Henry Threadgill: raging against "meaningless music."

Henry Threadgill and his Zooid Ensemble
$21, Friday, Feb. 6, 8 p.m., Crowell Concert Hall, Wesleyan Unversity,
wesleyan.edu/cfa
pre-concert talk 7:15

It's a funny thing about fierce avant-gardists. Sometimes their world views and artistic perspectives are so forward-thinking, or so counter-intuitive that they bend back around and somehow start to sound almost traditional. It's like quantum physics, or string theory or something. By traveling through galaxies' worth of ideas, the artistic visionary can arrive at hard-won conclusions that seem slightly familiar to us. Even while pushing boundaries, saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill has made music drawing on the language of gospel, hard bop and funk. He's bridged the worlds of elaborate composition and arrangements and improvisation. For music in the realm of "out jazz," Threadgill's sound has, at times, been surprisingly accessible.

Threadgill, who brings his group Zooid to Wesleyan's Crowell Concert Hall on Feb 6, was an early member of the pioneering Association for the Advancement of Creative Music. There will be a pre-concert talk on Threadgill's music by the composer and Wesleyan professor Anthony Braxton, a fellow Chicagoan and AACM member

Threadgill recently spoke to the Advocate by phone from his home in New York City. He talked about the state of jazz education, the music industry, and the detrimental effect technology has had on the world of jazz and creative music. For Threadgill, the flood of music and information available online has fostered a generation of musicians who don't have the same passion to come to terms with music that he remembers from his boyhood in Chicago. Young jazz musicians are unfamiliar with the pioneers, he says, sounding not quite curmudgeonly, but surprised.

"These young people out here don't even know who Cecil Taylor is or who Ornette Coleman is. It's a whole different kind of way that people have learned music now," says Threadgill. "When I was even just interested in music as a kid — and this was everybody in the neighborhood, kids — we knew who everybody was in music. It didn't matter whether we liked them or not. ... This is just the way we went about learning music in our environment. Everybody waited and saved their money to buy an LP and you read everything on there, listened to everything on there."

Beyond the disappearance of the competitive urge to master the information about who played on what record (why bother when you can Google it all?), Threadgill says a bigger loss has been the demise of live music in general.

"One thing that affected your whole development was the fact that you were around a lot of live music," he says. "That's one thing that the young musicians never had: the chance to see and hear a lot of live music — and we're talking about live music by the giants. That makes a very big impression on you. ... When you hear something live, it's not like listening to it on the radio or on the record player."

For someone who, in many ways, has worked at the periphery of some people's idea of the jazz world, Threadgill might be a surprising proponent of the monolithic record-company system, which is now mostly crumbling as a result of cheaper recording technology and distribution channels. Where many in the realm of boundary-pushing music have lamented the occasionally middle-of-the-road tastes off record labels, Threadgill views record labels as gatekeepers, sparing the listening public from having to wade through garbage.

"The problem now is: nothing is available and there's a whole lot of it — a whole lot of meaningless music now. There's too much, and there's an overload," he says. "It's not that people shouldn't have a right to play music, but we've got all of these people who have invaded the field simply because technology has allowed them to invade the field. You can have a home studio and buy beat and put all this different stuff together — sample this, sample that. That has really made things very bad. There's too much music. Nobody wants to wade through tons and tons of music to find out if this is a good CD or if that's a good CD."

In retrospect, from Threadgill's perspective, in the age of the big record company, at least someone was exercising taste and judgment.

"The one good thing about record companies is that they served as a way of separating a lot of meaningless music from being recorded," he says. "They gave contracts to people they thought deserved contracts. I don't really think we lost anybody. Everybody got picked up. As way out as people thought we were, we got picked up by a record company. We could have a Caruso, we got Muddy Waters, we got Ornette Coleman — who did we miss?"

Now, according to Threadgill, we're just inundated by the good and the bad, all lost in a wash of data.

"This is how I can disappear into the horizon. There's just too many people. Too many amateurs, too many people that don't even rank even as amateurs. I can't do anything about that. That's just reality. It's going to be that way in every medium. Technology allows people to do it. Next thing, we'll be going and looking for a brain surgeon that doesn't know anything about brain surgery."

If Threadgill's comments demonstrate a hard-eyed view of the state of the record business and music appreciation, his compositions and recordings offer a jubilant and wide-ranging counter-argument. Listen to the chattering horns, the chugging soul-gospel spirit and the powerful almost rock-like grooves on his thoroughly enjoyable 1987 record You Know the Number, and you can hear echoes of Charlie Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra and Lee Morgan, all fleshed out, loosened up and sped up a bit.

If his early recordings had a familiar big-band drive to them, Zooid, the ensemble Threadgill introduced in 2000, uses instrumentation with less of a pedigree. It's possibly the only group that employs oud, guitar, cello, tuba, drums along with the band leader's alto and flute.

As to the logic of the instrumentation, Threadgill says this: "I really don't know how I arrive at these things, they just come to me. ... It's not like something you work out with instruments, you either hear these things immediately or you don't. It just comes to you."

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