Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
I hope you enjoyed the ninth week issue from March 28-April 3, 2015 of
Volume 1, Number 2 of SOUND PROJECTIONS, the online quarterly music
magazine which featured the outstanding trumpet player, jazz and film
composer, arranger, orchestrator, ensemble leader, teacher TERENCE
BLANCHARD (b. March 13, 1962). The tenth week issue of this volume of
the quarterly begins TODAY on Saturday, April 4, 2015 @10AM PST which is
@1PM EST.
The featured artist for this week (April 4-April 10,
2015) is the legendary, iconic and innovative singer, songwriter,
ensemble leader BILLIE HOLIDAY (1915-1959). In recognition and deep
appreciation of Ms. Holiday's extraordinary life and career we celebrate
the powerful ongoing legacy of one of the preeminent artists of the
20th century. So please enjoy this week’s featured musical artist in
SOUND PROJECTIONS, the online quarterly music magazine and please pass
the word to your friends, colleagues, comrades, and associates that the
magazine is now up and running at the following site. Please click on
the link below:
Thanks. For further important details please read below…
Kofi
Sound Projections
A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music
in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and
expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host
Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in
contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're
living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to
openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique,
and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human
experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in
critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern
our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and
commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and
thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the
general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will
strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed
notions and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic
definitions of 'Jazz', 'classical music', 'Blues', 'Rhythm and Blues',
'Rock 'n Roll', 'Pop', 'Funk', 'Hip Hop' etc. in order to search for
what individual artists and ensembles do creatively to challenge and
transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what music is and could
be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative,
and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay homage to the endlessly
creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its
guises and expressive identities.
April 4, 2015--April 11, 2015
Billie Holiday (1915-1959): Legendary, iconic and innovative singer, songwriter, and ensemble leader
[In glorious tribute and gratitude to this great legendary artist we celebrate her centennial year]
FOR BILLIE HOLIDAY by Kofi Natambu
Deep within her voice there is a bird and inside that bird is a song and inside that song is a light and inside that light is a Joy and inside that Joy is a Monster and inside that Monster is a memory and inside that memory is a celebration and inside that celebration is a hunger and inside that hunger is a dance and inside that dance is a moan and inside that moan is a majesty and inside that majesty is a longing and inside that longing is a history and inside that history is a mystery and inside that mystery is a fear and inside that fear is a truth and inside that truth is a passion and inside that passion is a whisper and inside that whisper is a wolf and inside that wolf is a howl and inside that howl is a lover and inside that lover is an escape and inside that escape is a regret and inside that regret is a fantasy and inside that fantasy is a death and inside that death is a life and inside that life is a woman and inside that woman is a scream and inside that scream is a release and inside that release is a power and inside that power is a voice and inside that voice is a song and inside that song is a singer and inside that singer is a Holiday and inside that Holiday is Billie
Poem from the book THE MELODY NEVER STOPS by Kofi Natambu. Past Tents Press, 1991
THE DAY LADY DIED by Frank O'Hara
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfield Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
This immortal poem about Billie written upon her death in 1959 is from
LUNCH POEMS by Frank O'Hara (City Lights, 1961)-- Pocket Poets Series
WKCR presents: The Billie Holiday Centennial Festival:
Tuesday, April 7th marks the 100th birthday anniversary of the one and
only Billie Holiday. We'll be celebrating the hauntingly honest, lyrical
virtuosity of Lady Day with a weeklong centennial broadcast, featuring
her entire 1933-1959 discography, as well as on-air interviews with
musicians and scholars. WKCR has a precedent of commemorating Holiday
and her incredibly important contributions to vocal jazz, jazz as a
whole, and Black music in our annual birthday broadcast schedule and in a
special 360-hour Billie Holiday Festival that aired in 2005.
Tune in to WCKR 89.9FM-NY or online at www.wkcr.org
from Sunday, April 5th at 2pm through Friday, April 9th at 9pm as we
spend a week listening to and examining the life, career, and
distinctive sound of Lady Day. We'll be posting a full broadcasting
schedule soon, but so far, look forward to a combination of continuous
and show-specific programming throughout the week.
The Art of Billie Holiday’s Life By Richard Brody The New Yorker
Billie Holiday, like all great artists, is as distinctive, as idiosyncratic, as original off-stage and off-mike as on. Credit Photograph by Charles Hewitt / LIFE / Getty
Some biographies of artists take in the whole life—preferably with
equal attention to the work, and integrating the two elements to the
extent that the work invites it. Others offer a bio-slice or synecdoche,
centered on one particular period, relationship, or field of activity
to provide an exemplary angle on the life and work. John Szwed’s brief
but revelatory new book, “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth”
(Viking), which comes out this week—just under the wire for her
centenary (Holiday was born April 7, 1915)—is in another category. It’s a
meta-biography, about the creation of Holiday’s public image in media
of all sorts: print, television, movies, and, of course, her recordings,
but with special attention to the composition of her autobiography,
“Lady Sings the Blues,” which was published in 1956.
Szwed, whose
other books include a superb biography of Sun Ra, “Space is the Place,”
reconstructs, through ardent archival research as well as his own
interviews, the circumstances of the making of Holiday’s book. In the
process, he both evaluates the first-hand significance of “Lady Sings
the Blues” as Holiday’s factual and emotional account of her own life—as
a record of Holiday’s experiences and ideas—and also, secondarily,
treats the writing and the publication of the book as important events
in Holiday’s life. She died on July 17, 1959, at the age of forty-four,
and had been suffering from liver disease and heart disease. She was, as
she writes, addicted to heroin “on and off” since the early
nineteen-forties. Szwed says that, when she went to the hospital in
1959, “No one at the hospital knew who she was, and with needle marks on
her body, she was left in the hall for hours, since the institution was
not allowed to treat drug addicts.”
Holiday’s recording career
was precocious: she made her first records in 1933, with a small group
headed by Benny Goodman (who wasn’t yet a big-band leader). On the very
first page of the first chapter, Szwed writes wisely about the timing of
Holiday’s own book, nothing that at the time it was published, “jazz
had moved from being the popular music of 1940s America to a more
rarefied place in the public view.” This fact, for Szwed, mitigated the
response that Holiday’s book received. The critics now defending jazz
were mainly “closet high modernists who wanted no mention of drugs,
whorehouses, or lynching brought into discussions of the music.” And
those are among the subjects addressed, in unsparing detail, in
Holiday’s book. (Among the critics who attacked the book was Whitney
Balliett, this magazine’s longtime jazz critic, who wrote about it in
the Saturday Review.)
The first section of Szwed’s book is one of
the most briskly revealing pieces of jazz biography that I’ve read.
First, he establishes the bona fides of William Dufty, Holiday’s
collaborator on the book, rescuing him from charges of being a hack.
Dufty was an award-winning journalist at the New York Post at a time
when it was a leading liberal paper; he and his wife, Maely Daniele, a
longtime friend of Holiday’s, welcomed her to their apartment as “a
place of refuge from the police, her husband Louis McKay, reporters, and
the various unsavory figures who haunted her life.” Dufty did the
actual writing, based on long and detailed conversations with Holiday
augmented by archival research that sparked her recollections.
Szwed sketches a handful of the book’s divergences from the
independently established biographical record, starting with the
legendary first sentences: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when
they got married. He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and I was three.”
Szwed explains, “When Billie was born, her mother was nineteen, her
father seventeen. They never married . . . She was born not in Baltimore
but in Philadelphia. Some questioned her claim of having been raped at
age ten.”
Holiday’s book is unstinting in its depiction of the
hardships she faced. As a child, she heard from her great-grandmother
about life as a slave; she grew up away from her mother, in the home of a
cousin who beat her; she scrubbed floors in a “whorehouse” in order to
hear music on the record player; and the man who raped her when she was
ten was a neighbor. She quit school at twelve and travelled to New York
alone, where she worked first as a maid and then as a prostitute. Jailed
and released, she moved in with her mother, who lived in Harlem. They
were on the verge of eviction when Holiday, who was about fifteen, got a
job singing—more or less by accident—at a local nightspot. Holiday
details the roughness of the world of music, exacerbated by relentless
racism—travelling through the South in the age of Jim Crow, being forced
to darken her skin with makeup in order to perform in Detroit. She
describes in detail her addiction to heroin, her resulting troubles with
the law, and its impact on her career.
For all its confessional
frankness and accusatory clarity, there is, as Szwed reveals, much more
to her story—and the circumstances of the composition of “Lady Sings the
Blues” are an exemplary part of it.
Delving into earlier drafts
of “Lady Sings the Blues” and other archival materials, Szwed finds
echoes of the book in other published sources to which Holiday had
referred Dufty as particularly reliable. Holiday told Dufty some stories
that were ultimately kept out of the book, including the agonizing home
abortion that her mother forced her to undergo as a teen. But Szwed
finds that the book’s most important omissions were demanded by lawyers
(including one representing Holiday and McKay) and by many of the public
figures who played major roles in Holiday’s life and autobiography.
In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships
that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the
nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late
nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in
the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of “Citizen
Kane.”
In 1941, Welles wanted to make a film called “The Story
of Jazz,” in collaboration with Duke Ellington. It would be set in the
nineteen-teens and twenties, centered on the rise of Louis Armstrong,
playing himself. He wanted Holiday to play Bessie Smith. Welles’s movie,
Szwed writes, was “intended to be radically innovative, mixing together
different styles of jazz, using the surrealist drawings of Oskar
Fischinger.” It was put off, Szwed reports, due to the start of the
Second World War. When Welles went to Rio to make “It’s All True,” he
thought that the jazz story could be woven into it—but his filming of
“the everyday interaction of races in Brazil” soured Welles’s studio,
RKO, on the entire production.
The basic idea is the crucial one:
of all jazz singers, Holiday is the one who is a jazz musician, the
equal in musical invention of the epoch-making instrumentalists who
played alongside her. Szwed picks up on the negative effect on her
career that her style risked when she was starting out. He quotes one
club manager who told her, “You sing too slow . . . sounds like you’re
asleep!” Music publishers—who still made lots of money from the sale of
sheet music—didn’t like her singing, which didn’t present the melodies
clearly enough. His analysis shines all the more brightly when he goes
behind the scenes of the recordings to unfold the life of
performance—her initial experience as a cabaret singer, going table to
table for tips in the Prohibition-era cabarets on 133rd Street, where
she got her start; the peculiarities of the Fifty-Second Street clubs
where she performed in the late thirties, which fostered a casual
musical intimacy (“They were small, maybe fifteen feet by sixty feet,
and were located in the basements of brownstone residences. They
featured miniature tables for a few dozen people.”). He also explains
the painful conditions of some of her later recordings, when her health
and her voice were in bad shape (“The on-the-spot rehearsals, the false
starts, retakes, and overdubs began to pile up on the tape reels”).
Szwed looks closely at her choice of songs and the origins of ones with
which she’s closely associated, including “Strange Fruit” and “God
Bless the Child.” He details the life-threatening conflicts that she
faced on the road in the South, where she performed as a member of the
(white) Artie Shaw band. And he carefully considers the specifics of
performance later in her career, when she sang at Carnegie Hall and
recorded with far more elaborate arrangements than she had used in her
youth—and focusses on the musical implications of these circumstances.
Above all, in analyzing her art, Szwed argues for the difference
between the performer and the life—between the on-stage persona and the
person: “Her ability to communicate strong and painful emotions through
singing led many to believe that she was suffering and in real pain. But
real suffering is not necessary for great singing, only the ability to
communicate it in song . . . Like actors, singers create their
identities as artists through words and music. . . . All we can know for
certain is the performance itself.”
In general, the desire of
even the most discerning critics, such as Szwed, to separate art and
life, to analyze the formal traits of works as if they were dissociable
from the experience and the emotions that inspire them and that they
convey, is both noble and doomed—noble, because artists deserve to be
honored for their achievements, and doomed, because the formal and
systematic nature of those achievements isn’t what makes them endure.
The individuality, the immense complexity of inner life that art
conveys—including Holiday’s seemingly straightforward and instantly
appreciable art—doesn’t occur in a laboratory-like isolation.
Holiday herself, in “Lady Sings the Blues,” took care to depict the
unity of her personal life and her musicianship, starting with the
haphazard circumstances under which she began her career, as a teen-age
ex-prostitute in need of a fast way of making rent for herself and her
mother. She specifically connects the way she sings with her
experiences—and with her readiness to face them. (“Maybe I’m proud
enough to want to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island.”)
Holiday, like all great artists, is as distinctive, as idiosyncratic, as
original off-stage and off-mike as on. The life doesn’t explain the
art; rather, life is an art in itself—whether a creation of sublime
moments and fascinating gestures, or of terrifying confrontations and
mighty endurances—that is illuminated by the same inner light, inspired
by the same genius, inflected by the same touch that makes the works of
art endure on their own. The biographer of an artist is a critic in
advance, in acknowledging and appreciating the actions of an artist’s
life and recognizing what’s personal and distinctive in their being—in
discerning the artistic aspect of the life. Szwed, in his brief book,
accomplishes this goal, perhaps even better than he intended.
Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has
contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc
Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com.
Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth review – reclaiming Lady Day's artistry
Everyone knows about the sex and drugs – but John Szwed’s biography
makes the case for Holiday as a complex artist who inspired in many
different directions
Billie Holiday: one of the most famously
indescribable – and inimitable – voices in all of jazz and pop-music
history. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives
by Seth Colter Walls Thursday 2 April 2015 The Guardian (UK)
To the public, Billie Holiday might simply be an icon. But to
specialists, she’s the subject of a long and unsettled argument. In the
view of some critics, her art has often gotten short shrift compared
with discussions over the tabloid particulars of her too-short life. In
1956, she published a co-written autobiography called Lady Sings the
Blues, which tried to balance confessional storytelling with assertions
of her artistic control. It was accused of doing a disservice to jazz by
some self-appointed guardians of the genre.
In later decades,
Lady Day – as she was called by fans and fellow musicians – was even
accused of having been illiterate. A fast-and-loose 1972 biopic starring
Diana Ross, a pop singer ill-suited to capturing Holiday’s swinging
sophistication and melodic genius, hardly improved anyone’s
understanding. The feminist critic Angela Davis took sharp exception to
the film, writing that it “tends to imply that her music is no more than
an unconscious and passive product of the contingencies of her life”.
With the approach of Holiday’s centenary, more and more people are
coming over to Davis’s side. John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet
detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth,
communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes
good on them throughout. That’s not to say that he ignores the singer’s
romantic flings (with Orson Welles, among others), the domestic abuse
suffered at the hands of multiple partners or the long-term heroin use
that are part of the familiar Holiday lore. Crucially, though, he spends
more than half his page-count closely considering Holiday’s music. And
his book comes just as three new recordings – one from José James, a
singer who skillfully bridges the worlds of contemporary R&B and
jazz, one by Cassandra Wilson and another by the classical pianist Lara
Downes – likewise investigate the musician’s catalogue with respectfully
daring air.
As tough as it is for those musicians to interpret
songs Holiday made iconic, it’s possible that Szwed’s challenge was more
daunting. He is writing in the wake of Holiday biographies that have,
by necessity, relied on speculation and hearsay, given the fact that
Holiday gave few interviews (and saw her autobiography redacted by a
lawsuit-averse publisher). There are also political ambiguities involved
in narrating the choices of an African American artist who, as Davis
noted, “worked primarily with the idiom of white popular song”. And then
there are the difficulties of needing to describe one of the most
famously indescribable – and inimitable – voices in all of jazz and
pop-music history.
On the latter point, Szwed clears his throat a
bit – quoting divergent critical opinions and eminent musicologists –
displaying some of the agonies that prose suffers when summing up the
Holiday sound. But he does have moments where he succeeds beautifully:
“In the upper register she had a bright but nasal sound; she sounded
clearer, perhaps even younger, in the middle; and at the bottom, there
was a rougher voice, sometimes a rasp or a growl. But even these voices
were varied or might change depending on the song she was singing.”
Elsewhere, Szwed is on point when he describes Holiday “falling behind
the beat, floating, breathing where it’s not expected, scooping up notes
and then letting them fall”.
As the author of compelling books
on complex figures such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra, it’s little surprise
that Szwed is also wise and authoritative on the sad, complex
interaction of Jim Crow racism and early pop-music practices, in the
20-page chapter The Prehistory of a Singer. And he proves as good at
reading Holiday’s political choices – such as revising the “in dialect”
lyrics of Gershwin’s I Loves You, Porgy – as he is at spelling out
Holiday’s evolving approach to improvisation, over the course of her
career.
Like Davis, Szwed hears a hint of feminist
consciousness-raising in Holiday’s 1948 rendition of My Man. And on the
tortured history of credit-taking for the composition of Strange Fruit –
the anti-lynching protest song that stunned one nightclub audience
after another, once Holiday added it to her repertoire – Szwed cuts
through the brush to show the ways in which Holiday’s melodic approach
(as well as her choice to perform it in front of white people) destined
the song for a place in history as much as anything else.
If it
sounds like the accumulated weight of history makes for solemn reading, a
lot of fun can actually be had using Szwed as a listening partner. Go
ahead and launch your streaming-music engine of choice and build a
playlist with the tracks as Szwed considers them. You probably won’t
need much help enjoying three rare Holiday recordings with Count Basie’s
1937 band – available on disc eight of Lady Day: The Complete Billie
Holiday on Columbia, 1933-1944 – since the musicians’ collective brand
of ecstasy requires little in the way of selling. But Szwed’s
description of Holiday “gliding over rhythm suspensions and finding her
way over the glassine 4/4 of a great swing rhythm section” is a treat –
as is his song-by-song investigation of Holiday’s musical partnerships
with the pianist Teddy Wilson and the saxophonist Lester Young.
In the case of pre-existing songs that Holiday made her own, Szwed cites
earlier recordings by other singers before inviting you to compare them
with what he deems to be Holiday’s best version (the better to put her
skills in relief). And when it comes to the core of Lady Day’s catalogue
– the songs she recorded, with great variance, during multiple phases
of her career – Szwed’s listening notes shed useful light on the
differences, especially for fans who think they can safely dismiss the
portion of Holiday’s discography that is less favoured by jazz
aficionados.
That very hybridity – Holiday’s ability to help
define jazz singing, and then buck the genre’s conventions – is what
makes the new spate of tributes to her feel so appropriate. A listener
might disagree with an arrangement choice made by Cassandra Wilson, on
Coming Forth By Day, or else miss elements of swing in Lara Downes’s
classical recital A Billie Holiday Songbook – but their risk-taking is
clearly in the service of honoring Holiday’s often-surprising moves.
(José James’s Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday is
just about perfect, including as it does the playing of
MacArthur-winning pianist Jason Moran.)
Plenty of stars from
yesteryear had crazy-juicy personal lives; very few left behind
conceptual approaches that inspire in so many directions. Each of these
new albums is in league with Szwed’s book – a joint persuasion campaign
meant to encourage us to consider musicianship as the defining
characteristic of Lady Day’s legacy. That’s about as fine a
centenary-year gift as anyone had a right to expect.
Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth is published by Viking Press in the USA, and William Heinemann in the UK
When Billie played her yearly concerts at the Apollo and at Carnegie
Hall everyone came out in full force either to hear her sing or to see
whether she was still together. Each time a new record was issued it was
compared with her early ones, and she was often judged to be imitating
herself, to be working with the wrong musicians, the wrong arrangers,
etc. Most everyone liked to believe that Billie made her best records
when she sang with Count Basie and the other geniuses of swing. It's
hard to disagree, for she was, like all of them, an incredible horn in
those days. Billie's later records, usually in a much slower tempo, are a
different music. They are the songs of a woman alone and lonely and
without much sympathy. No one blows pretty solos behind her like Lester
did. Sometimes there are unintelligent voices in the background going
oo-oo-oo with none of the wit Billie had on "Ooo-oo-oo what a lil
moonlight can doo-oo-oo." Nevertheless, these are the songs of Lady Day
too, and if the sorrow sounds a little heavier it was because she'd been
carrying it a while. "I remember when she was happy-" Carmen McRae said
in 1955, "that was a long time ago."
Billie and Louis both were
arrested in 1956. Billie knew by this time that if the Narcotics Bureau
wanted to get her it only had to be arranged, the evidence "found" and
she could be convicted on her past record. In her book she pleaded that
the addict be treated rather than punished. She knew how little good
punishment had ever done to help her. And her stated purpose in
revealing all that she considered shameful in her life was to warn young
people away from heroin. "If you think dope is for kicks and for
thrills, you're out of your mind.... The only thing that can happen to
you is sooner or later you'll get busted, and once that happens, you'll
never live it down. Just look at me."
Billie never was able to
stop using heroin completely, though she tried very hard. Some people
thought she could have tried harder: "That girl's life... was just
snapped away from foolishness." But there were others who knew and loved
her. Lena Horne and Billie had been friends since Cafe Society days,
and she understood how life had been spoiled for Billie.
Billie
didn't lecture me - she didn't have to. Her whole life, the way she
sang, made everything very plain. It was as if she were a living picture
there for me to see something I had not seen clearly before.
Her
life was so tragic and so corrupted by other people-by white people and
by her own people. There was no place for her to go, except finally,
into that little private world of dope. She was just too sensitive to
survive.
Billie survived long enough to sing a few days at the
Five Spot, a club that opened in downtown New York in the fifties. Her
last appearance was at the Phoenix Theater in New York in May, 1959. On
May 31 she was brought to a hospital unconscious, suffering from liver
and heart ailments, the papers said. Twelve days later someone allegedly
found heroin in her room. She was arrested while in her hospital bed
and police came to guard her, to make sure this now thin, suffering
woman could not get away from the law one more time. But she escaped the
judgment of the United States of America versus Billie Holiday for a
higher judgment, on July 17, 1959.
Billie Holiday at 100: Artists reflect on jazz singer’s legacy
By Aidin Vaziri
Friday, April 3, 2015
Photo: Associated Press
Image 1 of 13
FILE - This Sept. 1958 file photo shows Billie Holiday. The Apollo
Theater is planning events to commemorate the 100th birthday of Holiday.
The legendary American jazz vocalist was born on April 17, 1915 and
died in 1959 at the age of 44. Holiday performed at least two dozen
times at the Apollo. She will be inducted into its Walk of Fame on April
16, 2015. (AP Photo/FILE)
Billie Holiday would have turned 100
this week, but who’s counting? The famed jazz singer and songwriter’s
voice is ageless, still luring fans with its effortless swagger and
unblinking candor. It carried with it all the difficulty she endured
throughout her tumultuous life — born Eleanora Fagan, an illegitimate
child, on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore; died strung out and broken 44
years later in New York — along with all the hope, fear and desperation
that came with it. “What comes out is what I feel,” she once said.
No one else can sound like Billie Holiday because no one else lived like Billie Holiday.
Yet in generation after generation, her influence is unmistakable. To
mark the centennial of her birth, which will be celebrated with
concerts, books, albums, tributes and reissue packages around the world,
we spoke with some people closer to home whose lives were deeply
touched by Holiday.
Paula West
Longtime Bay Area jazz singer, torchbearer of the American Songbook popularized by Holiday
I’m not quite sure when I first heard Billie Holiday. I believe it was
before the Diana Ross biopic (“Lady Sings the Blues”) was released. Of
course their voices were dissimilar. I was young at the time, and had
only been exposed to those “greatest hits,” such as “Fine and Mellow,”
“Them There Eyes” and “Good Morning Heartache.”
I feel the best
singers have always been able to get across the raw emotions of the
lyrics. She had no great vocal range, but that was never needed. It was
about telling the truth, the story, and not too many singers could ever
match her natural interpretations. No vocal histrionics, melisma
necessary. She was respected by musicians, as well, and her singing was
influenced by musicians such as Louis Armstrong.
There are dozens
of her interpretations I love, but “Lady in Satin” is my favorite,
particularly her version of “I’m a Fool to Want You.” The arrangement is
beautiful yet heartbreaking, of course, and no one could deliver that
better than Billie Holiday.
Lavay Smith
Blues and jazz singer with Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, renowned for her tributes to the first ladies of jazz
I remember seeing Billie Holiday singing on TV on an oldies station
that would show the Little Rascals, Shirley Temple and old
black-and-white movies. Like everyone who hears her, I loved her right
away.
Billie remains an icon because she was true to herself. As a
singer, she made you believe that she meant every word she sang. Lyrics
were very important to her, which isn’t true of all jazz singers. And
the feeling that she creates through her use of rhythm was always
swingin’ and happy. A lot of people think of her music as being sad, but
she had a great sense of humor that comes through, and I’ve always
found her music to be uplifting.
The first album I bought was
“Lady Sings the Blues,” and I played the heck out of. It included
“Strange Fruit” and many of her hits, like “Traveling Light” and “Good
Morning Heartache.” I love all of the Columbia recordings that she did
with Lester Young and Teddy Wilson, including all of the obscure songs. I
just love the feeling and the soul of these records. The interplay
between Billie and Lester Young is the textbook definition of how an
instrumentalist should interact with a singer.
Joey Arias New York cabaret singer and drag artist, who recently performed a tribute to Billie Holiday at Lincoln Center
I remember hearing her voice and thinking how lovely she sounded. I
wanted to have that same sound that she was emoting. It was a magic
spell that was sent to me. I feel as though we were connected at the hip
from stories I’ve heard from friends and family.
Billie was an
outspoken person. She was class all the way and never wanted to be
treated any other way. She was being followed and became public enemy
for standing up for her rights and acting strong and never letting her
guard down. She dressed beautifully and had such presence.
“Lady in
Satin” is my favorite album. It all depends on what period you want to
hear her style, but I love her in the late ’50s. She summed it all up —
her life, her singing and her thoughts, and her love of life and love.
Randall Kline SFJazz executive director
I heard her on the home stereo as a teenager. My parents were jazz
fans. One hearing of her voice — soft, persuasive, mournful, honest,
beautiful — told you to listen more closely. “Don’t Explain” for its raw
pathos. “Strange Fruit” for its power, poignancy and, sadly, its
contemporary relevance.
Getting to know Billie Holiday
Here are some albums to help you get better acquainted with the jazz singer’s magic.
“Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday,” Legacy. A two-CD set containing
many of the classic sides Holiday cut for Columbia and its Brunswick,
Vocalion and Okeh labels in the 1930s and early ’40s, including “What a
Little Moonlight Can Do,” “A Fine Romance,” “You Go to My Head” and “The
Man I Love.”
“Billie Holiday: The Complete Decca Recordings,”
GRP. An excellent two-CD box featuring the torch songs, raucous
renditions of signature Bessie Smith numbers, and other material Holiday
recorded for Decca from 1944 to 1950.
“Lady in Autumn: The Best
of the Verve Years,” Verve. A good two-disc survey of Holiday’s
small-band recordings of the 1950s, featuring stellar soloists like Ben
Webster and Benny Carter.
“Lady in Satin,” Legacy. A
heartbreaking beauty. Writer Michael Brooks wrote that this 1958 album
feels “as if a group of family and friends are gathered around a loved
one and saying their last goodbyes.”
“Ken Burns Jazz — Definitive
Billie Holiday,” Verve. Compiled by the documentary filmmaker, this
single-disc collection culls material from the three major phases of the
singer’s career.— Jesse Hamlin
Kitty Margolis
San Francisco jazz singer, trustee at the Recording Academy, founder of Mad-Kat Records
I remember staring at a girlish, chubby Billie on the cover of this
brown Columbia three-LP box set released in 1962, “Billie Holiday: The
Golden Years.” It had an extensive photo book with detailed track
listings inside and liner notes by John Hammond and Ralph Gleason. I
still have it. Opening it and smelling the paper takes me right back. I
realize now that a lot of the tunes in this box became very important to
my early core repertoire.
I don’t think there is one genuine female jazz singer in the world who doesn’t have Billie inside. She defined the idiom.
One major thing that set Billie apart as a jazz singer is that she was a
musician’s singer, a master improviser without ever uttering one scat
syllable. She was not a classically “pretty”-sounding singer like Ella
or Sarah. Billie’s sound was a bittersweet brew: raw, tart, personal,
intimate, relaxed, understated, urgent.
Billie’s storytelling was always 100 percent emotionally
intelligent and believable, an ironic cocktail of longing, pride, pain,
strength with a sharp glint of humor. No one could sound happier (“Them
There Eyes”) and no one could sound darker (“I’m a Fool to Want You”).
Billie sang the truth. There was no “acting” involved. She could take
even the most banal pop lyric of the time and imbue it with subtext that
gave it a much deeper message, almost like a code.
THE PANOPTICON REVIEW IS PROUD TO CELEBRATE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WORLD RENOWNED ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF CREATIVE MUSICIANS (AACM) WHICH WAS FORMED IN MARCH OF 1965 BY A LARGE AND VERY ACTIVE COALITION OF BLACK MUSICIANS AND COMPOSERS WHO WERE FULLY COMMITTED TO THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE OF SELF DETERMINATION IN THE ARTS AND IN THEIR LIVES.
Since their founding by a group of forward-thinking jazz musicians that included pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran, the AACM have been a force for innovation within the jazz community. The Chicago-based organization is a registered nonprofit organization dedicated, according to the AACM statement, "to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music." In the '60s and especially the '70s, the AACM were widely acknowledged as being in the forefront of experimental jazz. Early AACM members such as Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, and the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famadou Don Moye, and Malachi Favors) created music that would have creative implications that reached far beyond the city of Chicago. Their motto is "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future." Although there is not one typical AACM artist, it can be said that their membership in general has attempted to transcend common practice by absorbing into their work various influences lying outside the jazz domain (African indigenous musics and European classical forms, for example).
Sound
The AACM grew out of a rehearsal band led by Muhal Richard Abrams in 1962. The group, known informally as the Experimental Band, never performed, but existed to read down scores written by Abrams, Cohran, DeJohnette, Jarman, Mitchell, Troy Robinson, and Maurice McIntyre, among others. Many of the band's writers employed compositional techniques taken from contemporary classical music -- serialism, polytonality, and chromaticism. The group's first rehearsals were held in a South Side tavern, but the band eventually moved to Abraham Lincoln Center, one of the city's oldest settlement houses. Obviously inspired by a high level of creativity and frustrated by a lack of performance opportunities, Abrams, Christian, Cohran, and McCall instigated the formation of a cooperative that would produce concerts, and opened membership to their cohorts in the Experimental Band. In May of 1965, the AACM were chartered by the state of Illinois as a nonprofit organization. Six groups comprised the original AACM: Christian's hard bop quintet; Cohran's Artistic Heritage Ensemble; the Experimental Band; and the groups of Robinson, Jarman, and Mitchell. The next year, Delmark recorded Mitchell's band. The resulting album, Sound, was the first of many to come out of the AACM.
In addition to their function as a concert producer, the AACM run a free training program for inner-city youth. The AACM School of Music offers instruction on all instruments and vocals, as well as classes in music theory. The faculty is made up entirely of AACM members, many of whom are themselves graduates of the program. Although the cooperative's influence in the jazz world waned a bit in the '80s and '90s, affiliated artists continued to produce bold and compelling music. Newer members like saxophonist/composer Edward Wilkerson, percussionist Kahil El-Zabar, and saxophonist Ari Brown continued the AACM's tradition of high creative achievement.'
A POWER STRONGER THAN ITSELF: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
BY THE OUTSTANDING MUSICIAN, COMPOSER, AND PROFESSOR OF MUSIC AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GEORGE E. LEWIS WHO HAS BEEN A CHARTER MEMBER OF THE AACM HIMSELF SINCE 1971.
Kofi THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS BELOW ARE TAKEN FROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AND AWARD WINNING BOOK:
TOP TO BOTTOM: A famous collective shot of members of the AACM taken in the late 1960s, a photo of the book by Dr. Lewis on the AACM, another famous photo of members of the music collective taken with the co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams in the center of the photo playing a clarinet, and a photo of Dr. Lewis with his trombone and music computer modules from which Mr. Lewis composes some of his prodigious work.
AACM Panel Discussion: Muhal Richard Abrams, Frederick Berry, George Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell with Charles Kronengold: Moderator
CCRMA, Stanford University. May 12, 2014.
From George Lewis's work "A Power Stronger than Itself":
"Since its founding on the virtually all-black South Sideof Chicago in 1965, the African American musicians'collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has played an unusual prominent role in the development of American experimental music.
Over more than forty years of work, the composite output of AACM members has explored a wide range of methodologies, processes, and media. AACM musicians developed new and influential ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures."
Preparations for the AACM’s 50th Anniversary are underway! Since 1965 the AACM has been instrumental in thecontinuation of the tradition of creating original music with an influence that extends across the globe. In this respect, the AACM is preparing for a worldwide celebration of musical presentations, installations, exhibitions and more as the organization reaches a half century in 2015. This year long celebration will honor, reflect and advance the organization’s contributions to the world's musical landscape.
“FREE AT FIRST: The Audacious Journey of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians” The phrase “Free At First” is meant to reflect the very birth of this organization was inclusive of the members of AACM, who were unfettered by convention and tradition and adopted a “free” style that recognized no boundaries and defied categorization. The AACM had the audacity to compose, perform, publish, own, and institutionalize their own music and to prepare future exponents of their genre-bending, experimental form. Further, their collective, rather than confining the individual, actually made room for individual freedom of expression.
“Free At First” is also a reference to the sense of freedom the founders and early members approached musical compositions, organizational concepts and institution building – especially with the AACM School of Music. The scope of the exhibition is intended to provide the social framework, political climate, cultural milieu and the philosophical underpinnings within which this musician’s collective has thrived and survived – the only musicians’ collective still standing!
“Free At First” will be as broad and wide-ranging an exhibition as is the music created by the AACM. From historic and iconic photographs to a musical soundscape inclusive of AACM founders and the newest generation; from performance costumes and uniquely crafted awards of recognition to performance posters from around the globe; from a recreation of the famous Henry Threadgill “Hubkaphone” as an installation piece to be experienced by all visitors to a long ago silent film of Threadgill playing this unique instrument. Audience members will also be engaged in an exhibition game called, “Finding AACM” with questions and hints of where to find clues located somewhere throughout the exhibition.
Organized by DuSable Museum of African American History; Curated by Dr. Carol L. Adams and Janis Lane-Ewart. Exhibition Designer: Dorian Sylvain. “FREE AT FIRST: The Audacious Journey of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians” is sponsored by: The Chicago Community Trust, The DuSable Museum of African American History, and United Airlines, the Official Airline of the DuSable Museum.The DuSable Museum of African American History gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of the Museum.
The AACM Collective Turns 50 (With Its Radical Creativity Intact) By Seth Colter Walls March 13, 2015 Pitchfolk
Before he moved to New York and became a key drummer in Miles Davis’ powerful electric lineup, circa Bitches Brew, Jack DeJohnette played drums all over Chicago in the early 1960s. This was the same period during which future Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman were studying music at Woodrow Wilson College, and when a pianist-educator named Muhal Richard Abrams was leading rehearsals of what he called the Experimental Band, over at the C&C Lounge on the city’s South Side.
In 1963, DeJohnette introduced Mitchell to Abrams. Two years later, with DeJohnette off in New York, Mitchell attended the first meetings of a new collective cofounded by the pianist: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM). Inspired by the freer approaches to jazz improvisation suggested by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, as well as by Western-classical and world-music performance practices, members of the association pledged fidelity to no genre, focusing their goals instead on the composition and performance of original pieces—no matter the form. "Write whatever you want," Abrams once told a member, "and we’ll look at it."
Though DeJohnette is better known in mainstream jazz circles for his distinguished career as a bandleader—and for his participation in outfits with Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny—he hasn’t lost touch with these exploratory, avant-garde titans. Their communion can be heard on Made in Chicago, DeJohnette’s latest album for the ECM label. Recorded live in 2013, it reunites the drummer with both Abrams and Mitchell, and includes another AACM luminary in the bargain: the saxophonist-composer Henry Threadgill. Over the course of a 70-minute set, each heavyweight contributes an original composition (Mitchell even gets two). Along with the younger Larry Gray on bass, this wrecking crew’s concert closer is a brief, jointly improvised piece. This excerpt comes courtesy of ECM.
Jack DeJohnette: "Ten Minutes (excerpt)"
Abrams starts off with a minimalist riff on the piano, and is joined first by Mitchell’s horn (on the left channel) and Threadgill’s (on the right), before DeJohnette’s drums—playing free, but with an undeniable pulse—help the piece achieve liftoff. The freewheeling bash of that track is just one joyous texture on a master-class album that keeps things consistently intense and stylistically diverse.
Mitchell’s frenetic 1977 piece "Chant" kicks off the set with a four-note theme that Abrams references during a piano solo, before DeJohnette and Mitchell take over for an extended (and explosive) duo passage. On the slower, more sombre Abrams composition that follows, "Jack 5", Threadgill deals out piercing blues licks from his alto, while DeJohnette picks his spots like the master that he is—dropping stray percussion blasts that have the cumulative force of any recent 15-minute black-metal track you might care to compare his playing against. And then the drummer plays some danceable, funk-adjacent groove, all on his own (just in case you forgot his discography as a sideman includes On the Corner).
Mitchell busts out a bass recorder for his chamber-music style composition "This". Later on, DeJohnette’s composition "Museum of Time" provides him with the opportunity to stray a little closer to standard swing (and also gives Threadgill time to show how mesmerizing he can sound on the flute).
As much as any 70-minute set can, Made in Chicago feels like a balanced, contemporary introduction to the many-sided history of the AACM. Some of its textures clearly reflect the fact that, like many other AACM members, Abrams, Mitchell and Threadgill have all written contemporary classical music in addition to perfecting their improvisational languages. Chamber music pieces by all three will be performed as part of an all-AACM gig at New York’s Roulette on March 19, along with works by the pianist Amina Claudine Myers, the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, and the late violinist Leroy Jenkins.
Smith has also enjoyed a productive stretch of late, with his chamber-music-meets-jazz ensemble opus Ten Freedom Summers—a massive work that draws its animating spirit from icons and phenomena surrounding the Civil Rights movement—being selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer in composition, back in 2013.
50 Years of the AACM Celebrated in NYC Concerts Music of Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, more By JazzTimes A series of concerts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding in Chicago of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) will take place in New York City on Feb. 26, March 19 and April 28-29. The concerts will take place at Roulette in Brooklyn and the Bohemian National Hall on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Each evening will feature works by such AACM composers as Muhal Richard Abrams, Thurman Barker, Leroy Jenkins, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Wadada Leo Smith and Henry Threadgill.
Events are co-sponsored by Interpretations, SEM Ensemble, Roulette Intermedia, the Czech Center New York at Bohemian National Hall and Ostrava Center for New Music.
Details, as provided in a press release, follow:
Thursday February 26, 2015 @ Roulette AACM50: Amina Claudine Myers Trio // Thurman Barker's Strike Force Plus New music from two important figures of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Pianist and composer Amina Claudine Myers brings her trio with Jerome Harris (bass guitar) and Reggie Nicholson (drums). Composer and percussionist Thurman Barker presents the premiere of ‘South Side Suite’, and other works. Featuring his Strike Force Plus, with Malik Washington (timpani, percussion) Bryan Carrott (vibes, percussion), Eli Fountain (marimba, percussion), Ray Mantilla (percussion), Lonnie Gasperini (hammond organ) and Thurman Barker (drumset and percussion).
Thursday, March 19, 2015 @ Roulette
AACM50: Thomas Buckner performs works by Muhal Richard Abrams, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Henry Threadgill & Wadada Leo Smith Baritone Thomas Buckner celebrates 50 years of the Association For the Advancement of Creative Musicians with an evening of works written for him by AACM composers. Accompanied by pianists Joseph Kubera and Amina Claudine Myers, violist Stephanie Griffin, cellist Christopher Hoffman, flutist JD Parran, and percussionists Matthew Gold and Alex Lipowski, Buckner performs concert works by Muhal Richard Abrams, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015 @ The Bohemian National Hall AACM50: SEM Ensemble performs George E. Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, John Cage, Petr Kotik, & Christian Wolff
Petr Kotik leads the SEM Ensemble and members of the Ostravska Banda (Czech Republic) in works for chamber ensemble by noted composers of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians on the occasion of their 50th Anniversary. Works by AACM members George E. Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell (with Thomas Buckner, baritone), and Henry Threadgill are featured alongside works by John Cage, Petr Kotik, and Christian Wolff.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015 @ The Bohemian National Hall AACM50: Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble & Ostravska Banda Perform Muhal Richard Abrams, George E. Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, & Wadada Leo Smith // The Trio (Abrams/Mitchell/Lewis) Petr Kotik leads the Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble and members of the Ostravska Banda (Czech Republic) in orchestral works by George E. Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell (with baritone Thomas Buckner), Wadada Leo Smith, and AACM founder Muhal Richard Abrams. The evening also includes a rare New York appearance by The Trio, the distinguished improvising trio of Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell.
All concerts start at 8PM.
ROULETTE: 509 Atlantic Ave. Downtown Brooklyn BOHEMIAN NATIONAL HALL 321 East 73RD Street, New York City, NY 10021 General admission: suggested donation For more information on Interpretations visit Interpretations.
Fifty years ago, a group of South Side jazz musicians found themselves backed against a wall. Clubs were closing, radio stations were going pop, America's musical interests were shifting elsewhere: toward youth-oriented rock 'n' roll.
If these Chicago jazz artists had given in to inevitably changing musical tastes, jazz might have devolved into a nostalgia bath or succumbed to the commercial excesses of the fusion era that followed. Instead, the Chicago musicians who half a century ago created the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM, invented original musical languages, created intriguing new instruments, crafted novel ways of penning scores and otherwise defied long-standing presumptions about how music was supposed to be made.
AACM recordings: Bold ideas in sound
Because their work was steeped in the rituals of ancient Africa, as well as certain traditions of early New Orleans music, the AACM artists managed to convey a vast sweep of black cultural history — even as they were reinventing an art form. And though they didn't necessarily intend it, their breakthroughs opened the door to new ways of creating, staging and perceiving music.
Chicago and the rest of the musical planet will be celebrate the AACM's 50th throughout this year, a fitting response considering this organization's global profile and impact.
Pioneering AACM artists such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton (a MacArthur Fellowship winner) and Wadada Leo Smith (a Pulitzer Prize finalist) command international followings, as do AACM figures such as Nicole Mitchell, Kahil El'Zabar and George Lewis (another MacArthur Fellow)
Related: AACM's spirit endures in underground rock If early AACM bands such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Threadgill's Air carried the organization's banner to acclaim in Europe and beyond in the late 1960s and '70s, subsequent groups such as Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble, Ernest Dawkins' Live the Spirit Ensemble, Dee Alexander's Evolution Ensemble and El'Zabar's Ritual Trio continue to do so today.
But even an admirer of this majestic history might reasonably ask what exactly is the AACM? An organization? An attitude? A series of cultural practices?
Surely it's all of those, but also something more.
"It's really kind of a spirit thing," says Kelan Phil Cohran, a founder of the organization and, at 87, an active musician in Chicago and around the world.
"It was — and is — about creating your own artistic presence. That was the primary goal. Nothing has value other than that."
The idea of forging a singular sound and musical personality always has been central to jazz, dating back to its first great composer-intellectual, Jelly Roll Morton, and its first genius improviser, Louis Armstrong — both of New Orleans.
But the AACM founders in Chicago conceived fiercely individualistic approaches to music under duress, for their world was imploding in the early 1960s.
"Chicago musicians had been employed seven days a week — we couldn't get a day off," recalls Cohran, who came to Chicago in 1953, when jobs were plentiful.
"And gradually, by degrees, it went down and down, until there was no work at all."
Club dates, dance-band gigs, R&B sessions and the like were evaporating in the early 1960s, because of shifting musical fashions, changing population patterns and discriminatory enforcement of cabaret licensing laws, as George Lewis outlines in his definitive study, "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music" (University of Chicago Press).
In response, the South Side musicians organized.
If clubs wouldn't hire them, they would present concerts themselves. If conventional jazz idioms of an earlier era were losing the public's attention, they'd create music they wanted to hear, whether there was an audience for it or not.
In 1962, Abrams formed the Experimental Band that included saxophonists Fred Anderson, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell and drummers Jack DeJohnette and Steve McCall (drawing inspiration from Sun Ra's Arkestra).
This was the cauldron from which the AACM would emerge, a gathering of musical free-thinkers eager to break free of bebop, hard bop, cool and other stylistic boxes into which jazz had been packaged, sold and confined.
By 1965, Abrams, Cohran, McCall, pianist Jodie Christian and recording secretary Sandra Lashley signed the articles of incorporation for the AACM, officially launching what would become a revolution in sound.
"We figured there was no place for us to be showcased, no place to be heard," Anderson told me in 1990, as the AACM was preparing to celebrate its 25th anniversary (he died in 2010 at age 81).
"Most of the clubs weren't too keen on booking the latest new music, and there weren't even that many clubs to begin with. So we decided to showcase ourselves, build an organization that would feature us, instead of waiting around for someone else to do it.
"It was really tough at first. Any time you're breaking ground and playing original music, you can expect resistance. But that was no problem, because the Chicago guys were used to that."
The Art Ensemble of Chicago was the first to trumpet the new movement around the world, conquering Europe in the late 1960s with its free-flowing improvisations, unconventional instrumentation, Afrocentric garb and African-inspired face-painting.
Nothing like this had been heard or seen in jazz, inspiring sold-out concerts and wide critical acclaim in Europe and, eventually, back home in the U.S.
Threadgill's band Air similarly seduced audiences foreign and domestic with its unusual melodic material and its translucent ensemble textures, inspiring a galvanic shift in audience expectations of what jazz could be.
"We had no idea the AACM would catch on as it did," Abrams told me in 1990. "We certainly didn't establish it to be some kind of important institution.
"We weren't looking for notoriety, or anything. If we had, it probably wouldn't have turned out that way.
"We simply were turning to each other for support, and that was all it took. The resources were within us."
No doubt the AACM wasn't the first such enterprise.
The Underground Musicians' Association, UGMA, in Los Angeles, and the Jazz Composers Guild, in New York, slightly predated it.
Something was in the air. But none of these groups, or others that followed, attained the impact and longevity of the AACM.
Exactly why the AACM flourished artistically — notwithstanding virtually no financial support from foundations or corporations — is open to debate. The ingenuity and virtuosity of the musicians, as well as Chicago's long-standing taste for the jazz avant-garde, surely were essential.
But there's another reason too: the intrepid spirit of the AACM pioneers, who had a particular kind of grit.
"The first-generation AACM founders were all children of the first wave of migrants to venture north," wrote Lewis in "A Power Stronger Than Itself."
Which meant that "all of these people that we are talking about came from very, very struggling environments," Jarman said in Lewis' book.
"Every one of them started out at the bottom — maybe not the flat bottom, but pretty close."
Related AACM's spirit endures in underground rock Music
AACM's spirit endures in underground rock See all related
These musicians, who started with so little, simply willed the AACM — and its philosophies and musical practices — into existence.
And the organization survived, "in part, because support of one's own career wasn't the highest value," Lewis told me when his book "A Power Stronger Than Itself" was published in 2008. "People were invested in supporting each other and are (still) invested in supporting each other."
Indeed, a communal spirit has defined the AACM since the beginning and, in fact, has served as a model for the unusually collegial Chicago jazz scene in general.
That's not to say that the AACM didn't have internal battles to be expected in any human endeavor.
"We've had hard times, families have broken up, love affairs have fallen apart," Chicago multi-instrumentalist Mwata Bowden told me in 1995, during the AACM's 30th anniversary celebrations. "But we have persevered, we have continued to look forward, we have moved the music all the way around the world."
Moreover, it's critical to understand that the AACM did not signify a particular sound, style, idiom or aesthetic.
Each AACM band — from Cohran's soulful Artistic Heritage Ensemble to Braxton's hyper-cerebral experiments — was distinct from the others.
The AACM simply gave these far-flung musical explorers a common spiritual home.
The connective tissue among the bands and musicians of the AACM, past and present, lies not in the sound of music that cannot be categorized, but in a philosophy of experimentation informed by African antiquity and innovative instrumental technique.
Thus the AACM's motto: "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future."
The past five decades have produced recordings of vast expressive and stylistic range, as well as lasting influence on other jazz demographics.
Would the innovations of Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark (another MacArthur Fellowship winner) and the North Side experimental scene he helped build have been possible without the AACM?
Would the cross-cultural innovations of Asian and Asian-American musicians such as Tatsu Aoki, Jeff Chan, Jon Jang and Francis Wong have flowered without the model and inspiration of the AACM? Seems doubtful.
Many of the early generation AACM players have left Chicago, with Threadgill spending a great deal of time in India, Abrams and Lewis based in New York, Nicole Mitchell in California.
Others have passed away, among them indelible figures such as trumpeter Lester Bowie, saxophonists Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre and Vandy Harris, bassist Charles Clark and violinist Leroy Jenkins.
But the music still thrives in the gifts of new generations of Chicago players such as trumpeter Corey Wilkes, singer Saalik Ziyad and performance poet Khari B, now chairman of the AACM.
Times change, but the AACM continues, surely fueled by what William Russo once told me was the "spiritual and moral underpinnings to their art."
Is that what Cohran, an AACM co-founder, hears in this music?
"It's there," Cohran says. "That's all the AACM played. When you play somebody else's music, you never will get that.
"To me, the greatest goal is to find a reservoir that provides you with this spirit."
The AACM was that reservoir, and 50 years later, it remains so.
Published on Jan 13, 2015
Jack DeJohnette: Made in Chicago
Henry Threadgill: alto saxophone, bass flute, bass recorder Roscoe Mitchell: soprano and alto saxophones, wooden flute Muhal Richard Abrams: piano Larry Gray: double bass, violoncello Jack DeJohnette: drums
With "Made In Chicago", an exhilarating live album, Jack DeJohnette celebrates a reunion with old friends. In 1962, DeJohnette, Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill were all classmates at Wilson Junior College on Chicago’s Southside, pooling energies and enthusiasms in jam sessions. Shortly thereafter Jack joined Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band, and Roscoe and Henry soon followed him. When Abrams cofounded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in 1965, DeJohnette, Mitchell and Threadgill were all deeply involved, presenting concerts and contributing to each other’s work under the AACM umbrella. Jack brought them together again for a very special concert at Chicago’s Millennium Park in August 2013, completing the group with the addition of bassist/cellist Larry Gray. The concert recording – featuring compositions by Roscoe, Henry, Muhal and Jack, plus group improvising - was mixed by Manfred Eicher and Jack DeJohnette at New York’s Avatar Studio. "Made In Chicago" is issued as the AACM begins its 50th anniversary year.
Jazz (Music Genre) AACM celebrates a golden anniversary by Howard Reich Chicago Tribune hreich@chicagotribune.com
Anthony Braxton performs on stage on Day 2 of Middelheim Festival 2013 at Park Den Brandt on August 16, 2013 in Antwerpen, Belgium. (Peter Van Breukelen, Redferns via Getty Images)
February 27, 2015 Chicago Tribune They changed the way we think about music
Fifty years ago, a group of South Side jazz musicians found themselves backed against a wall. Clubs were closing, radio stations were going pop, America's musical interests were shifting elsewhere: toward youth-oriented rock 'n' roll.
If these Chicago jazz artists had given in to inevitably changing musical tastes, jazz might have devolved into a nostalgia bath or succumbed to the commercial excesses of the fusion era that followed. Instead, the Chicago musicians who half a century ago created the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM, invented original musical languages, created intriguing new instruments, crafted novel ways of penning scores and otherwise defied long-standing presumptions about how music was supposed to be made.
AACM recordings: Bold ideas in sound
Because their work was steeped in the rituals of ancient Africa, as well as certain traditions of early New Orleans music, the AACM artists managed to convey a vast sweep of black cultural history — even as they were reinventing an art form. And though they didn't necessarily intend it, their breakthroughs opened the door to new ways of creating, staging and perceiving music.
Chicago and the rest of the musical planet will be celebrate the AACM's 50th throughout this year, a fitting response considering this organization's global profile and impact.
Pioneering AACM artists such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton (a MacArthur Fellowship winner) and Wadada Leo Smith (a Pulitzer Prize finalist) command international followings, as do AACM figures such as Nicole Mitchell, Kahil El'Zabar and George Lewis (another MacArthur Fellow).
AACM's spirit endures in underground rock
If early AACM bands such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Threadgill's Air carried the organization's banner to acclaim in Europe and beyond in the late 1960s and '70s, subsequent groups such as Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble, Ernest Dawkins' Live the Spirit Ensemble, Dee Alexander's Evolution Ensemble and El'Zabar's Ritual Trio continue to do so today.
But even an admirer of this majestic history might reasonably ask what exactly is the AACM? An organization? An attitude? A series of cultural practices?
Surely it's all of those, but also something more.
"It's really kind of a spirit thing," says Kelan Phil Cohran, a founder of the organization and, at 87, an active musician in Chicago and around the world.
"It was — and is — about creating your own artistic presence. That was the primary goal. Nothing has value other than that."
The idea of forging a singular sound and musical personality always has been central to jazz, dating back to its first great composer-intellectual, Jelly Roll Morton, and its first genius improviser, Louis Armstrong — both of New Orleans.
A growing list of AACM celebrations
But the AACM founders in Chicago conceived fiercely individualistic approaches to music under duress, for their world was imploding in the early 1960s.
"Chicago musicians had been employed seven days a week — we couldn't get a day off," recalls Cohran, who came to Chicago in 1953, when jobs were plentiful.
"And gradually, by degrees, it went down and down, until there was no work at all."
Club dates, dance-band gigs, R&B sessions and the like were evaporating in the early 1960s, because of shifting musical fashions, changing population patterns and discriminatory enforcement of cabaret licensing laws, as George Lewis outlines in his definitive study, "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music" (University of Chicago Press).
In response, the South Side musicians organized.
If clubs wouldn't hire them, they would present concerts themselves. If conventional jazz idioms of an earlier era were losing the public's attention, they'd create music they wanted to hear, whether there was an audience for it or not.
In 1962, Abrams formed the Experimental Band that included saxophonists Fred Anderson, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell and drummers Jack DeJohnette and Steve McCall (drawing inspiration from Sun Ra's Arkestra).
This was the cauldron from which the AACM would emerge, a gathering of musical free-thinkers eager to break free of bebop, hard bop, cool and other stylistic boxes into which jazz had been packaged, sold and confined.
By 1965, Abrams, Cohran, McCall, pianist Jodie Christian and recording secretary Sandra Lashley signed the articles of incorporation for the AACM, officially launching what would become a revolution in sound.
"We figured there was no place for us to be showcased, no place to be heard," Anderson told me in 1990, as the AACM was preparing to celebrate its 25th anniversary (he died in 2010 at age 81).
"Most of the clubs weren't too keen on booking the latest new music, and there weren't even that many clubs to begin with. So we decided to showcase ourselves, build an organization that would feature us, instead of waiting around for someone else to do it.
"It was really tough at first. Any time you're breaking ground and playing original music, you can expect resistance. But that was no problem, because the Chicago guys were used to that."
The Art Ensemble of Chicago was the first to trumpet the new movement around the world, conquering Europe in the late 1960s with its free-flowing improvisations, unconventional instrumentation, Afrocentric garb and African-inspired face-painting.
Nothing like this had been heard or seen in jazz, inspiring sold-out concerts and wide critical acclaim in Europe and, eventually, back home in the U.S.
Threadgill's band Air similarly seduced audiences foreign and domestic with its unusual melodic material and its translucent ensemble textures, inspiring a galvanic shift in audience expectations of what jazz could be.
"We had no idea the AACM would catch on as it did," Abrams told me in 1990. "We certainly didn't establish it to be some kind of important institution.
"We weren't looking for notoriety, or anything. If we had, it probably wouldn't have turned out that way.
"We simply were turning to each other for support, and that was all it took. The resources were within us."
No doubt the AACM wasn't the first such enterprise.
The Underground Musicians' Association, UGMA, in Los Angeles, and the Jazz Composers Guild, in New York, slightly predated it.
Something was in the air. But none of these groups, or others that followed, attained the impact and longevity of the AACM.
Exactly why the AACM flourished artistically — notwithstanding virtually no financial support from foundations or corporations — is open to debate. The ingenuity and virtuosity of the musicians, as well as Chicago's long-standing taste for the jazz avant-garde, surely were essential.
But there's another reason too: the intrepid spirit of the AACM pioneers, who had a particular kind of grit.
"The first-generation AACM founders were all children of the first wave of migrants to venture north," wrote Lewis in "A Power Stronger Than Itself."
Which meant that "all of these people that we are talking about came from very, very struggling environments," Jarman said in Lewis' book.
"Every one of them started out at the bottom — maybe not the flat bottom, but pretty close."
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AACM's spirit endures in underground rock Music
These musicians, who started with so little, simply willed the AACM — and its philosophies and musical practices — into existence.
And the organization survived, "in part, because support of one's own career wasn't the highest value," Lewis told me when his book "A Power Stronger Than Itself" was published in 2008. "People were invested in supporting each other and are (still) invested in supporting each other."
Indeed, a communal spirit has defined the AACM since the beginning and, in fact, has served as a model for the unusually collegial Chicago jazz scene in general.
That's not to say that the AACM didn't have internal battles to be expected in any human endeavor.
"We've had hard times, families have broken up, love affairs have fallen apart," Chicago multi-instrumentalist Mwata Bowden told me in 1995, during the AACM's 30th anniversary celebrations. "But we have persevered, we have continued to look forward, we have moved the music all the way around the world."
Moreover, it's critical to understand that the AACM did not signify a particular sound, style, idiom or aesthetic.
Each AACM band — from Cohran's soulful Artistic Heritage Ensemble to Braxton's hyper-cerebral experiments — was distinct from the others.
The AACM simply gave these far-flung musical explorers a common spiritual home.
The connective tissue among the bands and musicians of the AACM, past and present, lies not in the sound of music that cannot be categorized, but in a philosophy of experimentation informed by African antiquity and innovative instrumental technique.
Thus the AACM's motto: "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future."
The past five decades have produced recordings of vast expressive and stylistic range, as well as lasting influence on other jazz demographics.
Would the innovations of Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark (another MacArthur Fellowship winner) and the North Side experimental scene he helped build have been possible without the AACM?
Would the cross-cultural innovations of Asian and Asian-American musicians such as Tatsu Aoki, Jeff Chan, Jon Jang and Francis Wong have flowered without the model and inspiration of the AACM? Seems doubtful.
Many of the early generation AACM players have left Chicago, with Threadgill spending a great deal of time in India, Abrams and Lewis based in New York, Nicole Mitchell in California.
Others have passed away, among them indelible figures such as trumpeter Lester Bowie, saxophonists Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre and Vandy Harris, bassist Charles Clark and violinist Leroy Jenkins.
But the music still thrives in the gifts of new generations of Chicago players such as trumpeter Corey Wilkes, singer Saalik Ziyad and performance poet Khari B, now chairman of the AACM.
Times change, but the AACM continues, surely fueled by what William Russo once told me was the "spiritual and moral underpinnings to their art."
Is that what Cohran, an AACM co-founder, hears in this music?
"It's there," Cohran says. "That's all the AACM played. When you play somebody else's music, you never will get that.
"To me, the greatest goal is to find a reservoir that provides you with this spirit."
The AACM was that reservoir, and 50 years later, it remains so.
Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.
Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.
The following text is an excerpt from
A Power Stronger Than Itself The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis University of Chicago Press, 2008: The Development of the Experimental Band
Alternative Pedagogies of Experimental Music
For many musicians, the space race began not in 1957 with the Soviet Union’s launch of the satellite Sputnik, but in 1946, when the pianist Herman Blount came up on the train from Birmingham to Bronzeville. Soon after his arrival, Sonny (as he was called) landed a job with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra at the Club De Lisa on 55th and State, a gig that he held down until mid-1947, when the Red Saunders Band succeeded Henderson. Sonny stayed on, rehearsing the band and refashioning Saunders’s backup arrangements for singers like Laverne Baker, Dakota Staton, Joe Williams, and Sarah Vaughan. Blount founded his own band in 1950, with people like saxophonists Harold Ousley, Von Freeman, Earl Ezell (later Ahmad Salaheldeen), and John Jenkins, bassist Wilbur Ware, and drummer Vernel Fournier.
Sometime in 1952, Blount announced that the Creator had ordered him to change his name. He went downtown to the Circuit Court of Cook County and legally became “Le Sony’r Ra.” In addition, he registered a business under the name of “Sun Ra.” Most musicians in Chicago, however, still knew him as Sonny, one of the qualified musicians of the South Side’s musical community. As Jodie Christian remembers,
My first encounter with him, he was playing stride piano, working at the It Club on 55th and Michigan. He was a good pianist, playing conventional piano, stride. We were playing, and Sun Ra was playing as a single pianist, a cocktail piano player opposite us. He hadn’t become “Sun Ra” then. I never heard anybody say that they remember when he started to organize this type of band, the space band. All of a sudden, it was there.
In 1952 Sonny began to seek out younger musicians from Captain Dyett’s DuSable regime, including drummer Robert Barry and saxophonist Laurdine “Pat” Patrick, to form a group called the Space Trio. Eventually, Sun Ra’s band began to grow, with exciting young musicians such as trombonist Julian Priester; percussionist Jim Herndon; bassist Victor Sproles; trumpeters Art Hoyle, Hobart Dotson, and Dave Young; and saxophonists James Spaulding, John Gilmore, Charles Davis, and Marshall Allen. Sonny’s charisma, erudition, and creativity inspired the musicians, who regarded him as their mentor. As Marshall Allen observed, “Sun Ra taught me to translate spirit into music.”
Around this time, as Sonny’s compositional palette became richer, he coined the term “Arkestra” for his band. “That’s the way black people say ‘orchestra,’” he observed laconically. At the Arkestra’s daily rehearsals, Sonny began to explicitly connect his music with projects of identity, philosophy, historical recovery, and mysticism. He explored the role of black people in the creation of civilization, and maintained that music could both change individual moral values and affect the fate of the world. The titles of his pieces began to connect two major themes—the infinite, Ethiopianist Zion of outer space, and the African mothership of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Nubia.
As anthropologist and Ra biographer John Szwed has noted, with Sun Ra, “music often seemed to be the subtext for some grander plan, one not always clear to the musicians.” Whatever the plan, Jodie Christian saw at first hand that Sonny’s disciplined domination of the Arkestra was absolute.
One day he was playing at Budland and the whole band was there, but Sun Ra wasn’t there. So I told John [Gilmore] and them, why don’t y’all hit and Sun Ra can come in later? “Naw, we don’t hit till Sonny comes in.” Sonny comes in an hour later. He ran in, sat down at the piano, and the band took their seats. You know what he said? “Let that be a lesson.” So at the end of the set I asked John, what was the lesson? He said, I don’t know, but Sonny said it was.
Alvin Fielder met Ra while working a dance gig on the West Side in 1959. “He asked me where I was from, and I told him I was from Mississippi. So he said, ‘Look, man, I bet you can play some shuffles.’” Sonny invited Fielder to an Arkestra rehearsal. “I was way above my head. I thought I was playing well, but as I look back, I’m sure that I wasn’t. Anyway, Sunny invited me to join the band. So I did.” Fielder played with Ra in 1959 and 1960. “Of course, the money wasn’t that great. But then again, as I look back, I should have been paying him.” Late in 1960, Sun Ra’s spaceship, with John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, and Pat Patrick on board, blasted off from Chicago for points east, eventually landing in New York City in January 1961. By 1962, the composer and pianist was preparing for an important New York concert with his Cosmic Jazz Space Group.
Philip Cohran had been working with the Arkestra since John Gilmore had brought him to a rehearsal in 1958. For Cohran, Ra’s example “opened my world up as a composer. I had written a few songs of merit before I got with him, but he taught me the one thing that really made a difference in my life, and that is: whatever you want to do, do it all the time. Once I learned that, there was no looking back.”
All the same, Cohran decided not to climb aboard for the Arkestra’s New York foray. “When I left ‘The Society,’” Cohran remembered, “everybody thought I was crazy. When I told Sun Ra that I was going to deal with my own thing, and I quit the band, I started studying on my own. I said, I don’t need nobody else to tell me what to do, I’ll just go ahead and do it myself. So I started studying every day.” In fact, during this time, the possibility of challenging the societal status quo drew many African Americans toward independent research into historical and spiritual knowledge. Richard Abrams says that “I always had a keen interest for looking into the so-called ‘occult arts,’ Around '59 or '60 I really started getting into that. One of the first books I read was Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. It awakened something in me that needed awakening. I bought literature and bought literature, and ended up finding out about the Rosicrucians. I got in touch with them and hooked up with the Rosicrucians.”
As Abrams became known as one of Chicago’s up-and-coming pianist-composers, two musicians exercised a profound impact upon his musical direction. The composer, arranger, and trumpeter William E. “Will” Jackson, who had played with Jimmie Lunceford, lived down the street from Abrams, and began to informally teach the young pianist the craft of arranging and orchestration. Around 1955, Jackson introduced the young composer to pianist Walter “King” Fleming, perhaps the most important early local influence on Abrams’s piano improvisations. Abrams began to compose, arrange, and play for Fleming’s band. “Every so often,” Abrams remembers, “they would let me sit in at the piano, until I would make a mistake and they would tell me to get up. But they would put me back down there until I learned how to do it.” Attracting the attention of radio personality Daddy O’Daylie, Abrams, saxophonist Nicky Hill, bassist Bob Cranshaw, drummer Walter Perkins, and trumpeter Paul Serrano formed a band called the MJT+3. In 1957, the group’s first recording, Daddy-O Presents MJT+3, featured a number of Abrams compositions, including “No Name,” which was actually composed collaboratively by Abrams and Fleming.
Abrams was also moving further along the autodidact path that had led him away from the conservatory. “I could always make up music,” Abrams remembered, “but it was plain stubbornness. I wanted to do it my own way. Even as a kid, when I didn’t even know how to do it, I would rebel against the mainstream situation.” The search for a way of teaching himself led him to the pianist, composer, and arranger Charles Stepney, who introduced Abrams to Joseph Schillinger’s unusual system of musical composition. Stepney, a house arranger for Chess Records, was soon to apply Schillinger-related principles, along with ideas from composer Henry Cowell’s early text, New Musical Resources and the work of Gy÷rgy Ligeti, to his landmark work for Ramsey Lewis, the Dells, the Rotary Connection and Minnie Riperton, Phil Upchurch, Muddy Waters, and Earth, Wind, and Fire. Stepney introduced Schillinger’s books to Abrams, who ended up buying his own copies. Everywhere he went over the next four years, Abrams kept these two massive tomes at the ready, teaching himself the complete system and developing new ideas under its guidance.
Schillinger was a pianist, composer, and theorist who came to the United States from Russia in 1928. Something of a polymath, Schillinger collaborated on experimental electronic instrument design with fellow Russian expatriate Leon Theremin and Cowell, who wrote the foreword to Schillinger’s signal work, the 1,600-page Schillinger System of Musical Composition, first published in the mid-1940s. The elusive Schillinger Society published and distributed the system as two large, expensive books containing many detailed musical examples, and in 1945, former Schillinger student Lawrence Berk founded the Schillinger House of Music to carry on the master’s teachings. In 1954, the school changed its name to the Berklee School of Music, as its curriculum expanded to include genres outside the canon of pan-European classical music, most notably jazz.
Schillinger taught that a wide variety of expressive forms, including both tonal and post-tonal harmony, could be both generated and analyzed algorithmically using mathematical formulae. His system emerged alongside other mathematics-oriented formal methods that emerged in the mid-to-late 1940s, such as French composer Olivier Messiaen’s 1944 Technique de mon langage musical, and later, the integral serialism that developed in America, with the work of Milton Babbitt, and in Europe, in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Messiaen’s former student, Pierre Boulez. Schillinger’s work with graphic elements, which anticipated by more than a decade the stochasticism of Iannis Xenakis, seemed to be justified by the premise of Cowell’s “overture” to the first volume of the Schillinger system, which held out the promise of using the system to move beyond well-established musical methods that were appearing stiflingly hegemonic in some circles: “The currently taught rules of harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration certainly do not suggest to the student materials adapted from his own expressive desires,” Cowell wrote. “Instead he is given a small and circumscribed set of materials, already much used, together with a set of prohibitions to apply to them, and then he is asked to express himself only within these limitations.”
While serialism based its rule sets firmly on the chromatic scale, and bebop harmony revised Wagnerian chromaticism, the Schillinger system made few presumptions concerning materials. Rather, whatever materials were identified by the composer as salient—rhythmic, harmonic, timbral, melodic, dynamic—became the basis for further generation and transformation. Thus, as Cowell noted, “the Schillinger System offers possibilities, not limitations; it is a positive, not a negative approach to the choice of musical materials.” As such, the system was equally suited “to old and new styles in music, and to ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ composition.” For this reason, the Schillinger system soon attracted composers from Earle Brown to B. B. King. The explicit organicism of Schillinger’s Mathematical Basis of the Arts connected musical invention with forms active in the natural environment, advancing the basically synaesthetic proposition that gestures active in one art form could find explicit, ordered, primordial analogues in another.
Positing an explicit role for the religious and spiritual aspects of music, Schillinger’s ideas ran counter to modernism’s secularist ideal. As a budding painter who had already explored the synaesthetics of Kandinsky, Abrams was excited about Schillinger’s construction of a necessary, ordered connection between sound, sense, science, emotion, reason, and the natural world. These ideas resounded with Abrams’s own explorations of the connection between music and spirituality. “I was really educated now, in a big way,” Abrams exulted, “because I was impressed with a method for analyzing just about anything I see, by approaching it from its basic premise. The Schillinger stuff taught me to break things back down into raw material—where it came from—and then, on to the whole idea of a personal or individual approach to composition.”
While Abrams was beginning to get a foothold in the Chicago musical scene, Steve McCall left the city to join the U.S. Air Force. Eventually, his orders took him to Bangor, Maine, where he ran the service club. “The service being what it was, it was a typically bad experience,” his sister Rochelle recalled. “Somebody put a note on the door, ‘All Niggers, Coons and Nightfighters Be Off The Street By Midnight.’” McCall returned to Chicago in 1954, and found a job in the airline industry. During that time, he bought his first set of drums, and used free air travel passes to visit New York and Philadelphia, where he took drum lessons from Charles “Specs” Wright, who had animated the big bands of Dizzy Gillespie and Earl Bostic. Watching the styles of Marshall Thompson, Wilbur Campbell, James Pettis, and Vernel Fournier, among others, by 1960 McCall had become one of the most sought-after young drummers in Chicago.
Around that same time, Abrams was looking for an outlet for his new ideas, and an opportunity emerged to do just that in 1961, when “there was a group of mainstream guys that formed a band for cats to write charts and things. We were rehearsing at the C&C Lounge on Cottage Grove and 63rd. A cat named Chuck ran it. It was a great big old long place, with a stage up front. They had floor shows in there. Eddie Harris was a part of it, Marshall Thompson.” By 1960, the ad hoc, informal educational system of jazz, combining high-school band training, informal jam sessions, home schooling, and autodidacticism, had already produced some of the world’s most influential music. Even so, many experienced Chicago musicians were seeking ways to address the limitations of this model of learning. For instance, neither high-school ensemble classes nor jam sessions taught theory in a consistent way. Vibraphonist Emanuel Cranshaw describes one of the alternatives that some musicians pursued in the mid-1950s:
Cats like Chris Anderson used to have classes in this basement on 39th and Lake Park, the way Barry Harris used to do. He was playing with a guitar player, a cat named Leo Blevins. Leo wouldn’t do much teaching, it was mostly Chris. Cats would come by with notebooks and he’d get up and talk. All the cats that you know—Herbie [Hancock] would go down there, and [pianist] Harold Mabern. Muhal was probably down there too.
Jam sessions, as historian Scott DeVeaux observes, “did not test such crucial professional skills or specializations as sight-reading, leading a section, or the endurance required to be the high-note man in a trumpet section.” Moreover, competition-based models of music-making tended to relegate collectivity and solidarity among musicians to the background at a time when more collaborative notions of the relationship of community to individuality were being pursued in many segments of the African American community. Thus, there were practical reasons for creating an environment in which musicians could rehearse, teach, and exchange knowledge across generations, as Eddie Harris told an interviewer in 1994. “Trying to play around Chicago,” Harris explained, “you figured there are guys that never played first chair, there are guys that never played on a big band, and there are other guys that never had an opportunity to write for a large number of people, and there are people that wanted to sing, and sing in front of a band—so let’s form a workshop.”
Harris credits trumpeter Johnny Hines as cofounder of the workshop, which at first attracted over one hundred musicians: “You start meeting guys, like the late Charles Stepney . . . There became a group of us. Muhal Richard Abrams, Raphael [Rafael] Garrett, James Slaughter, [drummer] Walter Perkins, Bill Lee. There was a small group of us who were on the same wavelength in trying things . . . not just sit down and play an Ellis Larkins run or a Duke Ellington run . . . we all wanted to try some different things.” The C&C Lounge provided a minimal but absolutely vital initial infrastructure for the musicians. Chicago trumpeter William Fielder, the brother of Alvin Fielder, recalls that “the C&C Lounge was a school for young musicians. Chuck and Claudia, his wife (C&C), offered the musicians a wonderful musical opportunity. The club would be empty and Chuck would say, ‘Play for me.’” Eyes on the Sparrow: The First New Chicagoans
The C and C-based ensemble gradually developed a largely generational divide between musicians who wanted to develop the band in a more commercial direction, and others who wished to continue the radical explorations for which the group had been formed. As Eddie Harris recalled, “Johnny Hines tried to take the musicians more our age; he wanted to go into the Regal Theater so he could have a band to really accompany all the stars that come in there. Muhal had taken the younger musicians and let them learn in reading on scales and playing with each other.” After Harris left to pursue his fortunes from Exodus to Jazz, the rehearsal ensemble soon dissipated, but a new ensemble, consisting largely of the younger players who were gathering around Abrams, started regular rehearsals at the C&C. The ensemble, which gradually came to be known as the Experimental Band, became a forum for Abrams to test his new, Schillinger-influenced compositional palette. Abrams recalls simply, “I just gathered together some people around me, some younger guys, and started to keep things going.” Two of these “younger guys,” saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, played critically important roles in what was later to become the AACM. Mitchell and Jarman had not participated in the fast life of the 63rd Street jam sessions that had animated the young adult experiences of Abrams, Donavon, Favors, and Christian. For these two younger musicians, adulthood and musical maturity would come in the 1960s, a very different decade indeed.
Born in Chicago in 1940, Roscoe Mitchell grew up in the western part of Bronzeville. Like Favors’s, Mitchell’s parents were religious, and his uncle was the minister of a spiritualist church. “I used to really enjoy the music in the church,” Mitchell recalled. “At the time I wasn’t that interested in the sermons.” Since the 1930s, Washington Park had been a center of black South Side life, with tennis, softball, swimming, and horseback riding. As a young person, Mitchell often spent an entire day in the park, talking to older musicians and watching them as they practiced.
Jarman was born in 1937 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. His father left the family just as Joseph was born, and within a year his seventeen-year-old mother joined the Great Migration to Chicago, finding a job in the defense industry. Unlike virtually all of the early AACM musicians, Jarman lived on the largely white North Side, and attended an integrated school, Schiller Elementary, just down the street from his home. The family’s eventual move to Bronzeville, near 48th and St. Lawrence, was the occasion for considerable turbulence in Jarman’s new life at school. “I had a lot of trouble and a lot of fights,” Jarman explained, “because it was a completely different society, a different moral and ethical standard. Then we moved back to the North Side and I went back to Schiller. This is all in that puberty range, ten to fourteen years of age. When I went back to Schiller, I got in trouble because I had been so influenced by the other school. I became a ‘bad boy.’”
Jarman and Mitchell were thoroughly steeped in Hollywood-style popular culture. It cost nine cents to go to the movies, and Mitchell and his young friends would walk about two miles from 59th and State, crossing over the Bronzeville border to the white movie theater, the Southtown, on 63rd and Halsted. Mitchell and his family listened avidly to Chicago radio’s Al Benson and McKie Fitzhugh, as well as Symphony Sid’s New York–based shows. And then there was television, an important, even revolutionary force that had not been part of the growing-up process for Jodie Christian’s generation. Locally, Chicago’s Old Swingmaster, Al Benson, featured singers such as Joe Williams on his 1951 TV show, and the Mahalia Jackson Show appeared in 1955. At the national level, black performers, including the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Nat King Cole, Martha Davis, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Carmen McRae, Lionel Hampton, and Duke Ellington all appeared. In 1950, Hazel Scott had her own fifteen-minute TV show in New York, and in 1952, singer Billy Daniels became the first African American to have his own nationally sponsored television show.
However, as commercial television grew, so did the racism of its corporate leaders. By the late 1950s, the medium had resolved “to keep blacks off national television as much as possible.” Instead, television portrayed marvelous white people, living in sumptuous, yet not too ostentatious homes, driving new cars that never broke down (at least not for long), playing with their kids and friendly dogs, and tending crisply manicured lawns. Although for the 1950s black working class, TV was a prime portal through which white middle-class values and ideologies entered their lives, as George Lipsitz has observed, the exclusion of African Americans from full participation in white society meant that their culture was not completely permeated by the values and images of the dominant culture. In fact, very few blacks in Mitchell’s neighborhood owned or had access to a television set, and in “real life,” as Mitchell remembers, “We didn’t really have to look on TV for role models because they were all in our neighborhood.” African Americans of Mitchell’s generation regularly encountered blacks who did not conform to media stereotypes, allowing neighborhood residents to more easily detect and critique the social and political agendas embedded in the medium.
Through his aunt Mary and his uncle Preston, “the family renegades in Chicago,” Joseph Jarman was introduced to the Regal Theater, and to local nightclubs.
I would go there to play with my cousins, and I began to learn the names of these people—Lester Young, Charlie Parker, James Moody, Nat “King” Cole, Miles Davis. They would be playing this music every time I went there, but I didn’t know the name of the music; it was just pretty music. I knew all the singers—the popular music, but I was more drawn to this other music because you just listened, and what you heard was inside rather than words and rhythms that they would suggest through the popular forms.
In the mid-1950s, Mitchell’s family moved briefly to Milwaukee, where he started high school and began playing the clarinet. His brother Norman came to live with the family, bringing along a collection of 78 rpm jazz recordings—killers, they used to call them. Louis Armstrong, J. J. Johnson. Billy Taylor was very popular back then. Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins.” As with Jarman, this strange new music exercised a peculiar power over Mitchell. “For me that was a weird time,” Mitchell recalled, “because after I started listening to jazz I didn’t want to listen to anything else any more. There was a certain coolness that went along with that—you understood jazz, that made you cooler. After a while I went back to include all those other musics I had grown up with.”
Entering DuSable High School, Jarman was drawn to Captain Dyett’s band. His parents could not afford to buy him a trumpet, Jarman’s preferred instrument, so he joined the band as a snare drummer. “All you needed was a drum pad and drumsticks, which cost about six dollars. The drum I played belonged to the school, and I couldn’t take it home.” Another future AACM member living nearby, James Johnson, played bassoon in the Dyett band. Johnson and Jarman would practice together, eventually developing a unique daily schooltime lunch ritual: “We would go across the street every day, usually without very much lunch money, maybe fifty cents a day. We refused to eat in the lunchroom. We would go across the street and put a nickel apiece in the jukebox. We could hear three songs for a dime. We would always play this one song by James Moody, ‘Last Train from Overbrook.’ We would play that every day.” In addition to performance classes, the school’s version of music history recalled Abrams’s 1940s grammar school experiences:
They’d show these films of white operas and white orchestras, like Mozart’s music—Mozart was real big—Beethoven’s music, and Brahms. That would be a part of our musical education. The teacher would show it, then talk about it, and you’d write a little paper on it. This was music history, but it was never really appealing. It was nice, but it was so much nicer to be in the band room hearing that live stuff.
Mitchell characterizes those who went to DuSable during the Dyett era as “fortunate,” but even Englewood, where he went to high school, had its advantages. He began playing baritone saxophone in the high-school band, and borrowed an alto saxophone from another student. Jazz was not taught at Englewood, but getting to know the precocious saxophonist Donald “Hippmo” Myrick, who later became associated with both Philip Cohran and Earth, Wind, and Fire, made up for that lack. “He kind of took me under his wing, because he already knew the stuff,” said Mitchell. “He was a fully accomplished musician in high school.”
The historian Robin D. G. Kelley has raised the possibility that some future AACM members were radicalized in part by the challenges of military life—not only combat, but also the racism that was endemic to service in the U.S. armed forces. In 1955, in his junior year in high school, Jarman dropped out and joined the army. “I went into the Airborne school, and the Ranger school, because you could make extra money. I made it through basic training and jump school as number two, because they wouldn’t accept a black as number one.” The army was where Jarman started to play the alto saxophone: “I got out of ‘the line’—the death zone—by transferring to the band. The first saxophone I had was a plastic one, like Ornette Coleman. The bandmaster gave me thirty days to get my act together or he would kick me back into the line. In that band were a lot of people who helped me to get my act together.”
Mitchell joined the army in 1958. Army musicians had plenty of time to practice and exchange information, and Mitchell met a number of saxophonists, such as Nathaniel Davis, as well as fellow Chicagoans Ruben Cooper and Lucious White, Jarman’s neighbor as a young person. Mitchell also came into contact with Palmer Jenkins, Sergeant Mitchell, William Romero, and Joseph Stevenson, “who was incredible on the saxophone. He was a great influence on Anthony [Braxton] when Anthony was in the army.” Mitchell was eventually transferred to Heidelberg, Germany, where he frequented local jam sessions at places like the well-known Cave 54, where pianist Karl Berger, trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, saxophonist Bent Jaedig and other European and American musicians met and performed together. Hard bop was the coin of that realm, although Ornette Coleman’s music was beginning to make an impression. During this time, Mitchell met saxophonist Albert Ayler, who was in a different army band, stationed in France. After duty hours, Mitchell would go to sessions and listen to Ayler:
I didn’t really know what he was doing, but I did know, because I was a saxophonist, that he had an enormous sound on the instrument. They would have these sessions, and everybody was, you know, talking about him behind his back, but one time they played a blues. Albert played the blues about three choruses straight. After that he started stretching, and something went off in my head—Oh, I see what he’s doing now.” It made an impression on me.
In August 1958, Jarman was discharged. “It was not something I wanted to continue,” Jarman said, “because it was very anti-human, this attitude they were making people into.” After a brief visit home to Chicago, he experienced a kind of odyssey: “I went wandering around the United States. I went to Arizona. My aunt was there. I stayed there for eight months or so. I couldn’t talk during this period; I was mute. I went to the Milwaukee Institute of Psychiatric Research in Wisconsin, as an outpatient, and enrolled in the Milwaukee Institute of Technology. They got me to be able to talk again, and I haven’t shut my mouth since.”
After his discharge from the army, Mitchell felt that “it was pretty much set that I was going to be a musician.” With the support of his father, who offered to provide him with a place to stay, he decided to use his GI Bill funds to go to Chicago’s Woodrow Wilson Junior College in 1961, where he met Jarman for the first time. “Jarman was already into a contemporary-type bag when I met him. He was always a little bit out there, all the time.” The two musicians studied with Richard Wang, who was, according to Jarman, “very adventurous as far as ‘jazz’ music was concerned, as well as ‘classical’ music.” According to Wang himself, who has to be credited along with the redoubtable Walter Dyett in any history of the early AACM members, in addition to the standard lessons in theory, counterpoint, and keyboard harmony, the young musicians were exposed to the music of the Second Viennese School, as well as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. The standard texts included Paul Hindemith’s classic 1946 Elementary Training for Musicians, which later became an aspect of AACM autodidacticism. Other texts included Hindemith’s 1945 The Craft of Musical Composition and composer Arnold Schoenberg’s 1951 Style and Idea.
Wang’s students, who performed in jazz and classical ensembles, included Malachi Favors and saxophonists John Powell, Anthony Braxton, and Henry Threadgill, as well as Richard Brown, who was playing piano and clarinet, rather than the saxophone for which he became known years later under his adopted name of Ari. Friday afternoons were devoted to rehearsals that brought Wilson students together with the cream of Chicago’s musicians. Present at these events were people like Eddie Harris, Charles Stepney, drummers Steve McCall and Jack DeJohnette, bassists Betty Dupree and Jimmy Willis, pianist Andrew Hill, and several musicians who had been part of the Sun Ra Arkestra, including trumpeter Hobart Dotson and percussionists Richard Evans and Jim Herndon. In the meantime, Jarman, Favors, Threadgill, pianist Louis Hall, and drummer Richard Smith (now Drahseer Khalid) had formed their own group, playing hard bop.
One day in 1963, Roscoe Mitchell turned up at a rehearsal of the Experimental Band at the C&C Lounge, and met Richard Abrams, who had been introduced to the saxophonist by pianist-drummer Jack DeJohnette. Malachi Favors, an early member of the rehearsal band, remarked to Abrams how impressed he was by Mitchell’s playing. “Muhal kind of took me in,” Mitchell recalled. “I’d go to school, and I’d go straight from school to Muhal’s, when he was living in that little place off Cottage Grove, down in the basement. I remember he had painted everything that velvet purple color. Sometimes I’d be down over to Muhal’s at ten, eleven, twelve at night, playing or working on music.”
Soon, Mitchell and Favors began rehearsing together and developing new compositions, often with two other young experimentalists, trumpeter Fred Berry and drummer Alvin Fielder. Fielder was becoming aware that “there comes a point where you go from a notion of swinging and keeping a pulse to a notion of time being something different. . . . Sun Ra had always told me, ‘Al, loosen up,’ I didn’t know what he meant, really.” Looking for something different, Fielder visited New York for nearly a year in 1962, but somehow, the music being played by what he remembered as a “clique” of musicians from Boston, Detroit, and Chicago was not satisfying his growing urge to find another path. “I first started to loosen up after meeting Muhal,” Fielder said. Abrams was performing in a trio with Rafael Garrett and Steve McCall. Fielder replaced the peripatetic McCall, and began to meet musicians from a younger circle of experimentalists. “The first time I played in a so-called free group was with Roscoe,” Fielder noted. As he told writer Ted Panken, “Roscoe Mitchell came to a rehearsal I was doing with Muhal, Kalaparusha [Maurice McIntyre] and [trombonist and bassist] Lester Lashley. He just sat and listened, and asked me could I play free [laughs]. I said, ‘Yeah, I play free,’ So he invited me to a rehearsal with Freddie Berry and Malachi Favors. That’s how the original Roscoe Mitchell Quartet started.”
“The first compositions we played in Roscoe’s group were very much like Ornette’s music,” Fielder recalled. “I developed a philosophy there that I wanted to play my bebop as loose as possible and I wanted to play my free music as tight as possible.” Up to that point, Fielder had been playing around town with musicians like saxophonists Cozy Eggleston and Earl Ezell (later Ahmad Salaheldeen), and pianist Danny Riperton, the brother of singer Minnie Riperton. Now, he was in the process of crossing a personal, conceptual, and professional Rubicon, with a very different kind of music. Discovering at first hand the social dynamics of the “Inside/Outside” binary, Fielder noticed that “None of the bebop cats would call me any more, once I started working with Muhal and Roscoe.” Meanwhile, Mitchell was trying to get his friend Joseph Jarman to come down and play with the Experimental Band. As Jarman tells it,
Roscoe said, you oughta come, there’s this guy who’s got a rehearsal band down here. He’s a nice guy and he knows a lot about music. So I went down there and there was this guy, and he greets you like you were his brother or something. He said, welcome, and there were all these people in there, and I had to step back, because some of them were like famous people—local Chicago musicians, Jack DeJohnette, Scotty Holt, Steve McCall. And then this guy gave me an invitation whenever I felt like it to come by his house and get music lessons. He’d offer you herb tea and it would be so good,” Jarman recalled. “He was into herbology, astrology, painting, all this mystical stuff that I had dreamed of. It was like I had found a teacher.
After daily classes with the dedicated, expansive Wang, the young musicians would join the nightly throng at Peggy and Richard Abrams’s tiny basement apartment on South Evans, where they would explore musical, cultural, political, social, and spiritual ideas. Abrams’s range of experiences and interests deeply affected the young musicians. “Muhal’s place would always stay packed with people,” said Mitchell. “He’d have all this time for all these people, and still at the end of the week he’d come to the band with a big-band chart.”
Abrams’s leadership of the Experimental Band extended and revised the alternative pedagogical direction begun in 1961 at the C&C, with the ensemble functioning as a site for exchange, learning, and experimentation across generations: “The Experimental Band gave me a place to play this music I was writing, but the younger musicians couldn’t read the music, because it was too advanced for them. So I had to make up ways for them to play it, all these improvised ways for them to do stuff. I would have them learn a passage, do hand signals for them to play different things.” The collective-oriented atmosphere of the Experimental Band became a regular forum that recalled the spirit of Will Jackson and King Fleming. As Abrams affirmed, “The attention that they gave me and the help that they gave me awakened something in me that needed to extend out to other people. Whenever someone newer in the music scene would come along, I would always be willing to help if they sought my help, and I would always reflect back on the fact that those gentlemen helped me.”
With the Experimental Band, Abrams moved to create cooperative situations where musicians could both learn new ideas and techniques from others, and bring in their own music and hear it performed. Mitchell and Jarman soon started composing music under Abrams’s guidance. Jarman’s recollection was of an open situation where exploration would be encouraged:
He said, “Write whatever you want, and we’ll look at it.” There was no judgment thing. We might say thumbs down or thumbs up individually or personally, but no one would ever say that publicly. I might bring a piece in and they’ll play it. They won’t say whether they like it or not but they’ll do their darnedest to play it as best as they could. Underneath they might have been saying, “What does this guy think he’s doing?” Or, “Wow, thumbs up.” But still they would do it.
Mitchell’s narrative points up how the composer-centered aspect of the AACM can be seen to emerge directly from Abrams’s encouragement. “I was getting my writing chops together,” said Mitchell, “and he [Abrams] always encouraged people to write, write, write. He was showing us all of these different compositional methods. He always had a deep appreciation for all kinds of music, and studied all kinds of music. He had a lot to draw on, and he passed it on freely to the people that wanted to learn that.” The new musical resources that were being explored were by no means limited to composition. New ideas and ways of thinking about structure in improvisation were also being hammered out. As Jarman told an interviewer in 1967, Abrams would say, “Don’t just think about what you’re playing when you’re playing a solo—think about what came before and what’s going to come after.”
Typically, however, Abrams minimizes the extent of the contact between himself and the younger musicians to a single crucial encounter. Abrams remembers that his initial advice to Mitchell concerning composition was to “write down what you’re playing on your horn. He proceeded to do that—that’s where ‘Nonaah and stuff like that comes from—and he’s never looked back since, and we never discussed composition any more.”
“That’s not really true,” said Mitchell. “He would always be turning people on to books, and talking about scores. Maybe he just doesn’t realize the effect that he had on people’s lives.” In fact, the young musicians were in constant, almost daily contact with Abrams. Saxophonist Gene Dinwiddie, an original AACM member, remembers that “Everybody was following him around like little puppies.”
Since their founding by a group of forward-thinking jazz musicians that included pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran, the AACM have been a force for innovation within the jazz community. The Chicago-based organization is a registered nonprofit organization dedicated, according to the AACM statement, "to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music." In the '60s and especially the '70s, the AACM were widely acknowledged as being in the forefront of experimental jazz. Early AACM members such as Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, and the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famadou Don Moye, and Malachi Favors) created music that would have creative implications that reached far beyond the city of Chicago. Their motto is "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future." Although there is not one typical AACM artist, it can be said that their membership in general has attempted to transcend common practice by absorbing into their work various influences lying outside the jazz domain (African indigenous musics and European classical forms, for example).
Sound
The AACM grew out of a rehearsal band led by Muhal Richard Abrams in 1962. The group, known informally as the Experimental Band, never performed, but existed to read down scores written by Abrams, Cohran, DeJohnette, Jarman, Mitchell, Troy Robinson, and Maurice McIntyre, among others. Many of the band's writers employed compositional techniques taken from contemporary classical music -- serialism, polytonality, and chromaticism. The group's first rehearsals were held in a South Side tavern, but the band eventually moved to Abraham Lincoln Center, one of the city's oldest settlement houses. Obviously inspired by a high level of creativity and frustrated by a lack of performance opportunities, Abrams, Christian, Cohran, and McCall instigated the formation of a cooperative that would produce concerts, and opened membership to their cohorts in the Experimental Band. In May of 1965, the AACM were chartered by the state of Illinois as a nonprofit organization. Six groups comprised the original AACM: Christian's hard bop quintet; Cohran's Artistic Heritage Ensemble; the Experimental Band; and the groups of Robinson, Jarman, and Mitchell. The next year, Delmark recorded Mitchell's band. The resulting album, Sound, was the first of many to come out of the AACM.
In addition to their function as a concert producer, the AACM run a free training program for inner-city youth. The AACM School of Music offers instruction on all instruments and vocals, as well as classes in music theory. The faculty is made up entirely of AACM members, many of whom are themselves graduates of the program. Although the cooperative's influence in the jazz world waned a bit in the '80s and '90s, affiliated artists continued to produce bold and compelling music. Newer members like saxophonist/composer Edward Wilkerson, percussionist Kahil El-Zabar, and saxophonist Ari Brown continued the AACM's tradition of high creative achievement.
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians Abbreviation AACM Predecessor Experimental Band Formation May 1965 Founder Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, Phil Cohran Type Non-profit organization Purpose Support and encourage jazz performers, composers and educators Location Chicago, Illinois Region USA Official language English Key people Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette Main organ A Power Stronger Than Itself: The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians Affiliations Black Artists' Group Endowment MacArthur Foundation Mission "to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music"
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is a non-profit organization, founded in Chicago, Illinois, United States, by pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran. Early members included Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Amina Claudine Myers, Adegoke Steve Colson, Chico Freeman, George Lewis and the Art Ensemble of Chicago: Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famoudou Don Moye, and Malachi Favors. The AACM is devoted "to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music," according to its charter. It supports and encourages jazz performers, composers and educators.
Contents 1 Background 2 Members 3 References 4 Further reading 5 External links Background
The AACM was formed in May 1965 by a group of musicians centered on pianist Muhal Richard Abrams who had organized an Experimental Band since 1962. The musicians were generally steadfast in their commitment to their music, despite a lack of performance venues and sometimes indifferent audiences. From 1969 the AACM organised a music education program for inner-city youths.[1] In the 1960s and 1970s AACM members were among the most important and innovative in all of jazz, though the AACM's contemporary influence has waned some in recent years. Many AACM members have recorded widely: in the early days on the Delmark Records Avant Garde Jazz series and later on the Black Saint/Soul Note and India Navigation labels, and to a lesser extent on the Arista Records and ECM labels.[2]
The musical endeavors of members of the AACM often include an adventurous mixing of avant-garde jazz, classical, and world music. The AACM also ran a school, The AACM School of Music, with classes in all areas taught by members of the AACM. The AACM also had a strong relationship with an influential sister organization, the Black Artists' Group (BAG) of St. Louis, Missouri. The AACM has received aid from the MacArthur Foundation and has a strong relationship with Columbia College. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians by George Lewis, has been published by the University of Chicago Press (May 2008).[3] Members Muhal Richard Abrams Fred Anderson Renee Baker Harrison Bankhead Mwata Bowden Lester Bowie Anthony Braxton Billy Brimfield Jodie Christian Phil Cohran Adegoke Steve Colson Iqua Colson Pete Cosey Ernest Dawkins Kahil El'Zabar Douglas Ewart Malachi Favors Alvin Fielder Chico Freeman Aaron Getsug Fred Hopkins Joseph Jarman Leroy Jenkins George Lewis Steve McCall Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre Nicole Mitchell Roscoe Mitchell Don Moye Amina Claudine Myers Reggie Nicholson Jeff Parker Avreeayl Ra Matana Roberts Wadada Leo Smith Isaiah Spencer Henry Threadgill Edward Wilkerson References
Litweiler, John (1984). The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958. Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-80377-1. Delmark.com Chinen, Nate (May 2, 2008). "Four Decades of Music That Redefined Free". The New York Times. Retrieved June 7, 2012.
Further reading
Lewis, George E. (2008). A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226477037. Reich, Howard. (March 1, 2015) Revolution in sound. Chicago Tribune. section 4, page 1. Kot, Greg. (March 1, 2015) AACM's spirit endures in underground rock. Chicago Tribune. section 4, page 1.
External links
AACM official site
A 1996 paper by a Kenyon College student: The Sixties, Chicago, and the AACM Retrospective profile of group in the New York Times May 2008 Review essay on A Power Stronger Than Itself at Sweet Pea's Ghost Dance and Music Review PHOTOS OF CHARTER AACM MEMBERS FROM THE LEGENDARY AND ICONIC GROUP KNOWN AS THE ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO:
Roscoe Mitchell Lester Bowie Joseph Jarman Malachi Favors and Don Moye
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
