The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met for the last session of 2024 by discussing Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip into Another World. This was a greatly detailed biography of Threadgill’s life as a musician and composer.
His music, while sounding strictly improvisational, is atctually written; Threadgill makes the point that this is serious music composition. He studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He plays various instruments himself and has created bands over the years which he performed with all over the world. The bands he formed include Air, The Henry Threadgill Sextett (with two t’s on the end,) and Zooid. The book covers years and years of Threadgill’s life. He was born in 1944. In the early 1970s he played in the Army Concert Band in Vietnam and in 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music.
There were only eight of us in our discussion this time, several of our members were still away for the holidays. Marian started us off by saying, “My favorite part of the book was the Vietnam chapters, my least favorite part of the book is all those names.!”
Everybody joined in at this point: “The names! All those names!”
Marian continued, saying, “I kept thinking that as the story moved forward in time, I thought I would begin to recognize some of these names. I did know the name Pharoah Saunders and I did know the name Sun Ra (and his Arkestra) and of course I know the name Duke Ellington, but most of the names, I did not know. And I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why is he naming all these individuals? Maybe just for the record? So that there would be a record? I thought it was a lot.’”
Barb added, “There’s an index at the end with all these people’s names. I was trying to figure out how many wives/partners he had and how many children. But none of them were in the index.”
Some of us then tried to answer Barb’s questions about his family. Perhaps three wives and four children. Barb doubled down on her initial point, remarking that “the fact is that this is a book about his musicianship and as a composer, but I was looking for more details about his personal life. The Vietnam section gave us that (more about himself than about the music.)”
Laura called our attention to how he was talking about the assumption that Black Jazz music was all improvisational, but he was a composer, and their pieces were written out and due to bias and assumption, recording studio executives just didn’t get it.
Nancy offered that by naming all those musicians in this book, maybe he had some feeling about not wanting these people to be forgotten. The thing that I found fascinating was when he would talk about his relationship to sound. It was a glimpse into a mind that works that way. For me, everything is words. To think of somebody going through the world mostly registering sound”
Robin asked, “Is that like synesthesia?”
Nancy, (implying no, synesthesia is something else) “I found it really fascinating the way he would just interrogate music, he talked about just studying and studying and going as deep as he could into some aspect of music and then being done with that.”
Marian went further, saying, “There were some things that made me think of obsessive-compulsive behaviors. At the very end of the book he said, ‘I got to the end, I could go no higher and then he said. ‘I worked and worked and worked and then I yelled out, ‘I got it’!’ and his wife came running in and asked, ‘You got what?’ He had found that next plateau. I think that’s the music I tried to listen to on YouTube for about 30 seconds, but it was too hard for me to follow.
Marian mentioned that the parts about the tiger in Vietnam was written in italics. And he was going back and forth, thinking should I sound the alarm? Should I wait? But then you find out that the whole interrogation was just him interrogating himself. Because of these passages, I stopped to look up whether there were tigers in Vietnam, and as of right now, there are no tigers outside of captivity in Vietnam, but I suspect that he really saw a tiger. It was the early seventies.
Robin replied, “I thought it was something made up.”
Laura, agreeing with Robin, said she “thought he was giving that as an example of how there was no formal debriefing when they left Vietnam, so the tiger interrogation was a metaphor for the non-existent debriefing from the war itself.”
Barb said, “I thought that was true about all war survivors.”
Nancy told us, “The years of the Vietnam war was when I came of age. I thought the writing in the Vietnam section was the best writing of the book and it just bought that whole time back. People that I talked to people who came back from over there validated for me what he talked about. Just the inane violence, the stupidity, these poor young people, their lives were just sacrificed. That was hard to take and the callousness with which their lives were treated. That whole thing about the Rock and that horrible venereal disease, how when the men got that disease, they just sent them away somewhere and then lied about it. Even him, he took dumb chances. He risked his life in such stupid ways. Remembering the decisions that the government made at that time and news that came out afterwards, which was even worse than we knew when it was happening.”
Barb said, “When something is so arbitrary and so stupid, it makes you take more risks because you have no control anyway. A moment of pleasure is worth more because it might be your last moment.”
Laura commented on how he didn’t have a piano in his band because he didn’t want chordal influence in the compositions. He wanted contrapuntal music, which is single line voices moving in different directions at the same time.
Barb mentioned that he talked about doing different rhythms at the same time.
Nancy responded, “I did listen to some of the recordings on YouTube and I can tell that was happening, but I couldn’t see that that was a good kind of music to listen to, it just felt disorganized. I think that my brain just didn’t get that.”
Laura said her favorite part was about thirty pages in here where he’s talking about (p.259) “There is an expectation that an artist’s autobiography will function as a primer, providing ‘explanations’ of the art. But this book is not a listening guide. If anything, it is an extended defiance of that expectation...Music is about listening...”
Laura continued, “From this page on I felt like he was trying to explain his music to us, and I loved it. A lot of the elements that factor into his music are observations, seeing things in nature. It’s an act of transposition. These pages allowed us to get peeks into his process. I felt like he was trying to explain it and I loved that because I love music. I just look back at his picture of him when he was a little boy sitting at the piano on page seven. He wrote ‘I could sit and play the piano for hours.’ What a beginning to decades and decades of creativity.”
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