Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music - Softcover

Threadgill, Henry; Edwards, Brent Hayes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593081846 ISBN 13: 9780593081846

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • Winner of the 2024 American Book Award and the 2024 JJA Jazz Award • An autobiography of one of the towering figures of contemporary American music and a powerful meditation on history, race, capitalism, and art.


A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker

Henry Threadgill has had a singular life in music. At 79, the saxophonist, flautist, and celebrated composer is one of three jazz artists (along with Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis) to have won a Pulitzer Prize. In Easily Slip into Another World, Threadgill recalls his childhood and upbringing in Chicago, his family life and education, and his brilliant career in music.

Here are riveting recollections of the music scene in Chicago in the early 1960s, when Threadgill developed his craft among friends and schoolmates who would go on to form the core of the highly influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM); the year and a half he spent touring with an evangelical preacher in the mid-1960s; his military service in Vietnam—a riveting tale in itself, but also representative of an under-recognized aspect of jazz history, given the number of musicians in Threadgill’s generation who served in the armed forces.

We appreciate his genius as he travels to the Netherlands, Venezuela, Trinidad, Sicily, and Goa enriching his art; immerses himself in the volatile downtown scene in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s; collaborates with choreographers, writers, and theater directors as well as an astonishing range of musicians, from AACM stalwarts (Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Leroy Jenkins), to Chicago bluesmen, downtown luminaries, and world music innovators; shares his impressions of the recording industry his perspectives on music education and the history of Black music in the United States; and, of course, accounts for his work with the various ensembles he has directed over the past five decades.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HENRY THREADGILL was born in Chicago in 1944. In 2016, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for In For a Penny, In for a Pound, an album he composed for his sextet, Zooid. He lives in New York.

BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1.

Too Much Sugar

No matter the season, Peyton Robinson always wore the same thing. Whether it was 110 degrees or 10 below zero, my great-grandfather used to walk around Chicago in a three-piece wool suit with long underwear beneath it, high lace-up leather shoes with wool socks up to his knees, an overcoat, and a top hat. His body temperature never changed. I used to watch the way he would sweat. It would be mid-August and he would be sitting there calmly with the sweat running down his neck in rivulets. He’d eat spicy food, too—he especially loved wild game: bear meat and raccoons and snakes and all kinds of rustic stuff. I figured that all these peculiar habits were the reason he lived so long and never seemed to catch a cold.

Peyton Robinson didn’t live with us. When I was young, I lived in a big and noisy apartment on 33rd and Cottage Grove near Groveland Park with my grandparents, my mother, my younger sister, and a number of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. But my great-grandfather lived in a rough neighborhood way out on the West Side. As I got older, I came to see Peyton Robinson as something approaching a creature of legend, the protagonist of a trove of family lore. It thrilled me when he came to visit, like some apparition from another century, or another planet. And I loved to think I came from such a singularity—from an ancestor who seemed to move through the world entirely on his own terms.

The stories were riveting. Years later my mother told me that once Peyton Robinson got into some trouble with a gang over on the West Side. One evening somebody said something rude to him and he said, “Fuck you.” The person was associated with the gang, and they conveyed a message that my great-grandfather had better watch his mouth if he didn’t want anything to happen to him.

Peyton Robinson went out at three a.m. with a shotgun and just started shooting up into the air, bellowing in the middle of the night. “Come on out in the street, motherfuckers, here I am!” he yelled. “I’m right here!”

It woke up the whole neighborhood. People were peeping out from behind their curtains at this crazy man screaming in the alley. But nobody ventured out to meet his challenge. And after that, people gave him a wide berth in the street.

Even the meanest dogs knew better, somehow. Often he would come to visit us early in the morning, arriving while everyone was still asleep. He would walk down the back alleys with his three-piece suit and a cane. Usually dogs would bark and growl and rush at the fences when people came down the alleys. But when Peyton Robinson strode by, the German shepherds and bulldogs were quiet.

I live in sound.

All my references go back to sound. I go back in my memory and I don’t see: I hear. The first thing I remember is the sound of the streetcar that went by our apartment building. This was before I started kindergarten. I must have been about three years old. There was a hospital nearby, and all these people would get off at 33rd Street. As the streetcar came in, the first thing you would hear is the carriage bell, announcing its arrival with a cling cling. The carriage bell was made out of brass and sterling silver and built into the floor of the streetcar. It worked with a foot pedal, and the driver would pump it as he pulled in. You find carriage bells in the Caribbean, too, in Jamaica and Bermuda and other places. When I heard that sound, I would run to the window. A few of the young grandchildren stayed home with my grandmother Gertrude during the day while my mother and my grandfather went to work and my aunts and uncles went to school.

The radio was on all day long. My grandmother would listen to shows like Arthur Godfrey Time and Art Linkletter’s House Party. Art Linkletter had a house band that featured an accordion player. I still remember that in particular because I wasn’t crazy about accordion at that time, and I thought the band sounded strange. After their shows finished, sometimes my grandmother would switch to another station where they were playing classical music. My sister and my cousins would get impatient and run off and play, but I would sit and listen and daydream on it. And then it might go from that to Serbian music, because Chicago had the biggest Serbian community in the country, the largest outside Yugoslavia. There was a Serbian radio station, a Serbian newspaper. And there was also a large Polish population, mostly living in an area behind the Stock Yards. So that music would come on, too.

In those days radio was more or less a hodgepodge. I remember Mexican music, country music (which people used to call “hillbilly” back then), jazz, rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, plus regular programming including radio plays, detective shows, and science fiction. On Sundays my grandfather would put on a gospel station and listen to Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland, Clay Evans, and the Pilgrim Travelers. There was a little of everything. In a way, you could say that the programmers didn’t have any idea what they were doing—which is the way it really should be. It was uncontrolled, untamed by the forces of commercialism. A lot of it was improvised. Television was like that in the beginning, too: Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, Arthur Godfrey and His Friends, the General Electric Theater on CBS hosted by Ronald Reagan, the Ford Star Jubilee with live stagings of scripts by Noël Coward and Herman Wouk, The Nat King Cole Show, The Kate Smith Hour on NBC. But radio was the main thing then: the same way kids sit for hours in front of the television or the computer now, back then we would sit in front of the radio and skip from station to station. And it was amazing, the amount of music there was.

By the time I hit high school, Studs Terkel had started hosting his radio show on WFMT, and I was enthralled by how wide and eclectic he made the world sound. He would play everything from blues and Mexican son jarocho to Central African music, Indian classical music, and flamenco, and he interspersed the music with interviews of all sorts of people—film and theater directors, actors, poets, blues singers, architects and industrial designers, orchestra conductors, folklore collectors, choreographers. Decades later, Studs Terkel’s program might have been called a “world music” show, but he did it without the label, before it was a marketing category, and that made it more thrilling: your ears could roam, and you heard unexpected echoes between far-flung corners of the globe.

When I was young, boogie-woogie was the music that caught my attention. Before it did, I wasn’t even aware that there was a piano in the house. It was in the hallway: a player piano, the kind you stick rolls in. When I started hearing boogie-woogie—it was popular then: Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, and people like that—I was just swept off. I was determined to learn how to play it myself, and when I was in elementary school I started pecking at the piano. I didn’t take formal lessons, but I was able to figure out some things by ear. I would sit there engrossed, trying to replicate a riff I heard on the radio or on a record, straining to stretch my little hands to fit those piston-like left-hand rhythms. Sometimes I’d put on a piano roll and then I could see where the keys were depressed and follow the patterns. I lost track of time. I could sit and play the piano for hours and no one would say anything because they knew where I was and I wasn’t getting into trouble. I was like a cow with a bell around its neck.

On Sundays generally we would go to my grandmother Gertrude’s church, the Church of God in Christ, which was a Holiness-Pentecostal...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593081846
• ISBN 13: 9780593081846
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 417
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland