Henry Threadgill: Listen Ship

As in other recent works, on Listen Ship Henry Threadgill appears solely as composer and conductor. No surprise there: his works vividly showcase a quest for a personal compositional dimension, one that reflects his drive for authenticity while engaging in dialogue, proposing a possible intersection between Black American musical traditions and other musical realms. This is eloquently detailed in his 2023 autobiography, Easily Slip into Another World. A Life in Music, a gem in the realm of autobiographies, where he describes the Chicago scene brimming with talent, each artist searching for their own working method while remaining attuned to the work of others.

Listen Ship, a sonic vessel that symbolically intertwines "Listening" and "Navigation," brings to life a highly distinctive instrumental ensemble: six acoustic guitars, including a soprano and two bass guitars, plus two pianos. This alone highlights Threadgill's curiosity for unconventional sonic blends while underscoring his oft- stated belief: "The physical structure of the instruments is important and is part of the architecture of a composition." In a July 2020 interview with Enzo Capua for Musica Jazz, from which this quote is drawn, Threadgill discusses specific instrumental combinations that work better than others in bringing to life fertile outcomes.

There's no doubt that this work—premiered at Brooklyn's Long Play Festival in May 2025 and promptly recorded in its now-released form— faithfully and coherently delivers on those ideas, with remarkable artistic, generative, and narrative results. "Listening" and "Navigation," indeed, at their highest level.

The roots of Threadgill's focus on this instrumental configuration can be traced to his 1993 album Song Out of My Trees, released the following year by Giovanni Bonandrini's Black Saint label: in the track "Over the River Club," three guitars—Brandon Ross, Ed Cherry, and James Emery—joined the bass guitar of Jerome Harris and the piano of Myra Melford. Even though that piece emphasized the song-form, certain blends and interweavings today sound like a premonition sounds to come. Also the use of two pianos had appeared in other works, such as Old Locks and Irregular Verbs from 2016 and Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus from 2018, both released by Pi Recordings.

Here, however, the ship doesn't belong to a "River Club" but ventures into the open sea. Threadgill demands an extraordinary level of empathy, commitment, and collaboration from the musicians involved. The lineup includes Brandon Ross again, on soprano guitar, alongside none other than Bill Frisell, Miles Okazaki, and the emerging talent Gregg Belisle-Chi, whom we've encountered in vibrant collaborations with Tim Berne and in his compelling interpretations of the saxophonist's music, convincingly adapted for solo acoustic guitar. The bass guitars are handled by Jerome Harris and Stomu Takeishi, with pianos played by Maya Keren and Rahul Carlberg.

Listen Ship unfolds as a kind of suite, with sixteen episodes of varying lengths, marked by the letters of the alphabet from "A" to "R." These range from the 40 seconds of "Q" to the eight minutes of "R." Repeated listens reveal that the durations of the pieces serve the unfolding of a meticulously crafted narrative architecture. The brief, elegiac, and sparse opening episode, entrusted to the pianos, is followed by just over two minutes of the guitar ensemble, weaving a dancing, circular figure: a dense thread that sets the stage for many subsequent episodes, where distinguishing individual voices within the thick texture is futile. Even less feasible is separating written parts from improvised ones: everything flows, generating form and meaning. Like a fine tapestry, it's not the individual thread but the overall design that emerges.

In a kind of mirroring, episodes featuring the two pianos and the guitar ensemble alternate, with expressive, dynamic, and configuration variations. The fourth episode, nearly four minutes long, introduces greater variety and dynamic contrasts, with dialogue among the guitars: a bustling hive, still largely circular in motion, with constant variations and insertions. There's an aura of growing confidence, binding individual personalities to the broader design. Thus, the two pianos in "E" approach a synthesis in an impressionistic tremolo, following the enigmatic sparseness of "A" and the reflective lyricism of "C."

A more elaborate synthesis arrives with the eighth track, which begins in the sparse mode of the pianos before venturing into the longest episode thus far, where Threadgill's vision unites guitars and pianos for the first time, approaching, in its harmonic progressions and development, the atmosphere of his work with Zooid. An Iberian ambiance, blending the introspective depth of flamenco with Caribbean habanera, permeates the track "L," with guitar lines that become almost voice-like, before a series of four aphoristic pieces follows the vigorous bass guitar duel in "M."

The final eight minutes meld this creative energy, with expansive solo contributions, particularly from Frisell and Ross. Here, the atmosphere carries traces of blues, always within Threadgill's prodigious chromatic and harmonic elaborations.

Undoubtedly, a milestone.

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