Since the 1990s, the Pulitzer Prize board has struggled to liberate the award from the grip of classical music.



On Monday, that campaign took another a dramatic step forward, with eminent, Chicago-born-and-raised composer-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill winning for his brilliant album of 2015, "In for a Penny, In for a Pound" (Pi Recordings).



Like trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith, who was a finalist in 2013 for his epic recording "Ten Freedom Summers," Threadgill stands as an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective of free-thinkers established in Chicago in 1965. And like Smith, Threadgill has spent an illustrious career forging an intensely personal musical language that transcends stylistic boundaries and traditional ways of organizing sound. (I served on the jury that recommended Smith's work for the Pulitzer.)



By honoring "In for a Penny," the board has struck another blow against the classical monopoly that has been in place from the very first music Pulitzer, awarded in 1943 to the great composer William Schuman for his "Secular Cantata No. 2, A Free Song." (Music finalists were "The Blind Banister," by Timo Andres and "The Mechanics: Six From the Shop Floor," Carter Pann.)



Not until 1997, when Wynton Marsalis' "Blood on the Fields" became the first jazz composition to win a Pulitzer (I served on that jury), did classical music yield to another genre. (It's worth noting, though, that Scott Joplin received a special award in 1976, the year of the American bicentennial.)



Since Marsalis' ground-breaking victory, however, the prize has reverted mostly to classical idioms, with the occasional exception: Ornette Coleman won for "Sound Grammar" in 2007 and posthumous special citations have gone to George Gershwin (1998), Duke Ellington (1999), Thelonious Monk (2006), John Coltrane (2007), and Hank Williams (2010). Bob Dylan also won a special award (2008).Non-classical finalists have included Don Byron for "7 Etudes for Solo Piano" in 2009.



Why would one genre dominate the prize for more than half a century?



Perhaps no one summed up the answer better than Duke Ellington, who had been recommended for a Pulitzer by the jury in 1965 but was rejected by the board.



"I'm hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home," Ellington told writer Nat Hentoff in a 1965 New York Times magazine piece titled "This Cat Needs No Pulitzer Prize."



"Most Americans," added Ellington, "still take it for granted that European music – classical music, if you will – is the only really respectable kind. I remember, for example, that when Franklin Roosevelt died, practically no American music was played on the air in tribute to him … by and large, then as now, jazz was like the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."



When Ellington was denied the prize, jurors Winthrop Sargeant and Ronald Eyer resigned.



In his memoirs, "Music Is My Mistress," Ellington reflected on the contretemps with the same characteristic grace and elegance that course through his music.



"Since I am not too chronically masochistic, I found no pleasure in all the suffering that was being endured," he wrote. "I realized that it could have been most distressing and distracting as I tried to qualify my first reaction: 'Fate is being very kind to me; Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young.'" Ellington was 66.



By the 1990s, the Pulitzer board began actively encouraging musicians of other genres to enter their works, changing the rules so that a complete written score was not required, only "a score of the non-improvisational elements of the work and a recording of the entire work." In effect, the board explicitly made improvisation an accepted part of the Pulitzers. By 2004, no score was required at all, a publicly released recording sufficient for entry.



"After more than a year of studying the Prize … the Pulitzer Prize Board declares its strong desire to consider and honor the full range of distinguished American musical compositions – from the contemporary classical symphony to jazz, opera, choral, musical theater, movie scores and other forms of musical excellence," the board said in a statement on June 1, 2004.



Now the evolution continues. By spotlighting Threadgill's "In for a Penny," the Pulitzer process has honored a major work blurring distinctions of genre that long have haunted the award.



Leading his band Zooid in an impossible-to-categorize six-movement suite, Threadgill, 72, conceived "In for a Penny" as a malleable composition featuring "four quintets plus one (alto saxophone, flute, bass flute)," to quote his album's terse liner notes. A different instrument, in other words, holds prominence in each of four movements (with two tracks serving as brief introductions), the music continuously changing sonic shape, flow and direction.



Regardless of this methodology – which might be lost on casual listeners anyway – "In for a Penny" unfolds as the rare suite that conveys a dense amount of musical information with unusual transparency and unmistakable melodic beauty.



In some passages, one marvels at the delicate interplay among lines articulated by Jose Davila on trombone and tuba, Liberty Ellman on guitar, Christopher Hoffman on cello and Elliot Humberto Kavee on drums and percussion. In other sections, each musician appears to be headed in an utterly independent direction, the ensemble somehow maintaining a cohesive sound and achieving lustrous colors.



In certain portions of "In for a Penny," which appeared on the Tribune's survey of the 10 best jazz recordings of 2015, Kavee's drum work evokes swing-tinged sensibility. In others, the lack of a central pulse references bracing contemporary composition.



Is this jazz? Classical? Something else?



Does it matter?



"When I began this work, it was something I perceived in a stream of phases," writes Threadgill in the liner notes, the "stream" metaphor apt for the fluidity and liquidity of this music.



"I wanted to write something that Zooid could revisit and find a new perspective and arrangement with each performance.



"I intended for this to be played in chamber-listening spaces."



With those last two sentences, Threadgill has described the boundary-breaking ethos of this work, which he conceived to accommodate the improvisational impulse at the root of jazz and the chamber-music ambience we associate with classical music.



That Threadgill should have developed such a distinctive expressive language may reflect the cauldron of music he encountered growing up on the South Side of Chicago, where he was born. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and other blues masters played the Maxwell Street market, where Threadgill's family often visited. Threadgill started piano lessons at age four and played along with boogie-woogie virtuosos he heard on the radio.



"I would practice Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons," he said in George Lewis' definitive book "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music."



Threadgill played reeds at Englewood High School and immersed himself in the then-thriving 63rd Street music scene from age 14. Over time, he also absorbed avant-garde classical music performed by the University of Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players, and in the early 1960s he attended Muhal Richard Abrams' rehearsals of the Experimental Band, an organization that in 1965 would blossom into the AACM.



By leading his collective Air across Europe in the 1970s and after, Threadgill helped build AACM's global acclaim. Other Threadgill ensembles have attested to the originality of Threadgill's work, including the exuberant dissonance of his Very Very Circus in the 1990s and the luminous tones and intricate counterpoint of his subsequent Zooid. Though Threadgill hasn't lived in Chicago for years, his periodic appearances here have underscored the uniqueness of his vision.



But that genre-bending approach long was excluded from the music Pulitzers, which caused consternation among many.



"I don't give a damn whether a piece is improvised or composed," Pulitzer-winning classical symphonist Gunther Schuller told me in 2004. "What matters is that it's a remarkable, new, revelatory piece of music."



Threadgill's opus is just that, and its triumph suggests the music Pulitzers are headed in the right direction.



hreich@tribpub.com

Twitter @howardreich