MoMA Mixtape: Brent Hayes Edwards Slips into Another World

León Ferrari’s Untitled + “Untitled Tango” by Air

Ferrari’s ink drawing made me think of “Untitled Tango,” the opening track on the 1975 debut of the trio Air (featuring Henry, the bassist Fred Hopkins, and the drummer Steve McCall), less because Ferrari was Argentine than because the song flirts with something it isn’t. Just as Ferrari’s scribble lingers at the edges of calligraphy without becoming legible, Henry’s composition hints at the stately menace of tango without ever quite inhabiting the genre. Threadgill played various woodwinds with Air, but it feels appropriate to open with an example of his work on the instrument that was his first love, the tenor saxophone.

Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player + “Portrait of Leo Smith” by Air

After relocating from Chicago to New York City in early 1976, Air became a fixture at the nightclubs and lofts around lower Manhattan. This composition, featuring Henry on flute, was recorded in concert at Studio Rivbea, the loft performance space on Bond Street in NoHo run by the saxophonist Sam Rivers and his wife Bea. If it brings to mind other “portraits” in jazz, such as Duke Ellington’s depictions of Bert Williams and Louis Armstrong, this study of Henry’s collaborator, the trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith (a fellow member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago), seems to suggest that abstraction might be the most accurate method of portraiture, as in Boccioni’s mesmerizing painting of a body in motion. As Boccioni wrote in a 1910 manifesto, “To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.”

“The tune has a faux-naïve, almost ritualistic opacity that reminds me of the forbidding creatures in the mysterious ceremony depicted in Jacques-Enguérrand Gourgue’s Magic Table.”

Anne Ryan’s Number 13 + Air’s “The Ragtime Dance”

As a longtime lover and practitioner of collage, I was thrilled to discover the mid-century work of Anne Ryan, whose small and intricate assemblages are feats of understated mastery. Their deft juxtapositions of texture (in compositions using handmade rag paper, Japanese rice paper, hemp, silk, cloth, and various printed and colored paper) made me think of Air’s earliest music. In the trio’s first public performances, Air provided the accompaniment for The Hotel, a play directed by Donald Sanders at the Columbia College Theater Center near Lincoln Park in Chicago. Sanders asked Henry to arrange a selection of ragtime tunes by Scott Joplin for the occasion. While Air came to be known as one of the great avant-garde units of the 1970s, its music was shaped by this deep revisitation of one of the foundational genres of jazz. Realizing that rags have a suite-like structure, Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall found ways to rearrange and expand the patchwork quality of the form.

Alberto Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m. + “T.B.A.” by Flute Force 4

Threadgill and James Newton were the driving forces behind a flute quartet that, despite recording a single album, gained a reputation as one of the most compelling of the single-instrument ensembles (including the World Saxophone Quartet, the Baritone Sax Retinue, M’Boom, and the New York Bass Violin Choir) that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Henry’s composition “T.B.A.,” driven by a bass flute playing a clave-like ostinato, achieves miraculous thrust with the lightest of means, a little like the engrossing, enigmatic assemblage that Giacometti built out of what he called a “fragile palace of matches” to commemorate an obsessive love affair in the summer of 1932.

Suwon Lee’s The most dangerous city in the world + “Come Carry the Day” by Very Very Circus Plus

The Venezuelan photographer Suwon Lee’s Crepuscular series features large-scale shots of contemporary Latin American cities at dusk, focusing not on the expected monuments and landmarks of urban life but on unexpected and liminal perspectives. Her La ciudad más peligrosa del mundo (The most dangerous city in the world) is a portrait of Petare, the largest neighborhood in Caracas, taken from El Ávila mountain, which looms above the city. Lee doesn’t shoot the iconic peak itself, but instead offers what she calls the “anti-cliché” of the view away from it, a bird’s-eye vantage of the city lights below. It made me think of the extended period Henry spent in Venezuela in 1974: he went almost on a whim, without any contacts, but rapidly integrated himself into the music scene. Like his experiences in Vietnam, Trinidad, and India, Henry’s time in Caracas left traces in his subsequent music, as in the augmented version of Very Very Circus that recorded the exuberant “Come Carry the Day,” featuring the Venezuelan percussionists Johnny Rudas and Miguel Urbina on vocals and the small, slender drums called the culo y puya.

Giacomo Balla’s Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences + “To Undertake My Corners Open” by Zooid

At the turn of the millennium, Threadgill found a way out of the constraints of traditional diatonic harmony, discovering an interval system based on three-note cells that provided the foundation for an entirely different compositional vocabulary. By the fall of 2008, when his new quintet, Zooid (named after a scientific term for an organic cell that moves independently within a living organism), recorded the two volumes of Things Brings Us To, they were playing with dazzling self-assurance. The open corners of Henry’s recent music—its refusal to settle, its propulsive ongoingness—makes me think of the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla’s experimentation with ways to portray movement in the supposedly static medium of painting, using repetition and refraction to imply the rapid wing patterns of birds in flight.