Review: Henry Threadgill’s ‘Listen Ship’

Audiences who saw artist-in-residence Henry Threadgill at Big Ears in 2024 were enthralled with five performances, each featuring a different configuration, and left eagerly anticipating the artist’s next move. Listen Ship (Pi, 2025), like many of Threadgill’s recent works, finds the eighty-one-year-old NEA Jazz Master conducting rather than participating instrumentally. The ensemble under his direction – six acoustic guitars and two grand Steinway pianos – is, in all likelihood, the only configuration of its kind. It is an octet of the type only Threadgill could devise. Listen Ship, perhaps the most complex presentation of the intervallic system Threadgill has been developing for the last quarter century, captures a grand suite wherein different elements of the ensemble interact with one another. Each of the sixteen tracks of the album makes up a different movement, each simply titled as a letter of the alphabet. Across the recording, different elements of the ensemble interact with one another in each piece. The work’s title seems to be a play on “listenership,” breaking syllables apart to perhaps suggest listening to these parts that form the whole.

Threadgill has obviously given deep thought to how guitar tones and overtones can blend to create one beautifully textured, holistic sound, further colored by the two pianos. However, this is not his first foray into this space. He first explored the guitar and piano concept on Song Out of My Trees (Black Saint, 1994) and two musicians from that project, Brandon Ross and bass guitarist Jerome Harris, return here. Joining Ross’ soprano guitar are Bill Frisell and Miles Okazaki on archtops and Gregg Belisle-Chi on a flat top. Harris is joined on acoustic bass guitar by Stomu Takeishi, who had played with Threadgill decades ago in both Zooid and Make a Move. The pianists are Maya Keren and Rahul Carlberg.

Vibrant guitar and piano interactions fill the first piece, “A.”  The music has the usual Threadgill characteristics, unusual forms and chords, unexpected timbres, elusive counterpoint, shifts between animation and reflection, lots of surprises, riveting call-and-response interplay, and odd-metered rhythms for which the absence of drums is particularly noteworthy. The forms across the overarching work are ever-changing. It takes a few, maybe more, listens, to appreciate the unified statement that eventually unfolds.  For every three parts that sound disjointed or disorienting, there are at least five others that exude beauty. Still, rather than providing  one or two sentence descriptions for each piece, these quotes are a far more compelling description of the music:

Brandon Ross – “…We were all challenged to internalize and express the piece, not just play it back- a piece full of unconventional challenges and unique idiomatic sensibilities, very precisely articulated and understood by the composer, who happened to be standing in front of you. It’s a lot of fun- if one can catch the spirit of what the music is saying. What is being communicated-what’s the idea being conveyed…I find if that can be perceived, the whole thing clarifies, comes alive, and is transporting…once you figure out exactly how to play…that note?!”

Miles Okazaki – “The compositions are only roadmaps, but Henry is the one who can show you how to get around. It’s through guided rehearsals when you really start to see the landmarks and connecting points and get a sense of the music’s totality. All of that is in his head.”   He also adds, “Henry has taken his [intervallic] system even further. Here, he’s assigning different intervals to different sets of musicians. It’ so deep.”

Bill Frisell – “Seeing Henry up there dancing and tapping his foot made it easier to feel where the time was. You could tell from his breathing and the movement of his whole body that he was hearing and feeling all of it at every moment.”  He then comments, “It’s the most challenging music I’ve ever played in my life. It put me back to when I first started playing guitar in the mid-’60s. It’s not just dealing with the written material, which was already stretching the technical limits of what I can do, but having to improvise in a whole new harmonic language. He has really helped me open windows to help me shake up my own stuff.”

When these extremely talented musicians remark on the difficulty of playing this music, far be it from this author to adequately describe it. Sometimes – as artists including John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock have commented – to fully appreciate art, “you don’t need to understand it.” Instead, as the album’s title suggests, you need only to truly listen to it. You need to approach the music with big ears and the ability to feel it. Simply, enjoy the creative, singular force that is Henry Threadgill.

‘Listen Ship’ will be released on Pi Recordings on September 26, 2025. It can be purchased on Bandcamp.