Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards (review)

Reviewed by: Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards Edward Komara Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music. By Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards. New York: Knopf, 2023. 403 p. ISBN 9781524749071 (hardcover), 32. 50; ISBN 9781524749088 (ebook), price varies. Illustrations, index. Since 1975, composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill has reaped a remarkable oeuvre in jazz, as cataloged by Lars Backström ("The Illustrated Henry Threadgill Discography, " https: //discography. backstrom. se/threadgill accessed 11 March 2024). Each of his albums upon release receives high praise from critics. Two recording firms have collected much of his music through 1996 in box sets, namely The Complete Novus interviews and chapters about him have appeared in anthologies by Studs Terkel, Francis Davis, and Gary Giddins, among others. Threadgill states: There is an expectation that an artist's autobiography will function as a primer, providing "explanations" of the art. But this book is not a listening guide. If anything, it is an extended defiance of that expectation. If it's meant to teach you anything about my music, it starts with the lesson that you need to relinquish that desire for transparency. Music is about listening. Nothing I can say can mean anything once you start to listen. It's about the sound, not about End Page 690 the words I might be able to pin up to preface or accompany whatever the sound does to you when it goes in your ears. (p. 259) Threadgill was raised and educated in the South Side of Chicago in an extended family that included his parents, grandparents, and a great-grandfather. His introduction to music was through childhood lessons on piano and alto saxophone, and during his high school and college years, he performed in various ensembles for jazz, blues, and sanctified music. He also began studying classical music, especially the works of Claude Debussy and Edgar Varèse. What keeps this opening section of the autobiography from reading like a retelling of Saul Bellow's classic novel The Adventures of Augie March is the abiding threat of violence toward the African American protagonist and his associates, whether in the tales told about Threadgill's ancestors, an afternoon when he and a friend were nearly stoned by a mob when they ventured into a White neighborhood, or throughout his army service in Vietnam (1967–68). Furthermore, for the education of a young jazz musician, Threadgill says that exposure to styles and imitating the solos from classic performances aren't enough: "That thirst for the tradition, it has to come from inside. . . . Young musicians have to find their way on their own, in the company of their peers. It's the only way to develop those modes of behavior, those ways of playing together, that are deep in the music" (p. 175). For me, the real beginning of the book is the reprint of "Where Are Our Critics? " (pp. 158–61), which was originally published in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) newsletter The New Regime (no. 1 December 1968: 11–12) upon his return to Chicago from Vietnam War duty. He recognizes: The question has been tossed about many times in recent years primarily by Black artists, that the term JAZZ had taken on too many false and bad connotations, stigmas, etc. , and in what is basically a commercial-materialistic-capitalistically oriented country, taken on a too limited conception in terms of art. Thereby setting the stage for a foreseeable dead end in terms of progressive. . .