It’s been five years since Zooid, Henry Threadgill‘s longest-running ensemble, released the excellent Poof. Cut Where You Was marks his return to alto saxophone and flutes– he conducted his last two albums. This release coincides with the 25th anniversary of their debut, Up Popped the Two Lips. Cut You Where You Was differs from other Zooid albums in that Threadgill composed it with economy as the hub on which creativity turns. Given the band’s almost instinctual comfort with the leader’s compositional approach, they move out onto a ledge in these (mostly) brief pieces. Threadgill arranged them with built-in permissiveness and flexibility within the interval-based compositional system. Its distinctive musical syntax guarantees that harmonic…
Tag Archive: Henry Threadgill
Though the century-old Pulitzer prize – launched as a celebration of the craft and social necessity of good news reportage – was eventually expanded to include fiction and music by 1943, the US-born art of jazz has only been represented by Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis in their lifetimes, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk posthumously – and most recently Henry Threadgill, for his four-part suite In for a Penny, In for a Pound, in 2016.
Publisher Joseph Pulitzer once declared his dreams for his readership were “to arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy … stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, and awaken their conscience”. Contemporary-classical composer and flautist Threadgill has been…
The ever-exploratory composer Henry Threadgill is more restless than ever at 81 and, thank goodness, shows no signs of slowing down. Listen Ship is his latest long-form composition and, like some of his more recent recordings, features him as a conductor and composer, not as a soloist. This 16-part suite was composed for four acoustic guitarists, two bassists, and two pianists. The lineup includes guitarists Bill Frisell, Brandon Ross, Miles Okazaki, and Gregg Belisle-Chi, with bassists Jerome Harris and Stomu Takeishi, and pianists Maya Keren and Rahul Carlberg. Ross has been working with the composer since the early 1990s, and Takeishi and Harris have worked with him sporadically for decades. Listen Ship is linked to 1994’s Song out of My Trees…