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Henry Threadgill’s Zooid: “Do the Needful”
From the album Up Popped the Two Lips (2002)
Back in June, Ars Nova Workshop put on a fabulous festival called Great Black Music here in Philadelphia. The last concert of the bunch featured a piece for saxophone quartet called “Background” by the American composer, instrumentalist, and bandleader Henry Threadgill (b. Chicago, 1944). Performed with aplomb by the Collide Quartet, “Background” blasted me out my seat with blaring fusillades of quasi-vocal lamentations interspersed with precise, metronomic passages of demented machine music reminiscent of Iannis Xenakis’s contribution to the sax quartet genre, Xas.
Threadgill, a chameleonlically versatile alumnus of the Chicago experimental jazz collective AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) has made music under the auspices of a variety of names and configurations over the last 40 years, including Air, The Henry Threadgill Sextet, and Very Very Circus. The most recent of these groups is a sextet entitled Zooid, comprising—along with Threadgill’s saxophone/flute—tuba, guitar, cello, drums, and bass.
Zooid’s music on Up Popped the Two Lips is angular, often atonal, and undeniably groovy. It’s as if the fleeting free-jazz passages in Mr. Bungle have been dilated to delicious, six-minute mini-symphonies. Too mercurial to have been composed, too damnably coherent to have been entirely improvised: how such a balance is struck—let alone maintained over the substantial length of Threadgill’s tracks—is a miracle of art that I strain to comprehend.
Played 50 time(s).
July 09, 2011, 10:52am
