When I was about fifteen years old, our class music teacher, Mr. Humphries, decided to give us a lesson in avant-garde jazz. First he played us a couple of recordings: then he sent each of us into the store room to collect an instrument, any instrument: as long as it was something that we did not know how to play (we were lucky: our school was very arts-and-music minded, and most of us could play something-or-other, whether it was symphony-quality violin or oboe, or a simple xylophone or penny-whistle). And then, switching on the reel-to-reel tape recorder, he ordered us to play and play and play... and later, when we listened to the "music" we had created, it sounded just like the "avant-garde" stuff we'd been listening to earlier... a cacophony, a noise, a musical Tower of Babel with everyone following their own thread and meeting in time, rhythm or harmony only occasionally, by chance.
That is what Henry Threadgill's Makin' A Move could have sounded. But it doesn't... instead, he takes rock, jazz, classical rhythms, a striking lead guitar, a brass band (at least, a tuba or two) cellos and guitars... and creates a musical masterpiece. It's not a CD for the top twenty, and I doubt that any of the tracks will be heard on popular, commercial radio, but this man's music should be HEARD... for example, the third track on the CD, "Official Silence", is more evocative and atmospheric than a lot of the music currently filling cinemas as soundtrack: it is dark and criminal, with a semi-comic melody, like a large Mr. Plod the Policeman tracking a bungling burglar down a dark back street full of alleys and dustbins and running tom-cats...
I like this CD. It's chaotic, like Van Gogh on a stormy night. You can't classify it or file it: it has a style of its own, like a Martian circus. It's not jazz, it's not classical, it's not rock--but there's something of each in there. It's an adventure. It's life--and it's alive!
I'm off to find some more Henry Threadgill recordings...
