Art Ensemble of Chicago - Tutankhamun (1974 Japanese Trio Records / Freedom Vinyl LP)

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Tutankhamun | Vinyl LP - 1974 Japanese Trio Records / Freedom (PA-9715, Freedom Discover The ‘60’s Series, Trio Electronics)

• Recorded in Paris on June 26, 1969, less than a month after the Art Ensemble arrived in France, during a period of astonishing creative output that produced over a dozen albums in under two years
• The quartet before Don Moye, with Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors each playing multiple instruments and sharing percussion duties across two side-long improvisations
• Japanese pressing on Trio Records, licensed from Alan Bates’s Freedom label, with liner notes by Masahisa Segawa and Toshihiko Shimizu

On May 28, 1969, four musicians from Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians boarded the SS United States bound for France. Within weeks they had a name, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and were recording at a pace that still seems barely credible. Tutankhamun was taped on June 26 at Polydor Studios in Paris for Alan Bates’s Freedom label, the same session that produced The Spiritual. The two side-long pieces here capture the quartet working without a permanent drummer, each member operating from behind an array of instruments that the credits only begin to suggest: Mitchell on alto, soprano and bass saxophones, clarinet, flute, whistles, sirens, bells and percussion; Jarman on alto, soprano and tenor saxophones, clarinet, oboe, flute, piano, harpsichord, guitar and percussion; Bowie on trumpet, flugelhorn, horns and bass drum; Favors on bass, Fender electric bass, banjo, zither and percussion. The group’s motto, “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future”, is audible in the music’s refusal to sit in any one idiom. Passages of collective improvisation give way to deep silence, textural detail, sudden eruptions and blues memory.

This is free jazz, but it is also something more specific than that label usually implies. The Art Ensemble grew out of the AACM, the Chicago-based collective founded in 1965, and brought that organisation’s emphasis on composition, multi-instrumentalism and what the group called “little instruments” (bells, whistles, bicycle horns, found objects) to everything they played. The Paris period was their most concentrated burst of recording, and Tutankhamun is one of its essential documents. This 1974 Japanese pressing is on Trio Records (Trio Electronics, Inc., the label arm of audio manufacturer Kenwood), which licensed Freedom’s catalogue for the Japanese market. It carries the yellow Trio label and includes Japanese liner notes by the respected jazz critics Masahisa Segawa and Toshihiko Shimizu. The catalogue number is PA-9715.