Henry Threadgill

Henry Threadgill’s music is regularly described as avant-garde, a label that can make it sound forbidding. But beneath its asymmetrical forms and unusual instrumental colours lie the sounds he absorbed on Chicago’s South Side: blues, gospel, marching bands, ragtime and the freedom encouraged by the AACM (the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). His playing is immediately recognisable: a dry, vocalised alto sound, tart and bluesy, balanced by a spacious approach to the flute. But it is his approach to composition—particularly the balance between notated music and improvisation—that makes his contribution unique. Many of his ensemble pieces have a joyous forward momentum, with the soloists woven into the musical texture rather than stepping forward for conventional jazz solo spots. As his career progressed, he transformed the freedoms of 1960s and ’70s jazz into something increasingly slippery, melodic and intricately organised.

His first great vehicle was Air, the cooperative trio with bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall. With no piano or other chordal instrument, all three players could move between melody, rhythm and accompaniment. Whilst there is plenty of skronk to satisfy free-jazz fans, Threadgill also used the format to rethink ragtime and early jazz without lapsing into pastiche. Live Air catches the original trio at full stretch, its extended performances both loose and tightly argued. After McCall left, Pheeroan akLaff joined New Air; Air Show No. 1, with Cassandra Wilson, offers a more song-centred offshoot.

Threadgill repeatedly reinvented his ensembles and their instrumentation. X-75 used four reeds, four basses and voice, while the Henry Threadgill Sextett was actually a septet—he counted its two drummers as a single percussion unit. Very Very Circus paired electric guitarists Brandon Ross and Masujaa—later Ross and Ed Cherry—with tuba players Marcus Rojas and Edwin Rodriguez, alongside French horn and drums. In the absence of a conventional bassist, the tubas provide both bass weight and agile counterpoint, anchoring the group’s lurching grooves without being confined to them. Carry the Day and Spirit of Nuff...Nuff offer the clearest introduction to Very Very Circus’s bright, clashing colours. Threadgill’s flute brings moments of welcome dreaminess to both albums, floating above their dense polyrhythms. Makin’ a Move goes further, alternating Very Very Circus with chamber combinations of acoustic guitars and cellos. The more elusive Song Out of My Trees reveals his gift for unusual small-group textures.

For Zooid, his principal 21st-century ensemble, Threadgill formalised an interval-based language that gives each musician a distinct route through the music. The name comes from biology: a zooid is an individual animal that functions as part of a larger colony, like a polyp within a coral colony. An apt metaphor for the way the players move independently while contributing to the ensemble as a whole. Liberty Ellman’s lean, jagged guitar lines are central to its sound. Earlier Zooid recordings also included Stomu Takeishi on bass guitar, but on later albums such as Poof and In for a Penny, In for a Pound, José Davila’s tuba and Christopher Hoffman’s cello provide the low end without a conventional bassist. Lines snag, overlap and suddenly cohere into an off-kilter swing. The CD-only This Brings Us to Vol. 1, Poof and In for a Penny, In for a Pound trace the group’s development, with the last winning the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. Beyond Zooid, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs introduces Ensemble Double Up, with twin pianos and twin alto saxophones.

His collaborations provide useful side roads. Ming places him inside David Murray’s surging octet; Made in Chicago reunites him with Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and Jack DeJohnette; and the new Fifteen, with Vijay Iyer and Dafnis Prieto, shows his responsiveness undimmed. Begin with Zooid, where Threadgill’s intricate writing is tempered by melody and supple grooves; then move back through the vivid instrumental colours of Very Very Circus before exploring the rawer freedoms of Air.