https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/Henry-Threadgill-Failure-is-Everything/212405
Non-stop encomiums and accolades have already piled high for *Easily Slip into Another World*, an incandescent new autobiography from the iconic African-American composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill, but here’s one passage that made my own jaw drop, about his initial impression of Goa when his band Very Very Circus came down for the Jazz Yatra at the cusp of the 1990s: “The festival was right on the beach – we watched the sun descend under the horizon behind the crowd as we played our set. We were rocking that night, but the crowd’s reaction to our music still took me by surprise. They had folding chairs and the audience started out seated. But they responded physically to the music to a degree that I’d never witnessed in any concert I’d ever given [as] people stood up and were dancing in the aisles – not just a couple of free spirits, but what looked like a majority of the crowd. Some were running up to the edge of the bandstand and spinning around in circles or falling on the ground like they were catching the spirit. I suppose the only way to describe it is to say that they were catching the spirit. I’d seen congregants transported to the point of possession and speaking in tongues in evangelical churches in Chicago, and I’d seen my share of frenzied thrashing and slam dancing in the punk scene in New York. But I’d never seen one of my ensembles provoke quite this degree of collective delirium. Threadgill - who will turn an elegant 80 next February - has achieved appreciable eminence in the intervening decades, including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2021 National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship for lifetime achievement. But even three decades ago when still in his 40s, he was an experienced veteran of the world – as well as the US Army in its disastrous Vietnam War – who had pretty much seen it all. Yet, he says that concert in Goa stood out: “It was so extreme that it freaked out the band. They didn’t stop playing, but their eyes got wide and they kept shooting me anxious looks. I kept going and tried to convey the message that we should just hold steady in the tumult we’d unleashed. I ignored the pandemonium in the crowd and concentrated on the music. I didn’t know what else to do. We had taken the crowd to the plateau – now the only option was to try to sustain it. When we finished our last tune, the audience erupted in a raucous ovation, and I exchanged glances with the band. Clearly there was something special about this place.” Now came heart-stopping magic, after “night had fallen like an opaque shroud over the coast.” The tired musicians were led back to their cottages by lamplight, but their leader “decided to take a little time for myself [and] misjudged how disorienting the darkness had become, almost immediately lost my way and found myself enveloped in the foliage. There were trees with leaves as big as my body, and underbrush so thick that it cut off the trickle of light from the beach. I could barely see my own hand in front of my face. I paused for a moment to catch my breath and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I stood there trying not to panic. Suddenly a little old woman stepped out from the bush right in front of me. I was startled, but it happened so quickly that there was nothing to do: I just stared at her. She was a rail-thin old lady, black as coal, with some sort of basket strapped to her back. She walked right up to me as though she was expecting to find me there. The whites of her eyes gleamed as she got in my face, so close I could smell her breath as she exhaled. She pointed her finger at me and spoke to me in English. ‘You belong here,’ she declared. And then she turned and melted into the bushes.” Thus began an intriguing, bountiful and previously almost unknown artistic engagement with India’s smallest state, where the influential jazzman felt compelled to return: “I knew I was going to have to go back. I needed to spend more time there to try to figure out what it meant.” That happened after another thunderclap arrived in the person of Sentienla “Senti” Toy, a talented singer/songwriter from Nagaland, and they commenced married life together in an old house in Moira: “it was a feeling of arrival – a certainty, even before we actually saw it, that this house was our destination.” When their daughter Nhumengula was born in 1996, “we brought her up as much in Goa as in Manhattan. She would run around the village barefoot on her own [and] even as a toddler Nhumi knew her way around the village better than we did. And she was perfectly safe in that environment – everybody in town knew her, and people would keep an eye on one another’s kids. That mutual responsibility was taken for granted.” Finding new love and starting life afresh is one of the familiar storylines of contemporary Goa, but what happened to Threadgill’s artistic output in those years bears closer attention. The house in Moira “allowed me to establish a new rhythm in my creative life” and “once I eradicated the continual buzz of what even then was an overconnected world, I found I could devote time to listening to what was going on in my head. I slowed down and paid attention to my senses: the new spices and colors and sounds around me. I would spend hours reading. I think I read everything Agatha Christie wrote while I was in Goa. Dostoevsky. Books on physics and astronomy. I had a telescope on the veranda and I would spend hours peering at the constellations. And above all I composed. I got a record deal with Columbia just when I started spending significant time in India. I wrote all the music on my three Columbia albums while I was sequestered there in Moira. The sources of inspiration were endless.” *Easily Slip into Another **World* describes how the 1997 song *Laughing Club* – https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1g6LlGtc0 - comes directly from “a real Goan organization” which “used to meet out in a field near Moira early in the morning [to] laugh each other into submission.” This is extraordinary modern music, seething with intelligence, that grooves deep into your consciousness when Threadgill blows his alto saxophone. At my first unforgettable listen, I quickly realized it belongs alongside the most important literature and art that has kept on emerging from fertile periods of contemplation and creativity in our ancient vaddos, as exemplified by Francis Newton Souza’s 1955 *Nirvana of a Maggot *– originally published by Stephen Spender in *Encounter* – which derived from long months “in a nearly deserted Goan village”. Since then, many of the finest creative minds of our times from Dayanita Singh to Amitav Ghosh have said they have found it possible to do some of their best work here. It’s a singular legacy, which should be acknowledged and celebrated accordingly. Threadgill’s co-author is the Columbia University professor Brent Hayes Edwards, and they have collaborated on an unqualified masterpiece, in which the only wrong note is the mangling of *Moidekar*, our Konkani word for belonging to Moira. I found everything else absolutely spellbinding, as Threadgill’s life trajectory shoots from the South Side of Chicago to Carnegie Hall, while meeting legends like John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. *Easily Slip into Another World *is especially recommended for every aspiring artist and writer, and includes many brilliant insights and gems of distilled wisdom, including this invaluable lesson: “I thought of calling this book Failure is Everything. As much as any other phrase, it’s my first tenet: a fundamental truth that sums up what I’ve learned through experience. Maybe it should be my epitaph. I don’t mean to be fatalistic – it’s simply a fact. Failure is the greatest motivator of all. When you fail at something, there are only three things that can happen. You can give up – drop it completely and go in a different direction – or let it slow you down. You can lose your moral bearings and become a cheat or a fraud. Or else you can get highly motivated to fix whatever went wrong. It heightens your determination: now you have something to prove.”
