“Easily Slip Into Another World”

The telling of a real life story is a strange thing. You can immerse yourself in a subject, as Philip Watson does in his brilliant book on Bill Frisell, the words approaching, then somehow merging with, the music and the man. That seemed like a reasonable and fair transaction to me, beneficial for everyone. I once, on the other hand, read an unauthorised biography of PJ Harvey in which her own input was completely absent, and I imagined the author writing it lying on his bed with posters of her on the wall. It was an eye witness account from somebody who seemed nowhere near the scene.

Autobiographies are something else again, there may be cherry picked truths, the subject usually painting him or herself, when all’s said and done, as someone who faced their hardships and battles with dignity. I’ve always preferred the kind of stories that tend towards rumination and raconteurism, and there’s plenty of that in Threadgill’s autobiography. But his life has been sufficiently colourful, violent, rich and contrary that merely to tell the tale shoots reality through with a kind of poetry. And he doesn’t dress it up.

I’m not sure how much of this is down to Brent Hayes Edwards, Threadgill’s co-author, but it seems the person putting all the stories together is often somewhat sidelined. I suspect the way the language intensifies the action is often down to his feeling for the subject. I wonder how the writing process went, who did what, but it’s in keeping with the tone of this brilliant collaboration that such mechanics of creation remain a mystery.

Threadgill has always been unwavering in his own vision and insistent that other artists must find theirs, but he’s also a devastatingly good storyteller, able to find comedy in the grimmest of circumstances. True to his word, the book slips in and out of worlds, but it’s partly just recounting things as they happened. The influence of the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Music looms large, a formidable organisation with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at its core, and one responsible for the growth of one of the most important musical movements in jazz history, encompassing theatre, education and a fearless experimentation in all things. The Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith and many others forged their singular careers there. But Threadgill was to be absent from its initial formation as world events took a tragic turn.

The sudden and brutal intrusion of the Vietnam War cuts across a youth in equal parts misspent and musical like a boot print on a manuscript, and this could easily have been a book solely about the war had he not managed to get out when he did. The brutality, surrealism and comedy of it all has echoes of “Catch 22”, and the terrifying episode that runs, in italics, through these chapters like a poem, reminds us that a keen sense of hearing in the dense jungle is a matter of life or death.

The impact of the war affects everything in the book that comes after, and resonates with his experiences as a kid being shot at by Police as well as stories of his gunslinging Great Grandfather, Peyton Robinson. Post traumatic stress hangs like a cloud over everything: he is relatively brief in his discussion of relationships and family, but goes into great detail about planning to kill a youngster who held him and his pregnant girlfriend at gunpoint. Violence is everywhere, as is its aftermath: but so is humour. Listening back to the recordings, it’s all there too, the anguished vibrato leavened by the wit of the phrases, that sound: that unique, singular sound.

And that’s what’s so powerful about this book. It’s a holistic experience, the secret of his musical intelligence revealed indirectly, much as a Zen koan prepares the mind to think for itself rather than give you the answers on a plate (if you take the answers, you’ve got to take the plate too…what do you do with that?). Threadgill’s tune titles, famously baffling, have always had that same irresistible resonance, where they nearly mean something. On this topic, he is, as with all things musical, very clear:

“You don’t need to know what I might have been thinking about. Instead you need to…figure out your own reaction. What now? What does it make you feel? What does it make you think about? Take me out of the equation.” (italics mine).

When I think of his music, it’s American through and through, a kind of customised logic constructed using a magpie’s scrapbook of everything seen or thought of. His inspirations range from the patterns of growth in a particular vine to the idea of people moving around a busy office without collision. It strikes me that these details are often somewhat scientific, concerning objects over feelings, another way to avoid telling his listeners how to feel. There’s always the sound of something familiar, but the way he gets there is all sidestep and sleight of hand. If Threadgill wrote fairy stories, the Princess would wake up without a Prince’s kiss (but he’d have his hand on the door handle, just too late). Occasionally puzzling, just out of reach yet often so accessible, the music is, above all, experimental in the true sense of the word. And underlying most of it is groove, a kind of relentless New Orleans styled undertow upon and around which intervals dance – angular, humorous and earthy, the drums a sunny disposition amongst those murky voicings.

The last twenty years of his music have entered on an intricate harmonic system analogous to mainstream jazz chord symbols, but closer in spirit to intervallic structures, enabling unpredictable mutations of harmony whilst retaining a coherent centre. It’s the longest he’s gone with a singular method, and, through ensembles of all shapes and sizes, it seems to be endlessly fertile ground, even allowing him to step outside the group and have someone else play it. Interestingly, it’s the one area of his music where he talks about the compositional detail although, like Stravinsky, he seems to sound exactly like himself despite changing his modus operandi relatively late in life.

On albums like “Rag, Bush and All”, or “Too Much Sugar For A Dime”, there’s something so familiar amongst the abstraction, the brute force and the delicate and strange harmonies. I wanted to know what it was, to have it for myself. It was not to be, it’s not mine, I’m still confused, and I’ve never been so pleased to have finished a book that refused to give me what I’d hoped it would.