An all-star trio unites for a rare performance at the ICA
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They all stay busy with their own projects. Threadgill's new ensemble Ship, comprising two pianists and six guitarists, will premier his composition 'Listen Ship' with them May 2 at the Long Play Festival in Brooklyn, and record it soon afterward. His memoir '
Iyer has continued touring with his trio, whose 2024 album 'Compassion' ranked high on assorted polls of jazz critics; his second duo album with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, 'Defiant Life,' will be released March 21 on ECM. And Prieto's Sí o Sí Quartet album '3 Sides of the Coin' was released in September, and a Celebrity Series of Boston performance followed in January.
With all that busyness, chances to perform together as a trio have been rare, despite their having known one another for 25 years or so.
Threadgill, who turned 81 on Feb. 15, was sought out by Iyer and Prieto, now both in their early fifties, upon their separate arrivals in New York City as young men. In separate phone calls, the three described how they evolved into a sometime trio.
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Iyer had moved to New York from the Bay Area after finishing an interdisciplinary PhD at UC-Berkeley. But he had kept busy playing adventurous, genre-expanding music while a student. Among the professors on Iyer's dissertation committee was George Lewis, a member of Chicago's legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), of which Threadgill was also an early member. Iyer also connected with Steve Coleman when Coleman traveled to the west coast for shows and workshops. Coleman – saxophonist, composer, bandleader, music theorist, and eventual MacArthur genius himself (receiving his grant in 2014, shorly after the younger Prieto and Iyer had been chosen for theirs) – hired Iyer for his band and brought him on Iyer's first tour of Europe.
Vijay Iyer.
Ebru Yildiz
Iyer decided to join Coleman, Lewis, and other heroes in New York, sharing a moving van with the guitarist Liberty Ellman, who would soon be recruited for Threadgill's band Zooid, the then-new experimental band with which Threadgill would years later record his Pulitzer-winning album (with Ellman doubling as the album's producer).
That inevitably led to Iyer meeting Threadgill. 'I remember him coming to hear [an early iteration of Iyer's experimental trio Fieldwork] at the Knitting Factory in like '99,' recalls Iyer. Joining Threadgill at a front table were two other legends: AACM guiding light Muhal Richard Abrams and pianist-composer Andrew Hill.
Dafnis Prieto.
Osmani Tellez
Threadgill remembers Coleman first telling him about Prieto, whom Coleman had met on a research trip to Cuba. 'He told me there's a drummer down in Cuba that knows your music, and he's determined to meet you.'
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Prieto says he knew Threadgill's music thanks to bassist Roberto Occhipinti, who played Threadgill's 'Makin' a Move' album at his home in Toronto when he and Prieto were in a band together. Prieto loved the music so much that Occhipinti had him take the CD home with him to Cuba.
'When I heard that the first time, it was almost like a music that I could hear in my dreams,' Prieto elaborates. 'And then when I wake up, it disappeared.' Prieto sought out more Threadgill music, and, after Prieto moved to New York, Threadgill showed up at a performance. 'He came out, introduced himself, and I couldn't believe that I was in front of him,' recalls Prieto.
Prieto soon appeared on a pair of Threadgill albums, both released in 2001: the final project from Threadgill's Make a Move band, and the debut of Zooid. 'I got him to play with me right away,' says Threadgill, 'because he said he knew everything I'd been doing.'
Flash ahead to 2012. Iyer was asked to play a benefit for the Jazz Gallery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The Gallery's artistic director, Rio Sakairi, suggested he add Threadgill to his then-trio for the performance. But Iyer's bassist and drummer had conflicts, and Prieto was the replacement on drums. (Linda May Han Oh filled in on bass.) They played one of Threadgill's pieces.
Two years later, Threadgill, Iyer, and Prieto did another benefit, this time as a trio. Each of them brought a couple of their compositions. 'We got through them really fast,' says Iyer, 'and then Dafnis was like, 'Let's do an encore!''
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The result was magical, Iyer recalls. 'I just remember experiencing what Threadgill did in that moment, the choices he made. And he didn't know what chord I was playing now and what I was going to play next, but it all actually fit somehow. I asked him, 'How is it that everything you play works?' He just laughed. But it was true, because he's putting this composerly sensibility into every choice he makes. So he's not ever just playing over the music. He's actually connecting the dots with it, and he's creating, stretching.'
It's that composerly quality each of them brings to the trio, says Iyer, that makes the group special and keeps them interested in playing together.
Threadgill agrees. 'We've got three composers here,' he explains. 'Every time the music changes, it holds up a different world, because it's coming from a different place. Because of each one of us, [and] our different approaches to composition.'
The trio has done other Jazz Galley benefits since that first night (they'll be celebrating the Gallery's 30th anniversary with shows May 30 and 31). They also reunited in Knoxville for the 2023 Big Ears Festival, one of five Threadgill ensembles featured there that year.
And Saturday they'll be doing their thing in Boston, each contributing compositions that they'll reshape together onstage.
'It's not like it's [Threadgill's] band and he's cueing people and stuff,' observes Iyer. 'We're all just in it together. It has this kind of unity, this rough and tumble energy, because we make these spontaneous decisions together.
'It's a particular privilege to get to work with Henry in a context like that, because it's so rare nowadays for him to do that — to really play someone else's music, period.'
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HENRY THREADGILL, VIJAY IYER, AND DAFNIS PRIETO TRIO
March 8, 8 p.m., at ICA, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston. $32 ICA members and students, $40 non-members,
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