At the London jazz festival in 2011, Chicago composer Henry Threadgill memorably played with Zooid, the long-term vehicle for his highly personal and elegantly polyphonic compositions for improvisers. His beginnings in 1960s Chicago free-jazz might imply a stormy soundscape, but this double album for quintet is welcomingly warm and melodious, even if the tunes and rhythms have the sinewy slipperiness of eels. Threadgill’s fragile but incisive flute curls through a quiet turmoil of staccato guitar and cello; Christopher Hoffman’s cello veers into double-bass pizzicato range against lustrous flute and humming tubas. The short Off the Prompt Box has a surging energy that could almost be danced to, and graceful electric guitar lines (the excellent Liberty Ellman’s) weaving with the cello presage a subtle exercise in brass multiphonics from Jose Davila. It’s captivatingly melodic for an improv band – because in Threadgill they have a unique navigator at the helm.
