Vox humana

 

I've just - finally - read Henry Threadgill's excellent Easily Slip into Another World - A Life in Music*, which I acquired more than a year ago; when I first got the book, I did start it, but the first few pages of "early domestic life" detail didn't grab me by the scruff of the neck, and other distractions gradually pushed the book further down my to-read pile. This past week was obviously the right time to come back to it: I had no trouble getting into it this time, and ended up devouring it. 

Of course, the reason soon became clear for the inclusion of the same domestic detail that failed to capture my attention the first time around: for this creator, 

(A)ny art is tied to its historical moment. And tied to the life

of the artist, and all the social, psychological and spiritual

content that molded that life. Music is everything that makes

the musician: family, friends, hardships, joys, the sounds on the

street, how tight you buckle your belt, the person who happens

to be sitting across from you in the subway car, what you ate for

breakfast -- all of it. **

I completely agree with this position, and I'm well aware that there is a strong element of confirmation bias at play in my agreement: having once reached the conclusion - inescapable, as it seemed to me at the time - that of course an artist's work cannot help but be informed and influenced by the experiences that artist has had in life, I was not in the least receptive to the counter-argument: that this is only one school of thought, and that whole critical systems have been built on the foundation that "art is separate from life"***. I was convinced as an undergraduate - and time has done nothing to change my mind on this point - that such systems are symptomatic of everything which is wrong, or can go wrong, with academic thought: people who spend their whole lives cloistered away in their studies and libraries and lecture halls, removed from mundane (i.e. real) life as far as is humanly possible, cannot be trusted to reach reasonable opinions on the nature of that life, much as they might like to maintain otherwise#. 

But back to Mr Threadgill: it stands to reason that the biographical details related in those early pages are deeply relevant to him, and thus to the reader - and it really didn't take long, once I was actually reading the book, for this to become quite clear.

I'm not about to delve into every single thing I found interesting in this book - there are dozens of them, and I would rather recommend that anyone reading this seek out their own copy - and it need not come as a surprise to anyone that most of what I will highlight here touches on Threadgill's connection(s) to B., such as they are: HT, being a titanic figure in creative music in his own right, doesn't feel the need to spend much time "bigging up" his peers, or even many of his elders (with some exceptions: Leroy Jenkins and Muhal Richard Abrams are both singled out for extensive praise, as are HT's early touchstones Sonny Rollins and Gene Ammons), and most of the mentions of B. which do occur in the book## are rather made in passing. But there are several topics touched on which nonetheless brought me straight back to B. in terms of my  conclusions as a reader...

... starting with this one: when he first began to play saxophone, it was a tenor, and this continued for a while, culminating in a (literal) religious experience. HT had become heavily involved with a local sanctified church, albeit it would seem that his initial motivation had more to do with wanting to keep company with a certain young female churchgoer than it did any truly spiritual concerns; he would play his saxophone during services, and served "as a de facto musical director". One day he was asked to take a solo, on the hymn "His Eye Is on the Sparrow", and he was amazed that "there was hardly any reaction at all. The matronly church ladies sat there watching me blow my heart out, and they barely stirred." This was not at all a typical reaction from the congregation, to put it mildly; but the reverend took young Henry aside afterwards, saying that he, too, had an old horn around somewhere which was doubtless in need of repair. He proceeded to fetch an old alto sax, and asked HT to get it fixed up, saying that he would cover the cost. HT got this done, and when he brought it back, the reverend asked him to play again at the next Sunday service, suggesting the same piece, but politely requesting that it be played on the alto:

... this time, the response was completely different. The congregation 

was buzzing... (with) unrestrained interjections  of spontaneous approval.

A rippling cascade of Amens as I reached the bridge...

- And of course the reverend congratulated him afterwards with a sly smile: "I knew it... You just didn't have the right horn."

What Reverend Morris had realized...was that the tenor saxophone

didn't register in this music. The tenor is a blues horn... But the people

at church just didn't hear the tenor. There's something about the similarity

between the range and timbre of the alto and the human voice... soon the 

alto came to be at the centre of my musical world.###

This is really the first time I've come across anyone talking in detail about this, something which I have thought about myself in the past. Atanase, who is older than me - and who was already well-versed in free jazz and related musics when I properly began to immerse myself in this stuff in my mid-thirties - is very much a tenor guy, I know. It was always the case for him (and as far as I know it still is) that the twin gods of this music are John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, with some daylight beneath, and next in the hierarchy would be players like (Rev.) Frank Wright, Charles Gayle and Peter Brötzmann; I know too that Arthur Doyle is very much in the mix, though I suspect he does not so much fit into Avto's hierarchy as occupy a space all of his own. When Avto himself began playing, it was of course the tenor sax (though he has also been known to dabble a little in shehnai and bass clarinet). For my part, though, I have long known that if I did want to learn a horn it would undoubtedly be the alto, and with no disrespect at all to the aforementioned giants, or to any other tenor players, my own route towards this stuff came via an early fascination with Ornette Coleman and, especially, Eric Dolphy. Besides my continuing obsession with Braxton, I have long held Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell in the same esteem; other favourite voices of mine would include Julius Hemphill, Marshall Allen, John Zorn... Mike Osborne, Joe Harriott... Oliver Lake, Marion Brown... Arthur Blythe... Jemeel Moondoc... I could of course go on^, and this preference for alto saxophonists continues into the present, when my favourite current players include Steve Lehman and Angelika Niescier^^. From all this, we might deduce that there must be two entirely different traditions within free and avant-garde jazz, centred around these two pivotal single-reed voices. Like I say, I have thought about this quite a bit on and off, but HT is the first person I have known to make any sort of attempt towards explaining it; is it, then, a matter of resemblance to the human voice for me, too? I am still not sure about that, but although I can't claim any sort of religious epiphany^^^, this passage struck me powerfully. After all my repeated defences of B. (in particular) against charges of being a "cerebral" player, it would feel entirely inappropriate to pursue too closely the description in the book of the tenor as "... a rhythm-and-blues horn... (with a) Saturday-night, big-bellied heft to its sound", lest the inevitable distinction take us too far along the path of emotion vs intellect (a misleading path, after all). But: there is something there, for sure.

***

Amidst all of the "war stories" that one might expect to get from a seasoned professional musician, I hadn't anticipated any actual war stories - but they are indeed present here, and HT's harrowing experiences in Vietnam form what is without doubt one of the most compelling sections of the book (occupying the whole of chapter four, plus at least half of chapter three), not least because one is left to infer that this is really the first time the author has ever set about describing these experiences in detail to anyone. However, what really knocked me sideways was the account of how he ended up there in the first place: as the head arranger of the Post Band at Fort Riley in Kansas, playing for special events involving visiting dignitaries and the like, HT should in principle have been out of consideration for posting to an active theatre, but found himself shipped out after his advanced (and doubtless quite dissonant) arrangement of "the great American national songs"~ was met with outrage by a gathering of military brass and senior religious figures. Having initially been told he would not be transferred to France or Panama because his status as arranger and clarinettist made him too valuable to the band stationed in Fort Riley, HT now found himself sent packing to Vietnam, apparently as punishment for having offended the various VIPs who had turned up for this big concert - shipped "off to war because of a piece of music"~~. It has often seemed to me that B. has been treated as something of an outcast for his refusal to compromise in his music - but as far as I know he has never found himself in literal danger of losing his life over it - ! The third and fourth chapters of this book really ought to be considered required reading.

Meanwhile, the fact that the remaining sections of the book are less - weighty, in terms of their subject matter, does not make them any less readable. Back in the States, aware that the experience of war has - among other things - transformed and heightened his sense of hearing, the composer proceeds to live a most interesting and varied life. The rest of the book contains far more worthwhile observations than I would ever seek to discuss here, but (as noted above) there were quite a few things which resonated with me, as a "Braxton-specialist": the AACM's collective dissatisfaction with the state of music criticism, and their refusal to be intimidated by "having to become the historians and explicators of (their) own creativity" (p. 162); the limitations of teaching music in a classroom environment (p. 174), and the determination to escape the confines of the conservatory (p. 185); the absolute necessity for HT of leading his own groups~~~ (p. 204); the desire (with Air, in this instance) "to kill the idea of accompaniment altogether" (p. 228); the technical difficulty of switching between instruments, especially different wind instruments (p. 229) - which helped me to a new level of appreciation of B's own virtuosity, something I didn't think was still possible at this point (!); HT's frustration at others' "rush to affix a pseudo-generic label (as) nothing more than an excuse not to listen" (p. 292); his finding it "productive compositionally to... shift (his) focus from one sound world to another" (p. 310); his further frustration at the "prejudices and limitations" of the US classical concert scene, both on its own terms and in its reluctance to allow outsiders in (pp. 327-30, p. 368); above all, perhaps, the composer's refreshed conception of "harmony... still based on the foundation of the twelve tones of the equally tempered octave, but which approache(s) organization through intervallic relationships rather than through tonal centers" (p. 371) really sounded like something which B. could have come up with - but given that the project under consideration at this point is Zooid, it's nonetheless delightful to know that a similar-in-theory foundation has led to a musical system which still sounds completely different. (The encapsulation of this later system as "harmony (which) is chromatic rather than diatonic" seems like a fair summary of much of B's own work from about 1980 onwards - although I daresay the maestro would think that to be a grotesque oversimplification.)

- And of course, there are many, many more where these came from, more than enough to persuade anyone who's read this far that this book merits their closer attention. Whether it's clarifying the derivation of the names Air (not an acronym - pp. 223-4) or the later Sextett (six@ musical parts, not players: "What the drummers were doing... was a single sectional part. It simply took two people to play it" - p.276), or explaining the genesis of the hubkaphone (pp. 182-7), ultimately inspired by the gongs played by Vietnamese montagnards - or holding forth on plenty of other subjects, Threadgill proves to be almost as intriguing and original a storyteller as he is a composer-arranger. Not for the first time recently, I can do no better than to finish up by saying that it all comes down to listening: 

Nothing I can say can mean anything once you start to

listen. It's about the sound, not about the words I might be

able to pin up to preface or accompany whatever the sound

does to you when it goes in your ears.@@

* HT with Brent Hayes Edwards (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023). Any quoted matter in this post retains the US-style spelling of the original, of course.

** Ch. 2, p. 52

*** I had already formed my own opinion on the matter by this time, but the conversation I'm recalling took place when I was a first-year undergrad reading Philosophy and French, and I was being set straight by my French tutor. [I had very probably expressed certain opinions about Sartre, on whom my tutor was a specialist; she was very much under his spell in more ways than one, and her rebuttal of my argument was doubtless (at least partly) born out of pique on his behalf. She did of course also have a point: at the age of eighteen, it would have been more appropriate for me to keep an open mind to all the various possibilities instead of dogmatically insisting upon any one thesis. Still, on this subject, I really wasn't interested in hearing about the "other schools of thought" - and I'm still not. With Threadgill all the way, on this one.]

# Consider Nietzsche's opinions on women, for example. (Did he ever really meet any?!) - You could always spot the philosophy dons a mile off at my alma mater,  if they happened to stray without the college walls: they were the ones hurrying along with their coats clutched shut and their heads resolutely down, dreading the possibility of having to interact with anybody, outside of their loci of power and privilege. (I'm being rather unkind here, but the observations are nonetheless accurate...)

## It would appear that they first met as teenagers, when both were studying privately with Jack Gell (ch. 1, pp. 25-6)

### This passage is all to be found in chapter 2 (pp. 66-7)

^ I really could, but I'm not about to try and list every single altoist that I enjoy listening to; Jarman's name is very obviously missing - this is especially obvious to anyone who has read HT's book, actually - but I have a more active interest in Mitchell's solo work than I do in the Art Ensemble, so I am far less intimately familiar with JJ's sound... while to mention Tim Berne or Steve Coleman, both of whom I really like as players, would mean going into the sort of qualifying detail which is well beyond the scope of the present post.

^^ I don't, of course, mean to imply that I only like listening to alto players. Just off the top of my head, some tenor players I particularly like - other than those already listed in this post - would include Frank Lowe, Sam Rivers, Larry Ochs, Joe McPhee and Evan Parker. (Oh, and I always enjoy listening to Atanase's continued exploits..!) It's also worth pointing out that HT himself continues to play tenor on occasion, as does Mitchell. (B. hardly ever does, but at least we now know beyond doubt that he did at one point...)

^^^ HT's own connection to the church did not last all that long, by the sound of it - and certainly did not withstand his first serious doubts about it. (He does come across in the book - and in his music - as a profoundly spiritual person, but... this is not the same thing.)

~ "America the Beautiful", "The Star-Spangled Banner" and so on. HT had arranged a medley of these songs which impressed the band in rehearsal ("Damn, Henry... this is really sophisticated stuff!"), but the performance itself lasted no more than eight bars before it was shut down in disgrace.

~~ The account of the events leading up to this, and those surrounding the aborted concert and its immediate aftermath, are to be found in the third chapter (pp. 83-8). It really does sound, by the way, as if the brass had every intention of making a permanent example of Threadgill, sending him to what they presumed would be his death: it is later explained that while he was in Vietnam, his papers were "lost", so that he could not even be considered for discharge when the time came - although they miraculously turned up again when the burgeoning Civil Rights movement led to an investigation into racism in the armed forces. Incredible as all this sounds, none of it feels fabricated or exaggerated in the telling. 

~~~ I came to very much this conclusion regarding B's own career, way back in the early days of the Braxtothon - specifically in writing about the trio album Silence. 

@ Even when there were two bassists in the band - before HT found cellist Diedre Murray, in other words - they were playing two separate parts: the omnipresent Fred Hopkins played bass, but Brian Smith played piccolo bass.

@@ Ch. 7, p. 259. (No, the irony is not lost on me that all I can offer - for the time being, at least - is words...)