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Henry Threadgill's Zooid

Saturday, April 1 • 8pm

“Sweet-and-sour, jazz-tango-Middle-Eastern-funk [from] one of our great composers.”
—The New York Times

One of jazz's most admired innovators since the '70s and a pillar of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill takes the stage with his “slinky, utterly distinctive, and disarmingly engaging” (The New Yorker) acoustic sextet, Zooid.

Program Notes

The iconoclastic saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill—one of improvised music’s most uncompromising and brilliant composers and bandleaders—returns to San Francisco with his exhilarating acoustic sextet, Zooid. He premiered the group in 2001 with the album Up Popped Two Lips, perhaps the most Dali-esque album title in jazz history. The CD was also one of that year’s best for its highly irregular and whimsical magnificence.

With the formation of Zooid, Threadgill created a new alloy of sound by stirring up a peculiar instrumental mix: electric guitar, oud, tuba, cello and drums. The music expressed breathtaking beauty, imaginative eccentricities and improvisational freedom. According to Webster, a “zooid” is any organic body or cell capable of spontaneous movement, and thus existence independent of the parent organism. Threadgill is the father, but his band mates are the offspring who have the liberty to move where they want in the group’s song-like pieces.

Threadgill’s compositional philosophy is deceptively simple: “When I write music, I want something powerful to come at people. And it doesn’t have to fit any categories. How can you deal with a broad range of thoughts and emotions if you stay locked into one road? So I open up my music completely. Keep it wide open. I like the idea of engaging the listener by making music that’s not passive. I like playing for people who have a broad diet. Otherwise, it’s like someone who only eats hot dogs. I think it’s ridiculous that people discriminate against a broad spectrum of music.”

Much the same as he has been throughout his career, which started with Chicago’s Association for the Advancement Creative of Music (AACM), the 62-year-old, New York-based Threadgill is still the champion of the unorthodox, the quintessential outsider and one of the America’s best-kept cultural secrets. In the words of critic Derk Richardson: “Threadgill’s music is alive and visionary, embodying the spirit of past innovations without replicating their forms, creating cognitive and cultural dissonances, and resolving them on deeper, more universal levels of meaning.”

— Dan Ouellette