DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

That is FRESH AIR. Composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill has led a wide range of colourful, small and enormous bands from A to Z – particularly, from Air to Zooid. He was named an NEA jazz grasp in 2020 4 years after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his composition “In For A Penny, In For A Pound.” Threadgill has two new releases, a three-movement suite for a 12-piece ensemble and an autobiography. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead has this assessment.

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KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Henry Threadgill’s ensemble from his album “The Different One,” timed to the discharge of his autobiography “Simply Slip Into One other World,” written with Brent Hayes Edwards. Threadgill is an efficient storyteller about rising up in Chicago, temporary encounters with John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Arthur Rubinstein, and the way wartime Vietnam honed his listening abilities as a survival mechanism. If his tales generally appear a bit too neat, who does not polish up a story within the retelling?

Henry Threadgill’s guide “Simply Slip Into One other World” illuminates his pondering as a jazz composer and bandleader for 50 years. He describes how a basic ragtime tune’s a number of themes, moods and keys impressed his Seventies trio Air and his ’80s sextet and tells why the later band’s two drummers blended so properly. He cites influences as numerous as early Ahmad Jamal, who’d suggest rather a lot with a small gesture, and free jazzer Cecil Taylor, who devised his personal musical techniques. And Threadgill affirms his abiding love for the versatile tuba and cello.

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WHITEHEAD: Listening to Charlie Parker early made Henry Threadgill see how extensive and deep jazz is. Black music, he writes, is just too younger to be dogmatic. Nonetheless, Threadgill notes how African American jazz composers have been inspired to remain of their lane, that means intention for nightclubs, not classical live performance halls. That didn’t deter Henry Threadgill.

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WHITEHEAD: Threadgill’s 12-piece ensemble on “The Different One” mixes Latin, jazz and classical musicians and contains members of his quintet Zooid, a string trio, two bassoonist and three saxophonists who can sound relatively like Henry himself, who conducts however does not play. That instrumentation permits for a variety of colours and textures.

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WHITEHEAD: Henry Threadgill describes transitional durations in his personal profession between one band or idea and the subsequent. His new album displays his band Zooid’s complicated, chess-like procedures in an expanded context. As Threadgill says, he’ll hear a texture in his head, then has to determine methods to make it. In his suite’s lengthy center motion, the strings every play a heartbeat-derived rhythm because the drummer amplifies and distorts the sound of his cymbals.

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WHITEHEAD: That is like a glimpse of one thing to be developed additional, as if Henry Threadgill, at 79, has his subsequent work minimize out for him, slipping into one more sonic world. Whereas awaiting the outcomes, you may examine his course of in his guide “Simply Slip Into One other World.” Henry Threadgill is a deep thinker with one thing to say.

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DAVIES: Kevin Whitehead is the writer of the guide “Play The Means You Really feel: The Important Information To Jazz Tales On Movie.” He reviewed the brand new CD by the Henry Threadgill Ensemble titled “The Different One” and a brand new autobiography titled “Simply Slip Into One other World.” If you would like to make amends for interviews you have missed, like our dialog with Blair Kelley concerning the Black working class or with Evan Thomas concerning the tense navy debates over dropping the atomic bomb in World Conflict II, take a look at our podcast. You may discover numerous FRESH AIR interviews.

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WHITEHEAD: FRESH AIR’s government producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and critiques are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Therese Madden, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed at present’s present. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I am Dave Davies.

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