The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection and New York music label Blank Forms are presenting a two-evening program in resonance with the work of David Hammons:
on Tuesday, 8 February, a concert by jazz composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill, accompanied by his group Zooid, and
on Wednesday, 9 February, a concert by composer Amina Claudine Myers on piano and organ.
Music runs throughout the work of David Hammons, a devotee of the compositions and improvisations of avant-garde jazz, a musical style pioneered by African-Americans. The work Central Park West (1990) refers to a song by John Coltrane. The cats lounging on the gigantic tam-tams in High Level of Cats (1998) allude to the nickname “cats” given to jazz musicians. Some of his works incorporate pieces of vinyl.
The paths of David Hammons and Henry Threadgill crossed in the 1990s through a mutual friend, the composer Butch Morris (1947-2013). In 2019, Henry Threadgill composed 6 to 5, 5 to 6 for a monumental sculpture by David Hammons, Day’s End, installed in front of the Whitney Museum in New York.
Henry Threadgill
Henry Threadgill (b. 1944) is a saxophonist and flautist celebrated for his personal approach to integrating modular composition within sophisticated group improvisation. An early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Threadgill spent his youth playing in blues, polka, gospel, Latin, and rock bands in his hometown of Chicago. In 1971, he formed Reflection (later renamed Air) with bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall. His penchant for idiosyncratic instrumental configurations has been a signature of his career as a bandleader, which has included especially the Henry Threadgill Sextett, X-75 (a nonet consisting of four reed players, four bassists, and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers), and, since 2001, his acoustic chamber ensemble Zooid. He was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his album In for a Penny, In for a Pound.
Zooid is a vehicle for Threadgill’s latest compositional method, a strategy which corresponds to a zooid’s biological designation as a type of cell which operates independently from the organism to which it belongs. For Zooid, the 76-year- old composer’s longest-running group to date, Threadgill assigns his instrumentalists specific intervallic parameters within which they are free to improvise, setting the stage for a polyphonic sound world of contrapuntal harmonies and free, pulsating rhythm that maintains cohesion while encouraging expression outside of habitual patterns. Zooid is currently a quintet with Jose Davila (trombone and tuba), Liberty Ellman (acous-tic guitar), Christopher Hoffman (cello), and Elliot Humberto Kavee (drums).
Blank Forms
Founded in 2016, Blank Forms is a New York-based non-profit orga-nisation that supports emerging and under-represented artists working across temporal disciplines such as experimental music, performance, dance, and sound arts. It seeks to create new ways of preserving, nourishing, and exhibiting the work of historically established and emerging artists to the public. Black Forms provides artists with curatorial support, residencies, commissions, and publications to help them document, disseminate, and make their work.
Curated by Blank Forms