17. Gateway

Henry Threadgill Sextet: Just The Facts And Pass The Bucket (About Time, 1983); composed by Henry Threadgill

No one really knows what jazz is, and the tendency (cf. Wynton, Crouch, et al.) to define the genre by extruding a set of parameters with a canon in mind just makes it harder to make sense of all the inevitable stuff that never fits. As Ornette Coleman once said, “We all know that a graveyard millions of years old is the study of archeology, not city planning.” Henry Threadgill’s ensemble music after disbanding the Air trio cut every which way on these questions. Both through-composed and improvised, antique and brand new, this album was a drily humorous rumination on death as both theme and structuring mechanism. His seven-member sextet (he counted the twin drummers as one) came on like a funeral procession that would never get to any burial site before it had explored every possible alternative. Opening with a percussion solo/soli, the horns tango in by twos, undergirded by the low strings, trading a set of rising figures, until they hit the stop-time double descending triplet that hooks the tune and cues the solo sections that follow, skating over the top of what still resembles a march but careens like a runaway boulder. No better way to die.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).