Brandon Ross & Breath Of Air

The avant-guitarist talks Henry Threadgill

Brandon Ross (photo: Enid Farber)

Tonight and tomorrow night, Pi Recordings and Roulette will be presenting Be Ever Out: The Music Of Henry Threadgill, a two-night event featuring four of the saxophonist and composer’s ensembles performing his work.

Tonight will feature sets by:

• the Very Very Circus Legacy Band, featuring alto saxophonist Noah Becker, trombonist Chris Bates, guitarists Miles Okazaki and Brandon Ross, tuba players Marcus Rojas and Jose Davila, and drummer Gene Lake

• the Air Legacy Trio, with Marty Ehrlich on reeds, Hilliard Greene on bass, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums

Tomorrow night’s show will feature performances by:

• the Make A Move Legacy Band, with Darius Jones on alto saxophone, Brandon Ross on guitar, David Virelles on keyboards, Stomu Takeishi on bass, and JT Lewis on drums

• the Sextett Legacy Band, with Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Frank Lacy on trombone, Mike Lee on flute, alto flute, clarinet and alto sax, Christopher Hoffman on cello, Ken Filiano on bass, and Newman Taylor Baker and Reggie Nicholson on drums

If you’re in NYC, you can buy tickets to the first night here and the second night here. If, like me, you’re somewhere else, both shows will be livestreamed (and archived) on Roulette’s YouTube channel.

Brandon Ross, who’s performing both nights, has been on a hell of an artistic journey over the course of the last forty-some years. His first recording was on an Archie Shepp album from 1975, There’s a Trumpet in My Soul. He worked with violinist Leroy Jenkins. He worked with saxophonists Marion Brown and Oliver Lake. He worked with Threadgill for something like a decade, in multiple bands or one evolving band. He worked with Cassandra Wilson on her breakout album, Blue Light Til Dawn, and the follow-up, New Moon Daughter. He’s made albums under his own name with For Living Lovers and Phantom Station. These days, many people probably know his name for his work in Harriet Tubman with bassist Melvin Gibbs and drummer JT Lewis. But in 2022, he put out an album on Burning Ambulance Music, the self-titled debut of the guitar/violin/drums trio Breath Of Air, with Charles Burnham on violin and Warren Benbow on drums.

It’s a beautiful record, a psychedelic, trance-inducing blend of improvisation and Black string band music; Peter Margasak reviewed it for the Quietus, saying, “Bypassing the structure of compositions, the trio ebbs and flows as one, as rhythms slacken and coalesce, density thickens and thins, and sonic landmarks shuffle, always remaining seductively amorphous.”

Around the time of the record’s release, I interviewed Ross for the BA podcast, and we talked about his work with Henry Threadgill, and particularly what he saw as the role of the guitar in Threadgill’s music. He said:

“So first of all, I think maybe one of the things that people need to understand about Henry is that — and this is my opinion, of course — first and foremost, he’s a composer. And as a composer, he’s also an orchestrator. And I mean, he also happens to be a really great and economical and incisive improviser too. So when I joined Very Very Circus, one of the first things he said to Masujaa, the other guitarist, and myself, was that he didn’t need a double, like — 12 strings. ‘You got 12 strings going on.’ And here he had a band with two tubas, saxophone and trombone, drums, and two electric guitars. And as I said, he’s a composer and is very thoughtful and specific about his orchestration. And so he told us, ‘Look, I don’t want you guys doubling up on this because it will cloud the information, be too much information. So if you play things, you’re going to play chords and things besides what’s written, voice them open, if they’re open. If you’re voicing a chord, voice it open and use only two or three notes maximum at a time.’ So in order to do that on guitar, you've got to skip strings. And an ordinary chord that you might strum, you can’t do that. You can’t do that unless you get involved in all kinds of muting and silly stuff. So for me, it changed my right-hand technique. And coincidentally or fortunately, I have for many years practiced classical guitar right-hand basic technique things as a regular part of my practice. Because I’ve always appreciated classical guitar, or I should say 18th century European guitar approaches. So it was like, okay, and then dealing with this music where it’s a whole other kind of organization and discussion about what’s called for and just Henry’s vision of the music. So that thing really was like a watershed thing for me — that whole early period for sure. And it opened up a whole other world and way of musical thinking for me. Where you are thinking about information, amounts of musical information, or what’s the impact of a particular musical choice in terms of information in the context. So I mean, with Henry’s music for me, it just took me into this great place of playing the guitar that really helped me, I should say, or it resulted in me having a very different kind of guitar sensibility.”

I also asked him about whether he saw or heard any commonalities between Threadgill’s music and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, because as a listener there seemed to be audible similarities. He broke it down in detail, saying:

“I would say maybe another key feature with Henry would be form. And it’s evolved as he’s moved through different bands and periods of the music. But form and his use and experimentation with form was the big one. And, you know, he used to say — I remember the first band, Very Very Circus was the first band I was in, and he, I remember him saying to the guys one day, to all of us, he said, ‘Look, people are going to want your gig, when they start hearing this band, they’re going to come up and want your gig, but, you know, they’re not going to be able to understand what’s happening if they come up and look at the music, because it’s not all on the page.’ But it has to do with how that information on the page was grouped and how it evolved as people started playing it. So formulaically speaking, in terms of format and stuff, you know, on Henry’s, some of the scores we used to do back then in Very Very Circus, we might get to a section of the score and in a similar sense of the term of lifting something out of a score, which is what Butch Morris often talked about with conduction, like you can get to a two-bar phrase that we’ll suddenly play retrograde and repeat that two or three times before moving on. And then when you go to create on the music, after you’ve played the written material, and now you’re going through the form to create independently as a soloist, then that form may move at half the speed as the written material. Or twice the speed. So something is now extended or elongated. And so the sense of time and where things are happening is very mutable. And it’s often difficult for some people to grasp what’s going on. But they’re aware that something has gone on. But it sounds — it can seem, amorphous is not the right term, it can seem highly open and highly improvised. And in lots of ways, it’s open to interpretation in that way by a player. But the structure and the form is highly specific. Harmolodics, from what I understand about it, and have gleaned from just spending a little time with Ornette and some of the musicians who’ve worked with him, is — I mean, Ornette would always talk about, when I heard him talk, he would talk about playing the idea. And playing an idea and not your instrument. But really following an idea, being able to follow an idea, and to let an idea move. And in terms of harmolodics, there’s a certain frame that gives you the harmolodic theory, the foundation of the harmolodic theory about how you can move and where you can move. So it’s actually again quite specific, but very open to who’s executing. Now, you know, a lot of people imitate what they think harmolodics is. And on the low end of the spectrum, it’s like, oh yeah, it’s just free after the head, you know. But on the other end, the higher end of the spectrum, people who worked with him and know it, it’s very much not that. I mean, I was talking to Greg Cohen about it maybe last year. And Greg played on the record that he got the Pulitzer for, Sound Grammar. And he was just sharing with me something that he did with Ornette that he said that Ornette always appreciated. And this gets into some of Henry’s music too. But it’s basically like an open, if this makes any sense, an open tonality. But it moves in specific associations. So I would say Henry’s music, where he’s at now in terms of what he’s using is very open centered in terms of key, because it’s now based on a different order. It’s based on a numerical system of ordering that’s related to choices in terms of pitch and harmony. And it’s not functioning in this diatonic harmonic sense. As harmolodics did not either, even though you could have some things that felt that way. So I think that’s probably the similarity.”

Brandon Ross is a genius. Henry Threadgill is a genius. Watch the Be Ever Out concerts, and buy the Breath Of Air album.

If you’re a free subscriber, that’s it for this week. Come back on Tuesday, when we’ll be talking about five new classical albums. If you’re a paying subscriber, stick around, because behind the paywall are articles on right-wing science fiction; Ted Joans; Patricia Highsmith; and William Langewiesche.