Henry Threadgill's Repertory Club Bands
A new Thread in the canon
Be Ever Out
Albums create the idea that musical ideas are finished and complete. This might be true, especially the closer you get to popular commodity, but is often an illusion, no more so than when it comes to music that uses improvisation, and further so for artists who are constantly moving toward a culminating point. The great 20th century example of that was Miles Davis, and the great 21st century one is Henry Threadgill.
Like Miles, Threadgill has gone through several distinctive concepts and styles, most of which can be heard on records: the trio Air with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall; the Sextett; Very Very Circus; Make A Move; and Zooid (his current large ensemble music is still so fresh and mercurial that it can’t quite be pinned down yet). Most of this legacy—except for Zooid—is going to be celebrated at Roulette, June 20-21, with a series called “Be Ever Out: The Music of Henry Threadgill.” Four repertory bands, each with a saxophonist in Threadgill’s place, will play music from four different eras.
The project comes out of last year’s Big Ears festival, which featured a Threadgill retrospective and launched the Air Legacy Trio (Marty Ehrlich, Hilliard Greene, Pheeroan akLaff) and the Very Very Circus Legacy Project, which have been ongoing. They’ll be joined by the Sextett Legacy Band and a new version of Make A Move.
Air and the seven-piece Sextett had consistent personnel and the music on the records has the quality of Threadgill establishing and working through his ideas about the jazz ensemble and compositional traditions, they feel like they come to an end when he gets to the last thought (the last Sextett album, Rag, Bush and All states this clearly). The first Very Very Circus album, Spirit of Nuff… Nuff (Black Saint, 1990), is his Bitches Brew-like career divider, not just a move into electric bands but into ensembles and music that grow fluid, with personnel and musical structures bleeding from one record and style to another—this is where the albums are valuable but also snapshots that can’t include everything outside the margins. Like Miles, Threadgill’s discography from this point is much less about this or that album but how a series of albums makes a complete whole (Zooid, which plays a demanding and inspired free contrapuntal music, makes much more sense and is most meaningful as a whole, not in parts).
Guitarist Brandon Ross is a key connecting point from 1990 to the debut of Zooid, playing with Threadgill in both the Very Very Circus and the intriguing and enigmatic Make A Move band, along with transitional albums like Song Out of My Trees (Black Saint, 1993) that connect the two. Winds player Marty Ehrlich has been a colleague of Threadgill’s for decades, and plays saxophone and flute in the Air Legacy Trio. They graciously took the time to talk with me about playing the music, and the idea of Threadgill as repertory composer (interviewed separately, I’ve edited the transcripts together thematically).
You were a big part of these original bands, playing in Very Very Circus and Make A Move, and also through the period in between when one transformed into another. What was it like to be part of that?
Brandon Ross: Yeah, it was interesting because I remember the summer Henry put it together. He created the project to get some work out and [make] money for everybody and he's an insanely prolific composer, so he wrote all that music. First and foremost Henry is a composer, or a chef, like someone who's experimenting with ingredients and combinations and textures and flavors and colors things like that and then as he’s said himself, he starts hearing something and he assembles a band to get the sound that he's hearing.
One of the things that has come up in the Very Very Circus rehearsals, Noah Becker, who is occupying that chair that was Henry's—it had been Yosvany Terry, but his schedule was prohibitive—and Noah is also an engraver, he does most of putting Henry’s things into [printed] scores and making parts these days. And so what happens occasionally is a piece will come in that Noah has transcribed, nice neat new parts and I'm like, “Yeah, this isn't right.”
“What do you mean?”
It's like it's from the score, but it's not. It's not correct because here's the handwritten part of Henry’s, and the other thing is that the music always evolves from the time Henry scores it, so I was thinking about this in terms of repertory and the composer. And I said, the same thing happened to Jesus, he wasn't around, people said it must be he meant this or that, it’s what we're gonna keep! It was such an important thing to have a direct experience with that, [even] guarding the so-called imperfections.
Air was something of a repertory band too, playing Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton, and rethinking jazz from those roots.
Marty Ehrlich: Right, and it's funny. I was talking with Henry the other day. I'm planning some gigs in the fall too, to add a Muhal [Richard Abrams] piece and some stuff that actually Henry played on, and we played on together, and he was like, “Hey we did Scott Joplin!” And of course Air doing Scott Joplin, and let's not forget that Muhal and Braxton did a duo record with Scott [Anthony Braxton with Muhal Richard Abrams, Duets, Arista, 1976; they play “Maple Leaf Rag”]. I think Air did great stuff with it. They really thought how to do this in a way that was their own while being fully respectful to the material.
Has there been a process of this repertory changing through playing so that the music is different than when Henry wrote it?
Ross: What I would say is any time I write a piece of music…can you put it in the hands of people? Can you start hearing it without having to conceive of it and then you say, OK this is what it needs to do and then that becomes the way it's done. But if [you’re working] from a score you're going to be referencing a particular iteration, but not one that has been lived in. And then, if it's been [recorded], then you can say, OK well, that's what this is and this doesn't reconcile with this written part so which [is it]?
We were talking about this. I was thinking, [is it] Make A Move revisited, the Sextett revisited? And for people to interpret this music, to move it along further, not just a memorialized reading which I don't think Henry would be very much interested in that…For [Henry], it's like looking back at a scrapbook, “Oh yeah here I was writing like that. I was interested in this phase of dealing with the music like that and that's interesting to see how that led to this other thing,” you know?
Technologies of the day change. I was playing a different guitar for each of those bands and the orchestration and the sound of the ensemble was impacted by those choices. The way this stuff is set up, Henry was hearing these voices and balancing orchestration and assigning things based on that. It's really interesting to be involved in it. It also tends to make me very nostalgic, which I don't like so much. We spent hours and hours and hours working on these pieces, and then traveling and touring, and they got that level of development from night to night that by the time you go to record they're on fire. So coming back to that now, I go, “How was I doing that?” I'm thinking about this stuff totally differently now. So I have to let go of what was and say, where are we now? I have to say I don't envy any of the saxophone players.
What's it like to be playing in Threadgill's place?
Ehrlich: That’s the wrong way to think about it, or I'm not thinking about it. For one thing that's different about doing the Air Legacy Trio [than] the other groups, which [include] a number of the people who were in those [original] groups, what we eventually called the Air Legacy Trio is a collective, and though I worked a lot with Fred Hopkins, and a little bit with Steve McCall, and Pheeroan worked with Fred and Henry in New Air, we weren’t playing with Air. But I love the idea of legacy as the continuation of this collective focusing on Henry as composer. It’s not a ghost band, I’m not hitting the road with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
Is Henry involved in the rehearsal process?
Ross: Not at all!
I spoke to Henry the first time we did Very Very Circus and one of the people we could not find was Masujaa, the other guitarist. Miles Okazaki is playing, an excellent guitarist…the music is not necessarily about being an excellent musician. It's about the chemistry of a collection of individuals, and when you get into repertory, I think that is the thing that can be lost. Because you have this thing on the page and you're approaching it [as a] composition, but the bands have typically been assembled by personalities, how [does] this person sound, they'll get this section of this thing right?
What’s the balance between repertory and putting your own stamp on things?
Ehrlich: Doing Henry's music is right in line with how I do my own music. Henry and I have been friends for decades. We are very different players, but I'd like to think that we're both intelligent players, and I know we are.
Let's get into what defines this band. Pheeroan I have done hundreds of gigs together, I don't even know—I mean he's on my records—we've played together so much. We have a long history so I just see this group as an extension of what I've been doing for decades. We've really had a great thing gelling with Hilliard, and we've been having fun and emotional resonance [playing] a continuous set where we connect four or five compositions with improvisational context.
Henry does a lot of notation, he sent me a lot of music. [This] music was fifty years ago and it's a lot of his first [compositions]. So I'm playing “Air Song” [from Air Song, 1975], for example, which is an important, beautiful flute piece. There's a couple unison lines between the bass and the flute and then there's the solo flute sections. These are fairly extensive and they sound beautifully improvised, but it turns out they are beautifully composed, in a way that—because in the end composition and improvisation are the same thing just one is written down— Henry had written out. So we had a great laugh over that, and then there's other pieces that were [sketches], they fill out much more through [improvisation], so [Henry] uses the whole 360º of approaches.
What this music has always been about, what Air always was about, was the idea of collective composition. And I really enjoy [this] because I have great respect and a lot of affection for Henry, for a long friendship and sharing all that community together.
Be Ever Out is at Roulette, with the Very Very Circus Legacy Band and Air Legacy Trio, 8 p.m. June 20, and the Sextett Legacy Band and Make A Move, 8 p.m. June 21.
Good listening to all.
Most of the Air albums, half of the Sextett ones, and Too Much Sugar for a Dime and Live at Koncepts by the Very Very Circus are not on any streaming service, a good reason to buy copies.
You can warm up for Be Ever Out with the Jazztopad NYC festival, which runs through June 18. Most of the shows are at Lincoln Center, including the David Rubenstein Atrium and Immanuel Wilkins and the Lutosławski Quartet playing at Dizzy’s Club.