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To celebrate saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill's career retrospective at the 2024 Big Ears Festival, Pi Recordings is proud to release both Volumes I & II of This Brings Us To together in a limited-edition double vinyl set. Featuring his long-running band, Zooid, the two volumes were originally released in 2009 and 2010 even though the music was all recorded at a single session. They were his first releases in eight years, longer than any hiatus in his career, a time that allowed for the gestation of what was to become Threadgill's signature intervallic system of composition and group improvisation that ultimately won him a Pulitzer Prize for his work In for a Penny, In for a Pound. The original albums were voted the #2 and #5 best releases of the year by The Village Voice Jazz Critics' Poll, about which NPR said "The jazz world is coming to realize that Threadgill is a true idiosyncratic great... This Brings Us To staggers and lurches and creates dissonances, and it still brings the mad-scientist funk." Remastered for vinyl by Threadgill's long-time guitarist and producer Liberty Ellman and housed in a gatefold sleeve with archival photos of the band, the release focuses attention on an important turning point in the career of one of music's great iconoclastic masters.
Henry Threadgill