The Book Cooks
Excerpt from
Easily Slip into Another World: A Life In Music
Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards
(Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House; New York)
Henry Threadgill © 2023 Wolfgang Daniel
In 1971, while I was still living with my wife Cathy and our newborn son in our apartment at the corner of 48th Street and Drexel in Chicago, I would often hear the sound of a bassist practicing alone from a coach house that was right behind our place. I think he might have heard me practicing, too. One day I saw him coming out of his building and we started talking. His name was Fred Hopkins. He was playing all the time, although he wasn’t performing too much. He was working to support himself by stocking shelves and bagging groceries at the A&P across the street on 47th. We decided to start playing together. He had a huge open space upstairs, a sort of loft above what had been the garage for the coaches. We’d rehearse up there. There was plenty of room to set up my hubkaphone.
Fred had gone to DuSable and studied under Captain Dyett. Dyett encouraged him to continue his studies, and in 1969 Fred ended up being the first recipient of the Charles Clark Memorial Scholarship (established in honor of Joseph Jarman’s late bassist) at the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, where he studied with Joseph Guastafeste, the principal bassist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Fred had gotten involved a little bit in the AACM scene, too: in the fall of 1970, Kalaparusha brought him into his band to record the album Forces and Feelings. Around the time I met him, Fred had also started playing with Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band.
It so happened that the drummer Steve McCall came back from Europe right around then and moved a couple of blocks away, near 51st Street. Steve was more than a decade older than me and Fred, and he had a lot of experience: he had played with everybody from Braxton and Muhal to Don Byas, Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, and Marion Brown. Steve had been one of the cofounders of the AACM in 1965, and so I knew him from those circles. I remember being impressed with his playing when I made the trip up from Kansas in the fall of 1966 to attend the recording session for Jarman’s first record, Song For. Soon after he came back to town, I ran into him at a concert at the University of Chicago, and when I realized we were neighbors, I asked him if he wanted to try playing in a trio with me and Fred. Sure, he said. So we brought his drum kit over to the coach house, too, and started playing together.
I had begun to collaborate with actors and directors in the experimental theater scene on Chicago’s North Side. Cathy or June Pyskacek introduced me to a director named Donald Sanders, who preceded Ronnie Davis as the chair of the theater arts program at Columbia College. The department had an initiative called the Chicago Project, which was set up to give students hands-on experience in mounting productions around the city in collaboration with professional performers and designers. Sanders asked me to do the music for a play they were doing called Hotel Diplomat at the Columbia College Theater Center on West Barry Avenue just north of Lincoln Park.
Sanders had the idea of using ragtime in the show, and when he asked me to write the music he handed me the two-volume Collected Works of Scott Joplin that Vera Brodsky Lawrence had edited in 1971, one volume featuring Joplin’s works for piano and one volume with his songs. Sanders didn’t give me any specific instructions about instrumentation or arrangements. “Use whichever ones you like,” he told me, “and we’ll weave them into the scenes.” He told me I could bring some of my own compositions in addition to the arrangements.
I was just beginning to work on the Joplin arrangements when I started playing with Fred and Steve, so naturally I brought the scores over. The first day we started rehearsing in the coach house, that’s what we played: the rags that I’d started orchestrating.
It was an interesting challenge, because ragtime was so closely associated with the piano. There were no models of how to proceed. There was nothing to listen to for examples of trios of saxophone, bass, and drums playing rags. I had to figure out how to make them work for our format. And we all had to rethink how we played our instruments. The constraints of the form pushed us in some interesting directions stylistically. Fred already had that fullness – that thick Chicago sound that comes out of the great Wilbur Ware tradition. But playing all these rags forced him to come up with an approach that wasn’t what you’d end up with if all you were playing was show tunes and jazz standards. It was great training material. We were already mature as individual players, but as a unit, ragtime shaped us. We stuck close to the form: rags are structured like little suites, we realized, but if you maintained the flavor of each section they allowed room for expansion and improvisation. We warmed up with other stuff, sometimes equally unusual: little arrangements of James P. Johnson, Mozart, marches.
After the show concluded, we started playing concerts around town. We’d identify ourselves just by listing our three names. I was doing almost all the composing so my name was first, but we wanted to make it clear that the band was a collective endeavor rather than a leader and sidemen. It never occurred to us to label ourselves the Henry Threadgill Trio.
By early 1973 we started calling ourselves Reflections. Sometime that year we put together a three-fold brochure with a multiple-exposure photograph of the three of us superimposed over one another, suggesting the way our music was a true interweaving. You couldn’t have one of us without the others.
We had been playing together for a while as Reflections before we decided to change the band’s name. Around the spring of 1975, Steve started seeing a woman named Susana Cavallo who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I remember she was working on translations of Spanish and Latin American literature by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Francisco Ayala, and José Hierro. She would have us over for these wonderful dinners at her house. One night we were sitting around and Susana started asking everybody when their birthdays were. “All of you are air signs!” she observed. It had never occurred to us, but it was true: I’m an Aquarius, and Steve and Fred were both Libras. She knew some astrology, and she figured out that there were other parallels, too, in our ascendants and secondary progressions.
“Air,” Susana mused. “You know, that would be a much better name than Reflections. It’s economical. Elemental, even. Nobody would expect a jazz band to have a name like that – one of the five basic elements.”
I exchanged glances with Steve and Fred. We had never quite been satisfied with Reflections. Something about it seemed vague: reflections of what? And it didn’t really suggest our sound as a trio – our particular approach. A group named after a basic natural element wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary, given that Earth, Wind & Fire was one of the most popular bands on the planet. But it was true that a name like that would be unusual in the jazz world. And there was something intriguingly enigmatic about it: just the one element, as though that somehow said it all. It seemed to fit what we were trying to do musically as a collective trio. Air suggested a quality or substance that was fundamental, even ubiquitous, yet hard to see and hard to grasp. The name implied something that was everywhere but elusive – it had that openness we were aiming for.
When we eventually relocated to New York, we found that the name took on other levels of association in that context. Many journalists and listeners later assumed we called ourselves Air in reference to the little placards posted in the lobby of many converted loft buildings in lower Manhattan, which the Fire Department required when artists started moving into those formerly industrial spaces. (In that context, the “A.I.R.” sign in the lobby indicated that there was an “Artist in Residence” in the building, so that, in the case of an emergency, the firemen would know there were residents to be evacuated.)
“And besides, it’s a three-letter word, and there are three of you!” Susana exclaimed, as though that settled the matter.
In composing for the three of us, my thinking was influenced most of all by the sound of the Ahmad Jamal Trio. It was a piano trio rather than a saxophone trio. But what I learned had to do with the way the music was arranged – the sense of space. They could lock into a groove, but they also knew how to be elliptical: to play a hint or a dollop in a way that suggested more.
You get the hand you’re dealt. And this was my hand. I was thrilled to have it, too: a dedicated group of three musicians, living in the same neighborhood and playing together all the time. What more could I want? But it required a particular approach compositionally speaking. I was working with a minimal palette. How much can you do with seemingly limited means? It meant learning how to write by implication. I didn’t have a brass section to work with, or an arsenal of violas to bring out some timbral nuance. As I said to a journalist once, it forced me to learn to write the silhouette of the thing rather than the thing itself.
From the beginning, people tended to assume that the music of Air was largely improvised, even “free.” It’s related to broader assumptions about the music. There’s a tendency to underestimate the intellectual component in Black music across the board, as though we don’t possess a sophisticated understanding of what we’re doing. We’re just playing. The fact is, the music of Air was largely composed. On the first couple of albums, there are some tunes that involve melodic statements followed by improvisation. But we quickly moved away from that. By the time you get to albums like Open Air Suit and Montreux Suisse Air, you’re listening to music that is almost entirely written. Ninety percent of it is represented on paper in some form, including the sections that might sound like individual solos. There’s a subtle line between zero improvisation and total improvisation. In Air we tried to hover right at that point of undecidability.
That said, how it was executed was another matter. I was responsible for bringing in material, but then things would get changed in rehearsals. That’s where the collaboration lay. In this way the music was constantly unfolding. And it kept changing form – an ongoing recombination of elements. The musical architecture was something less like a skyscraper or a bridge than like an octopus or a spider. The tentacles move independently, but there’s a coordination under it all.
This is another way of saying that Air was collaborative in the best sense. Every session, every day, it was a process. Interpreting the written material, we all had to sense each other’s needs and change things accordingly. You work it out together as you go along. In terms of the way we ended up sounding, the major difference between Air and other great trios that might come to mind is that radical commitment to the collective statement. It changes the whole frame of reference. We didn’t simply want to support one another. We wanted to kill the idea of accompaniment altogether.
Excerpted from Easily Slip into Another World © 2023 by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.