SLIP EASILY INTO ANOTHER WORLD: A Life in Musicby Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards
It’s rare to come across a new Vietnam War memoir from a major publisher in 2023. Most were written decades ago, when the memories were fresh and the wounds still raw. That generation of soldiers is dying out.
Henry Threadgill’s “Easily Slip into Another World” is an unusual newcomer to the genre. To begin with, this astringent book is only partly about his wartime experiences. The rest is about his rebellious childhood in Chicago in the 1950s, his apprenticeship in that city’s feverish music scene and – later, after the war – his varied career as a composer, saxophonist and flautist who toured the world and collaborated with Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis, one of the few jazz artists to win a Pulitzer Prize.
In other words, there’s more than an insane war story here. In fact, “Easily Slip Into Another World” is such a good music memoir, in the earnest and headstrong way of Miles Davis and Gil Scott-Heron’s, that it belongs on a high shelf next to them.
But this memoir rises to, and then falls away from, Threadgill’s wartime experience. It is the molten emotional core. Let’s start there.
Threadgill enlisted in August 1966 when he was 22. He had lost his draft deferment because he could not afford to attend Chicago’s American Conservatory of Music full-time. He didn’t feel like a soldier. If he volunteered instead of waiting to be called up, he was told he could continue playing music in the military.
After basic training, he was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, in a band that performed at officers’ dances when not on the field and played heroic martial standards for soldiers departing for battle.
The band became good and Threadgill’s arrangements (he had listened to Thelonious Monk, Igor Stravinsky and Cecil Taylor) became complicated. When asked to arrange a medley of national classics — “God Bless America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and others — for a major ceremony, he did so in a way that, in his words, was a bit added. angularity and dissonance.” He tried 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 buyer caught the eye. The ceremony was halted. Threadgill was released from the gang and to his shock and dismay was shipped off to the Fourth Infantry Division in Pleiku, Vietnam, in the heat of battle. A ‘musical peccadillo’, Threadgill writes, would probably have earned him the death penalty.
In Pleiku, Threadgill was nearly killed several times. He was in a jeep that overturned, and he permanently injured his back. He spent nights up to his waist in water. His base camp was attacked during the Tet Offensive. There are more strange harbingers than can be counted.
There was a lot of drugs, including the strongest pot imaginable, and a lot of music. Threadgill continued to play in bands and meet others. He makes you rethink the musical template of the Vietnam War. There is no Hendrix and Creedence in his account; in the jungles around Pleiku there are Coltrane and Coleman.
Threadgill gets the worst case of gonorrhea I’ve ever read about. His army papers have gone missing and in a ‘Catch-22’ nightmare, he’s not sure he can prove who he is to get home. The madness is endless, and the endlessness is maddening. He is not fired 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. “It’s like I’ve grown a bunch of antennae up there,” he writes. “When I came back, my receiving equipment was different.”
Threadgill co-wrote this book with Columbia University English professor and jazz writer Brent Hayes Edwards. Some of their interview transcripts are in small snippets, showing you just how close Threadgill’s smart yet philosophical speaking voice is to what’s on the page. It’s as if Edwards, as a sensitive amanuensis, is guiding a ball that was already rolling downhill.
Threadgill has always had a thing for titles. He plucks them from the air. They insinuate. Among his songs are “Everybody Will Hang by the Leg” and “Spotted Dick Is Pudding.” He is writing:
Sometimes a work of art has a shadow title: a provisional nickname or concept label – something you call it as you make it, but which ultimately doesn’t become the final title when it matures. It is as if the work shakes them off as it grows like a snake shedding its skin.
The shadow title of “Sliding Easily into Another World,” he writes, was “Failure Is Everything.” I’m glad he didn’t call it that; too much has been written lately about creative failures, and the shadow title would make this sound like a book for venture capitalists. But much attention is paid to Threadgill’s own failures, big and small. This is one of the reasons why this memoir is the kind of book I would like to give to young musicians. It’s also about the obstacles Threadgill has deliberately placed in its own path.
He could have made an easier career as a sideman. He is a multi-instrumentalist and has always been in high demand. He has often led his own bands. But he decided early on that he wanted to compose and instead fell in with the avant-garde arts and theater communities in Chicago and in New York. He always went his own way. He peeled off two dozen musical skins. He was mostly a leaver, not a joiner. It was his personality to turn the boats he had to drive upside down.
The first 200 pages of this book are so excellent that if it had stayed about that length, “Easily Slip into Another World” would have been an instant classic in that reviewer’s oxymoron. The last 200 pages wander off. Band follows band, tour follows tour, commission follows commission. This is a memoir with many area codes.
But Threadgill writes passionately about the barriers black composers and classical musicians have faced. He also usually refuses to endorse the boundaries between classical music and jazz.
He argues in his own way that it takes a village to raise a musician. There are roll calls from relatives, teachers and wandering artists who have helped him on his way. The Chicago environment meant everything. High schools have band rooms; Threadgill will make you wish every building had a music 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, hardship, joy, the noises in the street, how tight you fasten your belt, the person who happens to be sitting across from you on the subway, what you ate for breakfast – everything.
SLIP EASILY INTO ANOTHER WORLD: A Life in Music | By Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards | Illustrated | 403 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $32.50