Art Ensemble Of Chicago - People In Sorrow (1978 Japanese Odeon Vinyl LP)

Art Ensemble Of Chicago - People In Sorrow | Vinyl LP - 1978 Japanese Odeon (EOJ-50040, Toshiba EMI)

The Art Ensemble left Chicago in 1969 because there was nowhere left to play. Lester Bowie sold most of what he owned to pay everyone's passage on an ocean liner, running an advertisement in the Chicago Defender that read "Musician Sells Out!", a joke about abandoning his successful career as an R&B sideman for the avant-garde. Their drummer Phillip Wilson had just quit to join Paul Butterfield's band, so the four remaining members arrived in Paris without one. A French promoter appended "of Chicago" to the group's name for descriptive purposes and it stuck. What followed was extraordinarily productive: somewhere between 14 and 15 albums in roughly two years, recorded for BYG, Pathé-Marconi, Freedom and others, while the group performed in face paint and African dress at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. People In Sorrow comes from the middle of that run, and the absence of a drummer shapes everything about it. With percussion duties spread across all four musicians, nobody is keeping time. The piece breathes instead, opening in a long passage of scraped bells, whistles, bicycle horns and hushed conversation between horns, building slowly toward the collective intensity that arrives well into side A.

The instrument list explains the album's texture. Roscoe Mitchell covers soprano, alto and bass saxophone plus clarinet and flute. Joseph Jarman plays alto saxophone, bassoon, oboe and flute. Lester Bowie is on trumpet and flugelhorn, drawing on the vocalised, smeared tone he brought from his R&B years. Malachi Favors plays bass and zither. Every one of them also plays percussion. The result sounds less like a jazz quartet than a small chamber ensemble working without a score, and the AACM principles behind it (the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, founded in Chicago in 1965 to give Black musicians control over their own presentation and repertoire) are audible in the refusal to settle into any recognisable idiom. Famoudou Don Moye joined a few months after this recording, and the group's sound changed considerably once he did. Released by EMI's Pathé-Marconi in France at the end of 1969, then in the US on Nessa in 1971, the album stayed out of print for decades and circulated mainly through European and Japanese issues like this one.

This is the 1978 Japanese pressing on Odeon EOJ-50040, from the Jazz All Time Favorites 1800 series, manufactured by Toshiba EMI.