Great Black Music: The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the AACM
Sometime in 1969 an advertisement appeared in the Chicago Defender. It read: "Musician Sells Out!"
The musician was Lester Bowie, and the joke was his. He had spent years doing well in Chicago as a studio trumpet player, cutting sessions and jingles and rock and roll dates, married to Fontella Bass, whose "Rescue Me" had gone to number one on the R&B chart in 1965. He was, by his own account, bored senseless. So he took the standard accusation thrown at any musician who chases money and inverted it. He was selling out of the paying work and into the avant-garde, and he meant it literally: he and Bass put the contents of their apartment up for sale to fund the move.
On 28 May 1969, Bowie, Bass, saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman and bassist Malachi Favors boarded the ocean liner S.S. United States bound for France. A French promoter would shortly append two words to the group's name and make them, permanently, the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
What the group was carrying with them was three years of recorded work already behind them and a set of ideas about music that had been worked out in Chicago's South Side. The organisation those ideas came out of was called the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and it is still going sixty years later.
Sound
In August 1966, over two days at Sound Studios on North Michigan Avenue, Bob Koester recorded a sextet led by Roscoe Mitchell for his Delmark label. Stu Black engineered. Chuck Nessa, then working for Koester, supervised. The album was called Sound.
Mitchell played alto saxophone, clarinet and recorder. Lester Bowie played trumpet, flugelhorn and harmonica. Maurice McIntyre was on tenor, Malachi Favors on bass, Alvin Fielder on percussion, and Lester Lashley played both trombone and cello. Nobody in 1966 was putting a cello and a harmonica on a jazz record and treating both as serious voices.
"Ornette" opens, a nod to the man who had opened the door five years earlier, and it is the most conventionally energetic thing here: horns blaring over volatile percussion, Favors chasing the tempo. "The Little Suite" is where it gets strange. Bowie leads on harmonica. Mitchell answers with a recorder pitched so high it sets your teeth on edge. There is a güiro scraping somewhere underneath while Lashley's cello winds around Favors's bass.
Then the title track, twenty minutes of it, and this is the piece that changed what was possible.
There is no walking bass. There is no ride cymbal keeping time. Instruments enter, state something, and stop. Long stretches pass where almost nothing sounds, and the silence is plainly composed rather than accidental. Ornette Coleman had taken harmony apart and Cecil Taylor had done something comparable to the piano, but "Sound" goes after the pulse itself, and after the assumption that a jazz record ought to be continuously full.
The thing people get wrong about it is thinking it was improvised out of thin air. Alvin Fielder was clear on this. The music was rehearsed, he said, four or five days a week. Mitchell's own description of the method is the useful one. The musicians were free to make any sound they thought would do, any sound they heard at that particular moment. If someone felt like stomping on the floor, he stomped on the floor.
Wadada Leo Smith later made the point that the title was not casual. Sound, not pitch. That was the difference.
It was the first record any AACM member made.
Where the sound came from
The Association had been chartered in Chicago the year before, in May 1965, by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall and trumpeter Phil Cohran. What it grew out of matters more than the paperwork.
Abrams had been running a rehearsal ensemble since around 1961, usually called the Experimental Band. It barely performed in public. It existed so that musicians could write something, bring it in, and hear it played, working through ideas. It rehearsed at a South Side tavern and later at the Abraham Lincoln Centre.
Nearly everyone came through it. Mitchell, Jarman, Favors, Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill had already crossed paths in the music programme at Wilson Junior College. Bowie turned up at a rehearsal, took a solo, and by his account had Mitchell on the phone before he got home. Threadgill, invited in as a student, has described it as a rehearsal workshop rather than a band.
Two rules from that room did more to shape the music than any statement of principles. Members played their own compositions rather than standards. And if you brought a piece in, you wrote a part for everybody present.
That second rule is why so much AACM music sounds the way it does. If eleven people turned up and one of them had brought a cello and another had brought a bass saxophone, the composition had to make room for both. Odd instrumentation was not an aesthetic choice imposed from above. It was a practical consequence of a rule about fairness, and it produced something amazing.
The organisation also ran a free music school from 1967, taught by members, which is where trombonist George Lewis and multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart came in. Threadgill's summary of the teaching remains the best one. There was no AACM school, he has said. Everybody in it was a school.
The Delmark and Nessa years
For a group of musicians with no commercial prospects whatsoever, they got documented extraordinarily well, and it comes down to two men in Chicago.
Koester had built Delmark on blues and traditional jazz and had no obvious reason to record any of this. He did it anyway. After Sound came Jarman's Song For, Abrams's Levels and Degrees of Light, Braxton's Three Compositions of New Jazz and Maurice McIntyre's Humility in the Light of the Creator. That is most of the early AACM discography on one small independent label.
Chuck Nessa left Delmark in 1967 to start his own imprint, largely because Mitchell and Bowie kept telling him to. His first release was Numbers 1 & 2, recorded on 11 and 25 August 1967. It went out under Bowie's name because Mitchell was still contracted to Delmark, but the quartet on it, Bowie, Mitchell, Favors and Jarman, is the Art Ensemble two years before the name existed.
Song For
Jarman's debut was cut at Sound Studios in 1966 and released on Delmark in 1967, and the band is worth naming in full: Jarman on alto saxophone and voice, Fred Anderson on tenor, Bill Brimfield on trumpet, Christopher Gaddy on piano and marimba, Charles Clark on bass, with Steve McCall and Thurman Barker splitting the drum chair.
"Little Fox Run" opens, "Adam's Rib" and the long title piece fill out the rest. But the record turns on its second track, a fourteen-minute piece called "Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City", and it is one of the most striking things anyone in this scene recorded.
It starts with a brief saxophone statement, a nervous bass figure and a short burst of drums from Barker. Then everything drops away and Jarman begins to recite. Anderson and Brimfield sit the track out entirely, so it is just Jarman's voice over Gaddy's piano, which lands in dark clusters, and Clark's bass, which is spacious and deliberate and does an enormous amount of work in very little space. Whistles and a triangle appear at the edges. Jarman's text moves between references to Dada and hard observations about city life, education, race and power, and it circles back over and over to a demand to be seen, to be acknowledged as existing at all. It is one of the earliest sustained spoken word performances in this music.
Christopher Gaddy was 24 when he died in March 1968. Song For is the only record he ever made. Charles Clark was 24 when he died in April 1969, thirteen months after Gaddy. He was among the youngest people in the AACM and is on three of the essential early records: this one, Abrams's Levels and Degrees of Light and Jarman's follow-up.
Listen to Song For knowing that and the record changes shape. Gaddy's playing is patient and slightly withholding, a young pianist who has decided that leaving things out is more interesting than filling them in. Clark's bass on the recitation is the emotional spine of the whole side. Jarman's next album carried a piece titled "Song for Christopher". After Clark died, Jarman folded his band entirely and went to work with Mitchell, Bowie and Favors, which is how the Art Ensemble acquired its second saxophonist.
Two tragic deaths, thirteen months apart, and a group's whole direction changed.
Levels and Degrees of Light
Abrams waited three years after founding the AACM before making a record under his own name, which tells you something about the man. When he did, in two sessions during 1967, he handed most of the space to people twenty years younger.
The title track is a surprise. Abrams does not play piano on it. He plays clarinet, over nothing but Thurman Barker's cymbals and Gordon Emmanuel's vibraphone, following an eerie wordless melody sung by the classically trained vocalist Penelope Taylor. It is closer to chamber music than to jazz and it sounds like almost nothing else from 1967.
Side two is "The Bird Song", and it is a proper epic. Abrams's clarinet doubles Leroy Jenkins's violin, then the poet David Moore delivers five minutes unaccompanied, then two bassists, Charles Clark and Leonard Jones, start bowing hard against recorded birdsong while Anthony Braxton and Maurice McIntyre blow over the top. Braxton and Jenkins were both essentially undocumented at this point. Abrams put them on his own debut.
The original pressing was drowned in reverb, to the point where Moore's recitation was close to unintelligible. Some collectors consider that a fault and some consider it the entire point.
Paris
The deaths of Gaddy and Clark hang over what happened next. Wadada Leo Smith has put it plainly: after they died the decision was to get out of Chicago and take this music worldwide. Braxton went first. Smith and Jenkins followed about a month later. The Mitchell quartet sold their belongings and sailed.
France in 1969 was the right place. The country had been comparatively hospitable to Black American musicians since the 1930s, and in the immediate wake of May 1968 the French counterculture had an appetite for exactly this kind of politically charged Black experimental music. The magazine Actuel and its associated BYG label were recording everyone who arrived.
The productivity was absurd. A Jackson in Your House was cut on 23 June 1969, less than three weeks after they landed. Message to Our Folks followed on 12 August. There was Tutankhamun and The Spiritual for Freedom, sessions with Brigitte Fontaine.
Famoudou Don Moye joined on percussion in 1970 and the quintet was complete.
Les Stances à Sophie
Then, in the closing weeks of their stay, the New Wave director Moshé Mizrahi asked them to score a film. The result is the most approachable record the Art Ensemble ever made and the best argument against the idea that this music is forbidding.
Listen to it as an album and the sheer range becomes the point. There are two variations on a Monteverdi theme. There are short pieces called "Proverbes" that are mostly texture. There is "Theme Libre", nine minutes of open playing. And then there is the opening track.
"Theme de Yoyo" is a funk record. Moye and Favors lock into a groove that does not let up for nine minutes, the horns are arranged like a Stax side that has been left out in the rain, and Fontella Bass sings lyrics written by Noreen Beasley with the full authority of someone who had a number one hit five years earlier. Bass plays piano on it too. It is funny and filthy and completely serious, and it has been sampled, covered and DJ'd continuously ever since.
Two Monteverdi variations and a floor-filler on the same LP. That is the whole aesthetic in one object. The Art Ensemble had a motto for this, generally credited to Malachi Favors: Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future. Les Stances à Sophie is what it meant in practice.
For Alto
Braxton meanwhile recorded For Alto, a full double album of unaccompanied alto saxophone. Nobody had done it before. Delmark released it in 1971 and it is still a demanding hour and a half, all long unaccompanied argument and extended technique, and still the record that pushed a generation of saxophonists somewhere new.
The 1970s: lofts, and Air Lore
They came home around 1971, and through the middle of the decade a large part of the AACM membership moved to New York and became central to the loft scene. We have written about New York's loft jazz movement separately, and the AACM diaspora runs right through it.
The record that came out of that stretch and still startles people is Air Lore.
Air was Henry Threadgill on reeds and flute, Fred Hopkins on bass and Steve McCall on drums. They had been playing together since 1971. On 11 and 12 May 1979 they went into C.I. Recording Studios in New York with Michael Cuscuna producing and played Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton.
Here is the detail that makes it. Everything on that record apart from one Threadgill original was written by a pianist, and all of it is thought of as piano music. Air removed the piano from the conversation completely. "The Ragtime Dance" and "Weeping Willow Rag" come from Joplin, "Buddy Bolden's Blues" and "King Porter Stomp" from Morton, and they are played by a saxophone, a double bass and a drum kit.
What happens is not parody and not reverence. Joplin's hook stays intact on "The Ragtime Dance" and then the trio starts pulling at it, the melody stopping and starting, lurching ahead and then settling into a lope. Hopkins is monumental throughout. On "Buddy Bolden's Blues" Threadgill slows everything down and plays the blues at its heart without any interest at all in the chord changes, stretching the harmony out until the tune sounds like it is being remembered rather than played.
A trio built on the principle of original composition turning back to the oldest material in the book and finding it wide open. If you want one record that argues for continuity between 1902 and 1979, this is it.
Braxton took a different road, signing to Arista and recording Creative Orchestra Music 1976, which contains an actual march, played dead straight by an eighteen-piece band of avant-garde musicians. It is very funny and entirely sincere at once, which is a Braxton speciality.
The ECM years
In 1978 the Art Ensemble went into Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg with Manfred Eicher, and the results surprised people who thought they knew what an ECM record sounded like.
The label's reputation for cool spacious production reads like a poor match for a band whose live act was riotous. It turned out to be the opposite of a problem. All those small instruments, the bells and whistles and shakers that had been buried on earlier records, finally had somewhere to sit. Nice Guys, released in 1979, is the most legible the group ever sounded. The title track has a drunken lurching swing to it. "Ja" leans on reggae. "Dreaming of the Master" is for Miles. "Folkus" demonstrates how still and atmospheric free improvisation can be when a producer gives it room.
Full Force came out of sessions in New York in January 1980, opening with "Magg Zelma", which builds an oppressive dulcimer drone before a rhythm claws its way out of it, and closing the loop with "Charlie M", written for Mingus. Then Urban Bushmen, recorded live in Munich in May 1980 and released as a double in 1982, which is the best surviving document of what these five actually did to a room: marches, dance tunes, long quiet passages, sounds no other group could produce.
Amina Claudine Myers
Myers was in early, she is one of the most complete musicians the organisation produced, and in 2024 the National Endowment for the Arts made her a Jazz Master.
Salutes Bessie Smith (Leo, 1980) settles an argument people keep having. The assumption is that this music cut itself off from the blues. Myers, on organ and voice with Cecil McBee on bass and Jimmy Lovelace on drums, working Bessie Smith material across two days of sessions in June 1980, demonstrates that the connection was deliberate and never broken.
Song for Mother E was recorded in a single day, 9 October 1979, at Big Apple Recording Studios in New York, and it was the first record Leo Records ever put out. It is a duo. Myers plays piano on four tracks and organ on the other four, plus voice and something credited as a giggle stick. Pheeroan akLaff plays drums, gong, little instruments and sings. That is the entire cast, and the alternation between the two keyboards is what stops a duo record from running out of air across eight pieces.
The organ tracks are the ones that get you. "Have Mercy Upon Us / Chant" runs close to eleven minutes and builds a slow hypnotic chant over an organ sound Shatz accurately called eerie, church music that has come loose from the church and drifted somewhere less consoling. akLaff plays it with tremendous patience, mostly staying out of the way, adding a gong where a lesser drummer would add a fill. Elsewhere "Inner Destruction" goes free, "3/4 of 4/4" is a rhythmic puzzle wearing the clothes of a tune, and the title track is three and a half minutes of undefended tenderness. The album opens and closes with the same piece, "I'm Not Afraid" and then its refrain, which gives the whole thing the shape of a service.
Mother E was her mother. The record is dedicated to Mrs Elnora M. Thurman.
It gets filed under spiritual jazz, which is not wrong but is not sufficient either. It moves through gospel, free playing, folk melody and chant inside forty-six minutes, and it will always be, one of the greatest AACM records.
Sixty years strong
The AACM turned 60 in 2025. Concerts ran across Chicago through the year, with the capstone on 2 May at the Logan Center: a forty-piece Great Black Music Ensemble, a bass quartet, a Roscoe Mitchell trio and the vocal choir. Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers played an anniversary programme at the Walker Art Center that September. Estimates of the current membership sit at roughly 100 across the Chicago and New York chapters. The school still costs nothing to attend.
Flautist Nicole Mitchell, Cellist Tomeka Reid, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Junius Paul, Ben LaMar Gay, Matana Roberts, Mike Reed and the young tenor player Isaiah Collier are all members now. Parker's route from Chicago to the ETA IVtet in Los Angeles comes directly out of this tradition.
Put Sound next to Air Lore next to Song for Mother E and the only thing they obviously have in common is that nobody involved was asking permission. Abrams was once asked what the AACM sound actually was. Take all the sounds of all the AACM musicians, he said, and that is the AACM sound, and he did not think anybody had heard it yet.
META TITLE: Great Black Music: The AACM and Its Records
META DESCRIPTION: From Roscoe Mitchell's Sound to the Art Ensemble in Paris, a guide to the AACM, the Chicago collective behind sixty years of extraordinary jazz records.
EXCERPT: In 1969 Lester Bowie put an advertisement in the Chicago Defender reading "Musician Sells Out!", sold everything he owned and sailed for France. The Chicago collective he belonged to made some of the strangest and best records in jazz, and it is still going at sixty.
KEYWORDS: AACM, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Delmark Records, Nessa Records, free jazz vinyl
