Music Review

All the Feelings Remain the Same, Despite the Time That’s Passed

Credit...Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York Times

The last time Henry Threadgill brought a group to the Village Vanguard, around 24 years ago, I remember experiencing moments of ultra-clarity there, real highs of listening life, when you know that a genuinely original piece of music is slipping by faster than you’d like; but you are not fazed, because you are drinking it dry.

You didn’t necessarily understand what led to each matrix of rhythm and harmony and attack: all the moving counterpoint and rests between the melodic figures, the dance rhythms with loose funk and high-protocol steps from marches or quadrilles. You didn’t have to, because Mr. Threadgill’s music sounds like nobody else’s, and often gives you all its information at once, a whole complicated system of harmony and motion. Once heard, that’s it: You’ve got it for life.

The intensifying strokes, though, back then — and likewise on Tuesday, the first night of Mr. Threadgill’s return engagement at the Vanguard — were his alto saxophone solos. They were built of epigrammatic phrases, aligned with the moving intervals but pivoting off from them. They were out in front, gestural, actorly, elegant, noisy and tragic. Dealt in short segments, their essence could be absorbed piece by piece, as if he were feeding you with crumbs. They’d often end without traditional resolution, but with a sense of something serious hanging in the air.

There’s a lot to hear in Mr. Threadgill’s music, a lot of unusual timbres — not many bands hold down the rhythm with a drum set, cello and tuba — and the Vanguard’s intimate dimensions help you hear it better. On Tuesday night, the music was restless, prodding and regal: The exact sense memories returned intact, and the room had something to do with it.

Mr. Threadgill played and recorded a lot in New York in the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when jazz — a term he doesn’t use to describe his music, but which provides at least a partial basis for understanding it — was fragmenting and expanding. He still lives here, but his concerts and records are spaced farther apart; since the beginning of the new century, he’s been working with various versions of the group Zooid, an essentially acoustic band. Besides Mr. Threadgill on saxophone and flute, it now has Liberty Ellman on acoustic guitar, Christopher Hoffman on cello, Jose Davila on tuba and trombone, and Elliot Humberto Kavee on drums. Mr. Hoffman is the most recent member, but the rest have been playing Mr. Threadgill’s music for more than a decade, and they’ve learned to flow inside it.

Zooid is less melody or theme oriented than his earlier music; it’s more invested in a strategy, an endlessly permutating process, using determined sets of intervals, played in various sequences, as the binding agent. One piece was new: part of a composition called “Bingo” the group will be playing through the week. Others came from records: “Extremely Sweet William,” “To Undertake My Corners Open,” “So Pleased No Clue” and “A Day Off.”

If you recognized them, you have a very special kind of hearing. Melody is easier to remember than permutations of a system. But “So Pleased,” a slow song in its recorded version, felt dramatically more so on Tuesday, holding together while almost imploding. The details of the band’s process stretched out and enlarged, as if seen under a microscope, and two separate saxophone solos by Mr. Threadgill, each ending with mike-drop abruptness, cranked up the tension. And “A Day Off” slowly built its crescendo, with great solos by Mr. Ellman and Mr. Threadgill, until it was rocking: not a riff, not a tune, but a wholeness, a bumping, polytonal processional.