Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you are listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I am grateful you are here. Let's keep the icon show going with jazz composer Henry Threadgill.

[music]

Alison: Being one of only three jazz artists to win the Pulitzer Prize in music is just one of the reasons that makes composer Henry Threadgill an icon. Long a forefront member of the avant-garde jazz scene, Threadgill has been making music for more than 50 years. Starting in his native Chicago, where he grew up on the South Side, to his service in Vietnam as a bandleader and soldier, to his days after his service in the military when he settled in the East Village in the '70s and '80s, many of these memories are detailed in his new book, Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music.

The book has stories like the time a high school-aged Henry Threadgill spoke with John Coltrane for more than 45 minutes in a smoky phone booth in-between sets. Back in May, the 79-year old Threadgill came to our studio traveling solo, wearing a groovy hat and red frame glasses, and he spoke with us about his book and his latest composition titled The Other One. I started by asking Henry what it was like to look back at his life for someone who is always innovating and looking forward.

Henry Threadgill: To look back, [chuckles] it's a long road back. It's not just a long road, it's a very wide road too. Well, this project was one of like, what was I going to focus on, and the focusing had to do with what I could remember. Everything that I can remember is based around sound. If I get the sound right, I can put it in a time frame, so to speak. When I was a kid, when I was like two years old or three years old, I can go back to that because I can hear the sound of the streetcar stopping in front of the house, so I know then what was on the radio. I can also access other music that I heard and other events that I saw at that time by going back to that streetcar.

This is how I go back and reconstruct the past, that way. It's a difficult process sometimes, but it was fun too to go back. I remember some things I didn't even think I could remember. It's like going to an analyst in a way when you have a good writer interviewing you and digging into your history, that really get deep into the core of a particular question. Like I said, that's like being on a leather couch.

[laughter]

Alison: The book begins with a description of your great-grandfather, Peyton Robinson. You write, in the beginning, "He would always wear a three-piece wool suit no matter whatever temperature it was." Why did you want to begin the book with that story and that of your great-grandfather?

Henry Threadgill: He didn't just wear a three-piece wool suit. Let me tell you everything. He had on long underwear, he had on high-top shoes with socks that came up to his knees, and he had on a wool overcoat and a shirt and tie and a hat in Chicago's heat of 110 to 115 degrees. That's how he dressed. When the winter would be 20 below zero, that was the same apparel that he wore, and I never met anyone like that. My great-grandfather lived through four revolutions in his lifetime. I don't know of anyone that recounted anything like that, and I know I wont. When he told me about the experience, he said, "When I started out, Henry, it was a horse and a buggy, or a mule and a buggy."

Now, I have this part confused. I don't know if a train came next or a bicycle came next. Something like this, he said, "Then after the horse and buggy came the bicycle, then came the train." That's two. He said, "Then came the car, then came the airplane." This was in 1958 when I asked him that. We were watching the Russians go to the moon, and I said, "You don't want to see this program, where they going to?" He said, "That ain't nothing." He had already seen four revolutions.

Alison: [chuckles] Right, because you were born in 1870s, yes.

Henry Threadgill: Yes. How many people do you know or would you ever know to see four revolutions? Those are serious revolutions, right?

Alison: Yes, my grandmother--

Henry Threadgill: Going to the moon was the fifth, so that was five major technological revolutions that he saw in his lifetime. That's why he said it was nothing. It was just another step along the way.

Alison: You dedicate the book to your mom; you say she put you on this road.

Henry Threadgill: That's right.

Alison: How so?

Henry Threadgill: Because my mother started taking me to see live music when I was about two years old. I can remember those events too, standing on the seats because already, they had big shows in the biggest movie theaters. That was probably in New York and all around the country, and Chicago would be at the Chicago State-Lake Theater. We have to go see Duke Ellington and Count Basie, all these different bands, famous-named people, Louis Jordan. I remember seeing all these people when I was two and three years old. My mother, she's not only had put me on that, but they had an art station that was similar to this station like WNYC. You know who Studs Terkel was?

Alison: Yes.

Henry Threadgill: He was a good friend of mine. It was a station that he--

Alison: Huh?

Henry Threadgill: Yes, he was old-time friend of mine. I'm in his book as a matter of fact. He wrote about me in his book. My mother was the one that introduced me to Studs Terkel program. He not only had people on like your show where he had writers and poets and historians on, but he played world music. I had never heard any world music on one show, where he would go from the Congo to Portugal to Mississippi.

Alison: That's cool.

Henry Threadgill: [laughs] That's how the music would go. Like I said, my mother, she had all these interests. Then she was interested in art, and she really knew a lot about history. It was just amazing what she knew about history. She would tell me things about what was the first running hot water in the United States, things like that.

Alison: She just knew a lot, smart woman.

Henry Threadgill: I did find out much, much later that my mother had actually studied piano also. I didn't know that.

Alison: You were getting into it in high school? [laughs]

Henry Threadgill: Oh, God. I was a pretty wild kid.

Alison: Yes, there was a little drinking. There's a little smoking. There was a little bit of everything.

Henry Threadgill: A little bit of everything, yes. I was experimenting. [laughs]

Alison: When you look back, what was going on with you at that time?

Henry Threadgill: I was curious all of my life about everything I didn't know. If I see something and I didn't know what it was, I would start digging into it. I remember opening up clocks when I first noticed clocks. I said, "How is this thing working? Why is the hands going around?" Somebody would give you some medicine because you had some problem, a cold or something. Then I would start experimenting with that medicine, and I would start trying to make medicine also. I would give that to other children.

Alison: Uh-oh. [chuckles]

Henry Threadgill: Then I would have notes and study them on their reactions to the medicine that I gave them. [laughs] That was the thing that I always did.

[laughter]

Alison: You were curious. We'll leave it there. You were also gigging as a musician, sneaking out of your family home at night, climbing the elevator tracks, coming back in the morning. From that experience, what did you learn about being a professional musician?

Henry Threadgill: Well, at that time, it's hard to say. It was live music, being in front of live music. That was my first introduction to live music. My next introduction was to the Chicago Symphony, sitting in front of the symphony and having 100 musicians sitting in front of you. The sound of that, the impact of it is not the same thing as listening to a record or listening to the radio, and that was the impact. That was the biggest lesson I'm saying. When you are speaking music to the public live, the difference it's right then, and you can't correct it. You can't change it. You could change the recording, but you can't change that.

It brought to my attention how important that moment of engagement with the public is, that you have to treat that extremely sensitive because you can't change it. You have to treat that like that's the last thing you can do in life, and you have to get it right. That's the attitude that I've learned from that. Every time you play for the public, that it's a great moment, and you'll never get a chance to do it again. You really have to be into it. That's what I learned from that.

Alison: It's the intimacy of live because it's only that moment between you and the artist. Even if you're 1 of 100-

Henry Threadgill: You and the audience, yes.

Alison: -if you're 1 of 10,000 listening to us right now, it's the intimacy of this live moment, of this conversation, of what's being said.

Henry Threadgill: Yes, right.

Alison: You're very candid in the book about your time with the Vietnam War. Your draft number was going to come up, it was 1966, so you decided to volunteer for the draft as a musician. Did you understand what you were really getting into? Did you really have a sense of what could happen to you because you did end up in Vietnam?

Henry Threadgill: No, I didn't. Let me just clarify a little bit more of that statement.

Alison: Please fix it.

Henry Threadgill: I was drafted first. Then I went to the draft board, and the people knew me there. They called me in. They said, "I got good news for you, Henry, and we've got bad news. The bad news is you've been drafted. The good news is--" They asked me this question. They said, "You are a professional musician?" I said, "Well, I guess so, yes." They said, "That means that you can get a contract with the government if you enlist for the draft."

Alison: I see.

Henry Threadgill: That's different from being drafted, but it's just like you're volunteering. The difference is, at that time, if you were drafted, you was in the service for two years. If you enlisted, it was for three years. If you volunteered for the draft, that means that you could get out in two years and six months, and you had a contract. You are a brain surgeon, all you can do is operate on people brain. You make shoes, that's all you can do if you have an agreement with the government. That's what I had. I wasn't worried because I knew I was going to play music. It was not in my wildest imagination to think that I could end up beyond the United States at that time.

I said, "Why would I end up in Vietnam?" That was so far out of the picture. I just couldn't even imagine it.

Alison: But it happened?

Henry Threadgill: Yes, but it happened. [chuckles]

Alison: Yes, you were present at the Tet Offensive. You also wrote what you witnessed in the jungle. You had an injury. There were painkillers involved. What is something you'd like people to know or understand about the impact of being a young man at Vietnam at that time, the men of your generation?

Henry Threadgill: It's not about Vietnam, it's about war. That's what people need to understand. You're sitting here with the people in this studio, they walk out this door, they go home, and it's a normal life. A normal life, people are not running through the streets because mortars and bombs are coming in.

You're not standing here watching man's inhumanity to humanity, men killing men on an extremely high, sophisticated level. You come from a world where people go to bed. They get up and then go to work, and the only loud unusual sounds you hear is on the 4th of July of firecrackers. I didn't know anything about the sound of guns. I didn't know anything about mass killing or anything like that. You have to put yourself in that position of being that unexposed to not just violence but killing and watch human beings sink to a level so low that you can't imagine what some of the behavior that you would see.

Some of the things that I saw over there, I wouldn't even want to talk about it because people will say, "Oh, human beings sank that low?" Yes, and they always have sank that low when they get involved in war. All wars take us to this lowest denominator of human behavior. What I'm trying to impart here is that when will we learn this lesson and not keep repeating the same behavior? Why do we have to kill each other when there's still the possibility to reason? We're supposed to have some type of intellect as the animals that we are.

That's what this is really all about.

Alison: Before we run out of time, I do want to mention your Pulitzer Prize in music for the composition, In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Where were you when you found out you won a Pulitzer?

Henry Threadgill: I was sitting in my house.

[laughter]

Alison: On my couch having my coffee. [laughs]

Henry Threadgill: I don't remember who called me up to tell me this and I said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "Are you sure you know what you're talking about?" I said, "Why would they be giving me a prize? For what?" I had forgotten all about the record. I make a record, and I just keep moving. He said, "Well, you've won a Pulitzer for your last record." I said, "Well, which record was that?"

[laughter]

Alison: That was Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill on his new memoir, Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music.

[music]

Alison: From an icon in music to an icon in journalism, Charlayne Hunter-Gault has been covering Black life for more than 50 years, and she tells us more about her new book, which compiles some of her favorite stories over the years. This is All Of It.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.