HERBST THEATRE, SAN FRANCISCO — SUNDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2010
Henry Threadgill stood alone at center stage, listening intently to the gathering murmur of sound from the seated musicians around him. His concentration was almost palpable as he remained there, head bowed and with his hand on his chin, swaying gently to the groundswell of overlapped rhythms and choppy phrases. But the turbulence faded as he picked up his flute, and Threadgill reshaped its contour with a thoughtful, economical solo. Delivered with the inscrutable authority of Zen koans, each phrase was left to hang, unresolved, and to sink in gradually. This moment came early in Threadgill’s set with his sextet, Zooid, at the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Sunday night. But it was typical of the 80-minute performance, an intellectual safari through dense jungles of crisscrossed sound and innovative musical textures.
Threadgill’s music can be disorienting, but it is not, as too many people continue to insist, “free jazz.” These tunes were not improvised; they were intense, intricate compositions, with copious written scores spilling off the sextet’s music stands as evidence. Rising from muted solo introductions, they would swell gradually to envelop the full band, only to end with a stunning abruptness that could make a 15-minute performance feel like the briefest vignette.
Zooid’s group cohesion is remarkable, but each member of the ensemble brings something unique. Guitarist Liberty Ellman held a running conversation with the rest of the band, countering each soloist with brisk commentary and probing his own breaks from a variety of oblique angles. Stomu Takeishi, barefoot and writhing over his bass guitar, would rock back in his chair, lifting his legs parallel with the floor, and then roll forward to a crouch, all while filling in the crevices of the music with carefully targeted notes and swift, slashing strums. It was easy to forget that Ellman and Takeishi were playing acoustic instruments, but cellist Christopher Hoffman was nearly inaudible much of the time, his pizzicato accents remaining well below the surface. In solos, however, Hoffman overlaid the rhythm with a slouching, weary moan.
Threadgill seemed always to be pondering, as if thinking three moves ahead. On alto saxophone, he ramped up from furtive steps and tight squeaks to a wide-open wail, while his work on bass flute was exotic and ghostly, his phrases curling ambiguously in a stream of musical question marks. He dovetailed nicely, if oddly, with the tuba and trombone of José Davila, whose amorphous perambulations, suggesting the troubled dreams of some anxious elephant, pulled the music gently off-balance. Behind it all, Elliot Humberto Kavee’s drumming was a constant churn, a dizzying clockwork of gears and flywheels, rising and falling like the tide.
A zooid, I am informed, is a solitary cell that is part of a larger organism but can act independently from it. It is perhaps obvious to note that Threadgill’s group is itself a zooid in the greater body of jazz, but the comparison bears repeating: Threadgill’s music may fit within the long, stretching tentacles of the jazz avant-garde, but even within that context it is utterly unique, pulling in some indefinable direction all its own.
