Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (Pi Recordings)
Henry Threadgill Ensemble Double Up
Released April 2016
JazzTimes Album of the Year 2016
2016 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll Top 10 Best New Album
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=nuCmjvHZRZY
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About:
Henry Threadgill‘s important new release Old Locks and Irregular Verbs is his heartfelt tribute to an old friend, the composer-conductor Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, who passed away in 2013. He describes the work as “An emotion, a thought, a feeling that I retained in my memory of Butch.” Threadgill first came to know Morris a significant figure in jazz who was responsible for creating a distinctive form of conductor-led collective improvisation for large-ensemble built on a technique he called “Conduction” when he moved to New York in the mid-1970s from Chicago. They were subsequently members of saxophonist David Murray’s Octet in the early 1980s when Morris was still best known as a cornetist. Close friends for almost four decades, they lived near each other in the East Village and were both Viet Nam War veterans, but mostly, they were fellow musical explorers who were each keen on developing his own individual creative voice. Old Locks was commissioned by and premiered at New York’s Winter Jazz Fest in January 2014, where it was performed twice in front of rapt, overflowing audiences at the historical Judson Memorial Church. It features Ensemble Double Up, Threadgill’s first new band to record in fifteen years, an unorthodox instrumental combination of Jason Moran and David Virelles on pianos, Curtis Macdonald and Roman Filiu on alto saxophones, Jose Davila on tuba, Christopher Hoffman on cello, and Craig Weinrib on drums. Threadgill, who is of course also well-known as a saxophonist and flutist, says that he has always wanted a group where he didn’t have to play so that he could focus on composing and sculpting the music. The work opens an exciting new chapter in the ever evolving artistry of one of the greatest composers in modern music.
Threadgill has recently continued his amazing streak of accomplishments. He was named the recipient of a prestigious Doris Duke Impact Award; released the highly acclaimed In for a Penny, In for a Pound with his band Zooid, which the New York Times called “brilliant;” and helped the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), of which he is an early member, celebrate its 50th anniversary with a series of concerts culminating in a reunion of Muhal Richard Abrams Experimental Band at the Chicago Jazz Festival and the release of Jack DeJohnette‘s Made in Chicago, which also featured AACM mates Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell. Threadgill was also the subject of a two-day career retrospective organized by Jason Moran and held at New York’s Harlem Stage where works stretching his entire career were reinterpreted by an all-star assemblage of musicians including Moran, Cassandra Wilson, Greg Osby, James Carter, Steve Lehman, Yosvanny Terry, Darius Jones, Henry Grimes, Liberty Ellman, David Virelles, and many others. Speaking to the festival’s importance, Moran said “Thread is my favorite composer of all time. African-American composers are generally honored after they have passed away, and the festival was my way of insuring that this would not be the case for Henry.”
But even at age 72, Threadgill is pushing forward as emphatically as ever. After 15 years developing his unique interval-based system of improvisation with his band Zooid, he takes it one step further with Ensemble Double Up. Threadgill describes the new music as “an extension of Zooid. The interval stuff is already written into the composition but not as tightly prescribed. Its more based on the musicians’ ears so there is more room to move around.” The use of two pianos vastly expands the harmonic and tonal palette, adding a much wider range of color, texture, and weight. Curtis Macdonald, who as Threadgill’s music copyist for the last three years has an intimate view of his compositional process says “Henry demonstrates what he’s creating by playing the harmonic structures on the piano so it makes sense that he has decided to add pianists to this band. It’s a big shift in his approach, as there is now a new polyphonic density with a larger-than-life sonic landscape to explore.”
“Parts One” through “Three” of Old Locks (the entire composition is in a single movement and indexed for reference only) is a largely composed, meticulously arranged work that has all the hallmarks of Threadgill’s recent work: complex forms, multi-layered counterpoint, and rhythmic convolution. According to Virelles, “The ensemble parts are like a maze that need to be played very precisely, with interlocking phrases throughout, keeping a very specific rhythmic, harmonic and textural relationship between all the elements.” In the ensemble passages, Moran and Virelles play mostly single-note counterpoint, which Moran describes as “popcorn explosions” while still providing the music with its harmonic framework. Macdonald and Filiu invoke Threadgill’s logic on saxophones but bring their own sound; Hoffman and Davila both holdovers from Zooid provide the thrust that gives the music its most obvious connection to Threadgill’s recent music, while Craig Weinrib on drums drives the labyrinthine rhythms with poise.
“Part Four” is altogether different. As Macdonald puts it, “Henry deviates from his usual compositional system and composed an epic, deeply personal and emotive chorale in homage to Butch. It’s hauntingly beautiful and mournful, and it left a profound effect on us from the very first time we heard it in rehearsal.” According to Moran, “Every time we reach the end of this piece, I’m always crying because it is an emotional moment. Threadgill has always had an affinity for funeral bands, and this becomes a powerful moment when Double Up becomes a funeral band.” The movement starts off a slow dirge before turning into an elegy and finally building to a crescendo and abrupt end, a moving and poignant final remembrance.
David Virelles summarizes it best: “Henry is making some of the most advanced original music today. He’s at the peak of his craft, yet still very curious and completely open to all possibilities when combining sounds, and always looking to expand and learn. When listening to his music, one enters a very personal sonic world, with a very colorful, recognizable personality. I feel fortunate to be able to watch closely a consummate, original composer with a very personal language who keeps expanding and refining his craft.” True to form, Threadgill is already moving ahead, adding a third piano to the ensemble to perform his work “Double Up Plays Double Up Plus.” His personal quest continues, and we are all the more fortunate for it.
Track Listing:
1. Part One (Henry Threadgill) 19:16
2. Part Two (Henry Threadgill) 3:53
3. Part Three (Henry Threadgill) 16:39
4. Part Four (Henry Threadgill) 7:12
Personnel:
Jason Moran: piano
David Virelles: piano
Roman Filiu: alto saxophone
Curtis Macdonald: alto saxophone
Christopher Hoffman: cello
Jose Davila: tuba
Craig Weinrib: drums
Recorded May 22, 2015, at Systems Two Brooklyn, New Yorkm by Michael Marciano, assisted by Rich Lamb
Produced and Mixed by Liberty Ellman
Mastered by Steve Fallone
Photography by Jules Allen
Design: Simon Grendene
Executive-Producer: Seth Rosner, Yulun Wang
Review:
Recent Pulitzer winner Henry Threadgill only makes important records. In the jazz avant-garde, he is both revered elder statesman and active agent provocateur. Old Locks and Irregular Verbs is momentous in at least three aspects. Threadgill, a major multireed instrumentalist, does not play on it. Double Up is his first new group in 15 years. And it is his first band to feature piano.
Because he is Henry Threadgill, he went directly from 50 years of no pianos to an ensemble with two. His bands often include little-known players, but for his first pianists he chose two youthful masters, Jason Moran and David Virelles. The rest of the septet is Roman Filiu and Curtis MacDonald on alto saxophones, Jose Davila on tuba, Christopher Hoffman on cello and Craig Weinrib on drums.
The album is a four-part suite in tribute to “Conduction” innovator and cornet player Butch Morris, Threadgill’s comrade-in-arms of 40 years, who died in 2013. It is a revelation to hear pianos in a Threadgill ensemble, with all the sweeping sonorities and harmonic densities that Moran and Virelles can jointly generate. The suite has a special subject and unique instrumentation, but it is still classic Threadgill music, which means you must learn how to listen to it.
Instead of head melodies or chord progressions, there are organizing principles like modular/mathematical infrastructure and what Threadgill has called a “serial intervallic language.” Arcane counterpoint is pervasive. The ensemble rarely settles. There are so many separate things going on that it can feel like a three-ring circus. (Or a seven-ring circus; Threadgill once had a band called Very Very Circus.) Learning to listen requires you to resist the temptation to seek out the comfort zone of “solos,” and instead hear how arrays of diverse elements aggregate as new concepts of form. The first three movements of the suite are largely composed and carefully arranged. But they feel born in the moment. “I want my musicians to play spontaneous ideas,” Threadgill has said. “The only way to get them to do that is to get past the usual cues.”
The absence of “usual cues” allows for untethered, striking individual forays-for lack of a better word, call them solos-like Davila’s dark, extended tuba enigma on Part One, and Weinrib’s quietly expanding drum meditation on Part Two. Most significant, Moran and Virelles respond to a new creative situation with some of the most daring, inspired work of their careers. They pour forth fresh ideas, not in a “piano duo,” but in a seething piano choir.
The risk of Threadgill’s procedures is that they can come off as cold, esoteric intellectual games. But his memorial to Morris, his departed friend, confronts deep personal emotion. In the suite’s final movement, Double Up becomes a funeral band. The pianists open Part Four slowly, as if reluctant to intrude on silence, each searching for correlatives to sadness. Their dirge flows and veers because the sadness is not simple. Darkness descends when the other instruments join in a blend of mourning, so heavy it barely moves. But in this elegy, in this profound chorale, the ensemble, at first almost imperceptibly, begins to ascend and sing, and the suite ends in a crescendo of release and affirmation.
Thomas Conrad (JazzTimes)
