Henry Threadgill - Easily Slip into Another World A Life in Music

2023 Hardback Book

Pi Recordings is excited to announce the upcoming release of a new recording by the Henry Threadgill Ensemble recorded live at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn and his long anticipated auto biography, written with Brent Hayes Edwards.

Henry Threadgill—the celebrated composer, saxophonist, and flautist—is one of only 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 Musi- cians (AACM); the year and a half he spent touring with an evangelical preacher in the mid-1960s; his military service in Vietnam, illustrative of an oft-ignored 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 (including 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 and 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.

The composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill is widely recognized as one of the most original and innovative voices in contemporary music. A Chicago native, he studied at the American Conservatory of Music and, after serving in Vietnam, joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He has performed on more than thirty albums, including acclaimed releases from his bands Air, X-75, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, Very Very Circus, Make a Move, Zooid, and Ensemble Double Up. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003, a United States Artists Fellowship in 2008, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2016 Excellence in the Arts Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America. Threadgill was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2021. His four-movement work, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016.

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) andEpistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.