Henry Threadgill & Make a Move - Where's Your Cup?
Henry Threadgill is something else. I discovered Henry in a bargain bin, a promo copy of Too Much Sugar For a Dime, as it was on Bill Laswell's Axiom label, always a sign of quality and adventurism.
It messed me up bad. Like King Crimson, it took buying some more releases and several years to "get" HT. I could see the connection between his work and that of Steve Coleman, but my ears didn't bridge the two for a while. Unlike a lot of jazz composers (especially of the avant-garde school), his music is tightly composed and scored. Like Coleman, there is a lot of dense overlapping activities with polyrythms and melodic tracks into some sounding both strictly controlled yet on the verge of entropic disintegration. Unlike Coleman, there is less of a odd funk feel, and more weight given to typically non-jazz instrumentation (at various times he has incorporated two tubas, harmonium, oud, Central and South American ethnic percussion and vocals, violin, and various large brass frontlines).
He utilizes these odd lineups in numerous ensembles --Make a Move, Zooid, and Very Very Circus being the ones I know of-- and he drops all manner of outside musican contexts into his sonic stew. And since he and Make a Move are performing for the spring season of SFJazz, I decided maybe I should dig up one of their releases and refamiliarize myself. I picked Where's Your Cup?. It has a nice lineup; Brandon Ross (DJ Logic, Don Byron, Arrested Development) on guitar, Stomu Takeishi (Wynton Marsalis, Randy Brecker) on fretless bass, Tony Cedras (Cassandra Wilson, Paul Simon, Harry Belafonte) on accordion and harmonium, and JT Lewis (Harriet Tubman, Cassandra Wilson) on drums. Threadgill himself sticks to alto sax and flute this time around and the results are sublime.
The title track bears some almost cinematic Americana guitar plucking, in a manner not unlike a rougher-around the edges Bill Frisell. There is a lot of moments like that on the disc, with space given to make many of the tracks break down into seemingly freeform jams and then coalesce back into cinematic sections and drawn out transitions. Cedras contributes a palette that gives many of the songs weird colors of zydeco, tango and even a little bit of circus music motifs. There are places where this falls down, like it does on The Flew. But on the soft, dry sounding intro to 100 Year Old Game it works well, as well as on And This. JT Lewis plays much as he does in Harriet Tubman, swinging back and forth from chaotic to restrained, and the real MVP is Ross, who is one of the better guitarists out of the NYC underground scene that not enough people seem to know about, even though he plays with a lot of A-List talent. The electric post-bop lines he delivers on Laughing Club is solid.
It is still fairly avant material, and not his best in my opinion, as I really like Too Much Sugar For a Dime and the kind of third stream chamber jazz of Up Popped Two Lips.
Live though, he is supposedly a consistent winner, so i may just have to fork over the sugar to go see for myself.
It messed me up bad. Like King Crimson, it took buying some more releases and several years to "get" HT. I could see the connection between his work and that of Steve Coleman, but my ears didn't bridge the two for a while. Unlike a lot of jazz composers (especially of the avant-garde school), his music is tightly composed and scored. Like Coleman, there is a lot of dense overlapping activities with polyrythms and melodic tracks into some sounding both strictly controlled yet on the verge of entropic disintegration. Unlike Coleman, there is less of a odd funk feel, and more weight given to typically non-jazz instrumentation (at various times he has incorporated two tubas, harmonium, oud, Central and South American ethnic percussion and vocals, violin, and various large brass frontlines).
He utilizes these odd lineups in numerous ensembles --Make a Move, Zooid, and Very Very Circus being the ones I know of-- and he drops all manner of outside musican contexts into his sonic stew. And since he and Make a Move are performing for the spring season of SFJazz, I decided maybe I should dig up one of their releases and refamiliarize myself. I picked Where's Your Cup?. It has a nice lineup; Brandon Ross (DJ Logic, Don Byron, Arrested Development) on guitar, Stomu Takeishi (Wynton Marsalis, Randy Brecker) on fretless bass, Tony Cedras (Cassandra Wilson, Paul Simon, Harry Belafonte) on accordion and harmonium, and JT Lewis (Harriet Tubman, Cassandra Wilson) on drums. Threadgill himself sticks to alto sax and flute this time around and the results are sublime.
The title track bears some almost cinematic Americana guitar plucking, in a manner not unlike a rougher-around the edges Bill Frisell. There is a lot of moments like that on the disc, with space given to make many of the tracks break down into seemingly freeform jams and then coalesce back into cinematic sections and drawn out transitions. Cedras contributes a palette that gives many of the songs weird colors of zydeco, tango and even a little bit of circus music motifs. There are places where this falls down, like it does on The Flew. But on the soft, dry sounding intro to 100 Year Old Game it works well, as well as on And This. JT Lewis plays much as he does in Harriet Tubman, swinging back and forth from chaotic to restrained, and the real MVP is Ross, who is one of the better guitarists out of the NYC underground scene that not enough people seem to know about, even though he plays with a lot of A-List talent. The electric post-bop lines he delivers on Laughing Club is solid.
It is still fairly avant material, and not his best in my opinion, as I really like Too Much Sugar For a Dime and the kind of third stream chamber jazz of Up Popped Two Lips.
Live though, he is supposedly a consistent winner, so i may just have to fork over the sugar to go see for myself.
posted by theloniusfunk at 1:34 AM
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