The Art Ensemble Of Chicago - Les Stances À Sophie (2023 Play Loud! Reissue Vinyl LP)

The Art Ensemble Of Chicago - Les Stances À Sophie | Vinyl LP - 2023 Play Loud! limited reissue (pl-135, one of 1000)

The Art Ensemble of Chicago were the flagship group of the AACM, the Black avant-garde collective that transformed Chicago jazz in the 1960s, and by 1970 they had decamped to Paris, where they recorded prolifically for audiences ready for their radical, genre-spanning music. In July of that year they cut this soundtrack for Moshe Mizrahi's film Les Stances à Sophie. The core quartet is here, Lester Bowie on trumpet, Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman on saxophones and Malachi Favors on bass, joined by Bowie's wife, the soul singer Fontella Bass of "Rescue Me" fame. The album opens with its masterstroke, "Thème de Yoyo", a hard, strutting funk groove with Bass delivering a sly, provocative vocal over the top. It is one of the great avant-funk tracks, loved by crate-diggers and DJs, and utterly unlike the rest of the record, which ranges from free abstraction to a pair of variations on a theme by Monteverdi.

For a group whose reputation is built on difficulty, Les Stances à Sophie is unusually approachable, and "Thème de Yoyo" has become the door through which many listeners first walk into the Art Ensemble's world. Original pressings, French on Pathé and American on Nessa, have long been collector's items. This is the 2023 reissue on the German label Play Loud!, remastered and limited to a thousand copies, with new liner notes by the American music journalist Chris Morris.