Book Launch and Conversation with Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards

Book Launch and Conversation with Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards

Saturday, June 10, 2023
2:00–4:00 pm
Corbett vs. Dempsey
2156 West Fulton St.
Chicago, IL 60612

In celebration of the launch of Henry Threadgill's newly published autobiography Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Knopf), co-written with Brent Hayes Edwards, the authors will be joined in conversation by the longtime Chicago-based jazz critic and scholar Howard Reich. 

A Chicago native and a longtime member of the AACM, the composer, saxophonist and flutist Henry Threadgill has performed on more than thirty 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. In 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his four-movement work, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, and in 2021 he was awarded an Instant Award in Improvised Music and was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. Threadgill's most recent album is The Other One (Pi Recordings, 2023).

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His award-winning books include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003). In 2022-23 he is a Ford Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Howard Reich covered jazz, blues, gospel and classical music for the Chicago Tribune from 1978 to 2021. He has published six books including Let Freedom Swing: Collected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Gospel (2010) and Portraits in Jazz (2014) and produced/written three documentary films.

This event is free and open to the public. Space is limited and first come, first serve.