This year's Pulitzer Prize for music has gone to an unexpected but entirely worthy recipient: the jazz-affiliated composer and reed player Henry Threadgill, for his suite In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Threadgill is a major figure in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM, which arose in the 1960s and also includes Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, and various others. (Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself is the definitive account of the movement; Lewis has also composed Afterword, an operatic meditation on AACM.) I'd recently spent time listening to Braxton and Smith, as both made memorable appearances at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. I hadn't heard In for a Penny until yesterday's announcement, and am happily consuming Pi's recording, which can be obtained on Bandcamp. The work generally avoids conventional tonality, but it's marked by memories of bygone music, particularly the bounce of parade bands. The toughness of the harmony is leavened by lucid, playful, often delicate textures. Seth Colter Walls, who also covered Big Ears and knows the advanced-jazz world far better than I do, spoke to Threadgill about his Pulitzer win. (Seth's pieces for the Guardian are invariably essential reading.) Ethan Iverson interviewed Threadgill at length back in 2011.