Sneak Peek: 2021 NEA Jazz Master composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill

Henry Threadgill: The object for me is to make music. So I write it down, I bring it and somebody make a mistake. I say oh, that’s wonderful. Let me change this and put the mistake in because that’s the object for me. I’m not stuck on what I did. Remember music means nothing until you lift it up off the paper. It has no meaning. That’s what a conductor is doing. When a conductor is standing up there with a score in front of it and the orchestra. I don’t care whose music it is… Wagner or Beethoven’s. What the conductor is doing is saying too many violins is playing right there. Let me have less second violins. Trumpets start doubling so and so over there. He basically said a half a teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of pepper. The composition said a whole teaspoon of salt and three teaspoons of pepper. That’s what’s on the paper, but when you start to lift it up you find out it won’t bake. <laughs>