Music: From the Archives, Henry Threadgill

On the occasion of the release of the new Zoooid recording Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry Spp (Pi Recordings, more about the disc in another post).  I thought I’d dig up this Wall Street Journal piece from 2010.

• NY CULTURE
• November 9, 2010

A Jazz Man With His Own Vocabulary

Once Confined to the Margins of the Scene, Henry Threadgill Returns to the Stage

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By MARTIN JOHNSON

For a quarter century beginning in the mid-1970s, reedman and composer Henry Threadgill was a dominant force on the jazz and contemporary-classical music scenes. He led a variety of ensembles with increasingly idiosyncratic names like Air, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, the Very Very Circus, Make a Move and Zooid. These groups pushed the boundaries of both jazz and new music, yet they also trafficked in familiar elements like tangos, marches and fanfares. It was easy to become a Henry Threadgill fan without being a lover of jazz or new-music.

“What first struck me about Henry’s work is its lyricism,” said Butch Morris, a composer, cornetist and conductor who has followed Mr. Threadgill’s career since the ’70s. “He’s taken familiar forms and really advanced them.”

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Amy Sussman for The Wall Street JournalSaxophonist Henry Threadgill and his group Zooid will perform this week at Roulette in SoHo.

Then about eight years ago, Mr. Threadgill faded to the margins. He released no widely distributed recordings, and was heard in concert only sporadically. He finally returned last autumn with his band, Zooid, on “This Brings Us To, Vol. I,” (Pi Recordings), which was widely hailed as one of the best jazz recordings of the year.

This season, Mr. Threadgill is much more prominent, with “This Brings Us To, Vol. II” (Pi) and Mosaic Records’s limited-edition eight-disc retrospective, “The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air.” In addition, Zooid is to perform Mr. Threadgill’s newest works at Roulette in SoHo for three nights this week beginning Thursday.

Over drinks at an Italian café near his East Village home, Mr. Threadgill said the hiatus gave his band time to master his new style of composing music. “I have completely left the majorminor system in favor of a chromatic way,” he said.

Liberty Ellman, Zooid’s guitarist, added via email, “It’s a system for developing harmony and counterpoint from a set of intervals that originate in chord analysis.”

For Mr. Threadgill, one of the key goals of the new system was to facilitate collective improvisation along the lines of early jazz. Mr. Ellman said it was a challenge to learn the new system. “It’s difficult at first to put aside your pre-existing vocabulary while learning to play Henry’s music, but over time it becomes intuitive and it really opens your ears up to a larger musical universe.”

Mr. Threadgill, 66 years old, was born and raised in Chicago. He moved to New York in the mid ’70s and made his first mark with Air, a trio featuring bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall. Their 1979 recording, “Air Lore,” which is included in the Mosaic set, offered reinterpretations of the music of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton, and is acclaimed as one of the best jazz recordings of the late ’70s. “He’s one of the only musicians who has gone beyond the surface markers of Morton’s style,” said Anthony Coleman, a pianist and composer who recently also released a recording of Morton’s music. “It’s more than mere photo-realism.”

In the early ’80s, Mr. Threadgill presented his Sextett. He explained that the second ‘t’ in the group’s name highlighted the fact that their music was written for six instruments, though it was played by seven musicians (the drum part required two men). “You can have a quartet sung by 40 musicians, 10 singing each part,” he said. “I wanted my music to be viewed with the same respect.”

Other Threadgill ensembles included on the Mosaic collection typically feature unusual instrumentation. The Very Very Circus features two tuba players. “Hopkins spoiled me,” Mr. Threadgill said, referring to Air’s bass player. “Regular walking bass lines make the music too slow.”

Make a Move blends electric guitar with accordion and harmonium. The unifying element is Mr. Threadgill’s horn: His alto saxophone has a gritty, emotional quality, often an urgent voice above a wealth of intriguing rhythms.

The Mosaic box also includes unreleased work from Mr. Threadgill’s rarely heard X-75 ensemble. Unfortunately, some of the composer’s most intriguing ensembles have gone unrecorded. For instance, a YouTube clip from a concert in Hamburg, Germany, in 1988 is one of the few public documentations of his 18-piece Society Situation Dance Band. Mr. Threadgill felt it should only be heard in concert.

Mr. Threadgill still lives in the same neighborhood he moved to in the mid ’70s, and has seen the East Village change enormously since then. Yet he continues to find great inspiration sitting in Tompkins Square Park. “You can still learn so much from watching and listening to what goes on there.”

—Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.

Sports: Sometimes Coaches Get Tired Too

Six years ago I was interviewing an NBA head coach (who shall remain nameless because the comment in the title of the post was made off the record).  We hit it off pretty well and he kept talking well after my allotted ten minutes, so I began asking him stuff I’ve always wanted to ask coaches.  One of the queries centered on why coaches so rarely substitute in overtime.  It seems like unless a player collapses and is carted away in an ambulance then coaches stick with the lineup on the floor regardless of performance or situation dictates.

Coach paused after I asked (I didn’t cite the ambulance or anything like that).  Then he said almost apologetically, “sometimes coaches get tired too.”  He went on to talk about overtime games almost invariably involve a last shot scenario or two and other strategic maneuvers. “It’s draining.  I mean it’s draining if you’re out there on the floor, but it’s draining if you’re on the sideline too.”

I thought about coach’s comments during the final minute of overtime of the Miami Heat’s 115-111 win over the Boston Celtics in game two of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals.  With 46 seconds to go Boston was down 110-105 and Miami had the ball.  Boston didn’t foul intentionally.  Boston had taken a timeout with 59 seconds to go to draw up a play that resulted in a missed Kevin Garnett jump shot, one assumes that they had marching orders for either a make or miss scenario.  Instead, the Celtics let the Heat run more than 20 seconds off the clock, take a shot, get the rebound and then they resorted to fouling.

It was a crucial error.  Facing a deficit with 46 seconds to go, you want to maximize the number of possessions your team has.  In addition, the Heat shot a miserable 65.9% from the free throw line.  One would think that say Ray Allen (who had only two fouls, would have been assigned to foul the ball handler asap.  Instead, the clocked ticked away.  When Boston finally did foul, the Heat missed only one of their six free throws yet Rajon Rondo, playing the best game of his NBA career (maybe his life, I only know him as a pro) sunk two three pointers to bring the Celtics back within hailing distance but the clock ran out on them.

Coulda

Woulda

Shudda??

Hindsight is 20/20.  Maybe it was  a missed communication from the bench.  Maybe Rivers wasn’t tired; he did substitute Sasha Pavlovic for Brandon Bass in the final seconds in order to have as many perimeter shooters on the floor as possible.

Anyway, we’re halfway to a Heat-Spurs finals, though Boston’s game effort tonight showed that their defeat isn’t necessarily the forgone conclusion.  They played well enough to win.

Sports: There’s No D in OKC

The Oklahoma City Thunder have been a popular favorite to go to the NBA Finals since the end of the lockout in November, but I’ve had doubts.  Those doubts increased during the season even as the Thunder solidified their status as an elite team.  The reason was simple: their defense wasn’t ready for the prime time of the Finals.  San Antonio demonstrated Tuesday night with an efficiency that bordered on brutal during their 120-111 win.

In the first half the Spurs scored a pedestrian sounding 55 points but their offensive prowess was masked by a slow pace.  The team scored those 55 points on a mere 38 shots. Their Offensive Efficiency for the half was more than 122 points per 100 possessions.  Just for point of reference, the Spurs were the most efficient team in the NBA this season averaging 108.5 points per 100 possessions, so in the first half, they were more than 10% better than their season average and they were doing it against the third best team in the league!

Then came the third quarter,  the Spurs put on an offensive display that should be packaged on video and distributed to every sports fan in the world.  Cool, crisp passes, expertly set screens, they demonstrated that basketball could indeed be a beautiful game.  During a six minute stretch spanning 12 possessions, the Spurs scored ten baskets, five from behind the arc.  Their efficiency rating for that stretch 208 points, yes 208 points per 100 possessions.

The lone problem with the Spurs run was that everything was from the perimeter.  Unlike the fourth quarter of game one when the Spurs went into the road business and paved such streets as Manu Ginobili Boulevard, Tony Parker Turnpike, and Tim Duncan Parkway and every one of these roads led to the rim, Tuesday night, the Spurs were raining mayhem on the Thunder from outside.  Those shots stopped falling, and the Thunder were able to close  22 point deficit to single digits in the fourth quarter.

Oklahoma City can be  a premier defensive team.  In their first trip to the playoffs two years ago, they were in the top ten in Defensive Efficiency.  However, they have regressed and the Spurs have found ways to beat them inside and outside.  The Thunder may win a game in Oklahoma City, but barring a major injury, the Thunder’s run looks done, and their offseason agenda has been spelled out to them.

Sports: Eastern Conference Finals Game One

Sometimes if you can’t stop an opponent’s best player then slowing him down will do.  That was the case in Monday night’s opening game of the Eastern Conference Finals.  The Miami Heat beat the Boston Celtics 93-79 outscoring them 47-33 after intermission due in large part to their ability to slow Kevin Garnett.  The Celtics future Hall of Fame power forward had a nice night overall, 23 points 10 rebounds a steal, block and an assist, but most of the damage came before halftime.  In the second half, the Heat used different defensive alignments to double Garnett on the perimeter, often with Mario Chalmers, whose assignment, Rajon Rondo was sloshing through a horrible 8-20 shooting night.  Garnett before halftime scored 13 points on six of eight shooting.  Afterward he shot only three of eight, and his teammates were unable to help out.  Paul Pierce and Ray Allen combined for meager 18 points on a combined six of 25 from the field.

The game story was that the Heat ran away from the Celtics in the second half.  47 points isn’t running very fast, but without Garnett at the top of his game, the Celtics were reduced to a crawl.

Martin Johnson wrote a weekly NBA column for the New York Sun from 2003-’08, and for www.theroot.com from 2008-’10.  His sportswriting has also appeared in the NY Times, Wall St. Journal and the Atlantic Monthly.

Music: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (Well, Appreciate) Nostalgia

During my nearly three decades as a music journalist I was devotedly open minded.  No genre was beneath my contempt.  I was equally fascinated by the opportunity to write about mainstream phenomenon like N’Sync as I was personal favorites like Stereolab.  But there was one thing I unequivocally despised: nostalgia.  I hated the idea of music being a device to recall some earlier time in one’s life.  Music to my thinking was by its very essence in the present. It should relate to whatever was going on in that moment.  To assign music to a role as the soundtrack of a fond memory was in my mind to commodify it.    Music deserved better; I considered part of my job to insure that it got its due.

And it was my job, well for nearly three decades, but now that I write about music less, I’m more willing to take time and listen to things that aren’t the latest releases, so sorry Jenny Scheinman and Mischief and Mayhem, Robert Glasper, Theo Bleckmann, Henry Threadgill and others.  If the spirit moves me, I might listen to something else instead of your stellar new recordings.  And it was during a phase of indulging those something elses that I made my detente with nostalgia.

About a month ago, WKCR-FM, was engaged in its annual Duke Ellington birthday marathon.  It was a Sunday, and I usually listen to the Sunday morning trio of programs, Morning Ragas, Amazing Grace, and The Moonshine Show, as my background noise (yes, ragas, gospel and bluegrass I was raised to have eclectic tastes).  However that Sunday they were playing Duke, and I was enraptured as so many of their selections were from the ’60s and even the ’70s, not necessarily the most widely loved part of the maestro’s catalog. But albums like Money Jungle, The Drum is a Woman, and especially Afro-Eurasian Eclipse have great significance to me.  They were the first Ellington recordings that I pilfered from either my parent’s or my siblings collections and “Eclipse” was the first Duke recording that I bought at the age of 13.

I still recall the stoner at the record store telling me “hey little man if you’re getting into Duke, there’s lots more to hear.”  Unfortunately my family moved out of our hip Chicago neighborhood to a Dallas community that didn’t even have a record store, much less one with counterpeople eager to turn kids onto Ellington.

I listened to the Ellington broadcast all afternoon as my setting changed from home where I did administrative work for the food shop I help manage to moonlighting gig at a wine shop where I’m the Sunday/Monday shopkeep.  The memories alone were cool, but what moved me more was the music.  I always felt that my first Ellington recordings had been my training wheels for the deeper richer stuff elsewhere in his catalogue, but listening to these recordings sometimes repeatedly (‘KCR would do well to use a master playlist during its birthday celebrations), I heard a bracing modernity creep into the Duke’s trademark elegance.  At that point in his career, Ellington had bushels of laurels to rest on but he wasn’t.  He was restlessly trying to integrate what he heard in that moment with his current sound.  In hearing the music again, I heard what I loved about Elllington as a teenager and what I loved about it now.  I think found myself in a parallel quest to Duke’s with my own professional life.

I wrote off the Ellington experience as a product of Duke’s greatness.  Then six days later, it happened again.  This time it was Saturday night and I was getting home from a long busy day at the market/cafe where I manage the cheese, charcuterie and beer departments.  I stared at the pile of new discs that awaited my attention and didn’t know where to begin so I pulled up an internet radio station and searched for Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, which to my delight the station had in its entirety.

Ashley’s opera was one of the first that I encountered after hearing the groundbreaking Phillip Glass/Robert Wilson work, Einstein on the Beach.  I first heard Einstein in college and frankly, it was great music to drop acid with but I was never convinced that it achieved its full potential.  To me, it opened the door for contemporary commentary in an operatic setting but refused to go further.  Not Perfect Lives.  It was a proudly contemporary work with a smug, inquisitive and engaging voice providing tons of commentary and stylistic innovations.  I stumbled onto it during the summer separating junior and senior year.  I was sharing a  sublet from a Professor with  a classmate who was an avid classical music fan.  Daily we debated which movement of Perfect Lives would function as our soundtrack.  For a pair of 21 year olds looking to find our voice articulated in the larger world beyond campus, it was beyond thrilling to find it in this innovative opera.

While visions of that old sublet in Morningside Heights came to mind, so to did a renewed appreciation of Ashley’s vision.  It seemed as current as the dinner I was preparing.  Small wonder that nearly 30 years after its original release it was reworked into Vidas Perfectas in a production sponsored by Ballroom Marfa among others.

These two listening experiences didn’t just take me back, they connected the dots from me then to me now, and in doing so I found some ideas and directions as to what happens next.    I don’t know if that’s what always happens when people hear “Tracks of My Tears,” or “Layla,” but I know from first hand experience that it’s possible.  So I’ll save my unequivocal disdain for other targets.

Martin Johnson used to write about music for a living; now he writes about music because it makes him feel a little more alive.  His work is still occasionally published in the Wall Street Journal.

Sports: Western Conference Finals Game 1: My Smallball is Better Than Your Smallball

The conventional narrative about sports is that the player or team that wants it more usually wins.  The truth is that while desire plays a part, usually both teams or players want it with roughly equal zeal and that the difference in most contests in the strategic deployment of the talent.

During the quarter break between the third and fourth quarters of Sunday’s Game 1 of the NBA Western Conference Finals, San Antonio Spurs coach  Gregg Popovich was captured on camera exhorting his team to dig deeper and play harder “get nasty” is one of the terms I recall.  The Spurs then went out and outscored the Oklahoma City Thunder 39-27 in the final frame to turn a 71-62 deficit into a 101-98 win.   Much credit was given to Pop’s words, but it was Pop’s coaching skill not his motivational ones that turned the game in the Spurs favor.  

San Antonio is the deeper team and Pop’s deployment of that depth turned the game.  The Spurs not only went to a smallball lineup but an unusual one with wings Stephen Jackson and Gary Neal playing in place of starters Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green.  The impact on the OKC defense was well, nasty, the Spurs spread the floor allowing Manu Ginobili substantial driving room en route to 11 points in the period.  When the defense collapsed on Ginobili, Neal punished them with three perimeter jumpers.  In addition this lineup was stellar defensively.  Jackson kept OKC All Star forward Kevin Durant from getting to his spots.  Durant had 27 points for the game but only six in the fourth quarter, all on free throws.  In other words OKC’s premiere sharpshooter wasn’t allowed to breakdown the Spurs defense.

Now the onus is on the OKC coaching staff, not presumably to exhort their troops with greater emotion but to remake their alignments.  Thunder forward Serge Ibaka, the NBA’s premier shot blocker, played only 22 minutes while the Spurs scored half of their 101 points at the rim.  The Thunder are as advertised the younger faster team.  They are also a team reliant on outside shooting so going big isn’t a tenable option.  Instead they will have to find a way to make their smallball better than the San Antonio smallball.  OKC’s coach Scott Brooks is a superb tactician, but his opponent is well, nasty.

Martin Johnson wrote a weekly NBA column for the New York Sun from 2003-’08, and for www.theroot.com from 2008-’10.  His sportswriting has also appeared in the NY Times, Wall St. Journal and the Atlantic Monthly.

Sports: The Spurs Portfolio

John Hollinger of ESPN made my case for San Antonio Spurs to win the Western Conference Finals that start Sunday night in Texas.  So I’ll just quote him

“San Antonio’s numbers of late are video-game crazy: The Spurs not only have 18 straight wins, but they are 32-3 in their past 35 games. The most amazing stat is that they’re 24-3 in their past 27 road games, with two of three defeats coming when they decided to rest their starters.

That’s the scarier part; when you take out games the Spurs tanked, they’re record really starts looking good. In the last 47 games Tony Parker played, for instance, they’re 43-4.”

At last check Tony Parker plans to play against the Thunder.  It took the Spurs several months to lose four games with him.  I don’t think that they’re about to lose four in two weeks.

In addition, the Spurs played the Thunder three times this season.  They won two out of three.  Manu Ginobili missed all three.  He plans to play this series too.

I like the Thunder and I hope they’ll hold a championship celebration at Chesapeake Energy Arena, but this isn’t that year.