Henry Threadgill
Too Much Sugar for a Dime

THE REVIEW

[Of Varied & Eventual Peripateticisms]

Are you aware of the present? Well, it has already passed.

All the breath in the world won't be enough for you to chase it.

Yet in trying, a strange recoil and a slight rumbling of the guts advance in your indefatigable and indigestible labyrinths.

Put to music, it sounds more or less like this album.

With an untranslatable title in its whirlwind polysemy, just as whirlwind as what it contains, Too Much Sugar for a Dime is an ambush laid for common sense.

It tears apart the categorizations attached to it, purposely disregarded: what can be said is that there isn’t much to say about it. At least nothing sensible.

As for nonsensicalness, we have as much as you want, just ask.

Well, preambles aside, it is always and only about movement, in music as in everything else (what else?); of varied & eventual peripateticisms, torn apart by epiphanic idiocy, Threadgill seems to sling and till our complacency.

He mocks our habitual settling.

It is not just another cacophonic free-jazz piece, much maligned alongside English punk by the well-known Sicilian, nor anything else that can be defined.

It runs on the edge, without stumbling or bewildering itself into a recognizable form, swaying.

A hypnotic scrambling.

This is the fun of someone who has nothing to lose, nothing to win, and nothing to demand from exhaling into a brass instrument.

Then suddenly a percussive interlude, a clear melodic African chant, and then again, from rhythm to its dismantling.

This, whether one likes it or not, is the most vibrant legacy of good Babatunde Olatunji, whose carefree and primal percussion gave birth to the entire spectrum of modern music, now remixed and rejuvenated by H. Threadgill in a carefree manner.

A future-past that displaces any ending without a blow.

Living in the present is also this: pointing to a horizon that isn’t there.