Listen Ship advances and braids several strands of inquiry that Henry Threadgill’s been tugging at for quite some time. The album-length piece is scored for an ensemble of like instruments, something he’s been doing since the Carter administration. In this case the line-up is six acoustic guitars (including one soprano and two bass instruments) and two grand pianos. Once more, Threadgill has removed his own playing from the mix. While I can vouch for his intact chops as recently as fall 2023, when I saw him plays his ass off as his Zooid combo joined forces with Silke Ebehard’s Potsa Lotsa XL big band, it’s apparent from recent projects that his heart lies more with composing than playing. Perhaps most significantly, it engages new players to operate within the unique intervallic improvisational language that Threadgill pioneered with Zooid.
This last point will impose a potential frustration upon people who decide what records they’ll buy by who is playing on them. For while there are some pretty distinctive instrumentalists (the band includes Bill Frisell, Brandon Ross, Gregg Belisle-Chi, Miles Okazaki, Jerome Harris, and Stomu Takeishi on guitars, and Maya Keren and Rahul Carlberg on pianos), no one is here to put his own imprint on the music. They all work within Threadgill’s system, which asks players to listen to each other and improvise within a framework of specified intervals. The rules of the game shape how it is played, and the ways that the music breaks down into subsets of players who work towards moments of intricate counterpoint and cleanly articulated convergence will be very familiar to anyone who’s being following Zooid throughout this century. The guitarists’ spic and span tones also conform to systemic requirements.
So, don’t waste your time trying to figure whether that’s Frisell or Okazaki you’re hearing. What you’re really hearing are Threadgill’s acoustic guitarists, conducted by Threadgill. And, to reference once more that concert I saw in 2023, Threadgill is a very particular sort of conductor. The guy moves with a vigor that belies his eight decades on earth, and his physical guidance of eight attentive souls is the brain, breath, and blood that turns this one-of-a-kind rulebook into a living sonic organism.
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