Air

Formed in 1971 to play the ragtime of Scott Joplin for a Chicago theatrical production, Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall soon found that their sax-bass-drums pit band had the chemistry to become something far stranger and more enduring. As Air, the trio carried the structural clarity of Joplin into a realm of free improvisation, developing a language in which memorably knotted themes could flower into expansive, unpredictable forms. Air Time, recorded in 1977 and released the following year on Nessa, catches them at the midpoint of their existence, a moment when their rapport was deep enough to take real risks yet still charged with the urgency of discovery.

The album’s framework is simple on paper: three compositions by Threadgill and one each by Hopkins and McCall. In practice, that distribution of authorship underlines how thoroughly the trio had become a collective organism. Threadgill, switching among alto and tenor saxophones, flutes and his home‑made hubkaphone, supplies themes that are at once jagged and singable, built from asymmetrical phrases and unexpected intervals that lodge in the ear even as they destabilise your sense of meter. Hopkins’ bass is both engine and commentator, alternately walking, pulsing, bowing long drones or carving out counter‑melodies; his own tune opens a window onto the harmonic imagination that would make him one of the most sought‑after bassists in creative music. McCall’s piece, by contrast, foregrounds rhythmic architecture, using shifting accents, broken patterns and textural detail to show how a drummer can shape form without ever resorting to a backbeat.

Across the record, the trio’s history with ragtime lurks like a ghost in the machine. You can hear it in the way lines are voiced in close harmony, in the precision with which unisons lock in before flying apart, and in the underlying sense of pulse that remains audible even when the bar lines dissolve. But Air Time is not a nostalgia project. It’s a document of three musicians who have absorbed the lessons of earlier idioms and moved on, using them as raw material for something far more volatile. Threadgill’s solos pivot between tart, compressed runs and airy, spacious figures; Hopkins will follow a knotty horn line with a sudden drop into pure resonance; McCall’s cymbal work and small‑drum details constantly redraw the frame around the other two, making silence and near‑silence as important as surges of volume.