At the end of this past November, ECM released a 21-CD box set with an accompanying 300-page booklet entitled The Art Ensemble of Chicago [AEC] and associated ensembles. By the time ECM recorded this group’s album in 1978, it had established itself as the most significant ensemble to emerge from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in 1965 to serve as a Chicago “response” to the avant-garde “call” from New York sources such as the “New York School” of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. (Major individuals to come out AACM included composer/performers such as Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill.)
My own first encounter with AEC did not take place until the second half of the Eighties. I was living in Los Angeles at the time; and KPFK ran a program on Saturday mornings that went a long way towards stimulating my tastes for what I now call the “bleeding edge.” (It also convinced me that there was far more to the avant-garde than I had been getting from John Schaffer’s New Sounds programs on WNYC in New York!) I suspect that, when it came to going over the top as wildly as possible, the only precedent for AEC that I could imagine was Sun Ra and the Arkestra groups he had formed. Fortunately, AEC visited Los Angeles while I was living there, giving a concert in Royce Hall at the University of California at Los Angeles. So, as had been the case with my Ra encounters, I had a good opportunity to appreciate the group as a visual, as well as auditory, experience.
AEC members Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors (Maghostut,) Lester Bowie, and (Famoudou) Don Moye (photograph by Ralph Quinke, courtesy of ECM Records)
The ECM release consists of eighteen albums, three of which consist of two CDs. They involve both studio sessions and concert recordings, the latter usually including wildly appreciative audience responses. However, only five of those albums show up in the Discography list on the AEC Wikipedia page, hence the need for the conjunction in the full title for the collection.
Four of the albums were produced under Bowie’s name, with another four under Mitchell’s. There is also an album by Wadada Leo Smith, another AACM member. Smith never played with AEC; but one of the three tracks on this album, “Tastalun,” is dedicated to Bowie, who appears as “guest artist” on that track. Then there is the “Transatlantic Art Ensemble” album that brings Mitchell together with British avant-garde saxophonist Evan Parker. Finally, the collection closes with three Jack DeJohnette albums. While my own first encounter with DeJohnette was at the Village Vanguard, he is an AACM member. He is joined by Bowie on two of the albums and by Mitchell on the third.
Thus, what we have amounts to a “historical record” of how Chicago-based avant-garde practices both emerged and dispersed over a period of about 35 years. AEC figures in the first 23 years of that period, concluding with a 2001 tribute album for Bowie, how had died in 1999. However, as early as 1981, Bowie was beginning to venture off into directions of his own (some of which involved some retrospective speculations that manage to be both affectionate and funny at the same time). For his part, Mitchell collaborates with not only Parker but also, in a 2007 session, with two pianists familiar to ECM listeners, Craig Taborn and Vijay Iyer. In other words, rather than being just a “chronological history,” the collection amounts to a narrative, which is as fascinating for the agents involved in that narrative as it is for the music-making actions they take.
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