This RTV episode features Henry Threadgill’s Zooid and we watch “All The Way Light Touch,” commissioned by Roulette with the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund.
Performance date: 10/25/2009
Episode release date: 04/14/2010
Host: Phoebe Legere
Henry Threadgill (born February 15, 1944) is a Pulitzer Prize winning American composer, saxophonist, and flautist, who came to prominence in the 1970s by leading ensembles with unusual instrumentation and often incorporating a range of non-jazz genres. He studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago co-majoring in piano and flute, along with composition. He studied piano with Gail Quillman and composition with Stella Roberts (1899-1988). He has had a music career for over forty years as both a leader and as a composer. He was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition, “In for a Penny, In for a Pound,” which premiered at Roulette Intermedium on December 4, 2014.
Threadgill’s music has been performed by many of his long-lasting instrumental ensembles, including the trio Air with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall, the seven-piece Sextet, Very Very Circus, the twenty-piece Society Situation Dance Band, X-75, Make a Move, Aggregation Orb, and his current group, Zooid. He has recorded many critically acclaimed albums as a leader of these ensembles with various record labels namely Arista/Novus, About Time, Axiom, Black Saint, Columbia and Pi Recordings.