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PHOTO: ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO (1967-Present)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-art-ensemble-of-chicago-mn0000600734
The Art Ensemble of Chicago
(1967-Present)
Biography by Chris Kelsey
The group grew out of the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble of the mid-'60s, which had in turn grown out of Chicago pianist Muhal Richard Abrams' Experimental Band of the early '60s. The latter was a rehearsal band, created for the purpose of playing scores written by many of the city's forward-thinking, young, Black American jazz composers. It attracted, among others, Mitchell, Jarman, and Favors. The two saxophonists had both served in the military, though not together; they met while students at Wilson Junior College. Favors had been an established member of the Chicago jazz scene since the '50s. All three were early members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organized by Abrams and several like-minded fellow musicians. Lester Bowie moved to Chicago from St. Louis in 1966. Within days of arriving, he began rehearsing with Mitchell. In 1966, the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet (with Bowie and Favors) recorded Sound, the first album to come out of the AACM. In August 1967, Bowie recorded Numbers 1&2 for Delmark; on "2," the four musicians who would become the Art Ensemble recorded together for the first time. As the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, the band performed sans drummer for the next two years. In 1969 they moved to Paris, where they met and hired "Sun Percussionist" Don Moye, who had come to Europe from Detroit with trumpeter Charles Moore's band. Renamed the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the group had a great deal of success in Europe, recording classic albums like Reese and the Smooth Ones (BYG) and People in Sorrow (Nessa). They moved back to Chicago in 1971; their 1972 homecoming concert was recorded and issued as Live at Mandel Hall (Delmark).
The band's renown grew in the '70s. In 1978 they formed their own label, AECO, which released solo recordings by Jarman, Moye, and Favors. The group recorded for ECM in the late '70s and early '80s, making a series of critically acclaimed albums, including Nice Guys, Full Force, Urban Bushmen, and The Third Decade. The band won a series of critic's polls and was considered by many to be the finest jazz ensemble in the world. In the latter half of the '80s, a general decline in critical enthusiasm for the avant-garde resulted in less attention being paid to bands like the Art Ensemble. Side projects by individual bandmembers also seem to have had an effect on the group's vitality. Still, it continued to exist, concertizing and recording through the '90s, occasionally with guests and supplementary musicians. Jarman left the band in 1993 in order to devote himself full-time to spiritual matters. The band continued as a quartet. Bowie was stricken with liver cancer; for the band's June 1999 concert at the Boston Globe Jazz and Blues Festival, he was replaced by saxophonist Ari Brown. Bowie died in November of 1999. For its first concert following his death, a January 2000 date at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, the Art Ensemble performed as a trio. Although its remaining members were still capable of creating at a very high level, the future of the Art Ensemble seemed in doubt by the turn of the millennium. That said, the AEC continued to perform and record together, issuing Live in Milano in 2001 and Zero Sun No Point: Dedication to Mynona & Sun Ra with Hartmut Geerken in 2002. Four albums were issued during the fateful year of 2003, including The Meeting on Pi Recordings, Tribute to Lester on ECM, Urban Magic on Musica Jazz and Reunion on Il Manifesto. But tragedy struck again when Favors passed away. In September of 2004, Sirius Calling (on Pi) comprised the final studio recordings of the AEC with the bassist. Jaribu Shahid took over the chair for 2006's Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City: Live at Iridium. From then on, the Art Ensemble performed live only rarely given its members demanding schedules, and released only archival recordings. Jarman, a longtime Buddhist priest, eventually retired.
In October of 2017, Moye and Mitchell celebrated the AEC's 50th anniversary with a series of concerts at London's Cafe OTO with bassist Junius Paul and trumpeter Hugh Ragin; the second night the ensemble expanded to include cellist Tomeka Reid, double bassist Silvia Bolognesi, and violinist/vocalist Mazz Swift. The following year, at the 22nd annual Edgefest in Ann Arbor, the Art Ensemble's two remaining members performed for two evenings. One night featured them in the presence of Detroit friends, while the second evening placed them center stage in a 14-piece group that included Reid, Shahid (in addition to Paul and Bolognesi), and flutist Nicole Mitchell. In November, ECM released the limited-edition 21-disc box The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles. It featured the band's entire recorded output for the label as well as its individual members' solo dates and other AACM-associated recordings from Leo Smith and Jack DeJohnette.
Message Received: Paul Steinbeck on the Art Ensemble of Chicago
During his Faculty Fellowship with the Center for the Humanities in fall 2014, Paul Steinbeck, assistant professor of music, completed the fourth chapter of Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Improvisation, and Great Black Music, under contract with the University of Chicago Press. It’s scheduled for release in 2016, the 50th anniversary of the musical group’s founding. We asked him for an early glimpse of this work in progress.
Briefly, what is your book about?
It’s a history of the Art Ensemble of Chicago,
one of the most significant African-American musical groups to emerge
in the 1960s. There are a lot of ways to write a history; this one
combines historical inquiry with detailed analyses of the group’sperformances, an interdisciplinary approach rarely employed in jazz studies and improvisation studies.
What is the Art Ensemble?
It’s a group of African-American musicians who emerged from Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians [AACM]
in the late 1960s. They were an international phenomenon, an
innovative, experimental jazz group that played hundreds of instruments
from around the world, wore symbolic costumes and face paint, recited
poetry and performed theatrical sketches during their shows. You might
call them an experimental music group or a performance art group. Their
motto was “Great Black Music — Ancient to the Future.”
They were also an economic cooperative that pooled their resources.
They were very conscious of hard-working American musicians who didn’t
have anything to show for it. When the group moved to Paris in 1969,
they became minor celebrities but they did everything cooperatively:
lived in a house together, bought trucks together and the like. It
allowed them to grow their business and reach greater heights. When they
made money, they invested in new instruments or saved it, which allowed
them to be more selective about their gigs. They subordinated their
egos for the greater good. Eventually they were able to buy houses and
put their kids through college. One member, Lester Bowie [a St. Louisan], even gave financial lessons to other musicians.
How did you come to know the Art Ensemble?
As a student at the University of Chicago, I participated in the undergraduate jazz ensemble, directed by Mwata Bowden,
who was also a former president of the AACM. He exposed us to this
whole world. Playing the acoustic bass, I was struggling to be heard. He
turned me on to Malachi Favors,
who played bass for the Art Ensemble, and I started listening to him. A
couple of years later, I spotted him at the Hyde Park Co-op. My jazz
hero in the bread aisle! I’m sure I made some clumsy introduction, but
he was very friendly and personable, if only in a few words. Later, when
I was interviewing his daughter and siblings for the book [Favors died
in 2004], they told me about his military service in the 1950s, and how
he used to bring them things like Swiss chocolate and toothbrushes from
his tours overseas. We tend to put people on pedestals, but they’re even
more remarkable when they’re just people. But that day, I did continue
to trail Favors around the store.
Tell us about your research for the book.
I conducted archival research at Paris’ Bibliotèque nationale; New
York’s Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers and the New York Public
Library; and Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research, the Chicago
History Museum, the Chicago Jazz Archive, and the Art Ensemble’s own
collection. It was sometimes challenging to get interviews with group
members, but I did get them. I went to Chicago, Paris, New York City to
interview members, family, business contacts. Talking with them directly
had a big impact. When I’m listening to their performances or watching
them on YouTube,
I’m trying to figure out what’s going on — the improvising, the
decision-making, the contingencies. But hearing is always subjective. I
don’t want to privilege mine. Having a conversation with them, listening
to them muse on what happened before or after the performance — I
wouldn’t be able to write a book like this without their insight.
Your book is the first monograph on the Art Ensemble. Why do you think that is?
Scholars have written about the group before — in the U.S., France,
Italy, Germany. There’s a huge volume of words in other forms. Mine is
the first to give the group book-length treatment.
As a professional musician [Steinbeck plays acoustic bass], how
do you think you might hear the group’s performances differently from
others who might be examining them?
I have technical insight; I can identify technique and understand the
physical aspects of performing. It also helps that I improvise and I
know this particular scene after studying music with close colleagues of
the Art Ensemble.
Where did your book title (Message to Our Folks) come from?
It’s the name of a 1969 Art Ensemble album.
It says music has a message; it communicates more than sound. There’s
also the question of who “our folks” is. Is it African Americans on the
south side of Chicago? All African Americans? Members of the African
diaspora? All music listeners? This album title reflects that the group
was concerned with ideas as well as music — with having an impact,
modeling a community.
What might interest others outside your field in this book?
The book has fun anecdotes about people and events, and I think they’ll
enjoy the big personalities and radical thinking. Those in cultural
studies, performance studies and musicians should find a lot for them,
too.
In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world’s premier musical groups.
The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles
Art Ensemble Of Chicago
- Art Ensemble of Chicago
- Famoudou Don MoyeDrums, Bells, Bikehorns, Congas, Tympani, Bongos, Chimes, Gongs, Conch Shell, Whistles, Wood Blocks, Cow Bells, Conch Shell, Long Horn, Elephant Horn, Gongs, Cymbals, Chimes, Wood Blocks, Belafon, Bass Pan Drums
- Joseph JarmanSopranino Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Bass Saxophone, Bass Clarinet, Bb Clarinet, Bassoon, Piccolo, Flute, Alto Flute, Conch Shell, Vibraharp, Celeste, Gongs, Congas, Whistle
- Lester BowieTrumpet, Drum, Horn, Vocals
- Malachi Favors MaghostutBass, Percussion, Melodica, Vocal, Electric Bass, Cymbals, Belafon, Cans
- Dwight AndrewsAlto Flute, Bass Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, Triangles, Mbira
- Bobby NaughtonVibraharp, Marimba, Bells
- Leo SmithTrumpet, Flugelhorn, Steel-O-Phone, Gongs, Percussion
- Kenny WheelerTrumpet
- The Transatlantic Art Ensemble
- Evan ParkerSoprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone
- Jaribu ShahidDouble Bass, Vocal, Percussion
- New Directions
- John AbercrombieGuitar, Mandolin
- Lester BowieTrumpet, Drum, Horn, Vocals
- Hamiet BluiettBaritone Saxophone
- Donald SmithPiano, Organ
- The Note Factory
- Matthew ShippPiano
- Hugh RabinTrumpet
- George LewisTrombone
- William ParkerBass
- Gerald CleaverDrums
- Ari BrownTenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone
- Art MatthewsPiano
- Fred WilliamsBass, Electric Bass
- Phillip WilsonDrums
- Fontella BassVocals
- David PeastonVocals
- Eddie GomezBass
- Brass Fantasy
- Steve TurreTrombone
- Rasul SiddikTrumpet
- Frank LacyTrombone
- Vincent ChanceyFrench Horn
- Bob StewartTuba
- Stanton DavisTrumpet, Flugelhorn
- Malachi ThompsonTrumpet
- Bruce PurseTrumpet
- Craig HarrisTrombone
- James FeiSopranino Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Contra Alto Clarinet, Electronics
- Hugh RaginTrumpet, Piccolo Trumpet
- Tyshawn SoreyTrombone, Piano, Drums, Percussion
- Tani TabbalDrums, Percussion, Vocal
- Roscoe MitchellSoprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Bass Saxophone, Piccolo, Flute, Bb Clarinet, Gongs, Glockenspiel, Conga, Wood Blocks
- Corey WilkesTrumpet, Flugelhorn
- Paul LyttonDrums, Percussion
- Evan ParkerSoprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone
- Anders SvanoeAlto Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone
- John RangecroftClarinet
- Neil MetcalfeFlute
- Nils BultmannViola
- Philipp WachsmannViolin
- Marcio MattosCello
- Barry GuyDouble Bass
- Craig TabornPiano, Organ, Electronics
- Vijay IyerPiano
- Harrison BankheadDouble-Bass, Cello
- Tani TabbalDrums, Percussion, Vocal
- Vincent DavisDrums
- Roscoe MitchellSoprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Bass Saxophone, Piccolo, Flute, Bb Clarinet, Gongs, Glockenspiel, Conga, Wood Blocks
- Kikanju BakuDrums, Percussion
- Craig TabornPiano, Organ, Electronics
- Jaribu ShahidDouble Bass, Vocal, Percussion
- William WinantPercussion, Tubular Bells, Glockenspiel, Vibraphone, Marimba, Roto Toms, Cymbals, Bass Drum, Woodblocks, Timpani
- Muhal Richard AbramsPiano
- Roscoe MitchellSoprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Bass Saxophone, Piccolo, Flute, Bb Clarinet, Gongs, Glockenspiel, Conga, Wood Blocks
- Jack DeJohnetteDrums, Piano
- Larry GrayDouble Bass, Cello
- Henry ThreadgillAlto Saxophone, Bass Flute
1978-2015
Original Release Date01.10.2018
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-02-03/entertainment/ca-1000_1_great-black-music
Group's 25-Year Goal: The Great Black Music Orchestra
"Our music is primarily intended to stimulate thought, to get people to make new rationales," said Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester Bowie. "We come from jazz, blues and everything, but we're about establishing sort of a new reality on that, relating to those forms in a different way.
"We're creating a music that people of the world can relate to. Jazz served as a link to all these forms because jazz gives a foundation that develops your ears."
The veteran quintet--Bowie, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell (reeds), Malachi Favors Maghostut (bass) and Famoudou Don Moye (drums)--makes its first Los Angeles appearance in six years at UCLA's Wadsworth Theater tonight.
Since November, the Art Ensemble has been recording a seven-record project for DIW, the Japanese label that has released its three most recent albums. The new batch includes two records with the South African a cappella vocal group Amabutho, a homage to Thelonious Monk with pianist Cecil Taylor, a tribute to John Coltrane, a studio album by Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy group and the Art Ensemble with Brass Fantasy recorded live in Japan.
The group has focused its concert performances as a unit on special projects--like the string of West Coast concerts with Women of the Calabash, the vocal/percussion trio who will perform their own set and join the Art Ensemble at UCLA tonight.
"Calabash fit in with our scheme of trying to present a larger production," explained Moye. "We're building toward the Great Black Music Orchestra, which would encompass all of the bands (associated with them)--the Leaders, Art Ensemble, Brass Fantasy, Joe Bowie, etc."
The Art Ensemble was formed as an outgrowth of the creative ferment spawned by the Assn. for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) organization in Chicago during the mid-'60s. Initially a quartet, the group moved to Paris in 1969, absorbed the Detroit-bred Moye the following year, and quickly developed an international reputation while performing under the motto of "Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future."
Not all the comments were favorable. Maghostut (who goes by the name Favors), Jarman and Moye had started their ongoing practice of performing in face paint and African robes, and that led some critics to accuse the Art Ensemble of using visual gimmickry to mask musical shortcomings.
"When I first started to paint, people were saying that we were playing hate music," remembered Favors. "People have to recognize that we are basically an African people. Even though we have a lost a lot of our traditions as African people, we still have a connection spiritually with that."
The members of the Art Ensemble also developed individual careers from their separate home bases--Bowie and Jarman live in New York City, Favors and Moye in Chicago, and Mitchell calls Madison, Wis., home. The ideas and experiences gleaned from those projects are fed into the group's free-flowing improvisations.
Recording for a Japanese label won't make the Art Ensemble of Chicago a household name here but neither will a lack of American recognition deter the group from pursuing its long-term goals.
"We are the eternal optimists," declared Moye. "If we encounter resistance in a certain area, we pull back. In the context of 20-25 years of activity, a blank in a certain zone over a couple of years doesn't mean that much. We structured our whole (organization), conceptually, to be able to pick and choose an area where there's true interest."
The Art Ensemble of Chicago:
Long Live Great Black Music!
by Kofi Natambu
Detroit Metro Times
September 12, 1984
One of the more absurd comments made about contemporary black creative music of late is a ridiculous assertion made by someone who should know better, a certain Mr. Wynton Marsalis—trumpet wunderkind and current Jazz celebrity darling. In an astounding statement even for the usually outspoken and highly opinionated 22-year-old, Marsalis says in the July, 1984 edition of Downbeat magazine that “nothing got established in the Jazz tradition in the 1970s.” This is such an outlandishly false statement on the given evidence that it almost doesn’t deserve a reply. But we can’t simply allow such an obviously silly and inaccurate remark to. slide by without a severe challenge, even if it was made by an overzealous young media “star.”
C’mon Wynton, Give-us-a-break brother! You mean to tell me that you never heard of the Art Ensemble of Chicago? It’s sad, but true, that unfortunately there are still too many musicians who out of ignorance, pettiness or bias try to deny that necessary and often profound changes are taking place. Of course no one says that Marsalis or anyone else has “to like it” but please, a little credit where credit is due!
Speaking of credit, let’s all take a few precious moments to humbly acknowledge and thank Ptah (the God who protects and nurtures the Artist) that we have the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Talk about IRONY. Where else but in American music would one find five black virtuoso musician-composers who between them have mastered over one hundred instruments, including nearly every single member of the reed and woodwind families, as well as trumpet, bugle, and a bewildering array of percussion, string, and traditional acoustic instruments from various ethnic cultures around the world? The AEC is a virtual sonic encyclopedia of forms, styles, and traditions in the long history of African-American, and other world musics. After all, we are talking about the very best contemporary representatives of that endlessly creative tradition called “Jazz” though it should be stated up front that the AEC is much too dynamic, versatile, and broad-minded in concept and method to be easily fitted into any single category of musical expression.
It is equally important to realize that despite expressing a very wide spectrum of musical tastes and interests that range from the blues to swing, ragtime, ballads, spirituals, bebop, rock ‘n roll, ancestral folk songs, and various so-called “avant-garde” and ethnic musics, the Art Ensemble is not merely an eccentric band of eclectics. There is always at the core of their musical performances an utterly independent and quite original vision of what the AEC has always simply called “Great Black Music.” It is this boundless visionary spirit, and a stunning extension and subtle re-evaluation of the totality of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ music (and by artistic implication, their cultural philosophies) that characterizes the AEC and makes them, in my view, the most important musical ensemble to emerge in the U.S. since the John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman Quartets put everyone on notice some 25 years ago.
It is necessary then to ask two rather obvious questions: Where did such a band come from, and who are these guys anyway? For an answer to both questions you have to start in Chicago. It was there that four of these five dapper young men met and played together. It began as early as 1961 when the pianist-composer Muhal Richard Abrams put together the Experimental Band, a workshop and rehearsal outlet for young innovative musician-composers. It was also in this big band that the great Roscoe Mitchell met and began to collaborate with another extraordinary multi-instrumentalist and composer, Joseph Jarman. It was in this ensemble that Mitchell first met and worked with one of the finest bassists in the world, the regal Malachi Favors Maghostut.
It was also in Shytown in March, 1965, that a visionary group of black creative musicians led by young veteran musician-composers Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and Phil Cohran organized the now world famous musicians’ collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). It was in this nurturing context of on-going creative activity that the wise and whimsical Mr. Lester Bowie, trumpet master and composer joined the then Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, after arriving from St. Louis. It was this group (Mitchell, Favors, and Bowie, along with drummer Phillip Wilson) that first began to gain considerable attention in improvisational music circles. In 1966 Mitchell’s group, augmented with other outstanding young musicians from the AACM record Sound for the local based label, Delmark Records. This record quickly became a cherished collector’s item and is a landmark in the development of ‘new music’ worldwide.
In l968 Joseph Jarman, who had been leading his own innovative groups, joined with Mitchell, Favors, and Bowie to officially form the first edition of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It was this group that gained legendary status by leaving the U.S. for France in 1969, where they remained for two years recording some fifteen albums while also composing music for three films and touring throughout Europe. It was during this whirlwind tour that they met the outstanding drummer/composer Famoudou Don Moye who had been playing with the Detroit Free Jazz ensemble in Italy. Moye joined the band in 1970.
The Art Ensemble features incredible versatility along with dazzling theatrics, a high sense of drama and great wit and humor, not to mention lyrical and explosive poetry and a dadaist sense of reality. Don’t walk, RUN to the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wednesday, September 19 at 8p.m. You will hear one of the true wonders in all of music today.
Twentieth-Century Music
- Twentieth-Century Music / Volume 10 / Issue 01 / March 2013, pp 3-23
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1478572212000394 (About DOI), Published online: 27 March 2013
The Art Ensemble of Chicago's ‘Get in Line’: Politics, Theatre, and Play
by PAUL STEINBECK
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/art-ensemble-of-chicago/
Art Ensemble Of Chicago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Ensemble_of_Chicago
Art Ensemble of Chicago
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz group that grew out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the late 1960s.[1] The ensemble integrates many jazz styles and plays many instruments, including "little instruments": bells, bicycle horns, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and various forms of percussion. The musicians would wear costumes and face paint while performing. These characteristics combined to make the ensemble's performances both aural and visual. While playing in Europe in 1969, five hundred instruments were used.[2]
History
Members of what was to become the Art Ensemble performed together under various band names in the mid-sixties, as members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). They performed on the 1966 album Sound, as the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet. The Sextet included saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, trumpeter Lester Bowie, and bassist Malachi Favors. For the next year, they played as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. In 1967, they were joined by fellow AACM members Joseph Jarman (saxophone) and Phillip Wilson (drums) and recorded for Nessa Records.
All of the musicians were multi-instrumentalists. Jarman and Mitchell's primary instruments were alto and tenor saxophone, respectively, but they played other saxophones (from the small sopranino to the large bass saxophone), and the flute and clarinet. In addition to trumpet, Bowie played flugelhorn, cornet, shofar, and conch shells. Favors added touches of banjo and bass guitar. Most of them dabbled in piano, synthesizer, and other keyboards, and they all played percussion instruments.
They were known for wearing costumes and makeup on stage. Member Joseph Jarman described part of their style:
So what we were doing with that face painting was representing everyone throughout the universe, and that was expressed in the music as well. That's why the music was so interesting. It wasn't limited to Western instruments, African instruments, or Asian instruments, or South American instruments, or anybody's instruments.[3]
In 1967, Wilson left the group to join Paul Butterfield's band, and for a period the group was a quartet without a full-time drummer. Jarman and Mitchell served as artistic directors at the cooperative summer camp Circle Pines Center in Delton, Michigan, in August of 1968, during the same week that the Democratic Convention was in Chicago. After a farewell concert at the Unitarian Church in Evanston, Illinois, in fall, 1968, the remaining group traveled to Paris.[4] In Paris, the ensemble was based at the Théâtre des Vieux Colombier.[5] [6] In France, they became known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The impetus for the name change came from a French promoter who added "of Chicago" to their name for descriptive purposes, but the new name stuck because band members felt that it better reflected the cooperative nature of the group. In Paris, the ensemble was based at the Théâtre des Vieux Colombier [7] and they recorded for the Freedom and BYG labels. They also recorded Comme à la radio with Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem but without a drummer until percussionist Don Moye became a member of the group in 1970. During that year, they recorded the albums Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass and Les Stances a Sophie with singer Fontella Bass, who was Lester Bowie's wife. The latter was the soundtrack from the French movie of the same title.
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Fifty years on
Lester Bowie died of liver cancer in 1999.[8] Malachi Favors died in 2004 of pancreatic cancer.[9] Joseph Jarman died on January 9, 2019, of respiratory failure.[10][11]
As of 2017-2019 Mitchell and Moye remained active, with new and previous collaborators as guest under the name Art Ensemble of Chicago - 50th Anniversary Large Ensemble. They released an album in 2019:[12][13][14][15]
- Roscoe Mitchell – saxophones;
- Famoudou Don Moye – drums, congas and percussion.
Guests:
- Babu Atiba - african drums and djembe
- Fred Berry - trumpet, flugelhorn
- Silvia Bolognesi– double bass
- Brett Carson – piano
- Jean Cook – violin
- Steed Cowart - conductor
- Rodolfo Cordova-Lebron – voice
- Dudu Kouaté – African percussion
- Edward "Eddy" Yoon Kwon – viola
- William Lang - trombone
- Nicole Mitchell – flutes
- Moor Mother – spoken word
- Erina Newkirk - soprano vocals
- Junius Paul – double bass and objects
- Hugh Ragin – trumpet, flugelhorn and piccolo trumpet
- Tomeka Reid – cello
- Stephen Rush - conductor
- Jaribu Shahid – double bass
- Abel Selaocoe - cello
- Simon Sieger – trombone
- Baba Sissoko – African percussion
- Titos Sompa - vocals, congas, mbira, bells
- Christina Wheeler – voice, array mbira, autoharp, q-chord, theremin, sampler, electronics
- Enoch Williamson - congas, djembe and percussion
and another in 2023 with a smaller ensemble of 20 musicians - The Sixth Decade: From Paris to Paris.[16]
Discography
Further reading
- Steinbeck, Paul. Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2017.
- Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- Shipton, Alyn. A New History of Jazz. London: Continuum, 2001.
Films
- 1982 - Great Black Music - The Art Ensemble of Chicago Television documentary broadcast by Channel 4 in November 1982.
- 1982 - Live From the Jazz Showcase: The Art Ensemble of Chicago (directed by William J Mahin, the University of Illinois at Chicago). Filmed at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase in Chicago, November 1, 1981.
External links
- Art Ensemble of Chicago – official website, but not updated since before 2004, retrieved May 21, 2019
- The Art Ensemble of Chicago - current webpage as of 2019, maintained by Art Ensemble's European booking agency, retrieved May 21, 2019
- Art Ensemble of Chicago - Discography at Discogs
- Art Ensemble of Chicago discography (archive), retrieved January 11, 2005
- Art Ensemble of Chicago biography on the AACM site, retrieved January 11, 2005
- Art Ensemble of Chicago return to Mandel Hall after 32 years – report by Seth Sanders in the University of Chicago Chronicle, April 29, 2004, retrieved January 11, 2005
- Joseph Jarman interview at Furious, retrieved January 11, 2005
- Art Ensemble of Chicago photos, live in Salzburg/Austria 2006
- Art Ensemble of Chicago portraits by Dominik Huber at dominikphoto.com
Truly Ancient Truly Future: The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Nice Guys
by Eden Tizard
January 28, 2019
The Quietus
With a back catalogue of over 50 challenging albums, it might look like there's no particularly easy way of cracking the enigma of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago. Not so, says Eden Tizard, looking back at the group's first ECM album, Nice Guys, which was released 40 years ago this month
Perhaps not as monolithically daunting as an artist like Sun Ra, the back catalogue of The Art Ensemble Of Chicago is still a hefty one. Look past the vast trove of studio albums - with a significant pile of live LPs stacked on top of that - and you'll still have the solo and extracurricular activities of the group's five mainstay musicians to explore, not to mention the revolving door of other long-term and short-term members.
It's a lot to take in.
I first encountered the magic of The Art Ensemble through 1979's Nice Guys, not as fiercely unprecedented as earlier chapters in The Ensemble’s story, but still, an intriguing one. It's the group’s first album for ECM and like all of their work is beholden to the famous mantra: 'Great black music - ancient to the future'.
A lot of ground is covered on the record. You can hear them taking in elements of reggae, further exploring their infatuation with 'little instruments', and 'dreaming of the master' himself Miles Davis. It also marks a juncture of sorts, the end of a five year silence in terms of recorded material and one which ushered in a stellar run of records for music label giants ECM. I'd say this makes it an ideal entry point for the uninitiated.
As the name would suggest, The Art Ensemble Of Chicago formed in formed in that city's south side during the mid 60s. In their most steady incarnation, they were comprised of five very distinct musical individuals; Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, Don Moye, and Joseph Jarman - who passed away earlier this month after a lifetime dedicated to the opening up of sound.
Now, there's a myth amongst some that democracy is incompatible with the music group, that a dictator - benevolent perhaps - is necessary, whereas communal creativity means each member must sacrifice their own vision for lesser results. The Art Ensemble undermined this notion constantly. Together, they were able to accentuate the most unique elements of each individual player, the result a music of collective fragments, all members fluent in the art of communicating through the shards.
"The band wouldn't have survived without us becoming like a cooperative," said founding member Roscoe Mitchell in The Wire. Both Mitchell and other Ensemble members are central figures in the ongoing collective of musicians AACM - Association For The Advancement Of Creative Musicians - a non-profit organisation with the aim to support a network of Chicago-linked misfits whose ideas are too bizarre to fit in with the more conservative leaning jazz clubs.
The AACM actually predates The Art Ensemble and was the community in which the group was birthed. From its 1965 inception through to the present day, AACM can be seen as a directory of avant jazz’s most wayward thinkers - boasting the likes of Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Nicole Mitchell, and Matana Roberts in their midst. Within this network of non-conformists, Roscoe Mitchell would come across Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and Joseph Jarman.
Mitchell’s groundbreaking 1967 debut Sounds was the first release to emerge from AACM, coming the previous year to Jarman’s rule shredder Song For. Both records offer a scene synopsis of sorts, with the essence of jazz remaining while the form gleefully tampered with. Where even free jazz occasionally fell for the curse of doctrine, Mitchell with Sounds, Jarman with Songs For, and later the Ensemble itself remained ever open. This is a group who do not not rigidly stick to avant-garde notions of atonality and anti-rhythm, happy to explore all elements of sound - traditionally ‘musical’ or not.
Their move from conventional jazz sound was aided with an assortment of ‘little instruments’. These ranged from horns and bells through to all manner of strange toys and objects, on top of which they would use their own voices in odd syllabic outbursts, cover their faces in war paint, and utilise a variety of theatrics in the goal of an original art. It’s art full of mischief, but also genuine in its quest to arrive on some alternate spiritual plane.
Whereas their approach would ferment rapidly, sadly the same could not be said for fanbase or finance. This precarious existence prompted The Art Ensemble to move to Europe in the hope to find more open minded ears, and luckily they found them.
Some of The Art Ensemble’s most enduring work emerged from that stint in Europe, no doubt due in part to the adding of drummer Don Moye, but also thanks to properly inviting Jarman to be a member after the tragic loss of two musicians from his prior band.
It was also where they were named by a local promoter, as previously they’d worked under the moniker of The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. This was key, and marked a final erasure of ownership. As Jarman said, the group was now “a power greater than itself”.
The kinetic force of this newly named ensemble was self evident. Take records like People In Sorrow or Les Stances a Sophie, an album whose absolute scorcher of an opener ‘Themes De Yoyo’ is likely the most righteous fusion of free jazz and funk you'll ever hear. Defiant horns give way to an omni-directional battering, the rhythm highly taut and then frantically loose.
But for me the crowning jewel of that period is the 1971 album Comme à La Radio, a collaboration with French singer, actor and critical thinker Brigitte Fontaine. Throughout the album, the practices of both Fontaine and The Art Ensemble spar and coalesce in true free-spirit, endless invention found at the very heart of song. It’s one of the great underappreciated records.
Once back in America, this run continued up to 1974’s live album Kabalaba - Fanfare For Warriors, their final studio record until Nice Guys, was released the previous year. Then activities ceased for the group, though members individually guested on forty odd records by other people in the gap. After a period of effective silence for those in need of new Art Ensemble music Nice Guys announced their return.
As previously mentioned, it would be difficult to make a claim for the album as The Art Ensemble of Chicago stretching furthest from tradition. When compared to other jazz from the decade, it’s not as sensually jarring or formally audacious as say, Alice Coltrane's Universal Consciousness, Don Cherry's Organic Music Society, or Miles Davis' On The Corner. But what the record does do is pick up and develop the group's compositional chops in an audio quality of ever higher definition.
Nice Guys on paper is rather compartmentalised as a record, a succession of relatively short tracks with the reigns of compositional leadership given to a different member on most pieces. Yet remarkably there’s this tremendous sense of both ease and cohesion on the album where you can hear the joy of each player's whims being explored openly and freely - likely attributed to how long they’d been playing with each other up to that point.
There’s the title track, an onward trudge through seasick swing; 'Folkus', an extended, near rhythm-less exploration into tone, a mid-portion hijacked by glistening chimes over gutter-groan sax, while moments earlier its mangled tones are delivered in scattered free-associative jabs.
‘597-59’, meanwhile, barges in all trot and toot, its march swiftly followed by outright calamity. Then it goes back and forth again, and all within the first minute. Throughout this album - as well as the group’s wider career - the expectations that arise at the start of a piece will provide little aid for the listener in terms of guessing where it’ll eventually end up. It’s a sound which endlessly beguiles.
Like all releases in The Art Ensemble’s catalogue, the music’s sources are not strictly that of the avant garde, their approach to these alternate styles one of respect but hardly lofty reverence. You can at times pick up on a kind of twisted trad, derailed dixieland, or take the opener ‘Ja’, where it shifts from a wind and halt of tone to a traditional and rather jaunty reggae sound. It cements the idea that nothing is really off the cards for The Art Ensemble Of Chicago.
All music you come across on the album is presented in a production standard made possible by ECM, and I think this clarity is actually one of the records great attributes. An issue with some prior Art Ensemble recordings - particularly that of some live concerts - is that their poor quality could hold back from The Art Ensemble’s sound, as the structure and intricacies of their music doesn’t benefit from that type of recording. It simply hadn’t been made for those circumstances and the heightened audio reality of a recording like Nice Guys meant that every minuscule sound was granted the most seismic of impact.
All this talk of higher production values and a more succinct, approachable sound may give off misleading ideas about the group’s trajectory. It might make out that their work in the 60s and early 70s comes from the fervour of new life, while what followed was merely a long process of refinement. This is false. The Ensemble were never shackled to one approach, and while Nice Guys invites comparison to to some other studio records, it remains a highly unorthodox work which is later followed by a number of records every bit as atypical as their early material.
From Nice Guys you’re chronologically able to travel backwards, grow accustomed to and find the source of the group’s sound with ease. Or perhaps go forward, and hear them push at the remits in ever altered ways, like on their ECM run with the live record Urban Bushmen, and the studio albums The Third Decade and Full Force. Take for instance ‘Magg Zelma’, the opener of that latter record. It’s a composition in utter turmoil, an oppressive ambience on the dulcimer topped off by the distressed cry of something living being put down, then gargles, then lush liquid reveries, all before a propulsive rhythm comes forth from the din.
Well into the 80s and beyond, The Ensemble were still impossible to pin down. A group possessing a longevity of spirit, despite an unfixed membership. Nice Guys was my first interaction with them and I’m grateful. It’s one of The Ensemble’s most tight, consistent, and satisfying statements, documenting the group’s multifaceted ideas up to that point but with one eye that just keeps pointing forward. Truly ancient. Truly Future.
Art Ensemble of Chicago
by John Bloner, Jr.
January 27, 2013
--Lester Bowie in an interview with Lazaro Vega
Just as composer John Cage taught people to "reconsider [their] expectations and assumptions" about music, the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago explored the possibilities of communicating with sound. Saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell told jazz reporter Ted Panken, "Sometimes, I don't really hear like a scale, per se. I might hear one note, and then the next note with a whistle or a whistle with a kind of wind instrument, or a whistle and a bell."
The spirit in which AEC expresses its music may be contemplative or celebratory. Over decades of recording and playing live, its musicians have woven a kaleidoscopic quilt with African drums and chants to midway sounds, tent revival redemptive cries, evocations of both Mingus and Mancini, marching bands, New Orleans jazz funerals, and fragrant elements of funk, hip-hop, reggae, street corner serenades, sprawling improvised magic and silence. "Music is fifty percent sound and fifty percent silence," Mitchell said. "So, when you interrupt that silence with a sound, then they start to work together."
Great Black Music: Ancient To The Future
The Art Ensemble of Chicago embody the motto, Great Black Music: Ancient To The Future, of the nonprofit Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
AACM formed in 1965, as an organic progression of the Chicago avant-garde music scene that had spawned the Experimental Band years earlier. The Experimental Band contained a who's-who list of some of today's top jazz musicians, including not only Muhal Richard Abrams, Jack DeJohnette and Henry Threadgill, but also three young players: Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors. When Lester Bowie moved from his hometown of St. Louis to Chicago, he quickly fell in with them.
"I never met so many insane people in one room."
The four men--Bowie, Favors, Jarman and Mitchell--formed the group, Roscoe Mitchell's Art Ensemble. According to author Gerald Brennan, Mitchell's music was already pointing "to a new path for jazz at a time when the prevailing free jazz was being increasingly seen as a dead end."
In 1969, they moved to Paris in order to dedicate themselves to their art form. Soon after, drummer/percussionist Famoudou Don Moye joined them, and they became the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
"When I joined the Art Ensemble, we would rehearse eight hours a day, every day, and afterwards sit down and have a home-cooked meal in a home environment with the kids and the dog running around; just normal shit."
--Famoudou Don Moye (Village Voice article by Greg Tate)
According to Alex McGregor in Zing Magazine, The Art Ensemble distinguished itself by "turning away from jazz's tendency of celebrating individual virtuosity in favor of group dynamics."
In the 1920s, Louis Armstrong, by his out-sized personality and virtuosity on his horn, dramatically changed jazz music by placing the focus on the soloist rather than the ensemble. Other jazz giants would take center stage in the years to come: Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.
AEC turned around this dynamic. "If early jazz had helped set European standards of technique on their head through the use of new tonal colors," McGregor wrote, "the Art Ensemble had raided the attics, toy chests and junk shops to collapse jazz's 'gunslinger' competitiveness onto itself."
The Art Ensemble also brought a visual element to their concerts in years well before MTV. They were multimedia before the term was coined.
"We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that," Jarman said.
Along with Moye and Favors, he painted his face in tribal paint and dressed in colorful garb. Lester Bowie wore a lab coat and sometimes a chef's hat, while Mitchell stood as the straight-man, the dun-colored fowl in a hothouse of peacocks and birds of paradise; at least until his sax sounded.
The face-paint served another function. "Face-painting in non-Western cultures is a sign of collectivism, is a sign of representing the community," Jarman commented.
The music of the Art Ensemble was never an esoteric exercise, slim as its audience may have been at times; they had the chops to get people on their feet, shake their groove thing, and let joy overflow.
"I miss the sound of his voice as a human being. The voice of his trumpet is as unique as it is an extension of his personality" --Don Moye on the late Lester Bowie
In the span of five years, the Art Ensemble lost Lester Bowie (1999) and Malachi Favors (2004). The band has continued with guest musicians on bass and trumpet, but tours and records are few. AEC released a live recording in 2006, featuring Corey Wilkes on trumpet and Jaribu Shahid on bass. In 2010, AEC performed in Philadelphia with Hugh Ragin on trumpet and Harrison Bankhead on double-bass.
Roscoe Mitchell had performed the composition, Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City, with the Art Ensemble and later, in a classical music setting, which featured the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra. He also took part in a premiere performance of his classical composition at Mills College in Oakland, CA in 2012.
The Mills College Website offers information about that program and offers a terrific video of the Art Ensemble of Chicago that I have not seen anywhere else. It's a priceless piece of performance, particularly in its final moments with Malachi Favors.
Joseph Jarman was ordained as a Shinshu Buddhist Priest in 1990 and began the Jikishinkan Dojo in Brooklyn. He had left AEC in 1993 to concentrate on his Buddhist studies and the practice of Aikido, but returned in 2003. With musician, artist and author Chris Chalfant, he launched the Lifetime Visions Orchestra and performed as a duo with her.
Famoudou Don Moye has performed live in recent years with Harmut Geerken and on the recording, "The Gray Goose", dedicated to Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht, which offers the tune, "The Poplar Tree on Karlsplatz".
Karslplatz in Munich, Germany is a long way from Daley Plaza in Chicago, but Moye's subtle sounds on percussion show that great music knows no boundaries.
"There are a lot of sounds. We try to incorporate any sounds into the music. Sounds of life. Sounds of everyday. The deeper you get into it, the deeper it gets into you."
Explore the many recordings of the Art Ensemble of Chicago by visiting their page on AllMusic.com, as well as the individual pages of the group's artists. The four recordings made on the ECM label--Nice Guys, Full Force, Urban Bushmen and Third Decade--are a fine introduction, but you can go deeper into their sound by also lending an ear to their earlier and later records, as well as the music they have created in solo careers.
I believe we are born twice into this life; first through our parents and their influences and then through our own discoveries of people, places, philosophies, faith, cultures and the arts that we weave into our lives.
I thank the Art of Ensemble of Chicago for opening my ears, eyes, mind and my heart.
For further explorations, visit the Art Ensemble of Chicago at https://www.facebook.com/GreatBlackMusic on Facebook and the Great Black Music website
A Fireside Chat With The Art Ensemble Of Chicago
Fred Jung: Was there any doubt that the Art Ensemble would continue after Lester Bowie’s passing?
Malachi Favors: Oh, no, there was no question. The Art Ensemble and the AACM, we all started with that idea that if one can’t make it, we would just continue on. If somebody dies, we just continue on until we can replace him, if we want to replace him. In this case, the promoters seemed to demand a replacement. I think we would have went on with just the trio of Roscoe, Moye, and myself. And we did do that for a while. In fact, we have recordings coming out to that effect.
Roscoe Mitchell: The Art Ensemble is an institution. The way it was always run was that we dealt with whatever was there. You will notice that throughout our history, way back from when we had Phillip Wilson and he left to go with Paul Butterfield. We moved more towards the direction of developing as percussionists before we took on another drummer. Of course, it is what Lester would have wanted anyway.
Joseph Jarman: After Lester’s passing, the voice needed me back. After he made his transition, this year, 2003, ten years after I had left, I had a conversation with the other guys and they sort of convinced me that I should return. That was a worthy thing for them to do for me. I had not been with music and had been missing it because it had been a vital part of my whole life.
Famoudou Don Moye: We were committed to the Art Ensemble in whatever state it is in at the time.
Fred Jung: ECM is releasing the trio session, Tribute to Lester . Where does the recording stand in the epic that is the Art Ensemble?
Famoudou Don Moye: The trio was what that formation represented at the time as the Art Ensemble. So it is not a headcount. It is whatever we say it is. We were committed to a trio, as opposed to how were we going to replace Lester. The trio record is reflective of our commitment to furthering the music of the Art Ensemble in that format. It is always a challenge because the music changes. When it was four people, there wasn’t the second saxophone. When it was three, it was a singular saxophone, so you didn’t have the same kind of voicings. We didn’t rework the music. We just had a different approach to the songs we always play anyway. Thirty-five years, where do we start?
Malachi Favors: We miss Lester now. I do.
Fred Jung: What do you miss most about Lester?
Malachi Favors: His whole general appearance. He was a buddy. He could play. He was just an all around good cat. He stuck with the music when he could have went on and did something else and left the group alone. He formed a band and he did things with Bill Cosby, but he was always there like day one. How can you get over a person like that?
Joseph Jarman: Everything really. We were neighbors. We lived very close together, so I saw him a great deal more than the other members of the ensemble. I miss his sense of humor, his sense of style, and of course, his wonderful music.
Roscoe Mitchell: It is so hard to say. When someone is gone, you think about all these different things. Someone was here and now they’re gone. You can’t replace them. There will never be another Lester Bowie. That part is over and you have to come to grips with it. A lot of times when people are around, a lot of things get taken for granted.
Famoudou Don Moye: I miss the sound of his voice as a human being. The voice of his trumpet is as unique as it is an extension of his personality. We miss his personality more.
Fred Jung: What prompted Joseph Jarman’s return to the Art Ensemble?
Roscoe Mitchell: He had done what he went out to do and he was starting to feel like there was something missing in his life. He figured it out that it was music. He went off and became a Buddhist priest, but he had been doing music for so long that he felt like there was something missing in his life.
Famoudou Don Moye: He never actually left the group. We always felt that at some point, he was going to come back. People put more into that singular incident than what it actually was. Our agreement in the group was anybody that had critical issues in their life, they have to be addressed and we respect and support their ability to do that. He had to take care of some things that were critical in his life, which would make him be able to come back and play.
Roscoe Mitchell: That was done in February of this year. What it is for us is the bringing back of Joseph Jarman to the Art Ensemble.
Joseph Jarman: I loved it. It reminded me of the old days and had many new days in it.
Famoudou Don Moye: The record represents the moment that Jarman felt that he had addressed his issues and was ready to come back and contribute a hundred percent of what he could contribute. It is a work in progress. The music goes on.
Fred Jung: Was it like riding a bicycle?
Joseph Jarman: Yes, it was an easy transition because I had been practicing and focusing for that period time.
Roscoe Mitchell: Well, we had done some concerts before and now, it is all redefining itself. It is all a work in progress for me.
Fred Jung: The group could have remained the Roscoe Mitchell Quintet, why the Art Ensemble of Chicago?
Roscoe Mitchell: Well, it was very necessary for us to be able to survive. When it was the Roscoe Mitchell Quartet or whatever it was, we had receipts where we were getting like three dollars. Clearly, I was not paying the musicians. In order for it to really work out, everybody had to feel like they were really involved in it. We weren’t making any money. In order for it to stay together that long, everybody had to have some share in it.
Malachi Favors: Roscoe was the founder of the group and he had the option at one time to be the leader of the group, but he refused. That is when we became a co-op group because Lester and I offered him the leadership because he was the founder. This is how we ended up a co-op.
Fred Jung: Are today’s musicians missing the criterion of the proactive community that was the AACM?
Roscoe Mitchell: Yeah, I think they are. The way I look at it is that you have Chicago. Chicago has always been a place where musicians get together and rehearse and so on. New York, on the other hand, is not like that at all. Musicians are scattered all over the place. It is the same with Los Angeles. In L.A., everybody is scattered all over the place doing this and doing that. In San Francisco, however, people really do get together and rehearse. They have a tradition.
Famoudou Don Moye: It is a cycle. Cooperatives and collectives are part of the musical history. At any given time, you don’t have that many. Somewhere out there, there is a young group of musicians facing similar issues in their lives that we had to deal with in our lives. They are addressing them in similar ways. Hopefully, they will look at us and be able to find some meaning. We need a good, old-fashioned revolution somewhere to shake things up. There is not that much cutting edge. Everybody is afraid to take a chance. The bullshit is even thicker now.
Fred Jung: During the late Sixties and early Seventies, the Art Ensemble had a pronounced theatrical element to their performances.
Malachi Favors: I have to say that I initiated that. It came from, as you know, Fred, we’re African people here in the States and my first encounter with African music and African musicians was a concert downtown and I went to see it. This was before the Art Ensemble. I was taken down by it. It refreshed my spirit and I wanted to be into that some kind of way. At the time, I was with the Andrew Hill Trio and of course, that was a strictly jazz group, but I started bringing bells there. This is how it got started. When I got with Roscoe, anything went in music. You be the way you want to be and that’s how I started to get into the paint and all of that.
Fred Jung: Members of the Art Ensemble are all versed in multiple instruments, seemingly emphasizing you were great musicians, not merely great bass players or alto players.
Malachi Favors: It just overtook us that we could do what we wanted to do. After seeing African groups and how they would be great dancers and great on the congas. You have the feeling that you have to do anything to enhance the music. Don’t hold the music back. Let it come on out in any kind of way that you feel.
Roscoe Mitchell: That’s on all of us now because we’re living in the age of the super-musician. That is what is emerging right now, musicians that defy categories because you have a whole group of musicians that really study music. Logically, that is really the next step. I think that is why you have musicians that have diversified to playing different instruments. Not only do they specialize in several different instruments, they specialize in several different areas of music. The super-musician has to be concerned about not only learning his instrument, but they have to be a good performer and composer. Everybody is being faced with the problem of improvisation and it is really difficult to be a good improviser if you don’t know anything about composing.
Fred Jung: Then can someone who strictly plays standards be considered a valid improviser or is that person merely a lounge act?
Roscoe Mitchell: No, I don’t think they are. I didn’t make up the rules. The people that are really studying, they are happening. Nothing is by chance. To really be a good improviser, you’ve got to study music. You’ve got to study composition. You have to know counterpoint. You have to know that if somebody’s playing eighth notes, you can play triplets or half notes. You have to be trained and know how to orchestrate. You have to know dynamic ranges of certain instruments. You have to work on a scale of moveable dynamics. If I am playing with a violinist, my dynamics are different than if I am playing with another saxophonist. The thing about it is that it takes a long time. I have realized that it takes a long time to get to be what I am trying to be. It is a lot of study.
Fred Jung: How imperative is it for future generations to inherit the significance of African music?
Malachi Favors: It is very important because the rhythm base is from Africa. If you listen to African drums, no one can switch rhythms in the midst of rhythms like they can. The melodies, if you notice and go back in our history as black Americans, you will notice the sound of so called negro spirituals, you will pick up the sound of African ceremonial music. You will notice a great tie there.
Joseph Jarman: It is universal music. When you listen to Art Ensemble music, you’ll find elements from all the musical tones of the whole universe within it. Even though its roots are Afro-American oriented, it is a universal expression. You will find every possible form of expression through music that exists within the contexts of the music that the Art Ensemble plays.
Fred Jung: And the future?
Malachi Favors: I am working on something. It could be out in a year, maybe less. I’m working on something.
Joseph Jarman: I will be in Los Angeles with Milford Graves and a Los Angeles percussionist. I also work with Leroy Jenkins and Myra Melford in a group called Equal Interests and we will have a recording at the beginning of next year.
Roscoe Mitchell: I’ve just finished three solo CDs. I am working on a record of written compositions that will also be released next year on Mutable Music.
Selected reviews at All About Jazz: The Meeting (Pi Recordings, 2003) 1 | 2 Tribute to Lester (ECM, 2003) 1 | 2
Selected Recordings (ECM, 2002) Live In Milano (Golden Years of New Jazz, 2001) Coming Home Jamaica (Atlantic, 1999)
Web sites: Art Ensemble of Chicago ECM Records Pi Recordings
http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/2015/greg-tate-aacm-50th-anniversary
Five Decades, Six Galaxies, and Counting: The AACM at 50
Musical revolutions tend to have a spontaneous, spasmodic outlier quality about them. They poke the status quo and then have to weather a pushback that tests their survivalist mettle and ability to create appreciative audiences in sync with their intuitions and intentions. Such is the case with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
But first, let’s back up. When Ornette Coleman and his quartet infamously showed up in late-1950s New York, they brought a shock of the new that had seasoned pros divided as to whether they were charlatans or primitives or just insane. The Coleman group’s trumpeter, Don Cherry, however, recalled their most fervent devotees being not solely drawn from the jazz world but from the ranks of Beat poets, fledgling novelists like Thomas Pynchon, and painters such as Willem de Kooning, Bob Thompson, Hans Hofmann, and Larry Rivers. (Pynchon even wrote a Colemanesque character into his debut V., one “McClintic Sphere.”) In redefining the art of jazz, the Coleman group also redefined the music’s artistic circle. The jazz presence in the Eurocentric avant-garde art of the 20th century can be found across all the dominate “isms”—Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism. Poet Charles Olson, a Black Mountain College éminence grise, once said there was no Black Mountain aesthetic; there was only Charlie Parker that located bebop in John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns’ ideations in ways erased and elided by other Black Mountain principals.
Though these musicians originally hailed from locales as distanced and disparate as Illinois, Alabama, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas, their avant-garde reputations were made and secured within the nation’s crucible of gladiatorial cosmopolitanism, Manhattan. Come 1965, though, a group of their contemporaries in the midwestern quadrant of the country’s Black Music galaxy would decide to advance the art form known as jazz from the hog-slaughtering core of America’s midsection.
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a mouthful more often referred to by its acronym moniker, the AACM, has for 50 years gifted the globe of improvised music practitioners (and listeners) with a host of transformative composers and players: pianist and AACM founding father Muhal Richard Abrams; saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell (who would form the AACM’s flagship group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with fellow members, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors Meghostus, Lester Bowie, and Famoudou Don Moye); the promethean saxophonist Fred Anderson, who also ran the AACM’s longest running neighborhood venue, The Velvet Lounge; polymath Anthony Braxton; multi-reedist Henry Threadgill, who has been repeatedly cited as the most significant jazz composer by DownBeat magazine; and drummer/composer Jack DeJohnette (who’d become a percussive engine for change agents Charles Lloyd, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett); Phil Cohran; Wadada Leo Smith; Leroy Jenkins; and Amina Claudine Myers. And we can’t leave out George Lewis, trombonist, interactive software innovator, composer, Yale-pedigreed doctor of Philosophy, and the author of A Power Greater Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press), his 2008 chronicle of the AACM’s five-decade history of vanguard explorations.
Among that rich tome’s many revelations is that most of the AACM’s celebrated, now-world-renowned figures were nurtured within the culturally rich, economically challenging environs of segregated working-class South Side Chicago of the 1940s and ’50s—the products of the genius and generosity of prescient parents who prepared their whiz kids to fully avail themselves of every opportunity offered for self-directed success in a post–Civil Rights era/post-Apartheid USA. Lewis also details the organization’s developmental mandates for all members: interested parties could only be nominated into the organization by existing members, and all members had to commit to composing and performing their own original music and participating in the AACM Big Band.
When the Art of Ensemble of Chicago decided to move en masse to Paris in 1969, joined soon after by Braxton, the AACM quickly gained international prominence in Europe’s freer improv circles. The Ensemble’s epic, eternalist description of their esthetic as “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future” is as close as anyone has come to granting AACM music a genre and a political manifesto. The Art Ensemble’s inclusion of every known genre and historical era of music-making imaginable into the fold of so-called “free jazz” (“freedom swang” is our own humble vernacular nomination for a revision there) expanded the conceptual reach of that idiom exponentially. As did the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s emphasis on collective development, artistically and economically. As individuals, the group’s members also possess highly personal, highly recognizable sounds on their instruments. No astute listener would have much difficulty picking trumpeter Lester Bowie and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell out of any fast and thick crowd of freedom swang wailers.
The AACM brought new job descriptions and performance templates to the jazz fold, pioneering solo saxophone, drum, and brass concerts; percussion as orchestral lead voices; instrument-building (Threadgill’s Hubkaphone, made from hubcaps, stands out); and multidisciplinary collaborations with visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers, poets, and performance poets—many of the members created in those mediums themselves. The AACM’s heraldic avatars were musical globalists long before that became vogue: Bowie moved to Nigeria for a spell to play with Fela Kuti; Jarman, a martial arts master who opened his own aikido dojo in 1980s Brooklyn, had by 1990 became an ordained Shinshu Buddhist priest in Kyoto, Japan.
Braxton’s ambitions, inspired by Sun Ra and emboldened by AACM derring-do, spun off the planet and eventually wrote a symphonic composition designed to be simultaneously played by six different orchestras in six different galaxies!
Jarman has said of the AACM’s impact on his evolution:
Until I had the first meeting with Richard Abrams, I was “like all the rest” of the “hip” ghetto niggers; I was cool, I took dope, I smoked pot, etc. I did not care for the life that I had been given. In having the chance to work in the Experimental Band with Richard and the other musicians there, I found the first something with meaning/reason for doing. That band and the people there was the most important thing that ever happened to me. For his part, Bowie joked that he immediately felt at home upon realizing “never in my life had I met so many insane people in one room.”Threadgill said, “Bebop couldn’t service me: it didn’t have anything to do with people standing up for their rights, it didn’t have anything to do with the Vietnam War, didn’t have anything to do with the Gray Panthers, the Black Panthers. In the AACM what was happening was an expression of what I was about, and the moment. I knew that it expressed the times… the revolution in America, God is dead, America shooting down its kids, the [Vietnam] War, the questioning of traditional philosophies…. I was tied into that moment.”
Abrams, Threadgill, Braxton, and Lewis all migrated from their various emigre stains and met up with the Art Ensemble in mid-1970s New York, where all became instrumental in aiding and abetting what’s become known as the “Loft Jazz” insurgency, fomented by Sam Rivers, Rashied Ali, and others in then-cheap Lower Manhattan’s abandoned-warehouse district, Soho. The addition of the AACM cats’ California-bred compatriots David Murray, Butch and Wilbur Morris, New Haven notables Anthony Davis and Michael Greory Jackson, St Louis exiles Oliver Lake, Joseph Bowie and Julius Hemphill from that city’s AACM affiliate, The Black Artists Group, made for the healthiest and most innovative moment grassroots improvisation had experienced in Manhattan since the bebop era. From their home base on Chicago’s South Side The AACM continues their community-uplift mission, engaging in various educational initiatives in the city’s schools. The long-running AACM School of Music has been instrumental in this process.
The AACM’s core continues to experiment and lead the charge in fulfilling the creative promise of their ’60s experimental seedbed. The association also continues to incubate and harvest formidable presences for the global stage—notably Spencer Barefield, Douglas Ewart, incoming member Mankwe Ndosi (who performed with Ewart at the Walker earlier this month), Ernest Dawkins, Adegoke and Steve Colson, Nicole Mitchell, and Matana Roberts.
No longer affiliated with AACM, Roberts is a gripping and gutsy alto saxophonist whose ambitious sprawling “Coin Coin” series of ensembles (and recordings) enfolds epic family storytelling within expansive compositional frames. Mitchell is arguably the most virtuosic and innovative voice on flute we’ve heard since Eric Dolphy, and he has composed major suites based on Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic and transgenic fictions. Reedman Dawkins, a former AACM chair (poet and performer Khari B is the current chair), leads the clarion charge on the Chicago home ground, regularly bringing the association’s message to the city’s street corners, student assemblies, and lounges. True to AACM form, the bewitching and virtuosic vocalizing of Ndosi spans genres, ethnicities, species, continents, and likely galaxies, too.
Thanks to this standard-bearing third wave of visionaries, one already hears the AACM’s next half-century in full bloom: leapfrogging twenty thousand light years ahead of the status quo and still holding their organization’s freedom swang legacy down on the home front.
For more, read Greg Tate’s recommended AACM discography on the Walker’s Green Room blog.
Greg Tate is a writer and musician who lives in Harlem. He leads the Burnt Sugar Arkestra and teaches Black Futurism at Brown University. Duke University Press will publish The Greg Tate Reader in fall 2015.
Roscoe Mitchell: tenor, alto, baritone, and soprano saxophones, flute, percussion)
Joseph Jarman: tenor, alto, sopranino, and soprano saxophones, flute, percussion)
Lester Bowie: Trumpet, percussion)
Don Moye: Drums, percussion
Malachi Favors: Acoustic and electric bass, percussion)
"Theme De YoYo" (composition by AEC, 1970):
"Odwalla" (composed by Roscoe Mitchell, 1972):
"Funky AEC" (composition by AEC, 1980)
LIVE PERFORMANCE ON VIDEO:
Art Ensemble Of Chicago:
Lester Bowie (tp)
Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell (as, ts, cl, fl, perc)
Malachi Favors Maghostut (b, perc)
Don Moye (d, perc)
"Theme De Yoyo"
(Music & Lyrics by the Art Ensemble of Chicago--the singer is FONTELLA BASS)
Your head is like a yoyo
your neck is like a string
Your body's like camembert
oozing from its skin.
Your fanny's like two sperm whales
floating down the Seine
Your voice is like a long fork
that's music to your brain.
Your eyes are two blind eagles
that kill what they can't see
Your hands are like two shovels
digging in me.
And your love is like an oil-well
Dig, dig, dig, dig it,
On the Champs-Elysees.
"Reese and the Smooth Ones"--Art Ensemble of Chicago
Recorded in Paris, August 12, 1969:
Art Ensemble of Chicago
LIVE performance on Jazzland TV France 1970:
Art Ensemble Of Chicago Budapest 1:
ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO
Petőfi Csarnok
1995. február 14.
