Join us for a special premiere of the film The Other One, by the composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill. In May 2022, Threadgill presented an acclaimed concert at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, New York, that combined a vibrant new composition for a 12-piece chamber ensemble with an array of elements, including recited poetic texts and projections of paintings, photographs, and prerecorded film footage and vocal choirs. The New York Times described the music as possessing “a galvanic sense of swing” in a performance imbued with “an obliquely danceable, straightforwardly joyous Threadgillian energy.” The Other One captures and remixes the multimedia performance into a dazzling cinematic document of Threadgill’s experimental vision.
After the screening, Threadgill will be joined in conversation by Brent Hayes Edwards, who collaborated with Threadgill on his autobiography Easily Slip into Another World, which was published this month. Threadgill and Edwards will discuss the new music (which was inspired by percussionist Milford Graves’s research into the human heartbeat) and consider the film in relation to Threadgill’s long history of multimedia performance.
Henry Threadgill, one of the most original and innovative voices in contemporary music, has performed on more than 30 albums, including acclaimed releases from his bands Air, X-75, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, Very Very Circus, Make a Move, Zooid, and Ensemble Double Up. His four-movement work In for a Penny, In for a Pound received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016, and he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2021.
Brent Hayes Edwards is a Ford Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art and the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His award-winning books include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017).
This program is organized in partnership with the Ford Foundation.