‘Easily Slip Into Another World’ Review: Henry Threadgill’s Jazz Voyages

 ‘Easily Slip Into Another World’ Review: Henry Threadgill’s Jazz Voyages

The innovative saxophonist and composer delivers the story of a life devoted to a form of music always seeking new horizons.

By Clifford Thompson

June 16, 2023 WSJ

““Music is everything that makes the musician,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz composer, saxophonist and flautist Henry Threadgill notes in “Easily Slip Into Another World,” his fascinating memoir not only of a life devoted to music, but of music shaped by life. “Family, friends, hardships, joys, the sounds on the street, how tight you buckle your belt, the person who happens to be sitting across from you in the subway car, what you ate for breakfast—all of it.”

Indeed, during a recording career that has spanned nearly half a century, leading and composing for a succession of ensembles that includes Air, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, Very Very Circus, Make a Move and Zooid, Mr. Threadgill has created music that eschews the traditional structure of jazz tunes for an often thrilling everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sound. In works that range from joyous to introspective, instrumentalists frequently do not so much solo as come to the fore against richly textured, polyphonous backgrounds; a wonderful complexity informs even Mr. Threadgill’s quieter, more stripped-down compositions. A track may fade out at the end, as if the listener has been privy to part of a continuing thought process, or it may reach a clear destination via an alternate route.

As a budding musician, Mr. Threadgill drew inspiration from the works of the saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, traces of whose sounds, especially those of the free-jazz pioneer Coleman, can sometimes be heard in Mr. Threadgill’s compositions. (“Rag, Bush and All,” Mr. Threadgill’s 1989 album contains distinct echoes of Coleman’s seminal “Free Jazz” from 1961.) In Mr. Threadgill’s career, his artistic restlessness, one that has mirrored his personal restlessness and that calls to mind the careers of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, has resulted in continual innovation.

Mr. Threadgill’s life has been extraordinarily colorful. He was born in Chicago in 1944 and spent his early years near Groveland Park in “a big and noisy apartment” that was crowded with relatives. (His parents were separated.) When he was growing up, local radio stations played a dizzying variety of music, and young Henry absorbed it all. He regularly attended the local Church of God in Christ (his grandmother was a member); visiting singers included Mahalia Jackson and James Cleveland. Henry’s mother, who had studied piano, took him to concerts beginning when he was a toddler—he heard performers such as Louis Jordan and Lucky Millinder.

Another regular feature of Mr. Threadgill’s early years was racism. In 1954 his family moved to Chicago’s racially mixed neighborhood of Englewood, where police and adult neighbors sometimes seemed to be out to kill Henry and his friends.

In Englewood, Henry began taking piano lessons. During those years he was “captivated” by Parker’s music, and by age 14 or 15, he writes, “I knew I had to play the saxophone.” Meanwhile, in high school, he recalls, “I fell in with a crowd of dedicated miscreants” and was often “drunk at eight o’clock in the morning, before I even arrived at school.” After being expelled, he got himself together and was readmitted, but he continued to struggle with schoolwork—mainly because, at night, he would sneak out of the house with the saxophone his grandmother had bought him and go to music clubs, where “you never knew what was going to happen. Somebody might show you something.” Toward the end of high school, he began composing, inspired by Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” which was “like an alarm clock going off.” In 1962 Mr. Threadgill enrolled in Wilson Junior College to study music. His courses sparked a lifelong interest in eclectic intellectual pursuits, including Russian literature, existentialist philosophy and abstract expressionist painting. He graduated in 1964 and began studies at the American Conservatory of Music.

The Vietnam War interrupted his education. In 1966 he became a member of the 437th Army Band, stationed at Fort Riley, in Kansas, getting promoted to head arranger for the top band there. That assignment came to an abrupt end after his arrangement of a medley of “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America” and other iconic patriotic songs—for which Mr. Threadgill took inspiration from the spiky melodies of Thelonious Monk. Mr. Threadgill’s work so enraged the higher-ups that they deployed him to Vietnam. He became a member of the Fourth Infantry Band but also a soldier: “At any moment, you had to be ready to drop your clarinet . . . and grab your M-16.”

Mr. Threadgill’s war stories, which comprise the book’s dramatic high point, are numerous and wild, never straining credulity even as they sometimes defy belief. He was injured during the Tet Offensive. (For a time, his injury left him addicted to painkillers.) Like everything else in his life, Mr. Threadgill’s wartime experiences would influence his music: “One of the main ways that war transforms you has to do with your sense of hearing,” he tells us. “You acquire a heightened sensitivity to sound.” After returning to the U.S., he discovered that quite a few musicians he knew had also served in Vietnam. “So many of us saw action,” he notes, “that you have to wonder what effect it had on the development of the music.”

Back home, Mr. Threadgill completed his bachelor’s degree from the American Conservatory, became affiliated with the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and put a group together with the bassist Fred Hopkins and the drummer Steve McCall. First known as Reflections, they later renamed themselves Air. Reviews of their live performances called for them to make records, and the recording industry took notice. Air’s first album, “Air Song,” was released in 1975. By the end of that year, the trio—along with many members of AACM—moved to New York, which has since been Mr. Threadgill’s main base of operations. While Air’s first albums were largely improvised, the group’s later works, such as “Open Air Suit” (1978), were “almost entirely written,” Mr. Threadgill notes. In composing for Air, he was greatly influenced by the Ahmad Jamal Trio, particularly its “sense of space.” Its musicians, he tells us, “could lock into a groove, but they also knew how to be elliptical: to play a hint or a dollop in a way that suggested more.”

Over the course of leading eight groups and releasing dozens of albums—including the Sextett’s “Easily Slip Into Another World” (1987), Very Very Circus’s “Carry the Day” (1994), Make a Move’s “Everybodys Mouth’s a Book” (2001) and Zooid’s “In for a Penny, In for a Pound” (2015), which won the Pulitzer—Mr. Threadgill’s musical direction has shifted quite a few times, according to his tendency to “start hearing something totally different.” Mr. Threadgill’s book reveals him to be not only a musician, composer and innovator, but a musical intellectual, one for whom all of life translates into art. “Some people might have a tendency to forget the full variety of their experience,” he notes. “I hold on to all of it.””

Mr. Thompson’s books include “What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues.”

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Appeared in the June 17, 2023, print edition as 'All That Makes the Musician'.