My relationship with the music of Henry Threadgill was initiated by mild trauma. I worked as a clerk at Penny Lane Records in the 1980s. The late LeRoi Johnson, then a prominent Kansas City personality, was my manager. He made me the store’s jazz buyer.
Elation turned to anguish when LeRoi took to scolding me about unsold inventory. Because it was alphabetically exposed at the beginning of the jazz section, an unsold copy of Air Mail, the 1981 album by Threadgill’s band Air, was often used as the opening salvo of LeRoi’s tongue-lashings.
Partly to make my numbers look better and also because I was very curious about its contents, I bought the store’s copy of Threadgill’s 1987 album Easily Slip Into Another World without having heard a note. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Easily Slip Into Another World taught me highbrow art and party music aren’t mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t have known what to make of The Other One, Threadgill’s difficult new album, forty years ago. Yet in 2023, the confluence of dense chamber music and recondite jazz is my sweet spot.