The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
“It’s not just about composition. It’s about challenging the musicians. You’ve got to have people in a position where they don’t really know, where they’re a little bit off guard, a little bit off balance, and they can really be spontaneous and extemporaneous… Familiarity makes you kind of absent from really understanding something. So you need musicians to be challenged. You don’t want them to come up and say, ‘Oh, I know what that is’ every time. You’re not going to get anything. You’re not going to get anything fresh out of them. They need to be challenged every time they come up.”
Henry Threadgill