v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Babe Ruth from the Hasting's Historical Society

Babe Ruth and Hasting's dignitaries

Sandow on Threadgill

 

foto by Susan O'Connor

From Greg Sandow's blog:

But Threadgill -- who'll almost rhapsodically recall his work around that time with a Balinese dancer, a man who required everyone working with his company, even musicians, to study dance -- was looking for new ways of moving through musical space. And that's what he did, both in the Joplin music (which only began with Joplin, before taking off into improvisation), and when the trio played Threadgill's own compositions, touring and recording 12 albums as Air. "I studied what Ahmad Jamal was doing with drums," he says, "how the drums were tuned, how the drums wouldn't just keep time, they would play melody." In Air, it's fair to say, nobody kept time, and everyone played melody. Musical space -- normally organized by rhythm and harmony -- is instead shaped by movement. Or, to put the same thing in visual terms, Threadgill's pieces for Air are like surprising pencil drawings, in which you don't see colors or even forms, but which instead are brought to life by the active twisting of the penciled lines.

Threadgill's next long-lasting ensemble after Air was the Henry Threadgill Sextett, which didn't have six players -- it had seven, a lineup that included trumpet, trombone, bass, and Threadgill on saxes and flute, along with an unexpected cello and two drummers. (Threadgill counted the drummers as a single part; that's why he called the group a sextet). He recorded six albums with this ensemble, and his music got fuller. It had rich harmony now, and a quasi-orchestral sonic palette, challenging Threadgill to make quick changes of instrumental color, fine adjustments of, as he happily puts it, "how much white are you going to put in that red?"

But the Sextett made his music looser, too. He relaxed a little more; his compositions smiled. Now that he had more instruments, the drums might stray back to an enhanced version of their traditional role; the horns could play melodic lines from gospel music, R&B, or New Orleans jazz. Threadgill himself had played all those styles; as his freelance career expanded, he'd toured with a gospel choir (though that, he says, was also because the church fascinated him), and played dates at home with R&B groups like the Four Tops and the Dells. With the Sextett, he began to draw many kinds of music he liked into his work, creating a typically American -- and, if you like, typically postmodern -- stylistic stew.

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Interview with Philip Jeck

Interview with Philip Jeck at Junkmedia:

PT: And those improvisers in London - who were there?

PJ: People that were in London Musicians' Collective, people I knew from there. With two of them we were working regularly as a trio. Really important thing for my development was work with choreographer Laurie Booth, from '84 onwards, we did a lot of touring. Then he got some money to have a company, so I felt we were very lucky because we got money to tour and develop what we did. Over those years I've worked with him I developed a lot because I was playing so regularly. So yeah, that was really important part of my development.

And actually trough Laurie I met Lol Sargent with whom I've done "Vinyl Requiem", he was employed by Laurie in one big dance piece to do visuals. We got on well and we were talking...it was at that time that in record shops the cds section just got bigger than vinyl section. There was this change from analog to digital format, so we were talking about this, it was quite an important change. I grew up, you know, I bought my first records in early sixties, I grew up with 7" singles. So we were talking about marking some change, started to work on piece which turned to be "Vinyl Requiem". Not that vinyl has died, because people are still using it, but there was this sense of....You feel you could almost do "CD Requiem" now because everybody's got their mp3s players, there is big shift. A lot of people don't even go and buy music anymore from shop, they download.

PT: So you would say that working with vinyl is nostalgic?

PJ: Yeah, it's got to be in there, I mean - I don't conciously think: oh, this is a nostalgic work. But of course it is - it is like a record of the past, recordings of things that go (gone?) by. And for me this sound of crackle, when you put needle on the record is still very evocative and all those things that are stored in each one of those records can be very evocative. I feel like I'm recycling things, this records usually were thrown away, if I didn't used them they would be in a dustbin or recycle, melted down to use for something else. In the way there is almost ghost of the past that I'm trying to resurect, to get something new out of them. Also record players that I use are old, this is for the same reason - they have this sound, very lo-fi, like there is some thing that is put between the sound that is coming from the groove and sound that goes to the speakers. This add some history to the sound.

PT: What I find fascinating is that vinyl could have a longer history, because it could be destroyed in some amount and still...

PJ: Still work, yeah...

PT: And this history is like written....

PJ: Exactly, all those scratches are part of the history, like on sculpture and stuff there is patina of scratches, I think it is true sonicwise with records, there is its history, all those marks, maybe you spilled some coffee on it or whatever.

PT: Do you know Marina Rosenfeld? I was talking with her once and she said about her approach: she is using some kind of dublate which destroys trough using....

PJ: ...very quickly, they don't last long because vinyl is really soft. I sometimes use them and you play them for one hour or less, you put your hands on a record and they are all black, you know, this dust. They only last, I don't know, you can play them for like 20 hours and then the sound is all the same trough, whatever it was at the beginning.

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