In light of the recent passing of Joseph Jarman, below is a selection of an essay by this blogger about the Art Ensemble of Chicago and AACM. Rest in peace...
Founded in 1965, AACM,
under Muhal Richard Abrams’s guidance and direction, connected a number of
African American musicians looking for new opportunities and alternatives to
the commodification of black creative music. A number of similar jazz
collectives dedicated to communitarianism arose in St. Louis, Los Angeles, and
other cities around the same time, including the Black Artist Group, which
often collaborated with AACM. AACM then established a voting system and
structure which also defined itself in relation to Chicago’s South Side, as
well as a commitment to creative music.[2] According
to George E. Lewis, AACM’s communitarian ethos also included collaborations
with a number of other cultural organizations among African Americans,
particularly Jeff Donaldson’s collective of black artists who explored African
and African American styles for a distinct black aesthetic.[3] Moreover,
members of AACM also retained connections with the Organization of Black
American Culture and the Affro-Arts Theater through Phil Cohran, an early
member invested in promoting black cultural heritage through music and theater.[4] Cohran’s
involvement with the community-based Affro-Arts Theater attracted Gwendolyn
Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, and Stokely Carmichael while contributing to culture building
with music, dance, and classes for women, men, and children.[5] Indeed,
Ronald Michael Radano observed, “The AACM’s achievement as a stable, working
organization could not have come about without a strong commitment from its
membership, and that commitment surely would not have developed without
inspiration from the black-rights movement.”[6] Without
the atmosphere of black activism and a political climate demanding
self-determination, self-definition, and self-reliance, the AACM may not have
been born or survived to become a fixture of Black Chicago music and culture.
In Chicago, Sun Ra and
his Arkestra in the 1950s took jazz into different directions like the
aforementioned artists. Adding his interests in Afrofuturist and ancient
African history references and early use of electric instruments for his
soundscape, Sun Ra’s Arkestra included Phil Cohran, who later became a member
of AACM.[7] Sun
Ra’s band also used costumes, theatrical components to performances, space
chants, multiple drums, and a larger mythos of “Great Black Music” which
encompassed African, Latin, African American, Asian, and European styles.
“India” from the Arkestra’s Super-Sonic Jazz, for instance,
experiments with electric piano, exotica, and the eclecticism found in the
works of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. However, Art Ensemble members usually
cited the influence of Albert Ayler, Coltrane, or Cecil Taylor rather than Sun
Ra.[8] Age
differences as well as Sun Ra’s move to New York in 1960 resulted in him having
less influence upon AACM. Furthermore, during his Chicago years, Sun Ra was a
more conventional player who did not embrace atonality and free-form structures
as he famously did in later decades.[9] However,
his use of extramusical art forms of performance and visual art, in addition to
esoteric writings, aesthetic spirituality, and embrace of African history
shaped the course of Chicago jazz musicians just as it reflected larger
Afro-modernist sensibilities of jazz musicians elsewhere.
Significantly, the
authoritarian structure of the Arkestra also distinguished it from AACM and Art
Ensemble. The participatory and egalitarian organization of AACM differed from
the extreme practices of Sun Ra, who often punished Arkestra members who
disobeyed his absolute authority.[10] Punishment
sometimes took the form of house arrest, sometimes physical force for those who
disobeyed his rules of conduct, which included prohibition of drugs, alcohol,
cavorting with women, or missing rehearsals.[11] The
Arkestra’s communal living further distinguished AACM and Sun Ra, although the
cooperative economics practiced by Art Ensemble of Chicago as a result of their
time spent in France shows a shared value of solidarity.[12] Furthermore,
Sun Ra’s Arkestra did not permit membership of women except for vocalists. Even
then, June Tyson was subject to occasional exclusion and women instrumentalists
were not used. Even the Jazz Composer’s Guild, a short-lived organization of
avant-garde artists in New York City, fell apart partly due to Sun Ra’s
opposition to Carla Bley’s membership and the question of interracial
collaboration on equal terms.[13] Thus,
Sun Ra’s views on gender limited a more democratic cooperative of jazz musicians.
Like Africobra, Art
Ensemble of Chicago is a collective, and sought to connect their creative music
to a tradition of “Great Black Music.” The group similarly incorporated a vast
array of African, African American, and Caribbean musical traditions and styles
into their sound. “Ja,” from their 1979 release, Nice Guys, uses
a reggae rhythm and Jamaican accents in the vocals, for instance. “Theme de
Yoyo” from Les Stances A Sophie, featuring then-wife of Lester
Bowie, Fontella Bass, used funk musical features within an utterly unique Art
Ensemble of Chicago aesthetic. With Bass singing over a funky bassline, the
rest of the band maintain an unstable groove that threatens to fall apart
despite its repetition, retaining avant-garde tonalities and hinting at free-form
structures within a funk vamp. Art Ensemble of Chicago similarly used the blues
form as homage to black musical traditions and Chicago’s history. “Bye Bye
Baby” from Certain Blacks is a blues with harmonica, but
retains space for individual expression of avant-garde soloing. The titular
song from 1970 LP Certain Blacks includes Chicago Beau as well
as lyrics on black individual expression, asserting “Certain blacks do what
they wanna.” This can be interpreted as not only a reference to Black militancy
of the time, but a defense of individual and group difference against black or
white critics and conformists opposed to Art Ensemble of Chicago’s eclectic
tastes and presentation. Trumpeter Lester Bowie, for example, defended the Art
Ensemble’s musical expansiveness against Wynton Marsalis because they embraced
tradition and the future rather than remaining stuck playing the same chord
changes of the bop era.[14] “Get
In Line,” another composition with lyrics, is a critique of the French critics
who only perceived the band in terms of racial politics and exoticism, not as
creative artists.[15]
Some members, such as
Famoudou Don Moye and Malachi Favors Maghostut, used face paint and body art to
add a visual component to the band’s performances. Lewis argues that the use of
masks, body paint, a variety of “little instruments,” and the
multi-instrumental virtuosity of the band created an assemblage of sounds and
textures.[16] The
face paints, masking, and African dress additionally emphasized the role of
musicians within many African cultures as a seer or griot. Like Phil Cohran’s
Artistic Heritage Ensemble, which connected themselves to the griot tradition
of West Africa, Art Ensemble of Chicago used African signifiers to affirm the
communitarian ethos of AACM and reflect their understanding of Black
Aesthetics.[17] Becoming
an assemblage, or a multi-layered approach to music and art within a collective
that tied itself to community support, education, and celebrating African
American culture and history, Art Ensemble resembles Africobra. Art Ensemble of
Chicago also reinterpreted familiar materials from popular culture, like
Africobra.[18] Both
groups used an assemblage of poetry, jazz, face paint, and musical styles from
popular music or the past to world music.
However, the concept of
“Great Black Music” or a “Black Aesthetic” was never defined in narrow or
essentialist terms, which allowed for individual expression in both groups. Art
Ensemble, for instance, included a diversity of performance attire and musical
styles in their performances, as well as incorporating aspects of European and
world music into their repertoire. Lewis describes Art Ensemble of Chicago’s
sonic, visual, and multi-media diversity as a way of asserting a particular
black cultural identity within a universal medium, music.[19] The
performative aspects, individual stylistic variations, cooperation as a unit,
and cooperative economics allowed the group to persist, particularly when the
band resided in France.[20] As
Kelley suggests, the use of poetry, humor, painting as well as other elements
of the Art Ensemble’s performances and recordings affirm a radically different
structure of a jazz band that contributed to the Black Arts Movement without
being overtly political or essentialist.[21] Indeed,
there may also be elements of Afrofuturism in Art Ensemble’s allusions to
futurity in their slogan or Lester Bowie’s lab coat worn during performances. As
a result of combining futurity and tradition, Art Ensemble’s revision of the
past and imagining of the future endeavors to resist traditionalism. By
resisting the traditional jazz-oriented club performances, they also asserted
black self-definition and self-determination to resist commodification of their
art form. Thus, in spite of Amiri Baraka and Frank Kofsky’s interpretation of
free jazz as linked to black nationalism, Art Ensemble shows a more nuanced
portrait of the jazz avant-garde’s support of black cultural aesthetics and
community art without necessarily following the narrower forms of black
cultural nationalism.
In short, AACM and the
Art Ensemble of Chicago exemplify a form of Chicago Black Arts Movement
aesthetics that eschews essentialist notions of identity, undemocratic
organizations, and commodified art removed from communities. Drawing on earlier
generations of jazz activism and aesthetic sensibilities which encouraged the
Civil Rights era, Art Ensemble of Chicago champions an innovative performance
style within a black aesthetic favoring individuality through the collective.
Like Glissant’s metaphor of the rhizome for explaining identity without
grounding black cultural movements in a totalitarian or singular root, they
respect black musical traditions and heritage, but also retain visions of the
future in sight. The sense of individual expression is not lost, lending
credence to Glissant’s notion of identity through relation as each member of
the collective shapes and refines the other. Jeff Donaldson and the members of
Africobra practiced a similar approach to black cultural identity and the
visual arts. Donaldson’s TransAfrican aesthetic, which combines elements of
jazz and popular culture, and African art forms, shares the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s
rhizomatic model of cultural and artistic expression. The democratic form of
these two groups likewise contributed to their longevity because members were
able to express their own unique styles, pursue their own ideas of performance,
and retain connections with the communities they seek to serve.
[1] Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our
Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2017) 32.
[2] George E. Lewis, “Expressive Awesomeness:
New Music and Art in Chicago 1965-75,” in The Freedom Principle:
Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 116.
[3] Clovis E. Semmes, “The Dialectics of
Cultural Survival and the Community Artist: Phil Cohran and the Affro-Arts
Theater,” Journal of Black Studies 24, no. 4 (1994): 449.
[5] Radano, New Musical Figurations:
Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press), 91.
[6] Clovis E. Semmes, “The Dialectics of
Cultural Survival and the Community Artist: Phil Cohran and the Affro-Arts
Theater,” 452.
[7] George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger
Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), 160.
[10] Paul Szwed, Space Is the Place:
The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997),
117-118.
[12] Benjamin Piekut, "New Thing? Gender
and Sexuality in the Jazz Composers Guild." American Quarterly 62,
no. 1 (2010): 25-48, 37.
[13] Nanette de Jong, “Women of the Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians: Four Narratives” in Black
Women and Music: More than the Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2007), 135.
[15]
[18]
[20] Kelley, “Dig they Freedom: Meditations on History and the Black Avant-Garde,” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 3 (1997): 21.
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