Henry Threadgill Zooid
This Brings Us To, Volume 2
Pi Recordings

“This Brings Us To, Volume 2” is, as the title indicates, the second volume of recordings from Henry Threadgill Zooid’s “This Brings Us To” sessions, the first volume of which I reviewed for the Jazz Mann (http://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/henry-threadgill-zooid-this-brings-us-to-volume-1) back in December 2009.  Most of what I said of Volume 1 naturally stands for Volume 2, so this need not be a long review. One thing I will say, for what it’s worth, is that this was, for my money, the best jazz album release of 2010.

According to the release notes posted on the Pi website, Volumes 1 and 2 represent the two sets that the band performed live while on tour in Europe in 2008, each captured live in the studio once the touring was done. All of the music was recorded in November 2008, so the year-long delay in issuing “Volume 2” seems a curious decision; the two discs, it seems to me, rightly belong together in one package, as each complements and amplifies the virtues of the other, with “Volume 2” effectively expanding on “Volume 1”. Where the opening live set, reproduced on “Volume 1”, offers a slow-burn master-class in Threadgill’s structured melodic creativity, and demonstrates his ability to guide his ensembles’ improvisations by imposing intervallic limitations, “Volume 2” does the same with a touch more fire in its belly. This surely reflects Threadgill’s skill in sequencing musical events. Volume 2’s compositional parameters seem just a shade looser, with an extra degree of physicality manifesting itself in the ensemble’s playing. And, significantly, that physicality is captured with stunning vibrancy by producer and mix engineer Liberty Ellman in what may well be the most vivid and immediate recording in my collection.

The music on this unpreposessingly titled disc may well be the best of Threadgill’s long and consistently exemplary career. Each new ensemble since his mid-?80’s Sextett has advanced Threadgill’s program, and the now decade-old Zooid are the vehicle for his most mature and refined music to date; their uniformly dynamic, vibrant and characterful interpretations of it are immediately appealing, and Ellman lets us hear both the refinement of their interactions and the physicality of their music-making in vividly intimate detail.

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