Jazz author talk - Henry Threadgill & Brent Hayes Edwards

A towering figure in modern jazz and creative music. Composer, saxophonist, flautist, bandleader. NEA Jazz Master, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. THREADGILL will talk with memoir co-author EDWARDS (Columbia University) abouthis fascinatinglife in music, his service in Vietnam, his Chicago childhood, and beyond. Followed by a QA. HENRY THREADGILL Hailed by theNew York Timesas perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation,Henry Threadgillhas been celebrated for over forty years as one of the most original, forward-thinking composers and multi-instrumentalists in American music. His four-movement work,In for a Penny, In for a Pound, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016, one of only three jazz compositions to ever be so honored. A Chicago native, Mr. Threadgill studied at the citys American Conservatory of Music, majoring in composition, piano, and flute. A Vietnam veteran, he performed with the U. S. Army Concert Band. Mr. Threadgill is an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) , dedicated to the performance of its members original music. Mr. Threadgill has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Aaron Copland Award, and the Doris Duke Impact Award. Down Beatmagazines International Jazz Critics Poll has five times distinguished him with its Best Composer Award. The Jazz Journalists Association honored him with its 2002 Composer of the Year Award and its Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Threadgill has released over thirty critically acclaimed albums. Mr. Threadgills orchestral pieces, 1987sRun Silent, Run Deep, Run Loud, Runand 1993sMix for Orchestrapremiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His many commissions include Mordine Co. Dance Theater, Carnegie Hall, the New York Shakespeare Festival, Talujon Percussion Ensemble, Junge Philharmonic Salzburg Orchestra, the Biennale di Venezia, and the American Composers Orchestra. He has been composer in residence at University of California-Berkeley and the Atlantic Center of the Arts. Through the years, Mr. Threadgill has led, performed, and recorded with numerous groups, most recently Zooid and the Double Up Ensemble. In 2015, a two-day festival at New Yorks Harlem Stage celebrated works spanning Mr. Threadgills career performed and reinterpreted by an all-star collection of musicians. BRENT HAYES EDWARDS B. A., Yale (1990) ; M. A., Columbia (1992) ; Ph. D., Columbia (1998) . Brent Edwards writes and teaches on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. His most recent book is is the author ofEasily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, the co-written autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill (Knopf, 2023) , which was awarded a 2024 American Book Award and a 2024 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year Award for Biography or Autobiography. Edwards is also the author ofEpistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination(Harvard University Press, 2017) , which won the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism as well as the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; andThe Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism(Harvard University Press, 2003) , which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collectionUptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies(Columbia University Press, 2004) . Edwards has edited scholarly editions of Frederick DouglasssMy Bondage and My Freedom, Joseph ConradsNostromo, W. E. B. Du BoissThe Souls of Black Folk, and (in collaboration with Jean-Christophe Cloutier) Claude McKaysAmiable with Big Teeth. With Eve Gianoncelli, Edwards editedcrire le Monde Noir, a collection of the interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal. Since 2014, he has served as the Harlem Renaissance period editor for theNorton Anthology of African American Literature. From 2001-2011, Edwards was co-editor of the journalSocial Text, and he is also a member of the editorial boards ofTransitionandCallaloo. Since 2021 he has served as the editor of PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Association. Edwards is also a translator, having published English-language versions of essays, poems, and fiction by authors including Edouard Glissant, Aim Csaire, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Sony Labou Tansi, Paulette Nardal, and Monchoachi. His translation of Michel Leiriss 1934 bookPhantom Africa(Seagull Books, 2017) , was completed with the support of a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Edwards was a2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.