the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt twelve)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

As far back as I remember, I had two major objectives. I wanted to be able to fly. And I wanted to be able to turn myself invisible.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt eleven)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

I realized that they were all wearing lead protective coverings to protect them from the radiation. I’d just waltzed in wearing my usual scrubs.

I was petrified. I dropped the urine samples—the bottles shattered on the floor—and backed out. The technicians just stared at me.

After that happened, I developed an irrational fear that I had been exposed to radiation. The peril seemed to be everywhere. In my head it expanded into a general fear of contamination: any space, any surface could lead to infection or exposure.

As I went around the hospital on my rounds, I started having powerful compulsions to bathe. I would shower multiple times a day and scrub myself raw. I got a reputation among my colleagues: Threadgill, the one who’s prone to strip down anywhere and everywhere and start washing himself. When I couldn’t find a shower, I’d just use a sink. Nurses would come into unoccupied rooms and find me standing there half naked washing myself fanatically in a disturbing sort of St. Vitus’ dance. Then I began to store changes of clothes in various rooms around the hospital, like a squirrel burying nuts for the winter. I hid bars of soap and industrial-strength cleansers in cabinets in various room. I’d rush in and grab my supplies whenever the impulse came over me.

I’ve been wearing these scrubs for a whole hour, I’d think to myself. They could have picked up any number of germs as I interacted with patients and collected samples. I have to get out of these clothes right now! I’d duck into a room where I’d left a store of supplies. Once I was wheeling a patient somewhere on a gurney and the urge came over me so forcefully that I just left him lying there in the hallway while I fled to do one of my ritual cleanses.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt ten)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

Experimentation is at the heart of the creative process. What sets art and science apart from every other domain of human endeavor is that they are formalized realms for radical experimentation. For taking chances. Areas of activity where conjecture and risk taking are privileged and failures and dead ends are accepted as part of the game. This is the reason there’s perpetual tension between musicians and record companies: experimentation doesn’t go well with commodification. The same sorts of tensions can arise in science, with the funding of research that seems too theoretical, too far out, too removed from any practical application or patent potential.

To expel myself from my proclivities, sometimes I have to let my mind slip into another world. Then it’s hard to fall into habit, into the same old ingrained ways of working. Sometimes I have to destroy my own process to get to something new.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt nine)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

There is an expectation that an artist’s autobiography will function as a primer, providing “explanations” of the art. But this book is not a listening guide. If anything, it is an extended defiance of that expectation. If it’s meant to teach you anything about my music, it starts with the lesson that you need to relinquish that desire for transparency. Music is about listening. Nothing I can say can mean anything once you start to listen. It’s about the sound, not about the words I might be able to pin up to preface or accompany whatever the sound does to you when it goes in your ears.

If you really need to know, I can tell you—for whatever it’s worth—that anything can go into my music. I get ideas from all sorts of sources. It might be going to the theater or looking at a painting or just watching a tree branch outside the window. It might be reading about the muddy intricacies of trench warfare during World War I or poring over The Book of Five Rings (Miyamoto Musashi’s seventeenth-century book on sword-fighting tactics) or looking at the novels of James Joyce or Heinrich Böll. Anything can seep into the music.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt eight)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

In composing for the three of us, my thinking was influenced most of all by the sound of the Ahmad Jamal Trio. It was a piano trio rather than a saxophone trio. But what I learned had to do with the way the music was arranged—the sense of space. They could lock into a groove, but they also knew how to be elliptical: to play a hint or a dollop in a way that suggested more.

You get the hand you’re dealt. And this was my hand. I was thrilled to have it, too: a dedicated group of three musicians, living in the same neighborhood and playing together all the time. What more could I want? But it required a particular approach compositionally speaking. I was working with a minimal palette. How much can you do with seemingly limited means? It meant learning how to write by implication. I didn’t have a brass section to work with, or an arsenal of violas to bring out some timbral nuance. As I said to a journalist once, it forced me to learn to write the silhouette of the thing rather than the thing itself.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt seven)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

I didn’t shed my war experiences when I got off that plane from Vietnam, or when I was discharged from Fort Leonard Wood and came back to civilian life. Vietnam stayed with me, and it took me to some dark and twisted places even once I returned to Chicago. The simple fact of it was, I was really fucked up. Everybody that came out of the service and out of that war was fucked up. We were in flagrant denial about that fact. We acted like everything was all right just because we were walking around with all our body parts, just because we weren’t alcoholics or sleeping on the street or acting like raving psychopaths. But we were all fucked up.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt six)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

When Malcolm X was shot in the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, Reverend Morris stood up before the congregation at the Langley Church of God and asked us to mourn his loss. “He was a great man,” Morris declared. I remember being taken aback. In that climate, it seemed like a big leap. I assumed that for people in the church, the Nation of Islam represented a completely different world—not only because of religion, but because the evangelical milieu was so far away from the mundane concerns of the material world. For people so single-minded in their focus on salvation, I thought, it would be considered folly to advocate for political justice or social revolution.

At the church, I was careful never to mention that I was an admirer of Malcolm and everything he stood for. But given where I had grown up and what I had seen—given the path my life was taking in the early 1960s—I found it impossible not to be impressed by Malcolm. Like Muhal Richjard Abrams or the poet Amus Mor, for me Malcolm was one of the main models, a figure whose example defined the times. I remember watching Malcolm on these talk shows on TV. They didn’t have anybody who could handle him. It would always be two or three or four white intellectuals up against Malcolm, as though one antagonist wasn’t sufficient. How is that fair? I wondered. And then he would demolish every argument they came up with. What he said was bold, but he never advanced opinions that he couldn’t back up with facts. And the country had never seen anything like that before. They’d never seen a Black man on TV who could battle intellectually like that, who had the arsenal of facts and the rhetorical agility to dominate any debate. It was the most sophisticated thing that young Black men in my generation had ever seen.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt five)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

Whether you look at Varèse or Ellington, Bud Powell or Maria Callas, Beethoven or Liszt or Ali Akbar Khan: the content of their art is intimately linked to their being born in history at a particular time. This is why you can’t simply reproduce it. Young people studying jazz these days are deluded if they think they’re learning to play the way Dizzy Gillespie played, or the way Bill Evans played. You can’t do it the way they did it. Any art is tied to its historical moment. And tied to the life of the artist, and all the social, psychological, and spiritual content that molded that life. Music is everything that makes the musician: family, friends, hardships, joys, the sounds on the street, how tight you buckle your belt, the person who happens to be sitting across from you in the subway car, what you ate for breakfast—all of it.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt four)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

I have never really known fear as a young child living in a Black community in the first years of my life. Once we moved to Englewood, two things happened that gave me nightmares. It was like an inauguration.

The first was the lynching of Emmett Till—when we saw those pictures of his mutilated body in Jet in September 1955. Our parents reacted to it, but they didn’t realize their children looked at those photos, too. The worst part was, I knew him. I used to go to the same barbershop as Emmett Till in Chicago. The barbershop was owned by Mr. Parker, the father of my friend Donald. There were always a lot of kids coming and going in that place. But I remember seeing Emmett Till there. His father would bring him in. My own parents didn’t know about this, because it wouldn’t have occurred to them that I would be in the barbershop with this kid. But we knew him, and then we saw those photos. How can you think that I could grow up and handle that on my own? What was I supposed to do with that? Where was I supposed to tuck that away?

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt three)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

My mother had eight brothers and sisters, and my aunt Evelyn was the middle sister. She was the first one to go to college and she decided to study opera, which was fairly unusual. We didn’t even know what the word meant. I was about three when she met a bass player named Nevin Wilson, who was playing with Ahmad Jamal. Nevin was the first real musician in my life. They got married and moved to Rockford, Illinois, and over the years I would sometimes go to stay with them. So I was exposed to some of the music that they were doing. I wanted to play bass because my uncle played bass. But when I got up on a chair to play it, it hurt my fingers. I asked him why I was having all these problems, and he told me I was going to have to wait to grow up to play bass. I said, “I guess I won’t play the bass if I have to wait to grow up to do it.”

I didn’t have any intentions at that point in terms of becoming a musician. I just knew I liked music a lot and I wanted to play it. I kept noodling at the keyboard, learning things by ear.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt two)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

In Englewood I went to Beale School, just a block away from home, from the fourth grade to the eighth grade. When I got to seventh grade in 1956-57 I had a teacher named Mr. Zimmerman who used to wear these blue serge suits all the time. He was a very quiet man. Not that we were bad, but he really controlled the class without hardly saying anything. I think the kids might have been a little bit afraid of him. Mr. Zimmerman would make us take a nap in the afternoon, which was unusual in seventh grade. But in fact it was very important to me, because I was always daydreaming. It didn’t take much to set my imagination off, and I couldn’t wait. The year before, I used to walk past his classroom, I remember, and wish I were in his class. I couldn’t wait to get to seventh grade because I knew that they took a nap, and I saw that nap as their dream time.

But the important thing was, he would play classical music during our nap period. For almost forty-five minutes in the afternoon, Mr. Zimmerman would tell the kids to put their heads down and rest, and he would go and stand at the window and stare out the window as if he were remembering something. I think he was a veteran, maybe from the Korean War. There was something about him. After becoming a veteran myself I can kind of spot certain things in people, especially people that have been in war zones. I can’t tell from people who’ve never been in a war zone—they don’t have any of the little signature kinds of things I can pick up on—but with people that have been in those kinds of dynamic situations, there are telltale signs. I’m sure there was something like that going on with Mr. Zimmerman, because he would use that period for some type of reflection and meditation. And he was a good teacher. He explained things well.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt one)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

By the time I hit high school, Studs Terkel had started hosting his radio show on WFMT, and I was enthralled by how wide and eclectic he made the world sound. He would play everything from blues and Mexican son jarocho to Central African music, Indian classical music, and flamenco, and he interspersed the music with interviews of all sorts of people—film and theater directors, actors, poets, blues singers, architects and industrial designers, orchestra conductors, folklore collectors, choreographers. Decades later, Studs Terkel’s program might have been called a “world music” show, but he did it without the label, before it was a marketing category, and that made it more thrilling: your ears could roam, and you heard unexpected echoes between far-flung corners of the globe.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt fourteen)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

I considered the northern white stance against slavery. How much of the desire to end the institution was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain? Was it just too much to watch? Did it offend Christian sensibilities to live in a society that allowed that practice? I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt thirteen)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

“To fight in a war,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

“Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?” I asked.

“I reckon.”

“Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt twelve)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

We walked through the dark, the river at least in earshot, if not right beside us. I didn’t know if Huck was still angry with me, but he didn’t speak. I didn’t mind that, as I was too tired for conversation, too angry to entertain anyone else’s thoughts. My anger fascinated me, still. It was certainly not a new emotion, but the range, the scope, the direction of it, was entirely novel and unfamiliar.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt eleven)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

I found a couple of thick, forked sticks and started digging into the beach. The night was so dark I could barely see the hole we were making. Norman dug with an energy that I didn’t have. He dug like he wanted the job done. We stood back to back and tore into the ground like we hated it.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt ten)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

“I sure would like to be in St. Louis,” a man said.

“New Orleans,” said another.

“Yes, New Orleans. They know how to have fun in New Orleans.”

“Ever been to New Orleans?” Big Mike asked me.

I shook my head.

He thought for a second. “You oughta go some day. Pull that line tight.”

I did and watched as he pounded in a stake with a sledge. “I ain’t neber been nowhere,” I said.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt nine)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

Norman and I lay down to sleep in a tent with a clarinet player called Big Mike. Big Mike, a small man, of course did not know that Norman was black. But he didn’t offer any objection to my presence. He was far more comfortable with my presence than I was with his. He performed what I imagined was his nightly ritual. He placed his cased clarinet very neatly and squarely at the foot of his rolled-out blanket, laid a cloth over it and then lay down to rest. Norman nodded to me and we, too, found our beds.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt eight)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

“We never button the bottom button on the vest,” he said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He took the tie, put it around his own neck, put a knot in it and then slipped it over my head.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt seven)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

“It’s a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.” Easter laughed.

I laughed with him.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt six)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

“Kin you tell me the fastest way to the Mississippi?”

“The Mississippi River,” the man said. “The Big Muddy, the Big River, Ol’ Man River, Old Blue. What you goin’ do with a river, son? It’s wet and big and deep. That’s where I lost my wife and my money on a riverboat called the Chester. The Mississippi River. Who wants the river?”

“I do,” Huck said.

“The Gathering of Waters. The Mississippi. Who wants to know?”

“I do, mister.”

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt five)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

I helped him shove off. I could see that the business with the warring families had troubled him. Killing is hard to see up close. Especially for a child. To tell the truth, I hadn’t seen much killing myself, except that I lived with it daily, the threat, the promise of it. Seeing one lynching was to see ten. Seeing ten was to see a hundred, with that signature posture of death, the angle of the head, the crossing of the feet.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt four)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

Young George had an instrument in his lap. A carved wood neck attached to a gourd with some strings. “Is that a banjo?” I asked.

“I made it,” Young George said. “But I dare not play it here. Ain’t nobody around, but sound travels, you know? Especially music. People can hear music miles away and then they try to find it.”

“Especially music,” Old George agreed.

“Especially music,” Josiah repeated.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt three)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

Huck started laughing. He pointed at me and laughed harder.

“You mean you was pullin’ on my leg?” I said. He was enjoying himself and that was all right with me. It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again.

“I had you goin’,” Huck said.

I acted like he’d hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt two)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

My prediction was not only true, but turned out to be grossly understated. The rain was torrential, biblical. Our beach fairly disappeared. I managed to pull in our trotline, else it would have been lost for good. That a flood was coming was a foregone conclusion. The only question was how high. The river rose and rose, covering much of Jackson Island. Sheet lightning lit up the sky seconds at a time. Huck fretted that a twister might be coming, but I told him the winds were blowing in a rotation counter to such an event. What I said was “Dat wind be twistin’ optsite of a tornada.” It was nonsense, but it quieted the boy’s fear. Then he pointed.

I looked. A house was floating down the channel toward us. It was a frightening sight. It was late afternoon, dark with no sun, and so it was difficult to see, but it was as big as what it was. It hung up against some trees and Huck and I had the same idea. Provisions. We dragged Huck’s canoe from the cave to the water and paddled to the house. It was hard work. We tied the boat to a tree and climbed in through a smashed window. We waded through water inside the wrecked house, with clothes floating everywhere. It had settled at a severe angle so it was a bit of a climb to the kitchen cabinets. Huck opened one and squealed, ironically, like a pig, as he found a rasher of bacon. I turned and saw a boot between the stove and the wall, then it became clear the boot was at the end of a leg.

“What is it?” Huck asked.

“Take the bacon and get back in the canoe,” I said.

the last book I ever read (James: A Novel by Percival Everett, excerpt one)

from James: A Novel by Percival Everett:

“Why did God set it up like this?” Rachel asked. “With them as masters and us as slaves?”

“There is no God, child. There’s religion but there’s no God of theirs. Their religion tells that we will get our reward in the end. However, it apparently doesn’t say anything about their punishment. But when we’re around them, we believe in God. Oh, Lawdy Lawd, we’s be believin’. Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”

the last book I ever read (Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, excerpt twenty)

from Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa:

“The 6th was pretty dramatic. That’s about as dramatic as you’re going to see it, short of a civil war.”

The conventional wisdom, which had settled into Washington, was that there had been warnings. But Milley knew the internet chatter had lacked coherence and did not provide the specific, credible intelligence that could avert a catastrophe.

It had been a grave U.S. intelligence failure, comparable to the missed warnings prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and to Pearl Harbor, and exposed glaring gaps and weaknesses in the American system.

What did Milley and others miss? What did they not understand?

Milley, ever the historian, thought of the little remember 1905 revolution in Russia. The uprising had failed, but it had set the stage for the successful 1917 revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917 revolution, had later called the 1905 revolution “The Great Dress Rehearsal.”

Had January 6 been a dress rehearsal?

Milley told senior staff, “What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.”