Yesterday I spoke with pianist and composer Vijay Iyer. Among other things, we talked about Fifteen, his trio album with Henry Threadgill and Dafnis Prieto. You can read Media Room’s review of Fifteen here. You can purchase the recording here. Vijay spoke at length about Henry Threadgill and mentioned his acclaimed autobiography Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (2023). The book was featured in the “Briefly Noted” section of The New Yorker June 19, 2023: “I go back in my memory and I don’t see: I hear,” Threadgill, a Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician and composer, writes in this autobiography. As a child, he taught himself to play his mother’s piano, then learned the clarinet, the flute, and the saxophone (his main instrument). Threadgill is an engaging narrator, touching on racism in the Chicago of his youth, his military service in Vietnam - one band performance is interrupted by a Vietcong raid — and his compositional process. The book’s title refers to a state of mind in which he is able to resist the “mess” of conformity and produce an utterance of his own. “Your neurosis and your dream,” he writes, “they go hand in hand.” Media Room Live! With Katherine Young Next week (September 3, 2026) Media Room Live! will talk with bassoonist and composer Katherine Young whose album BIOMES will be released on Chalkin Records September 18, 2026. She said: BIOMES is an ongoing project that draws on an evolving collection of materials – photographs, scientific and fictional texts, notation, field recordings, videos, drawings, maps, and more – organized in relation to specific ecological communities, among them desert, wetlands, forest, oyster reef, and the human microbiome. Each biome carries its own characteristics that shape the music's timbre and density, as well as the interaction strategies Young weaves among performers. Media Room - The Arts in Real Life is reader-supported, AI-free, quality arts writing. If it is of value to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediaroom.substack.com/subscribe
