By Glen HallSince the early 1970s, saxophonist/flutist/composer Henry Threadgill has been creating challenging music with some of the most influential musicians in modern jazz. Born in Chicago, he started getting noticed as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). His trio Air became one of the most acclaimed of its era. Since then, Threadgill has been at the forefront of free jazz. One hallmark remains the distinctive instrumentation found in groups such as Sextet/Sextett, Very Very Circus and the group he's bringing to the Guelph Jazz Festival, Zooid.
What prompted you to start composing? I don't know. You start writing music because you've got music in you. I started writing music as a kid.
I thought you started by playing other people's music. I did, but I wrote music, too. I was making up music when I was a kid, but I started writing music by the time I was in high school.
Were you writing for a group? Not in particular. I was just writing music, hoping to get it played. I would play it with the people I put together, you know?
Were you writing in any particular style? Yeah, I guess so. I was sort writing what was going on at the time, some of the newer things with people like Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, people like that.
Did you write modal music? Modal music? I know a lot of people writing about writing modal music, but they don't really know what they're talking about. They just talk, they don't really analyze. You can't understand something unless you go into it seriously.
You mean because so-called modal tunes had tonal changes? It's thrown around a lot. Anything you're throwing around a lot, it's usually getting played. It becomes a catchall term. Any term can be an inefficiency in the area, anywhere. It just seems to make its way over there. But they never really look really seriously. They're just talking off the top of their heads, saying this and that. And it's really not true most of the time.
Many jazz musicians write "tunes" ― melodies with chord progressions ― but you write full-blown compositions. Yeah, right. I don't write tunes as such, you know.
How did you decide that you were going to reach beyond the usual jazz format? It's in the tradition. From the beginning, with people like King Oliver: that's how he started out. He wasn't doing what other people were doing. He took the thing much further out. Those are the people I was playing attention to. People like Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, the people in that aspect of the music. I'm only talking about them. But I listen to and study music from all over the world. You learn art from a lot of places. But I'm referring to this music. You know, Ornette Coleman, Andrew Hill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Waddada Leo Smith. All of these people had a great impact in terms of the tradition. The tradition is one of going forward. It's not like something in terms of a repertory body of music that's reinterpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted. That's my understanding of the tradition that I'm a part of. It's one that goes forward. It's one that keeps extending itself. And it was just in my nature as a human being, you know. I wasn't going go over and over the same thing.
Why do think it is that so many jazz musicians are content to just play within the tradition? When you say "so many jazz musicians," you're speaking about musicians right now, right? Because now they have a serious problem. They've got a problem because, first of all, they've been affected the wrong way by music schools and universities that interfere with the black music process. Just like the Chinese music process, the Balinese music process, the Indian music process: there's process by which art comes about. See, they've taken a European music process ― and there's nothing wrong with the European music process, the European music process was good for European music ― but European music process isn't good for the Indian music or the black music or any other kind of music.
The process is all about how you get to the art, and what you've got is these universities are running like Ford factories. See, everybody's learning the same thing. All you have to do is review music history. You can't find any evidence of music coming about as a result of that. And why do you have these problems now with all these musicians now sounding the same, playing the same, not interested in anything different. They don't even know who's playing music. People who are 40 or 50 years older than them, they don't even know who they are. The schools are telling them everything. You set up in front of 30 people and tell them how to get from A to B, so everybody knows how to get from A to B the same way. If you sit down and listen how Dexter Gordon gets from A to B, or Eddie Lockjaw Davis gets from A to B, or Coleman Hawkins gets from A to B, or Sonny Rollins gets from A to B, or John Coltrane gets from A to B, well, they all get from A to B a totally different way. And that's because it's an individual thing; you've got to work these things out individually. That is the real method for jazz or improvised black music. It's an individual process that has to be maintained.
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