A Power Stronger Than Itself

A POWER STRONGER THAN ITSELF A POWER STRONGER GEORGE E. LEWIS THAN ITSELF The AACM and American Experimental Music The University of Chicago Press : : Chicago and London GEORGE E. LEWIS is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2008 by George E. Lewis All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47695-7 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-47695-2 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lewis, George, 1952– A power stronger than itself : the AACM and American experimental music / George E. Lewis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ), discography (p. ), and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47695-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-47695-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—History. 2. African American jazz musicians—Illinois—Chicago. 3. Avant-garde (Music) —United States— History—20th century. 4. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3508.8.C5L48 2007 781.6506Ј077311—dc22 2007044600 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. contents Preface: The AACM and American Experimentalism ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: An AACM Book: Origins, Antecedents, Objectives, Methods xxiii Chapter Summaries xxxv 1 FOUNDATIONS AND PREHISTORY 1 Coming North: From Great Migration to Great Depression 1 Early Musical Experiences 9 Improvisation and Autodidacticism in 1950s Chicago 14 The End of an Era 27 2 NEW MUSIC, NEW YORK 29 Cultures of Spontaneity: Integrationism and the Two Avant- Gardes 29 Beyond a Bebop Boundary: The Challenge of New Music 37 Critical Responses: Anger, Noise, Failure 43 A Far Cry from New York: Segregation and Chicago Music 50 3 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EXPERIMENTAL BAND 55 Alternative Pedagogies of Experimental Music 55 Eyes on the Sparrow: The First New Chicagoans 61 : : v vi : : Contents 4 FOUNDING THE COLLECTIVE 85 Urban Decline and the Turn to Communitarianism 85 Born on the Kitchen Table: Conceiving the Association 96 Naming Ceremony: Black Power and Black Institutions 105 5 FIRST FRUITS 115 The First Year: Concerts, Critics, and Issues 115 New Arrivals and the University of Chicago 125 Travel, Recording, and Intermedia 141 Memories of the Sun: The AACM and Sun Ra 156 6 THE AACM TAKES OFF 163 The Black Arts Movement in Chicago 163 New Arrivals and New Ideas 169 The AACM School 175 Performing and Self- Determination 179 Cultural Nationalism in Postmodern Transition 196 7 AMERICANS IN PARIS 215 Conceiving the World Audience 215 Le Nouveau Paris Noir: Collectivity, Competition, and Excitement 220 The Politics of Culture: Black Power and May 1968 235 Die Emanzipation: The Rise of European Free Improvisation 247 Homecoming 254 8 THE AACM’S NEXT WAVE 259 More from the Midwest: The Black Artists Group 259 New Elbows on the Table: The AACM’s Second Wave 276 Ten Years After: The Association Comes of Age 313 9 THE AACM IN NEW YORK 325 Migration and Invasion 325 Europe and the Lofts 338 Beyond a Binary: The AACM and the Crisis in Criticism 353 Diversity and Its Discontents: New American Music after the Jazz Age 370 10 THE NEW REGIME IN CHICAGO 389 Generational Shifts in the Collective 389 The Two Cultures and a New Chapter 396 Contents : : vii Form and Funding: Philanthropy and Black Music in the 1970s 400 Strains, Swirls, and Splits 420 11 INTO THE THIRD DECADE 439 The 1980s: Canons and Heterophony 439 Great Black Music: The Local and the Global 449 Leading the Third Wave: The New Women of the AACM 459 12 TRANSITION AND REFLECTIONS 481 New York in Transition 481 Chicago in Refl ection 485 J’ai deux amours . 493 Afterword 497 The Way of the Arranger 497 The Individual 498 The Book 499 Expansion and Sacrifi ce 499 Boxing with Tradition 504 Regrets 505 Survival 507 Contemplating the Post- jazz Continuum 507 Atmospheres 511 Futures 513 Appendix A: List of Interviews Conducted by the Author 515 Appendix B: Selected AACM Recordings 519 Notes 525 Bibliography 601 Index 637 preface THE AACM AND AMERICAN EXPERIMENTALISM Since its founding on the virtually all-black South Side of Chicago in 1965, the African American musicians’ collective known as the Associ- ation for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has played an unusually prominent role in the development of American experimental music. Over more than forty years of work, the composite output of AACM members has explored a wide range of methodologies, processes, and media. AACM musicians developed new and infl uential ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures. In addition to these already ambitious achievements, the collective developed strategies for individual and collective self-production and promotion that both reframed the artist/business relationship and challenged racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure. In a 1973 article, two early AACM members, trumpeter John Shenoy Jack- son and cofounder and pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, as- serted that “the AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.”1 This optimistic declaration, based on notions : : ix x : : Preface of self- help as fundamental to racial uplift, cultural memory, and spiritual rebirth, was in accord with many other challenges to traditional notions of order and authority that emerged in the wake of the Black Power movement. The AACM is part of a long tradition of organizational eff orts in which African American musicians took leadership roles, including the early- twentieth- century Clef Club, the short- lived Jazz Composers Guild, the Collective Black Artists, and the Los Angeles- based Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension, or Underground Musicians Association (UGMAA/UGMA). The AACM, however, became the most well known and infl uential of the post- 1960 organizations, achieving lasting international signifi cance as a crucial part of the history of world musical experimentalism. The corporate- approved celluloid description of the AACM in the Ken Burns blockbuster fi lm on jazz contrasts markedly with the situation in the real world, where the AACM’s international impact has gone far beyond “white college students—in France.”2 Musicologist Ekkehard Jost called attention to both the economic and the aesthetic in summarizing the AACM’s infl uence. “The signifi cance and the international reputation of the AACM,” Jost maintained, “resulted not only from their eff ectiveness in organizing, but also, above all, from their musical output, which made the designation AACM something like a guarantee of quality for a creative music of the fi rst rank.”3 While most studies that extensively reference the AACM appear to be confi ned to an examination of the group’s infl uence within an entity puta- tively identifi ed as the “world of jazz,” the musical infl uence of the AACM has extended across borders of genre, race, geography, and musical practice, and must be confronted in any nonracialized account of experimental music. To the extent that “world of jazz” discourses cordon off musicians from interpenetration with other musical art worlds, they cannot account for either the breakdown of genre defi nitions or the mobility of practice and method that informs the present- day musical landscape. Moreover, ac- counts of the development of black musical forms most often draw upon the trope of the singular heroic fi gure, leaving out the dynamics of net- works in articulating notions of cultural and aesthetic formation. While individual musicians are certainly discussed at length in this volume, the focus is on the music, ideas, and experiences emanating from the collective. On this view, the AACM provides a successful example of collective working-class self-help and self-determination; encouragement of diff er- The AACM and American Experimentalism : : xi ence in viewpoint, aesthetics, ideology, spirituality, and methodologies; and the promulgation of new cooperative, rather than competitive, relation- ships between artists. In that regard, I am reminded of how, a few years ago, my former student Jason Stanyek (at this writing a professor of music at New York University) called my attention to a very vital aspect of U.S. slave communities that proved fundamental to my conception of the questions that this project could address. In an important revisionist work, anthropologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price ask how, in the face of their radical ethnic, lin- guistic, and cultural diversity, “such heterogeneous aggregates of men and women could compose a social order for themselves, within the boundar- ies of maneuver defi ned by the masters’ monopoly of power.”4 The phi- losopher of music Lydia Goehr poses a related question in expressing her “sense of wonder at how human practices come to be, succeed in being, and continue to be regulated by one set of ideals rather than another.”5 Speaking of the birth of African American culture, Mintz and Price seem to answer both Goehr’s question and their own, in probing the ways in which slave communities promulgated “certain simple but signifi cant cooperative eff orts,” that is, communitarian institution- building that was undertaken in order “to inform their condition with coherence, meaning, and some mea- sure of autonomy.”6 As if in illustration of this point, Famoudou Don Moye, the longtime percussionist and member of the AACM collective, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, has affi rmed the necessity of acting in concert in order to move beyond simple strategies of resistance.

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