THE FREEDOM PRINCIPLE Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now Edited by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African beautiful reproductions of work by artists such as American artists and musicians grappled with new Muhal Richard Abrams, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Cau- language and forms inspired by the black national- leen Smith, Rashid Johnson, Nick Cave, and many ist turn in the Civil Rights movement. e Freedom more. A roundtable conversation features Beckwith, Principle, which accompanies an exhibition on the Roelstraete, curator Hamza Walker, current AACM topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, member and cellist Tomeka Reid, and artist Romi traces their history and shows how it continues to Crawford, with additional comments from poet and inform contemporary artists around the world. scholar Fred Moten. A chronology and curated play- list of AACM-related recordings are also included. e book coincides with the ftieth anniversary e resulting book oers a rich sense of a global of the founding of the Association for the Advance- movement, with crucial roots in Chicago, driven by ment of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-our- a commitment to experimentation, improvisation, ishing organization of Chicago musicians who collective action, and the pursuit of freedom. challenge jazz’s boundaries. Combining archival materials such as brochures, photographs, sheet mu- Naomi Beckwith is the Marilyn and Larry Fields Cura- sic, and record covers with contemporary art work tor at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She that respond to the 1960s Black Arts Movement, e has curated or cocurated many exhibitions in the United Freedom Principle explores this tradition of cultural States and has contributed to numerous periodicals and expression from, as one AACM group used to put it, the “ancient to the future.” Essays by curators Naomi books. Dieter Roelstraete is the former Manilow Senior Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, AACM member Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and historian George Lewis, art historian Rebec- and a curator of Documenta 14. ca Zorach, and gallerist John Corbett accompany 8 x 10, 320 pages, 300 color plates For a review copy or other public- To place orders in the United States ISBN 13: 978-0-226-31930-8 ity inquiries, please contact: Rose or Canada, please contact your local Rittenhouse, Promotions Manager, University of Chicago Press sales Publication Date: July 2015 University of Chicago Press, 1427 representative or contact the Uni- Cloth $45.00 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. versity of Chicago Press by phone Email: [email protected]; at 1-800-621-2736 or by fax at Phone: (773) 702-0376; 1-800-621-8476. Fax (773) 702-9756. They play. You listen. In the spring of 1965, four jazz musicians rationalization, of the machine age’s No one dreams. from Chicago’s predominantly African very own mindlessness.3 The AACM also American South Side began meeting in refused to accept the long-time margin- — Jean-Paul Sartre, the kitchen of an apartment in one of the alization of jazz in the historiography of Jazz in America1 area’s many public housing projects built “serious” Western music.) in the aftermath of World War II. It was The AACM was effectively founded the home of percussionist Steve McCall’s during another meeting held on May 8, parents. McCall (b. 1933, Chicago; 1965 at Phil Cohran’s home on East d. 1989, Chicago), along with pianist Seventy-Fifth Street, near Cottage Grove Richard Abrams (b. 1930, Chicago), Avenue, one of the historical arteries of pianist Jodie Christian (b. 1932, Chicago; African American cultural life in Chicago d. 2012, Chicago), and harpist and trum- (nearby Sixty-Third Street had long been peter Phil Cohran (b. 1927, Oxford, MS) home to one of the greatest concentra- met to discuss the challenges facing tion of music halls and nightclubs in the black musicians coming of age in the Midwest). Abrams, Christian, McCall, and United States during the mid-1960s as Cohran — a veteran, as it so happened, of Max Roach, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, the period’s social conflict and cultural Candid Productions Ltd, 1960 Sun Ra’s genre-defying Arkestra during dissent manifested in the jazz commu- its formative tenure in Chicago throughout nity. (A quick look at the titles of some continues to this day, half a century after much of the 1950s — sent out invitation of the era’s classic jazz albums commu- its founding, was dedicated to the promo- postcards to the city’s African American nicates the mounting militancy and tion of experimental (“free”) jazz and music community. The postcards stipu- growing political radicalization of jazz, improvised music, i.e. creative musician- lated a fourteen-point agenda, with one which also inevitably included a height- ship. (Here, the first of many linguistic of the main proposed topics being the ened sense of racialization, a darkening caveats is in order, as it was one of the promotion of “original” compositions, or of jazz’s cultural complexion: Ornette AACM’s primary aims to challenge the “creative” music. It was a decisive depar- Coleman’s Something Else!!! from 1958 implicit hierarchies attached to the very ture from jazz’s traditional attachment and Tomorrow Is the Question! from language of jazz; AACM sought to alter to a more or less defined corpus of stan- 1959; Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom the customary association of jazz with dards. Other subjects of discussion at the Now Suite from 1960 and Speak, Brother, standardized “light” entertainment — initial gathering included a name, sala- Speak! from 1962; Jackie McLean’s recall Theodor Adorno’s infamous ries, places to play, dues, and order and Destination Out! from 1963; Albert Ayler’s dismissal of jazz’s signature use of discipline. (The emphasis on the last item Spiritual Unity from 1964 — it certainly syncopation as an echo of militarized is entirely in tune with the growing mili- was a golden age for exclamation points.) tancy of black cultural life at the time; for Although their memories of these University of Chicago Press, 2008), 97. Lewis’s magisterial instance, less than a year after the AACM study tells the story of the Association for the Advancement foundational moments diverge — in Phil was founded, a new political movement of Creative Musicians in the greatest imaginable detail. Cohran’s hoodoo-tinged origin story, Lewis, himself a prolific composer and contributor to some saw the light of day in the San Francisco the AACM was conceived in the shadow of the era’s landmark recordings, has been a prominent of Dinah Washington’s final resting place member of the organization since the 1970s. His book is also 2 an invaluable source for students of postwar American musi- in Oakwood Cemetery — it was during cal history and anyone interested in the African American the gatherings in McCall’s familial kitchen, experience in the Midwest more broadly. I will be referring set among the familiar urban markers to this book throughout this article. Special thanks are due to George for his invaluable help throughout the development of postwar aspiration, that the seeds of our curatorial project, as well as for his contributions to were sown for the Association for both the exhibition (as an exhibiting artist) and the catalogue the Advancement of Creative Musicians (as a contributing author). (AACM), one of the most influential and Oak Woods Cemetery is located in Chicago’s South Side longest-lasting collectives in American Woodlawn neighborhood (a couple of blocks south of this musical history. The organization, which author’s home, in fact). It is also the final resting place of such luminaries as Jesse Owens, the unlikely sprinting hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Eddie Harris, author of the jazz standard “Freedom Jazz Dance”; and Harold Washington, 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Jazz in America,” in Robert Gottlieb, the first African American mayor of Chicago and a key figure ed., Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, in the cultural history of black Chicago. and Criticism from 1919 to Now (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 710. 3 See Adorno’s notorious diatribe “On Jazz” from 1936, reprinted in Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: 2 See George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of The AACM and American Experimental Music, AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: California Press, 2002), 470–95. University of Chicago Press, 2008 20 21 Art Ensemble of Chicago “Great Black Music” poster, 1971 Bay Area, namely the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.) During these formative early meetings, all of which were recorded on tape, there were hardly any mentions of terms such as “avant-garde” or “free jazz”; nor were there any refer- ences to the concept of “black music,” even though almost all of the musicians present at these meetings were African American, and the founding of the AACM was inextricably linked to the defining impulses of mid-1960s black cultural ferment — such as the call for cultural emancipation and greater self-determination in the wake of a civil rights struggle caught between the rival Addison Gayle Jr., The Black Aesthetic, drives of assimilationism and separatism, Doubleday, 1971 between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, between the American dream “Great Black Music” moniker in particular of universal brotherhood and an emer- reflects the organization’s complicated gent Afrocentrism spurred on by the citi- relationship with black nationalism, zens of so many African countries fighting on the one hand, and its dedication to to free themselves from their colonial the universalist aspirations of color-blind overlords.