[Henry Threadgill’s memoir unfolds from his maddening wartime
experience to his boundary-pushing musical career. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

VIETNAM CHANGED THE WAY THIS JAZZ MAN HEARD THE WORLD  
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Dwight Garner
May 15, 2023
The New York Times
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_ Henry Threadgill’s memoir unfolds from his maddening wartime
experience to his boundary-pushing musical career. _

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_Easily Slip into Another World
A Life in Music_
Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards
Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN 9781524749071

It’s rare to come across a new Vietnam War memoir from a major
publisher in 2023. Most were written decades ago, when memories were
fresh and wounds still raw. That generation of soldiers has begun to
pass away.
Henry Threadgill’s “Easily Slip Into Another World” is an
unusual entrant in the genre. For one thing, this astringent book is
only in part about his war experience. The remainder is about his
rebellious childhood in Chicago during the 1950s, his apprenticeship
in that city’s pyretic music scene and — later, after the war —
his variegated career as a composer, saxophonist and flutist touring
the world and becoming, along with Ornette Coleman and Wynton
Marsalis, one of the few jazz artists to have won a Pulitzer Prize
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There’s more here than an insane war story, in other words. In fact,
“Easily Slip Into Another World” is so good a music memoir, in the
serious and obstinate manner of those by Miles Davis
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and Gil Scott-Heron
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that it belongs on a high shelf alongside them.

But this memoir rises toward, and then falls away from, Threadgill’s
war experience. It’s the molten emotional core. Let’s start there.

Threadgill enlisted in August 1966, when he was 22. He’d lost his
draft deferment because he couldn’t afford to attend Chicago’s
American Conservatory of Music full time. He didn’t feel like a
soldier. If he volunteered rather than wait to be drafted, he was
told, he could continue to play music in the Army.

After basic training he was stationed at Fort Riley, in Kansas, in
a band that performed at officers’ dances when it wasn’t out on
the field playing heroic martial standards to soldiers leaving for
combat.

The band got good, and Threadgill’s arrangements (he’d been
listening to Thelonious Monk, Igor Stravinsky and Cecil Taylor) grew
complicated. When he was asked to arrange a medley of national
classics — “God Bless America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner”
and others — for an important ceremony, he did so in a manner than
added a bit of, in his words, “angularity and dissonance.” He was
trying to stretch the music, to see what he could get out of it.

A Catholic archbishop stood up during the event and called the
arrangements blasphemous. Top brass snapped to attention. The ceremony
was shut down. Threadgill was fired from the band and, to his shock
and dismay, shipped off to the Fourth Infantry Division in Pleiku,
Vietnam, in the thick of the fighting. A “musical peccadillo,”
Threadgill writes, had earned him a probable death sentence.

In Pleiku, Threadgill was nearly killed on multiple occasions. He was
in a jeep that overturned, and he permanently injured his back. He
spent nights waist-deep in water. His base camp was attacked during
the Tet Offensive. There are more strange harbingers than can be
counted.

There were a lot of drugs, including the strongest pot imaginable, and
plenty of music. Threadgill continued to play in bands and came across
others. He makes you reconceptualize the musical template of the
Vietnam War. There’s no Hendrix and Creedence in his account; in
the jungles around Pleiku, there’s Coltrane and Coleman.

Threadgill gets the worst case of gonorrhea I’ve ever read about.
His Army papers are lost and, in a “Catch-22” sort of nightmare,
he’s not sure he can prove who he is in order to go home. The
madness is endless, and the endlessness is maddening. He isn’t
discharged until 1969. He’s a different person.

“Easily Slip Into Another World” is about learning to hear the
world, and Vietnam changed the way Threadgill did so. “It’s like I
grew a set of antennae over there,” he writes. “When I returned,
my reception equipment was different.”

Threadgill wrote this book with Brent Hayes Edwards, a professor of
English at Columbia University and a jazz writer. Some of their
interview transcripts are included in small snippets, which let you
see how close Threadgill’s canny but philosophical speaking voice is
to what’s on the page. It’s as if Edwards, as a sensitive
amanuensis, guided a ball that was already rolling downhill.

Threadgill has always had a thing with titles. He plucks them out of
the air. They insinuate. Among his songs are “Everybody Will Hang by
the Leg” and “Spotted Dick Is Pudding
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Sometimes a work of art has a shadow title: a provisional nickname or
draft label — something you call it as you’re making it, but that
doesn’t end up being the final title when it matures. It’s as
though the work sloughs them off as it grows the way a snake sheds its
skin.

The shadow title of “Easily Slip Into Another World,” he writes,
was “Failure Is Everything.” I’m glad he didn’t call it that;
too much has been written about creative failure recently, and the
shadow title would have made this sound like a book for venture
capitalists. But a lot of attention is paid to Threadgill’s own
failures, large and small. This is among the reasons that this memoir
is the kind of book I’d want to place in the hands of young
musicians. It’s also about the obstacles Threadgill intentionally
put in his own path.

He could have made an easier career as a sideman. He’s a
multi-instrumentalist and has always been in demand. He’s frequently
led bands of his own. But he decided early that he wanted to compose,
and he fell in instead with the avant-garde art and theater
communities in Chicago and in New York. He always made his own path.
He peeled off two dozen musical skins. He was mostly a leaver, not a
joiner. It was his personality to rock the boats he was supposed to
steer.

This book’s first 200 pages are so excellent that, if it had
remained about that length, “Easily Slip Into Another World” would
have been, in that reviewer’s oxymoron, an instant classic. The last
200 pages drift. Band follows band, tour follows tour, commission
follows commission. This is a memoir with a lot of area codes.

But Threadgill writes ardently about the barriers Black composers and
classical musicians have faced. He also refuses, most of the time, to
ratify the borders between classical music and jazz.

He makes the case, in his own fashion, that it takes a village to
raise a musician. There are roll calls of family members, teachers and
stray artists who helped him along the way. The milieu in Chicago
meant everything. High schools have band rooms; Threadgill makes you
wish every building had a band room.

This book works because Threadgill has a complex mind and tactile
sense of life on this planet. It’s always been hard to guess which
way his beard is pointing. He writes, in a typical sentence:

Music is everything that makes the musician: family, friends,
hardships, joys, the sounds on the street, how tight you buckle your
belt, the person who happens to be sitting across from you in the
subway car, what you ate for breakfast — all of it.

Dwight Garner
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has been a book critic for The Times since 2008. His new book, “The
Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and
Eating While Reading,” is out this fall.

* African American Biography
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* Jazz
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* Avant Garde jazz
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* Vietnam War
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* African American memoir
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