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.”

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