AACM at 60

Creative Musicians in Chicago and New York City celebrate six decades of advancement

My article on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which comprises separate chapters in New York City and Chicago, has been published in the October issue of DownBeat, online and at newsstands (?) now.

I’ve followed AACM music since 1968, when I first heard tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson with trumpeter Billy Brimfield in a basement coffee house in Evanston, IL, and soon after on composer-reedist Roscoe Mitchell’s debut album Sound.

In retrospect I’ve got to accept these experience were beyond influential — they were formative for me. I was taken by the vivid, urgent, imaginative music, unlike anything else I’d encountered although I’d been listening to current jazz, Motown, and rock with a preference for Hendrix and San Francisco bands. I followed up by searching out Mitchell, Anderson and their colleagues like Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Amina Claudine Myers, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre — who I soon came to understand were involved in a principally Black musicians’ cooperative organization led by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. Attending the Experimental Band sessions Abrams led in South Side venues on Monday nights, and performances by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Air and other ensembles populated by continuously emerging original musicians, I became ever more entranced.

What was this music? Why did it move me? Why did it seem opaque to others? What did the musicians intend? Was anything else like this? What lessons could I take from it? I’ve asked myself those questions for 55 years, and have enjoyed the engagement, always. I’ve been gladdened, as well, by the movement of these musicians and their innovative ideas into acknowledgement, appointment to significant educational positions, high honors and critical acclaim, if not overall mainstream acceptance (and who would want that?).

The playlist above features those first generation artists. Since then — Thurman Barker, Chico Freeman, Douglas Ewart, George E. Lewis, Iqua and Adegoke Colson (whose capacious archives involving the AACM and much more) have recently been acquired by Northwestern University), Pete Cosey, Edward Wilkerson, Kahil El’Zabar, Ernest Dawkins, Mwata Bowden, Nicole Mitchell, JoVia Armstrong, Famadou Don Moyé, Mike Reed and Tomeka Reid are among the many leaders who’ve emerged from the AACM and who I’ve written of. What a pleasure! And an education. With more to come.