Henry Threadgill

The Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga hosted the Threadgill-Iyer-Prieto Trio Tuesday night. This is pretty wild and wooly music for such a classy venue in a tony suburb, but the house was nearly full, and the audience was appreciative. Threadgill was one of the leaders of free jazz's turn toward more structured composition in the 1970s and remains a major figure. On alto sax he shares some of Ornette Coleman's simplicity and directness, but as a composer he brings a lot more complexity.

The evening's performance was broken primarily into two extended pieces (or suites), each played almost entirely without any breaks. The sonic landscape shifted between quiet, space-filled passages and rollicking percussive grooves, all with Threadill's distinctively quirky harmonies and modulations.

The rest of the Trio consists of two 40-something masters– Vijay Iyer on piano and Dafnis Prieto on drums. I'd heard Prieto in person before and found his formidable playing a little too drums-forward. Although there were also plenty of percussive fireworks Tuesday, Threadgill's penchant for quiet spaces is apparently a good influence on Prieto, who painted gentle textures with mallets and brushes. These were among the best moments of the night, along with some high-energy sequences in which Iyer blocked out peculiar rapid-fire chord sequences and filigrees, Prieto grinned at him over his cymbals as he kept the time in several meters, and Threadgill drifted along between them in his own sonic universe, breathing extended earthy tones on bass flute.