EASILY SLIP INTO ANOTHER WORLD: A LIFE IN MUSIC by Henry Threadgill {Brent Hayes Edwards, co-author}

Finished Th 10/22/26 

I got this on Kindle and was shocked at the depth of this man's knowledge of music.

Also, has some of the best coverage of what it was like to be a soldier in Vietnam during the war.

The Draft: 4 years if you wait to get drafted; 2 years if you volunteer; 3 years if you enter as a 'professional' and Threadgill entered as a 'musician'. He wrote a composition that insulted a high ranking official and he was sent to the battlefront. 

From freejazzblog.org:

"The most important reason for this is that Threadgill (with Edwards) is an amazingly good storyteller—the type of storyteller who could tell a story about anything and have you in the palm of their hand. Every music bio has that section at the beginning about ancestors and childhood. I suppose it’s necessary, but it almost always leaves me impatient. (“Okay, okay, Bach’s dad was a bagpiper. Can we get to the Cantatas?”) Threadgill, from the first sentence, draws you in with stories of Peyton Robinson, his great-grandfather. Each story has that urgency of “So there I was …” (even if Threadgill wasn’t actually there). It’s a superpower, this kind of storytelling, to use words to leave you desperate to know, “What happens next? How’s it going to end?”

Incidents of neighborhood racism in Threadgill’s late ‘50s/early ‘60s Chicago leave us angry and uneasy. Brief encounters with Sun Ra and his band leave us envious. The section on his time in Vietnam is genuinely harrowing, edge-of-your-seat stuff. I can imagine the movie made from just that chapter. When he returns to Chicago afterwards, Threadgill pursues different relationships, educational opportunities, friendships, and musical experiments.

He is of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), but, because of his time away, not enmeshed in it. He takes us through the formation and story of Air, the Sextett, Zooid, etc. Certain relationships stuck out to me, I’m not always sure why—such as that with guitarist Brandon Ross. It’s not prominent in terms of the word count given to it, but it feels meaningful.

As we watch him assemble and disassemble different ensembles over time, looking for his sound (not THE ONE sound, but the sound he needs at that moment), you can see his fascination with the mixture of timbres (something I heard Threadgill comment on in the ‘90s). Whether it’s a phalanx of basses, or the stringreedbrass mixture of the Sextet, or the accordion on Song Out of My Trees, you can see his fascination with the sounds of instruments and their players, and their place in his writing. For example, he’s had a bunch of cellists and a bunch of tuba players over the years, but I can always tell when it’s a Threadgill cello or a Threadgill tuba.

In the way of great storytellers, the language here is nonviolent, never engaging in the gossip of so much music-oriented writing. It also never seems to gloss over things that someone like Ellington would in his autobiography. He talks about the drugs, racism, and divorces because they happened. They were part of the context. But I never feel as if I’m a voyeur. It’s an extraordinary balance he achieves.

Easily Slip Into Another World doesn’t bring us up to the minute, but it gets pretty darn close. He talks of his relationship with Pi Recordings and its blessings. It wasn’t his Pulitzer that made Threadgill into an elder statesman of “this kind of music,” but it helped. The story of his relationship with the Indian state of Goa—first missing a chance to play there, then playing there, then getting lost in the jungle and … nevermind, I won’t spoil it—is one of the most beautiful and endearing of the book.

I suppose Threadgill is right, and the book doesn’t provide transparency in the sense of answers about his music—although his explanation of the Zooid approach to harmony is wonderful “inside baseball”—but it does help you approach the music with good questions. My experience of this book (as important as my evaluation or analysis) was one of rapt enjoyment, and also fascination. I know it’s the second time I’ve used that word, but it’s genuinely true that one quality of great music to me is that it is fascinating. Among all its other qualities, Henry Threadgill’s music is fascinating to me. This book is fascinating. The two fascinations amplify each other."