The Brooklyn Rail

In the early 1970s when I was still living in Chicago, my friend the tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield recommended me for a job playing lead alto sax in a well-respected big band in New York. But it didn’t work out. Stubblefield told me later that the cat looked me up and declared, “Wait, this guy’s one of those free players.” No, Stubblefield had tried to tell him, “Henry knows how to play lead alto.” But the cat wouldn’t budge.

I was a little annoyed at first until I realized it was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t want to work for someone else. I wanted to play my own music. But the anecdote demonstrates the tyranny of the category. The bandleader tossed me in that box without a second thought.

In my own experience, labels don’t draw people in. Instead, they distract and dispel. They keep people from engaging with things they might otherwise try.

Labels instill biases and expectations. I’ve had dozens of people come up to me after a concert and tell me they’d shied away from my music because they heard I was a “jazz” musician and they associated that word with something they were sure they didn’t like. It was only when they happened to hear me that they realized I didn’t fit the stereotype.

Categories are the favored currency of the marketing department. They’re a way to sell things. A way of using language to seduce, to insinuate, to entice. To lure you into a corral. (Ooh, the “world music” section.) Worst of all, categories are duplicitous. They impose false hierarchies. A word like “classical” has been hijacked to refer only to a strand of Western European music, as though the traditional musics of the rest of the world are somehow automatically beneath that standard.

Why not just call it music? Why do we even need the label? At this point the problem is that people take the system for granted. We’ve been conditioned; we need the categories. We’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves. You say music and people respond, what kind of music? They only know how to approach art when they’re led up to it by the epithet.

I got a call yesterday from a friend of mine who asked me to send a piece of music for his class. The students are going to take my score, analyze it and do their own arrangements. And then my friend wants me to come and give them feedback.

He told me he realized that his students didn’t know anything about what was happening in the 1960s and 1970s. They only know now. So he’s trying to introduce them to the history of the AACM and other currents from that era. But he doesn’t want them simply to imitate the past. He wants them to find their own way.

It makes me think of the great composer William Grant Still. People forget that he studied with Edgard Varèse. You listen to Still’s music: not a trace of Varèse. Because he didn’t study with Varèse to become a clone. All the masters know. You might learn some things from your predecessors. But you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.

It seems like something was lost when the music became part of the curriculum, something you could get a degree in. When I was growing up, my friends and I were driven not by assignments but by our curiosity. And curiosity doesn’t settle into categories. We devoured everything: swing, bebop, West Coast jazz, cool jazz. The labels didn’t matter. Starting in grammar school, we would gather whatever records we could find and go to my friend Milton Chapman’s house and study them. We couldn’t read music yet, but we could sing every part. A Cuban kid named Curly who played the bongos moved to Chicago. As soon as we heard him, everybody wanted to play drums; we started making our own out of cardboard boxes and pots and pans. How do you cultivate that sort of curiosity, where anything goes and you can go anywhere?

Categories are also lanes. As if music is only music. But you can’t leave out the other arts. Often the impetus is coming from somewhere else: from literature, or from dance. After the premiere at BAM in 1987 of “Run Silent, Run Deep, Run Loud, Run High,” my piece for chamber orchestra and vocalists, I remember one critic proclaimed that Threadgill needed to go back where he belonged in “smoky club basements.” Although my libretto was resolutely abstract, he dismissed it as “ghetto lyrics.” I had to laugh. But the message was clear: get back in your lane.

The word order is interesting: if you think about it from the artist’s perspective—rather than that of the audience, the critic, or the marketing department—you realize that sometimes it is precisely by using a system that you can create a type of chaos. Order can be the most effective way to get to what appears to be disorder. You set up the system, so it’s still you, but then you rely on the rules and the system takes the ego out of the equation. You don’t have to stop and engage it subjectively. You just go along with the system, and it creates a type of randomness that you can’t put your finger on. So if I’m speaking as an artist, whether in the intervallic language I use in my music for Zooid or in the letterpress printing I’m doing for the multimedia installation I’m working on now, I often turn to systems. Not to close things down but to open them up. For the artist, a rage for order can be a way out.