Henry Threadgill

Frederic TutenHenry, we know each other, but I don’t know your history.

Henry ThreadgillI grew up in Chicago in the 1940s and ’50s. My siblings and I used to come home from Sunday service and play church. I loved going to my mother’s mother’s church because it was a sanctified church where people go off and speak in tongues and get wild and all of that. Afterward, at home, we’d put on little stage shows and pretend to be the preachers and the singers.

FTDid you ever perform with a church as a musician?

HT Yes, I did. I met this minister out of Philadelphia named Horace Sheppard who had a troupe of the most talented people. We traveled and played music for holy ghost people—holy rollers. It was just like Billy Graham, but it was all Black. Horace would tell me, “Henry, I want you to walk down the aisle and play ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’ on your alto sax. When you get to the front of the church, I want everyone to be screaming. I want you to tear the place up.” By the time I’d get to the pulpit, people would be up on their feet screaming. Horace would run down the aisle and leap onto the stage, doing the split, and say, “Ride on, King Jesus!” (laughter) This was not a show. These were serious people, taking spirits out of people and stuff like that.

FT For how long did you do that?

HT A couple of years, from around age eighteen to twenty-one. I got drafted in 1966, and my views on religion changed after I got to Vietnam and met the indigenous people there. The US military used the Montagnard people as scouts. They could smell the wind and listen to the ground and say, “That’s an elephant not a truck.” In their village, there were no doors, and, from what I understood, the word lock did not exist for them. You could leave everything you had on the ground, and it would rot before others would even look at it. That changed me. I said, If the Montagnard aren’t “civilized,” then I’m with them. 

FT Tell me about your parents.

HT I was named after both of my grandfathers. I’m Henry Luther Threadgill. My mother’s father was named Luther Pierce. My father’s father’s name was Henry Threadgill. He was one of the few Black men who worked for Al Capone. He was a bootlegger and drove liquor all over the country, all over Canada. He made enough money that he moved from Arkansas to Chicago.

My father worked for the mob and was a professional gambler. He ran casinos and stuff like that. He used to pick me up in a brand-new Cadillac every year. Everybody wanted to dress like my father. He was the sharpest man in town. He got all the women. But my father also loved jazz. He opened up a casino, and while he counted the money, he would give me a handful of nickels and say, “Hey, Moon. Go play some music.” (My father never called me Henry. He called me Moon.) There was nothing but jazz on the jukebox because that’s all he listened to, and he wasn’t going to be anywhere that didn’t have it. I got hooked on jazz right away.

FT It was illegal gambling?

HT Yeah. He worked for the Italians. And there were other guys just like him. They had broken up with their wives, but they all took care of their children. I remember this period when my father was taking bets from a funeral parlor, downstairs where the morticians worked. The kids would be upstairs where they held wakes, and we’d be running through with balls and jumping up onto the coffins. And my father would come up and say, “What you all doing here? Don’t you disturb any of these bodies.” (laughter)

I remember getting in some trouble because I was stealing and stuff, and my mother made me go stay at my father’s. He told me, “Moon, don’t ever do anything that you don’t have any talent to do. You ain’t got no talent if you go to jail.” I had a half brother, Russell, who got to the top of Golden Gloves boxing and then went for the championship. There, this guy beat him so bad. My father went down and told Russell, “Don’t ever call me again to pick you up with you looking like this. You don’t have the talent for this.”

My father had been everywhere and done everything and had more women than anybody I’d ever seen in my life, but he and my mother were still the best of friends. He had somebody bringing him reefers when he was taking chemotherapy in the hospital. My aunt told me he was taking bets until the night he died. She said they found him with money in his hand. That man was too much.

FT Growing up in Chicago, were you exposed to a lot of live music?

HT Around 1958, when we were living on the South Side, my friend Milton Chapman told me about a big concert at Englewood High School. It was Chet Baker and Stan Getz with Frank Rosolino on trombone. I remember it cost about fifteen cents to get in. I was thirteen years old and stood near the stage. I unzipped my mouth and said, “Fucking Stan Getz and Chet Baker, man!”

FT Was that the first live jazz you heard?

HT I had already been to a lot of concerts. My mother took me to see everybody—Duke [Ellington], Louis Jordan, Count Basie. They all played in the major movie theaters in Chicago, and we’d be up in the balcony. Until I was about six years old, I had to stand on my seat so I could see down to the stage. My mother was into the arts, and she knew that music was going to be my thing. I think she always knew it. She supported me all the way.

FT When did you say to yourself, “I want to be a composer, a musician”?

HT From the very beginning.

FT How old were you?

HT Three. I taught myself. I used to sit at the piano every day and wait for boogie-woogie to come on the radio. Somebody like Albert Ammons would come on, and I’d try to play along. My hands were small, so I struggled. But I got it, and in the process I learned how to play the piano. Then, I wanted to understand how music was made. I’d listen to Tchaikovsky, Serbian music, Beethoven, hillbilly music, everything on the radio, and ask, How does somebody create this?

When I got older, my mother had me take piano lessons from Mrs. Holmes. I thought I’d been sent to hell. She was a church lady in a little round hat, and she came with the Bible, a music book, and a ruler. I’d keep one eye on the music and one eye on her ruler. When you do that, you’re going to make a mistake, and—pow! So I stopped coming home after school. I’d stay out shooting marbles or climbing trees, watching my house until Mrs. Holmes left, and then I’d go home.

Polish music and the music from Serbia had a big impact on me. One of the biggest Polish communities outside of Poland is in Chicago. And one of the biggest communities of Serbs outside of Serbia is in Chicago too. I grew up listening to their music. And—besides the blues—I listened to hillbilly music, because we had a whole community of Appalachian people. (singing) “I’m so lonesome, I could cry.”

I knew that the white people were ashamed of the hillbillies, because they didn’t wear shoes and didn’t go to school. But that music was the real white American folk music, and they were denying it, just like they were denying the people who made it. Then you see what happened? After a while, it became the Grand Ole Opry, and then it became country and western music, and then just dollar signs after that.

FT So you first learned to play music on the piano. When did you start playing other instruments?

HT I liked the sound of the tenor saxophone from listening to Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins, and Lester Young. I started playing at the end of my freshman year in high school, in about 1958, all the way into college. My music teacher had me learn clarinet, too, because in the big band era, all the saxophone players also had to play clarinet. Later, I became interested in playing the flute because of so many great flute players like Frank Wess, Sam Most, and Hubert Laws. Around 1969, I started playing flute seriously.

I remember when I was about fifteen, on Monday nights there were rehearsals at the Chicago School of Music. George Hunter used to run the band. He was a famous band director, and the band was full of successful musicians. They were all white. All men. They owned houses. They had boats. They would play in Woody Herman’s band, Les Brown’s band, and the Raeburn Boyd orchestra when they came to town. I walked in with my tenor sax one night, and they didn’t really pay me much attention. They kind of glanced, you know? Mr. Hunter looked at me, then he looked at everybody, and he said, “Okay, pull up 25, 36, 102, 509, and 700.” They had over a thousand arrangements. I hadn’t seen music written by hand before, only printed music. Mr. Hunter counted us off: “1, 2, 1-2-3-4.” Boom. I hit the first note and that was all. The notes were flying all over the place. I said, “What the shit? Oh man, this is bad.” Mr. Hunter took us into a slower piece. “1, 2, 3, 4.” Same thing. I only got the first note. He called his next piece. And I couldn’t get it. I was a teenager, and I was very self-conscious. I thought, They don’t like me because I’m a Black kid, so they’re just washing my ass out. But it wasn’t true. I just wasn’t at their level as a musician.

I put my sax in my case and slammed it shut. The whole place got quiet. When I left, I slammed the door so hard I almost knocked the glass out the window. I got home, stormed in the house, found my mother and my grandmother, and told them, “I’m moving to the basement.” I covered up all the windows and went downstairs to practice. I was devastated, completely fucking emotionally devastated. I didn’t think I was worth shit. They used to bring my food to the door and leave it on the floor. Kids would come around saying, “Henry doesn’t like us anymore. He never comes out to play.” My whole spirit had been broken. I had to find out what I was called to do in my life.

I started living in the basement probably in June. School started in September. The first Monday after that I went back to the rehearsals. Again, they didn’t pay me much attention, but I got my music out. “Pull up 19, 44, 16, 108. And 1, 2—” Boom. When they took off, I was right with them. I missed some stuff, but I had figured out how to stay with it even if I messed up. I heard these white guys say, “The kid is alright, huh?” (laughter)

If I had gone back there and failed again, that would have been too much. My teachers had told me: You haven’t failed when you make a mistake. You have to stumble forward. If you let a mistake register on you physically and emotionally, you’ll lose your position. But if you just stay with the program, you’ll be back in the saddle. You have to keep riding. Don’t let the horse throw you. Later, when they come back and play that piece again, you can say, “I remember you. You threw me before, but I’ll get you this time.”

FT Tell me about the hubcaphone. How did you make your own instruments from hubcaps?

HT Around 1970, I was driving down Maxwell Street in Chicago, and there was a place that sold nothing but hubcaps. I made a rack with metal pipes so that the hubcaps could lay on top. When I started playing it, the whole thing fell over. I didn’t even know how to play it. You had to dance to play it. About that time, I left Chicago and went to Amsterdam, where I lived with the painter Quan Tilting. He was way out there as a painter. He had built a platform with canvases on two sides. He would take two or three brushes in each hand, and whirl and jump and spin through the middle of the platform. I started practicing his painting movements. And that’s how I figured out how to play the hubcaphone.

FT How did you start your own group? For example, how did you start Zooid?

HTZooid is the most recent group. My first group didn’t even really have a name. It was just the Henry Threadgill Ensemble. And then I had a group doing music and theater happenings. I started working with avant-garde theater in the early ’70s. I did a couple of shows with Arnold Weinstein, worked in guerrilla theater in San Francisco, and with Shirley Mordine’s dance company. And then came this theater director who wanted me to use Scott Joplin rags and my own music for this production. The theater company had moved into this hotel, The Diplomat, where you had country western people living, a former hillbilly star, and a woman who had been in theater and was still dressing up in the same costumes she used to wear when she performed on stage, like she was reliving the past. The Italian mob had control of the liquor store, and behind it was a gambling place. The people in the theater company studied the weird characters in there, and then they wrote a script called Hotel Diplomat. When the mob came and threatened the director, Don Saunders, he changed the name to 99 Rooms. That was the birth of my group Air, and after that, it was history. Air was the group that was famous. We just took off. The critics demanded that we be recorded. We didn’t have to ask anybody for a recording contract.

FT That’s almost unheard of.

HT I know. That was unbelievable. We came to New York from Chicago in ’75, and I later started another group called the Sextet—that was a seven-piece group. I kept that for a long time. We did a lot of recording and traveled all over Europe and other places. Then I had a five-piece group called The Windstream Ensemble. I did a lot of theater and dance work with that group at the Public Theater and other places. Then came Very Very Circus, which everybody knew all over the world. After Very Very Circus, came Make a Move. After Make a Move came Zooid. I’ve had that group for about fifteen years. I also had a dance band called the Society Situation Dance Band. That band was never recorded, and it was never supposed to be. It was for live performances where people could dance to it.

FT You’ve said you’re a different person with each instrument you play.

HT That’s right. I have to create a solo sound. There’s a lot of flute players, and I don’t want to sound like them. There’s a lot of alto sax players, and I don’t want to sound like them either. I’ve developed my own voice, and I use a different approach when I’m moving from one instrument to another. When I’m changing instruments, it should be another person coming to you. You just heard me coming to you as Maria Callas, now I’m Beverly Sills or Madonna or Beyoncé. (laughter)

FT What we’re really talking about is your drive to go forward, not to continue doing the same thing that you did well and that you got money for, but to do something that you want to do.

HT That’s in my nature. I feel I will literally die if I don’t go forward. Going back has always been a mistake for me, like when I went back to smoking or went back to this woman I had a bad time with. Why did I go back there?

FT When I was getting to know you, you told me Ulysses was one of your influences. I thought that was a pill.

HT I don’t get a lot of my information from music anymore. It comes from dance. It comes from theater. It comes from film. It comes from literature. It comes from painting. It comes from photography. I only listen to music for enjoyment. I’ve been looking at Albert Oehlen’s paintings, studying them for days, looking at their rhythmic possibilities. When I’m looking at a photograph, I’m looking at the light, at the background and middle ground and foreground. I can’t even think about that in terms of most music, you know.

FT Henry, did you go to college?

HT Of course. I started out at Woodrow Wilson Junior College. Then I went to University of Chicago for a while, then Manhattan University in Kansas. Eventually, I came back to Chicago, where I went to the American Conservatory of Music. I graduated in 1974, but I was a student there for about eight years.

FT That’s amazing.

HT I didn’t go to school to get a degree. I went to school to take every course that they had. I kept changing majors so I wouldn’t have to get a degree. I said, “You think I’m going to let you give me a degree in four years? You offer a hundred courses but I’ll have only taken fifteen of them. Keep your degree. I want every piece of information you got.“

FT Were you playing music and going to school at the same time?

HT Yeah. It was very difficult. I had trouble with a lot of professors at the conservatories. One professor said I’d never learn anything because I wouldn’t do what he wanted. I said, “I know you want me to prove that I can write a concerto. But I’ve analyzed every piece of music and I got the highest grades. Why do I need to prove it?” The dean didn’t know what to do with me. The great Stella Roberts was supposed to be retiring, but she said, “I’ll take him.” And she became my composition teacher.

Stella Roberts has been written out of history. When she was eighteen, she was accepted to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. So she went to Paris on a boat. She was a little country girl who didn’t know anything about reefers, nothing about gay people. But then she sailed to France with Man Ray, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland, and went straight to Gertrude Stein’s. (laughter) And who turned up? Picasso. She met Alice B. Toklas, Stravinsky, everybody. She was in that group, but she was a woman, and women just weren’t getting credit.

You know why Stella Roberts was such a great teacher? Because she didn’t teach me anything. Generally, when you walk away from great people, they’ve left their fingerprints all over you. You become the little Roy Lichtenstein and the little Mozart and the little Charlie Parker. But Stella Roberts was different. I’d come in and she’d be sitting there at the piano. I’d pull out my music and she’d put it on the piano. There was always a little spot that could be better or cleaned up, but would she comment on it? No. She would never criticize or even point it out. She knew I knew where it was. Once, she looked out the window and said, “Come here, Henry.” I helped her up, and we went to the window. She asked me, “You know who designed that building over there?” I didn’t. She said, “That’s Frank Lloyd Wright. Look in my cabinet, in the architecture section, and find the book on Wright and take it home.” The next time I came back, she said, “Do you know Ulysses?” I said no. She said, “Look in the cabinet.” We never discussed any of the books. I was like, Are you fucking kidding me? What does this have to do with what I’m doing? I’d try to figure out what I was doing musically that was parallel to the books—how they could inform me about the mistakes I made in my music. But even if I didn’t figure it out, I’d learn other things about literature and architecture. She took me back down the course of reeducation in those departments. What did Stella Roberts show me? She taught me to be the teacher.

FT She taught you how to teach yourself.

HT Exactly.

When I play music, I don’t know how it will touch the listener. There’s materiality in literature, painting, and photography, but not in sound.

FT Well, even if you can’t touch it, music vibrates in your body.

HT But it vibrates differently in each person’s body.

FT That’s true for painting too, though. Each person sees what he or she sees. We don’t know what they see.

HT But where the painter is trying to get something on the canvas, I’m trying to get off the canvas. The musical score is a form of calligraphy. You have to lift the music off the paper and put it in the air. It’s not like the word acoustic. You pronounce it the same way all the time. Acoustic is acoustic is acoustic is acoustic. But music is a matter of idiom and style and different folkways.

I want to enjoy music the way the novice enjoys it, and not because I have more technical information than somebody else—that’s not enjoying music because then you’re explaining it, and you shouldn’t have to explain music.

I don’t play down to people; I play up to people. If you play down to people, you don’t have respect for people. I have a high opinion of people, so I play up to people. 

FT I write for the kind of reader that wants to read me, and I hope that they like it.

HT: There lies the big difference between literature and music. Words are definite. Notes have no meaning at all. Music has no meaning at all. Songs with people singing are suggestive at best. If you take away the words, what does it mean? Each person will get something different.

My objective with Zooid, and with all of my groups, is to make music. I take what I write to the rehearsals, and if somebody plays it wrong, I say, Wait a minute. Go ahead and play that wrong again, because you did something right. You know what I’m saying? A rehearsal is an exploration. I don’t care what I’ve written. In rehearsal, I throw it away or turn it upside down. I move this over here and that over there. I don’t care because my objective is to make music.

FT That’s all that matters.

HT Years ago when I was working for the University of Chicago hospital, I learned something about the value of making mistakes.

FT What were you doing there?

HT I collected tests the doctors ran on patients and took them to the labs. I was about nineteen or twenty. I was working full-time and going to school part-time, trying to save enough money to go to the conservatory in the fall. Eventually I got caught not being in school full-time, and got drafted.

One day, a guy brought me down to the research lab, where they had animals and were growing things in petri dishes. This guy told me it’s only through mistakes that we progress. All great discoveries have come through mistakes. Without mistakes, we’d remain in the same place. That’s how I compose music. You try to come up with the best solution, the best order for the music to be taken in by the musicians. But when you get into rehearsal, the work, the exploration, really begins. 

FT What are you working on now?

HT I’m getting ready to make another turn with my work. I’ve been lucky in my musical life; I only change when I find the material to make a change. I’ve now found a way to advance rhythmically through Morse code. That communication system is dot–dash, but dot–dash is not enough. Two notes are considered a dyad. You need three elements, because harmony is always three notes. So you need dot–dash–dot. There’s a short phrase, and there’s a long phrase, and then there’s another short phrase; Morse code uses letters, but I’m saying those are phrases.

FT Is that a rhythmic system?

HT It’s rhythmic design.

FT How does that translate into performance?

HT Here, let me show you an example. I’ll write, “Mary hates Fred. Fred doesn’t care what Mary’s opinion is. Mary tells Fred to fuck off.” Can you see this? “Mary hates Fred.”

FT Oh, good. I’m glad I found out.

HT That’s short. Then you say, “Fred doesn’t care what Mary’s opinion is.” That’s long. “Mary tells Fred to fuck off.” That’s shorter. Short, long, short. You following me? It’s rhythmic design. That’s what I’ve taken from Morse code.

FT How does the improvisational aspect fit into the design?

HT I’m going to attach it to the body, to the musician’s own meter. Nobody has done this. It is the new frontier. This is going to take me all the way.

FT Okay, so explain.

HT I will record the heartbeats of four musicians for twenty seconds each, and then put that in a continuous loop so they can keep hearing it.

FT They’re listening to their heartbeat as they’re performing.

HT Right. And then what they’ll play will be both written and improvised, according to what they hear coming from their body. The improvisation has guidelines, and a lot of that is the rhythmic design. Or they have to stay within parameters: I’ll tell one musician that the only intervals they can play are a minor second, a major third, an augmented fourth, and a sixth. I’ll tell another musician, “You can play a major second, a minor third, a fifth, and a seventh.” Those are the only intervals they can use to play a short phrase, a long phrase, and then a short phrase.

It’ll be my job to make it work, to create the synthesis. I’ll examine the differences between these four musicians’ heartbeats. Is it like finding the medium or the mean? What is the difference between my heartbeat and your heartbeat? I’ll be making decisions coming out of the organic aspect of each person’s body. It’s not just made up. It’s real, because it’s you. It is you.

FT It’s biology as music.

HT Yeah. And, you know how clothing is made in a factory? One person makes this part, another person makes that part.

FT An assembly line.

HT But it’s not going to fit together like a normal shirt. My hand might be coming out my knee, and my foot might be coming out my ear. (laughter) It’s still my body. It’s still the same body parts. Only the positions have changed.

FT Like a Picasso painting.

HT Exactly. It worked because nothing had changed. Everything was just reassembled.

This is all going to be at Roulette, right down the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for two days. May 20 through 21, 2022. It’s a multimedia piece, starting with films that I made a couple of years ago in the Tilton Gallery and Luhring Augustine. The performance will open my film, Plain as Plain in Plain Sight. The second night will open with my other film Plain as Plain, but Different.

I’ve written a book called Migration and the Return of the Cheap Suit, and during the performance, the text and photographs from the book will be projected on a screen. The first part of the book is about people who left the city willingly. The second part of the book is about people getting evicted. I took the photographs last year when this COVID-19 thing hit us, and all the yuppies were moving out of the East Village. Every day, I’d go out for my evening walks and see all this stuff the yuppies were leaving in the street: fabulous women’s shoes, $4,000 speakers. It was money in the street. There were moving trucks everywhere.

At Roulette, I’ll project the pictures I took of all that onto the screen. Then I’m going to perform the text. I’ll read some to you, and how I might improvise it: “Now we sing the coming of empty space, the unwanted shifting.” Now, for the performance: “Now we sing the coming of empty space. It’s not about what’s crawling up my leg, or something wet going down my back. Empty space. It’s about the unwanted, unwanted, unwanted, shifting.” I’ve also been working on synthesized choruses. I’m going to sample my voice to create a choir effect. Solo, duet, or trio.

FT Henry, this is an evolution for you, right?

HT Yes, it is.

FT You’ve built your work over all these years, and now you see another thing. You’re in a state of grace.

HT I’m lucky. I’ve been fortunate with this. I’ve always feared that a day might come when there won’t be another move for me on the chessboard. I started out doing one thing in music and I took it as far as I could go.
I didn’t change for novelty’s sake. I changed when I used up all the information I had. Then I had new ideas that took me to the next place. That’s my musical history.