Jazz
Pi Recordings · 28 August 2026
“Red Admiral Red Moon Rising” runs twelve minutes and twenty-one seconds and takes up more than a third of the record’s thirty-six minutes on its own. It is the exception: of the ten tracks, five come in under two minutes and three more sit below four. Henry Threadgill has been writing in short, clipped statements for decades, and here he pushes that as far as it will go.
Zooid returns five years on from “Poof” with the same odd instrumentation as ever: Liberty Ellman on acoustic guitar, Jose Davila on tuba and trombone, Christopher Hoffman on cello, Elliot Humberto Kavee on drums and Threadgill on saxophone, flute and bass flute. The tuba marks the bottom with an oompah step, and a moment where all five play at once is hard to find. On “Fluoroscope” (6:12) the flute and Ellman’s guitar share the front without ever quite meeting.
“Bingo” comes split in three (2:16, 2:02 and 3:41) and placed second through fourth, so the opening of the record works as a suite before the long piece arrives.
The last quarter is something else. “Blur”, “Off and On What Happened”, “Lightnin’”, “Snow Bones” and “Wind at My Back” run between one forty-five and one fifty-five, come one after another and add up to nine and a quarter minutes: they are sketches, and several of them stop before they have said anything. After the twelve minutes of development at the centre, the album dissolves into miniatures.
Pi Recordings put it out on 28 August. It is Threadgill’s thirteenth album for the label Seth Rosner founded in 2001 for the sole purpose of releasing him, and it arrives eleven years after “In for a Penny, In for a Pound” (2015), the record that won him the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Rating: 8/10
Text by Aina Torrents