sound in Bali and the way they organize sound in South India. Whatever I can learn from that, I learn from that and integrate it. See, with the American Experience, black people and Chinese people had the American spirit, but white Americans almost forgot about it! They didn't have any information after they left Europe, other than imitating Europe. Finally, when you get into Appalachian-American and Hillbilly Music, which I grew up with, you see the beginning of the roots of the material of another experience in America. Rock and Roll sprang up because new elements here were kind of being denied. America was isolated in the first place. We started to learn things and process things in their own isolated way, and everyone else in America was doing the same thing. Black Americans didn't look to Europe as a template. The interesting people like Ives and Copland: when you read their writing, they are saying what is going on in America, how America is thinking. In their process, in the way they process, they are telling you about the thinking in America at that time. How they were breaking out of a type of isolationism and also a type of imitation-ism as well. EI: Talking about Fred Hopkins, I have also been listening to Stomu on these Zooid records, and there seems to be a connection in the way that the bass sounds. I think Stomu is a phenomenal bass player. HT: All of these players I have been really lucky. This is one of the best groups I have ever had, ever. It's quite incredible. The dedication of these musicians to the music is 150% all the time. I have never had a group this size with this type of commitment. These guys are at rehearsal on time or before me. I don't write anything for Elliot [Humberto Kavee] anymore, maybe a note here and there. It's very difficult to figure out what we're doing, too, because it sounds like we are playing in . Thats because I never allow the drums to play in the meter I am playing in. That wont happen. EI: There is no downbeat.

HT: You can't tell. You don't know. It's funny when people say things like, "The section in 5/4, and I say, I'd like to know where that was, and the band would say, We would, too. I don't know where you heard that! because basically I think in . Beat to beat, penny to penny, dollar to a dollar. I don't need drums to play in the same meter the band is playing in because that's really redundant. In rhythm, they talk about secondary beat, the first beat, and the first accent and the secondary accent. When you put meter against meter, thats what you get. So now you lose all meter, and that's really what I want. I don't want any sense of meter because when you sense meter, you see and feel division. This is over, and this is coming next. It gets in the way of the flow. The flow is everything in film, everything in theater, everything in literature, everything in architecture, everything in dance, everything in music. Boxing or barring music for me is over. In bars of 4/4 to the next bar of 4/4 or bar 4/4 to bar of something else you feel the demarcation. The demarcation has interrupted the flow. It inserted itself into the picture in the form of some kind of physicality that takes away from the big picture. You want to see the forest, not the trees. EI: Tell me about the tuba. You have had so much tuba in your music for so many years. HT: Well, after the period with Fred, I couldnt find any more bass players. EI: I can understand! HT: Not that there werent bass players, but I couldn't find anybody that. . . You come to New York, and people are finished because they think that they've finished their process. They come here not to woodshed with anybody. We [Air] came here as a group and we woodshedded before we came. We didnt come here to get our stuff together. We had gotten our program together and came here. What I found very difficult in that stage of my life in New York was to get people spend time with as a group. I was lucky with the Sextett, but I still had Fred and I had Muneer Abdul Fataah before Diedre Murray. Unfortunately, Muneer he didnt get a chance to record with us, he left to move to Europe.

[Back to tuba.] This is what happened: I formed in the Wind String Quintet. The Wind String Quintet never got recorded; it's the oldest group I have outside of Air. EI: Was it related to the X-75 stuff? No? HT: No. When I first started writing for it, it was violin, viola, cello and bass, with me playing woodwind. It didn't work with the bass, and I put a tuba. The tuba was the only thing that had the material, the same material that I had in terms of the instrument. The tuba can lock into the wind world in terms of orchestration! I had four strings over there, and I had no sympathetic anything with them, no sympathetic material. I didn't have no brass, no gold, whatever. With the tuba, I had brass and that could lock in another kind of way. Also, I didn't like the bass response time in this kind of context. I did a lot of music for the Wind String Quintet; it started off with Bob Stewart. Marcus Rojas learned how to play. He didn't even improvise when I found Marcus; he came through the Wind String. I had Marcus Garveys grandson in there. I had all kind of players in there, great string players like Diedre Murray, Corey Dixon, and Leroy Jenkins. I had three or four commissions from Carnegie Hall that most people dont even know about. EI: Do you still have the scores? HT: Yes, I still have the scores and the tapes. EI: I hope those come out sometime. HT: We played Town Hall, and all over. No one was ever gonna give me a recording date with that! It took us forever to get a recording date with the flute quartet. In the jazz world, they went, "What is this flute quartet?" Took Bonandrini to allow us to make a record for him. [1990s Flutistry by the Flute Force Four.] The Wind String group, I did a lot of theater and dance things with them over the years, and Tom Buckner always would put us on his Interpretation series. So that tuba goes back to the Wind String Quintet. I wasnt coming from the European concept of a String Quartet and adding woodwind. I was coming from some place else, and I was looking for a different kind of blend. It was

already strange because the string quartet would have been two violins, a viola and a cello, but I had violin, viola, cello, bass, and then I took the bass out and replaced it with a tuba. EI: Sounds like with the tuba you get to move those strings around a bit more. HT: Yes, it can blend into the strings section. The bass cant blend and go from section from section quickly like the tuba can. It can go into the brass section and come out the wind section and go into the string section, and it sits in there like a ghost. EI: I have laughed many times listening to your records, listening to these high tuba parts, two octaves above the bass. They bass and tuba can play close to each other or really far apart. Jos Davila? Where is he from? HT: He's Puerto Rican, but he is from Connecticut originally. He grew up in New York after coming here, going to school in Connecticut. EI: He sounds great on those records. HT: And his trombone playing is on another world, all by itself. Stomu played that acoustic electric bass. When he first came, he was playing the electric bass, but I got him to start playing this acoustic instrument because of the sound, because it was a whole other sound. I told him I can't have an electric sound where I am going, I don't want an electric sound. (It can be amplified.) I did electric with Very Very Circus and Make a Move, and I was finished with that. I couldnt drag that on over to this new sound. I was hearing something, that's why I went to the oud. I was trying to approach the expansion of the octave, with quarter tones. We been working on expanding the octave for a little while, incrementally. Im not interested in what other musicians pick up from it, really, but I have a need for my palette. EI: It seems to me that you look forward, you move forward.

HT: Thats the only place for me to look. I figured out a long time ago that going back for me is always a mistake . I mean on every level: personal life, everything going backward does not work for me, it's destructive. All of my mistakes have been made going backwards. [laughs] EI: [checks time: 73 minutes.] That might have been the right note to end on unless you want to keep going... --(I had really wanted to ask Threadgill about Vietnam, but didn't know how to start that conversation. Go on to part two.) 05/16/2011 --EI: Did you know Albert Ayler? HT: No, I didn't know him. I never got a chance to see Albert Ayler. I knew Trane: he was really something. I met Trane when I was a kid in Chicago, just about 16. A highly spiritual man, a bit of an enigma, and just kind of wide open. I could listen to him, but it was hard to understand him sometimes. He was acting like I was his peer or something. I said, Are you crazy? I'm 16, 17, what are you talking about, you know? The guy's asking me what am I practicing. "What's wrong with you? Don't you think I'm standing here to find out from you? [Hed say:] "Who do you like, what do you listen to?" I mean, that's my department. That's what I'm supposed to be asking. What the fuck is the problem here? This guy's taking over all my questions, you know. EI: Dewey Redman told me something similar about hanging out with Coltrane. HT: It was real. That's just the type of person that he was. He would just pry you open: "Why do you like Ornette, why are you here, what's going on? What are you practicing?"

What could I be practicing? [sarcastically:] You know, the universal book, Trane! The rulebook, Trane! The fakebook, Trane! But Albert, I wish I had met him. Because you said something about how live music is it. Live music is it. I was thinking yesterday about these peoples' blogs, you know, and reviews and stuff talking about records, records, records. When's the last time you saw something about a live performance? I'm not just talking about jazz, I'm talking about all music. The most powerful experience you ever have in your life is a live experience. I used to sit up in front of the Chicago Symphony, man, on the first row there. That shit would destroy me. I mean, that orchestra was hip. I had to sit on the edge of the Edgewater Beach Hotel, on the ground floor. Fritz Reiner was right there, I was right here. You stand up in front of Coltrane, the sweat would get on you. Gene Ammons right in front of you. Arthur Rubinstein sitting right there, playing in front of you. You know, that ain't records. Records have their role, but live music man, nothing will transform you like a live music experience. Most of the young musicians have never had the exposure to live music that I was able to have, you know? It's kind of sad, because I heard so much live music, man. I can't tell you how much. I'm talking about jazz and classical music. Heres a good story: I had an assignment to go hear some music when I was 18, any classical music. So I went down to Roosevelt University, where they had one oclock concerts on Friday afternoon. And I didn't know who was playing or anything, I just had to write a report, and I couldn't get in this auditorium, some of the doors were closing. I was panicking: you don't just go on in there. And this guy saw me, he said, What is it? What's wrong? I said, I'm trying to get into this concert. He said, Well, why don't you just come on with me and hear some music with me? I said, Well, OK -- You gonna hear some music? He said, "Yes." Were talking and walking along. I said, Wow, you know your way around back here. He said, Yeah, I've been here. And we come in backstage. It's a small room, auditorium, and he says, Go

down here, have a seat. I'm coming back, I was gonna say, Well, ain't you gonna come, too? I turn around, I'm just about in the first seat, and I turn around and I see him going toward the piano. It's Arthur Rubinstein. So I heard Rubinstein and all of them at the University of Chicago right on the spot. I met Hindemith and Varese... EI: What was Hindemith like? HT: Ah, Hindemith, he really didn't like Americans. He thought we were the stupidest people on earth. EI: Did you like his music? HT: Yeah. I only met him just a little bit at the contemporary music center. This was at basically same time as Ralph Shapey, as the Contemporary Chamber Players, so I got to see everything. I heard Berio, all of the contemporary guys. I heard all that music live. Schoenberg, you know I heard all his stuff played live by probably best players in that world at that time, because that orchestra was hip. That Contemporary Chamber Players orchestra, they played only the most advanced stuff. EI: Shapey's own music was great. HT: Yeah! So the AACM was existing side by side with them in the University of Chicago area. We were listening to them, and they were listening to us, too, but they wouldn't admit it. Shapey would. Yeah, they would listen to what we were doing, but we were listening to everything that was going on then. So I heard all of this music while other guys were practicing out of fake books and how to play Coltrane. They weren't at those concerts. I was in touch with Joseph Schillingers wife a long time. She used to be up on the Upper East Side. I used to invite her to things, and she'd say, Oh, Henry, I'm too old. Schillinger wrote a book on how to choreograph. It never got printed. Lincoln Center got it, the library there, and they wouldn't let me see it. I come across it, and I wanted

to see what he had come up with. They wouldn't let me see it, so I called her and said, Well, who do you know? She called them and said, Mr. Threadgill there has my permission to see anything that you have in your possession. They wouldn't let me copy it. I kept going there every so often, and I did copy it. EI: So that's a system that's been valuable for you. HT: Well, I was into dance. I've always been into dance and theater, too. I made my living in dance and theater before I left Chicago, because jazz musicians didn't hire me. They didn't think I knew anything about music. Much to my benefit. EI: Sounds like you got the last laugh on that one. HT: Oh, you know, the best thing that can happen to you sometimes is to be rejected, if you have the ability to think laterally! When people close the door on you they've actually opened up more doors. That never bothered me. Chicago was like, Oh, he can't play, so the dance community hired me and the theater community hired me and I was playing in the blues band with Left Hand Frank and all those people. I was playing in real blues bands. I was in the house band at the Blue Flame. And I played in polka bands on clarinet. And I played in parade bands. I didn't really meet those people who were trying to play tunes or like Sonny Rollins or whoever. Actually, I was getting the bigger and better musical education, playing in polka bands, parade bands, mariachi bands, Latin bands, church bands. I was really getting a musical education. Because otherwise I would just be playing [scats Scrapple from the Apple and Donna Lee] or whatever that scoobie-doobie shit that they were doing. Those guys didn't know who the fuck Berio was. Or they didn't even know about Strauss, basically. Oh, he writes waltzes? [Sarcastically:] "Yeah, he writes waltzes." Stravinsky or Messiaen, who were they? I never saw the jazz crowd at the concert hall, checking out music. It was a longer process becoming a musician. I was shut out of the traditional people's world, the jazz players, and forced into a bigger

world that takes up a lot more time. The first time an orchestra set up in front of me I was so transformed I didn't know what to do. Then when the kabuki came in front of me, I was destroyed. So it's a longer journey now than when I started out being impressed with Sonny Rollins and Lester Young, that narrow world I started out in. Not only me, but these other people who ended up in the AACM, like Wadada and Roscoe Mitchell, we all came in like this [indicates small]. Next thing you know, the picture's that big. That's one thing that you'll see in all of our backgrounds. I was a Sonny Rollins fanatic when I came in here, 15 years old. But, all of a sudden, the whole picture changed when Ornette and Cecil appeared. I always knew I wasn't going to play that other music, because I couldn't play that music in the first place. Nobody could play that music but the people that lived it. Music comes out of a social context. EI: Right. HT: And young musicians right now don't understand that. All you can do is practice something that's not from your time. You're not able to do it. Art has an emotional, social, psychological and spiritual content that's tied to you being born in history at that time. You'll never be able to express what Bud Powell expressed. You'll never express what Lizst expressed when he sat down and played. You can't do it. It's tied to the times. And young musicians waste their time practicing and practicing and practicing, thinking they're going to get up there and play something that Dizzy GIllespie played. You can't do that. He did it! Youve got to find something else. You can only play that music you learned, but you'll never be able to compete with Oscar Peterson or Bill Evans or anyone else who played that music. I discovered that when I was young, you know? I learned that I never can do that, not the way they did it. I don't care how much you learn about it. You won't be able to do it because it's tied to a life. Music is everything that you've learned in a life; it's your family, your friends, your experiences, your hardships, your good days, your bad days it's tied into all of that. All

of that comes into play when you express something. The integrity of it becomes a real reality when it becomes a part of your time. Accept that what you are expressing is a product of your time. You can't bring to the product of another period the necessary investment in terms of the emotion and the psychology and the experience to lift it up to that level. Only the people from that time can do that. Now, people are just using young people in these schools, making them pay to learn jazz and stuff and to achieve a level of excellence; and they come out believing that they're going to accomplish what these other people accomplished. You're not. Not at that. Maybe at something else you will be able to do, but not that. If you think that performance with Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie in Paris can be topped, think again. They were the best of the players at that time, and they brought it up to a height. It's always that way. Chopin brought it to a height, all these people bring these things to a height, you know, and it's all about everything in your life, your family, your friends, your schooling, your ups and downs. All of that is in the psyche of the artist. And when you get into another period, that period has a requirement that you bring that in order to express something from that period. Man, it's just wonderful what the New School and Berklee can teach people about technique, but they're still misleading them into giving up all their time into thinking that you're going to play something that Coltrane played or that Lester Young or Wayne Shorter or somebody played music that was particular to a particular time, you know, because there's a cut off spot, like with the post-bop people. I'm too young to be a part of that. I'm on the far side of that. So, what's there for me? Because this is kind of empty. At that period, we were all playing music as kids, and I'll never forget, man, we heard that Ornette shit and we said, Man, there it is. There's the voice of new possibility. All of a sudden. We were sitting up there practicing Daahoud and we knew in our hearts that wasn't going nowhere. Frank Strozier, Booker Little, and some of those people inherited that stuff, but we were too young for that. When Trane went

over to that last period and Ornette and Albert and them appeared, I'll never forget. I'm telling you it was like a fire alarm going off. We turned on the radio and I heard "Lonely Woman," and I was like, "Uh oh." We was like 15 or 16: "Did you hear that, did you hear that radio?" We all said, "Did you hear that music we got to go get that." All of a sudden. . . EI: The band, too. Charlie Haden. . . HT: Oh, forget it, he was from another planet. It was a brand new day, you know? Sun Ra had already been there in Chicago and stuff, but he had left. But this, man, this was like an anthem. It's almost like something that went off and we all heard it. There was a bunch of kids that didn't hear it, and those were the kids who were going to stay in that dream, that false dream as far as I was concerned. Because they never went anywhere. Not that most of them stopped playing music, but this was like a voice in the wilderness or something. This was like possibilities. Oh, wow, there it is. And we didn't know what it meant, but it was like this is the way, but what way is that way? We just knew it was the new way that we could invest ourselves in completely. You keep making replicas and variations of the same thing, and this is what's been going on in the arts for a long time, you know. But the people who suffer are the young musicians, at the hands of the people who teach them and the people who hire them to make a living it can destroy your development. It can take years to find yourself because of this. You've got to get through all that mess, if you're lucky, to find yourself. Kids are practicing and learning Coltrane solos. What do you want to learn Coltranes solo on Giant Steps for? What are you supposed to find out? To engage and look at it and study it, yes, but to engage in it physically is contaminating yourself. You start practicing something, and practice don't make perfect, practice makes permanent. You start putting things in yourself, and it's going to take time to get things out of yourself. You might need a big enema for that. You know what I'm saying?

You should only engage certain music on an intellectual level of looking at it and understanding it, but you shouldn't put it in you. You figure out a little bit about stuff to do, but don't steal that stuff, because that stuff is powerful. The people who you were listening to that was some powerful stuff coming from them. Your muscles don't have anything to do with your mind. They'll take over. There are information cells in your muscles. You're going to put information in your muscles that you're gonna have to pay to get rid of. Remember, we evolved in time, we go through this period, a lot of stuff comes to us. We condense it, we throw out what we don't need. Now you put some stuff in you that's too powerful for you to expel, and it's going to stay with you. You put some stuff in there that you cannot reduce down, and it's going to stay in you, it's going to keep getting in your way for a long time. Youve got to be careful in your training. EI: You never learned any solos? HT: Hell, no. EI: Did you sing any? HT: Yeah, you sing everything. EI: So singing is better than playing? HT: Don't want to put them in your muscles. You don't want to imprint it that far. You start imprinting that far, you ain't got nothing to play, you know what's going to come out. You start falsifying and plagiarizing. No, no, uh, uh. No, no. When we were kids, anybody could sing any solo that anybody played. People who were second line, third line, didn't even have names hardly. We listened to everybody's part on every record, every bass part, drum part, everything. And we knew who everybody was, and this is not the information that all the kids now can access with their laptops, iPods, iPads, Google me this, jingle me that, and I don't even know. . .

Any kid who I was around when I grew up knew everyone in the Glenn Miller Orchestra, down to even Paul Whiteman's fucking band with their square asses. And everybody who was on the West Coast. We everything Brubeck did...Chet Baker, Don Ellis, Paul Gonsalves, Paul Quinichette... We knew every fucking song and could sing every fucking part, that's what we would do for entertainment. We'd get together and say, "You do the bass, you do drums, I'll do piano, you do the lead. We new every name, and I went to a music class at the New School recently where the kids didn't know who I was and were up there telling me, "Yeah, I think I heard something about Cecil Taylor." Oh, really? This is the information age? But, see, they don't have access to live music. I was able to go and get it. All I had to do was show up with my saxophone when I was 14. At all the big jazz clubs I could walk right in, just sit down right there. They said, You cant drink, but you can listen. I'm here to hear Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, that's all I'm here for with my saxophone. I'm just sitting there with my saxophone case, right there beside me, I was 14, 15. All I had to do was get there. EI: The community was different. HT: You know? EI: All you saw all the classical music, too! HT: Yeah, by the time I got to junior college man, I didn't have no money. We'd go down to the Orchestra Hall as ushers, right? I forgot how much they was paying me. It wasn't shit. I had my scores and studied conducting. I'm 18. The Chicago Symphony's at its fucking height, Fritz Reiner is conducting, and all I gotta do is sit people down, take out my flashlight, go sit in the back and open up my damn scores. Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Hindemith, whatever. "Oh, really, ah. Yeah, that's interesting. Oh, look at the tempo. I didn't see that. Oh, that's the balance. There's nothing here that says you do it like that."

I talked to these kids. They got money to do some of these things. They tell me they did a workshop or something with Steve Coleman to get advice. I said, "Well, did you see Boulez at Carnegie Hall a couple months ago?" They say, Whos he? So how many people here know anything about the Sequenzas? Oh what's that? "Berio, you know anything about Berio? Anybody know anything about Berio or Herbie Nichols here? Oh, let's just talk about Puccini and writing for the voice. Or, yes, anybody here read Ulysses? Or who knows anything about dancing and theater in here? Or ballet?" I start talking about ballet, and they say, Ballet? I say, Yeah. Don't you know that ballet came from composers and not from dancers?" Stravinsky and all the people who composed ballet: They brought the whole story and everything. And I say, "What are they teaching you at these schools and what is in your own private development that you don't go see Beckett or you don't go see the dance company from Cambodia when they come here?" What is wrong with you, you know? "Oh, you don't listen to music before the Grand Ole Opry?" Are you a fucking idiot, you know? You don't know anything about real hillbilly music? I can be a bad idea to teach jazz, because it puts everybody on the same diet. That can't produce diversity. Everything we like about Mozart, everything we like about Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson, is because they all had a different diet. You can't have the same diet and produce all of this diversity. Johnny Griffin sounded the way he sounded because he developed that sound, and Paul Gonsalves on that sound, Paul Desmond that sound. If they all had the same person teaching them how to manufacture and think about sound, it'd have

been disastrous. The good news is what they learned about how to make sound physically it's an advance. But they all got the same kind of mouthpiece. I'm looking at them, and they all got the same fucking pieces, same kind of saxophone, saying, "I got a Mark VI." I wouldn't even go near something like that. EI: Sure. HT: They say, What is that you got, what's that? It's a Herbert Couf, that's what I play. I been playing that for years. "Never heard of it." I said, I'm sure you haven't. The magazines put in there the setup that you use so all the kids replicate it, and that's not good. You're supposed to find out what's comfortable for you, what works for you. Not looking at me because you're impressed with me and I got a name or something, and you get somebody else's equipment to match yours. What kind of foot pedal you use, what kind of drums you use? Find out what fits your body and your thinking and mind. No, but see that's anti-commercialism. I think they should invest in really teaching people music, just like the way medicine is done. You learn generally. You have to be a general practitioner, then you specialize. You want to be a podiatrist, you want to be an ear doctor, you want to be a neurologist, but first you've got to be a general practitioner. I sit up in front of some kids at a jazz school and start talking about music, and I say, "So how much Bach did you have to play and what other instruments did you have to study?" I was a viola player, you know. I said, "You know you're supposed to learn about music. You want to play rock and roll or whatever the fuck you want to do, but you're supposed to know the general." As much general Western and now, world music. You see Paquito and them, when they come out of Cuba, they all met together when they first came out of Europe, you know. Now, these young players coming out of Cuba, they know far more about world music. They know all these players in India and Wales. Paquito didn't

know about that. They knew who the jazz guys were, yeah, and the classical names, yeah, but they didn't know who these world players were in Bali and the Philippines and all over the world. The guys that come out of there, out of Cuba, they know who they are, see? Here in this country, we should have the same sort of information base in music and leave people alone in terms of being specific about it. Don't be helping people with being no jazz musician or anything else. Don't help them with that. Help them with the knowledge of how to use science to the best of their ability to reproduce sound, how to research information and these types of things. Keep them in a neutral zone so that they can become whoever they will be. EI: Thank you for all the music. HT: That's the most important thing, man, is playing music for people. That is, I really play music for people. I don't play down to people, I play up to people. That's the greatest thing in life, to be able to do something, to have something, and to be able to survive. Because you know America and the arts, it's not a great appreciation. You know that. EI: It seems to have gotten worse instead of better. HT: Yeah, it's not easy. Henry Threadgill is one of our most important living players and composers. Unfortunately, critics and establishment grant-givers understand this better than most conventional jazz players or jazz students. Full context for this anomaly is given in part three. Threadgill could have won more hearts in the general jazz populace if he had continuously performed his most charismatic tunes. Of course, this is the last thing that Threadgill wanted to do. "I figured out a long time ago that going back for me is always a mistake," he says in part one. Thanks to his continuous forward motion, there's an overwhelming amount of Threadgill music to explore. Buried in that onslaught of thousands of recorded compositions there is surely something for

everybody. I don't love everything by Threadgill I've heard, either. But certain things move me almost to tears. For me, Threadgill's genius is most obvious in the work of his Sextett, the group of seven players Threadgill led during the 1980's and documented on When Was That?, Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket, Subject to Change, You Know the Number, Easily Slip Into Another World,and Rag, Bush, and All. An enterprising student should make this collection a dissertation topic. Four Sextett pieces I can't do without: "Soft Suicide at the Baths" from When Was That? is a long, melancholy D major dirge that should be sung and played everywhere music is made. Threadgill is in the lead with clarinet, singing out the tune four times, gradually getting wilder and looser and then subsiding. Some of the time the trombone plays or it doesn't, or the trumpet plays or it doesn't, or the cello. By accompanying above and below the tune at non-intuitive moments, the sudden lack of the trombone, trumpet, or cello can have the effect of a negative image. Only Henry Threadgill orchestrates this way. Some of mystery is unquestionably inadvertent: during the loudest chorus, the band falls helplessly out of sync, still blowing strong (and wrong). He talks more about his rehearsal techniques in part one. "Theme from Thomas Cole from You Know the Number. A is

homophonic and vaguely "classical" in F-sharp minor, B is a rare example of successful counterpoint in jazz. All the musicians play the parts cleanly, without any raggedness or smudging. But there is almost always a soloist who is blowing ragged lines against the pure texture. Threadgills playing in particular is quite irrational. It is impressive that a man can write such elegant music and then deface it so casually. In the first A there is only cymbals. In B each drummer is assigned one of the lines of counterpoint. It's not an easy tempo but it never drags: nice work from Reggie Nicholson and Pheeroan Aklaff.

The last time through A, Threadgill varies his pecking dee-dee-deedee figure for the first time (at 5:45). This tiny moment of entropy presages the brief horn calamity that starts the coda. A sonorous Csharp 7 is eventually agreed on except in the bass: Fred Hopkins swoops down to pound on his low F-sharp. This moment (a prolonged V dominant over i) is found in any piece of Beethoven but hardly ever appears in jazz. The tension is gratefully released in a satisfying blare of pure minor. Silver and Gold Baby, Silver and Gold from You Know the Number. Like "Soft Suicide," "Silver and Gold" is mysterious dirge with a slithering microtonal Hopkins introduction. But here the harmonic language is more complex, almost Ellingtonian. Diedre Murray is unnervingly scored at the top of her instrument. The weird staccato note in the melody sounds like a mistake, but it is exactly the same on the reprise. At about a minute into the track, Threadgill gets a few bars of Johnny Hodges-like statement, and you can almost hear the words, Silver and Gold, Baby! Silver and Gold The second chorus features an abstract Threadgill solo. The accompaniment of Murray and Hopkins (switching between arco and pizzicato) marks the tunes harmony but doesnt lock up anything like a piano player would. Threadgills last two impassioned notes almost an operatic appoggiatura ties up his solo perfectly (4:07). The third chorus reprises the tune with Murray an octave down, although the band makes it only halfway through before getting stuck on a dolorous vamp for Threadgill to preach over. "Black Hands Bejeweled" from Easily Slip Into Another World. In part one, Threadgill talks about writing everything out for the two drummers in the Sextett. Hard to imagine, but in this piece I hear that the toms are tuned almost like a scale and that there is a "thickness" to the beat that is quite unusual. Threadgill played with Mario Bauza, and "Black Hands" should be picked up by an ultra-savvy dance or wedding band. The composer

moves through mediant movement like a standard 19th-century opera composer: The tune is in G, then B-flat, then E. I adore the tiny bass melody, "G, A, B, D," that calls the tune out on to the floor. Tricky phrase lengths! The musicians can't rely on just having a good ear: they need to be staring at their charts to know which version of the cheerful off-beat line to play. Nice solos from the ensemble, too. If "Soft Suicide at the Baths" explores a certain kind of sadness to its fullest expression, "Black Hands Bejeweled" pursues a kind of perverse but genuine joy to the farthest mark. --During the Sextett years, Threadgill was almost really famous. Some of the records came out on a major label and he was even the subject of a Dewar's Profile. But then that group disbanded, and none of his groups since have achieved quite the same level of traction. Perhaps part of the problem was the ascent of the Young Lions. As I have written before on DTM, Henry Threadgill is the musician that could have really helped the Lions integrate the past with the present in a surreal and unforced way. But as far as I know, no post-Marsalis straight-ahead players have a relationship with Henry Threadgill. (Maybe that is just beginning to change...) Another relevant aspect to Threadgill is how he doesn't seem to have a clique. While he came out of the AACM, he is not tied to that aesthetic any more than anything else. He just loves to make weird and fun music that shows no regard for category. That's another way I wish Threadgill had been more influential: The jazz world was awfully cliquey for a time. Threadgill is above those concerns. He never needed to be part of the jazz world, then or now. Jazz's loss is general music's gain, I guess. He confidently asserts that high-level classical composers know about him and his work, and I believe he is right. I'm sure a few of those composers are working on decoding the system Threadgill is using for Zooid. The last two records on Pi, This Brings Us

To Vol. 1 and 2, showcase this latest atonal language, a language that definitely gets a certain sound out of the music. I admit that I could use the occasional non-language piece to offset the encroaching web! But, again, Threadgill never looks back, and he's hardly the first great composer to settle into a dauntingly abstract, granitic late music. One piece really caught me: "Polymorph" from This Brings Us To Vol. 2. The point about the web is counterpoint, and Zooid specializes in having the five members hang out in different areas, each a voice in charge of slowly mutating harmony. The first minute is a medium burn tune, then the solos begin. I love the tuba two octaves above the bass! Threadgill's muttering, barely played improvisation is cool, but the most intriguing solo may be by Stomu Takeishi. He and Eliot Humberto Kavee gather some steam, leading to a fierce final full band sequence that celebrates the blues. The blues is in everything that Threadgill has ever done. That's one reason he is so important, and why he has been able to cross genres the way he has. In part one, Threadgill says, "Ive always understood how music got created here in America, and that I was under no obligation to do any particular thing. I do exactly the way I feel, whatever I want to do." That's fine, but plenty of lesser American artists say the same type of thing with far less successful results. Threadgill's natural blues sensibility keeps him grounded in something real. The conclusion of "Polymorph" is thrilling because the magician's cape swirls out of the frame just enough for us to percieve that real blues in an unadulterated form. 05/21/2011