While various aesthetic wars have raged around him, Henry Threadgill has steadily built up an important body of innovative jazz. Despite scooping up poll plaudits and exciting critical fervor over the past 20 years, he remains one of America's bestkept cultural secrets, a condition that Columbia no doubt hopes to reverse with its recent signing of Threadgill.

His Columbia debut, Carry the Day, arrives with much expectation, but it's doubtful that Threadgill's dense, visionary and, to most ears, unorthodox ideas about musical organization will win him a place in America's living rooms. Déjà vu descends: Ten years ago, Threadgill, then high off the acclaim for his great Sextett albums on the About Time label, signed briefly with RCA/Novus before resuming his allotted place on the fringes. The commercial and/or corporate fate of Threadgill's new deal is impossible to second-guess, but it's safe to say that his marginalization over the years illustrates the gulf between art and hype in jazz.

Carry the Day continues the experimental yet ecstatic verve of Threadgill's earlier albums with the band he aptly calls Very Very Circus. As an improviser, he still projects a raw, intuitive energy, issuing both scruffy joy and antsy angst on alto sax and flute. But it is more the general features of his concept than the specifics of singular soloing that make Threadgill's music tick, an important difference in function from other modes of jazz that emphasize the heroism of the mighty soloist. Threadgill's Euro-African chamber avant jazz is all about supple shifts of meter and tonality, rumbling dins and roller-coaster energy, classical and quasi-cabaret sonorities, the fiendish criss-cross of guitars and tubas, thrumming South American percussion and other sundry ingredients woven together as if discontinuity didn't exist.

While it also contains new textures and balances, Carry the Day finds Threadgill up to his old tricks, describing an emotionally complex, ambivalent world. It opens with the simple chant of "Come Carty the Day," which gives way to harmonically restless slithering and a deceptive air of celebration. Following the musky dirge "Hyla Crucifer ... Silence Of," sung by Sentienla Toy, the album closes with the turbulent, splatter-painted eloquence of "Jenkins Boys Again, Wish Somebody Die, It's Hot." Make no mistake: As titles like these suggest, this isn't easy listening. It is music that continuously weaves in and out of self-generated configurations and resolutions.

Threadgill continues to make some of the finest noise under the rubric of jazz – if jazz can be considered a widely embracing, evolutionary art form instead of a calcified, retrogressive vocabulary. And if we accept the more adventurous definition, Threadgill may be the most important jazz musician alive. (RS 706)

JOSEF WOODARD