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Art Ensemble of Chicago: Bap-Tizum (1972) |
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Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals
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Sunday, 22 January 2006 04:18 |
Art Ensemble of Chicago
Bap-Tizum: Live at the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival
Atlantic Records, 1973; Men With Hats LP, 2001
By John Sinclair
The Art Ensemble of Chicago has been a leading force in American music since its inception in 1967 as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. The pioneering creative music collective celebrated its 30th anniversary four years ago, but the untimely death of trumpeter Lester Bowie and the semi-retirement from performance of the Brooklyn-based Zen master Joseph Jarman have effectively brought their reign to a close at the turn of the 21st Century.
The recording under hand, recorded in performance at the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival shortly after drummer Don Moye had become a permanent member of the Art Ensemble, remains one of the finest of all their many recorded works, and I must admit that hearing my much-younger voice introduce the band from the stage that September afternoon fills me with pride to have been associated with this brilliant organization, as well as with the anticipatory excitement I felt at that moment as the AEC prepared to unleash its kaleidoscopic performance before an unsuspecting audience of 12,000 festive music-lovers at Otis Spann Memorial Field.
I go back a long way with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in fact, all the way back to 1965 when it was the Roscoe Mitchell Art Quartet with Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and a variety of drummers including the late great Philip Wilson and the very much alive Alvin Fielder.
Back then Joseph Jarman led his own daring ensemble of spectacular young Chicago players featuring Christopher Gaddy on piano, Charles Clark on bass, Steve McCall at the drums, and Jarman's searing alto saxophone, dynamic compositions, highly-evolved poetry and brilliant sense of dramatics.
And Don Moye, then a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, was just beginning to learn to play the drum set, woodshedding for hours each day with fellow drummers Danny Spencer and Ronnie Johnson in the basement of the Artists Workshop commune at 4825 John C. Lodge, where Charles Moore and I held the front apartment on the ground floor.
My sister Kathy had moved to Chicago to attend graduate school at Northwestern University. Kathy and her husband, Douglas Casement, publisher of Spero magazine and one of my early mentors, settled not in Evanston but in Hyde Park, on the South Side, near the University of Chicago.
One day my sister encountered Joseph Jarman strolling down a neighborhood street and struck up a conversation with the flamboyant young musician and poet. Their budding friendship led my sister into Jarman's circle of friends and musical colleagues in the heady artistic milieu of mid- 60s Chicago, and her enthusiastic response to their creative activities was quickly communicated to her brother in Detroit.
As a budding poet, jazz critic and organizer of cultural events who lived at the center of a collective of improvising jazz musicians, poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers and others called the Detroit Artists Workshop, founded in the Fall of 1964, I was excited to learn of the existence of a group of kindred souls only 280 miles to the west who had banded together to advance their own activities, so similar in sound and intention to our own. Soon I was making regular trips to the Windy City to forge strong links between our respective collectives and to set up performance opportunities in Detroit for Jarman and his friends.
Jarman's musical world, like so many of his peers, was centered on the teachings and practice of the pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams and his Experimental Band, an ensemble fully dedicated to developing and playing original creative improvisational music devised by its members. Abrams and the Experimental Band formed the core of an emerging musical collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which would introduce to the world the music of Jarman, Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Lester Lashley and many others whose work was marked by its fierce individuality and complete disregard for the orthodoxies of the established jazz order.
Like the Artists Workshop, the AACM went beyond the music itself to tend to its proper presentation to the public. Nightclubs and bars were generally looking for something more easily digestible as entertainment than what the AACM members were offering, and the few jazz promoters in town stuck close to the tried and true as well. In order for their music to be heard, Muhal taught the participants in his program, they would have to stage their own concerts where they could control the circumstances of their presentations, develop their own audiences outside the mainstream and make their mark on the world through their own efforts.
The Roscoe Mitchell Art Quartet, the Joseph Jarman Quartet and other formations that grew out of the Experimental Band began to organize concerts at the University of Chicago and other community venues, attracting students, faculty members, poets, artists and street-level intellectuals of every sort to hear their challenging original music in settings of their own devise. I had the pleasure of appearing with Jarman and his ensemble at some of these presentations, including a show at UC where the players took the stage with bags over our heads and launched into an all-out assault of music and poetry which took the crowd by storm.
Now the AACM needed an outlet for their music on record, and soon Roscoe Mitchell, Jarman, Kalaparusha, Braxton and Abrams himself were documenting their original work on a series of albums for Bob Koester at Delmark Records. The first recording session I ever attended, early in 1966, produced Joseph Jarman's first album, Song For, a triumphant tour-de-force by the fiery reedman and poet which spotlighted the emerging talents of Christopher Gaddy and Charles Clark. Mitchell's debut album, Sound, soon followed, and Lester Bowie released his initial recording on former Koester associate Chuck Nessa's self-titled Nessa label.
Tragically, during the next year Gaddy and Clark, both in their 20s, passed away within months of one another, leaving their deeply bereaved leader to grieve the loss of two extremely close friends and musical partners. Now without an ensemble of his own, Jarman gravitated to Mitchell, Bowie and Favors for emotional and musical support, and before long the four improvising artists began performing together as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble.
By 1969 the Art Ensemble had developed its unique identity as a drummer-less quartet centered on the virtuostic bass of Malachi Favors and the vast array of reed, brass and percussion instruments wielded by Bowie, Mitchell and Jarman. Their music encapsulated the entire history of Africans in America and utilized elements of every stage in the development of jazz to illuminate the principle expressed in their motto: Black Music Ancient to the Future.
On stage, the Art Ensemble's message extended outward from its members iconoclastic original compositions and startling guerrilla costumery through its stunning displays of instrumental virtuosity and improvisational genius. Every conceivable reed instrument, from sopranino sax to the bass saxophone and a myriad of flutes, might well be brought into play, countered by the brass arsenal of Lester Bowie and seasoned by the sounds of an infinite variety of percussion instruments.
In the summer of 1969, having despaired of procuring work and achieving critical acclaim in their native land, the Art Ensemble left the U.S. for a long sojourn in Europe. Based in Paris, the band now known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded a series of ground-breaking albums for the BYG label, including A Jackson in Your House, Reese & the Smooth Ones and People In Sorrow, increasing their positive exposure through European festival appearances and occasional nightclub and concert-hall performances.
It was also in Paris that the Art Ensemble completed itself when its members, strolling one fine afternoon through the streets of the City of Light, stumbled over the prostrate form of a seriously inebriated American expatriate named Don Moye, now a finely studied drummer who had abandoned his studies at Wayne State to make a European jaunt with the avant-garde Ann Arbor ensemble known as the Pigfuckers. Moye joined flutist Arthur Fletcher and bassist Ron Miller to barnstorm the continent under this questionable moniker, which truth be told had been supplied by this writer when asked by Ron Miller to suggest the most vile possible name for their impromptu touring outfit.
Moye was immediately adopted into the Art Ensemble family and soon became the official fifth member of the cooperative, adding his wildly imaginative conception and skilled, exciting drumming to the line-up. The group's musical horizons broadened immensely as Moye's percussive talents were integrated into the ensemble, adding a whole new colorative palette and extending and underlining the rhythmic possibilities inherent in the members compositions and improvisations.
Now the Art Ensemble was complete, and its five members would go on to work together for almost 30 years, forging a completely unique musical identity and collectively illustrating the incredible range of musical elements inherent in their all-encompassing concept called Black Music Ancient to the Future. And, as the most visible standard-bearer of the principles and practices of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Art Ensemble of Chicago would carry the message first articulated by Muhal Richard Abrams and the Experimental Band to creative musicians and listeners all over the world.
By 1972 the Art Ensemble was back in Chicago, but their return to the USA had elicited no great deal of critical or popular response. Very few performance opportunities were presented, and their work so easily documented while they were in Europe was going largely unrecorded. Yet the Ensemble was at the very top of its game musically, and their infrequent public performances were quickly becoming legendary.
When I was presented with the opportunity to select and schedule to artists to appear at the first Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, my very first impulse was to replace the usual jazz-festival attractions with the cream of the creative music avant garde. I felt that the vast majority of the people we hoped to attract to our festival wouldn t know one jazz artist from another, and that this gave me the chance to introduce them to the artists whose music I found most exciting.
Miles Davis and Charles Mingus were the closest to the mainstream I wanted to get with my line-up, and as it turned out, Mingus was too ill to make the date and was replaced by Pharaoh Sanders. Archie Shepp, New Dalta with Leo Smith and Marion Brown, Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra, the CJQ of Detroit and the Art Ensemble of Chicago were more to my contemporary taste, and all were available.
The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 was the Art Ensemble's first U.S. festival appearance. They were presented on a Saturday afternoon bill titled Music of Chicago which kicked off with Hound Dog taylor & the Houserockers, followed with the Mighty Joe Young band and special guests Lucille Spann, Willie Dixon and Koko Taylor, continued with the Art Ensemble of Chicago presentation contained in this LP and closed with a terrific set by Muddy Waters and his band. As you can hear on this recording, the Art Ensemble, surrounded by state-of-the-art Chicago blues, turned in a mind-boggling, roots-drenched performance that completely captivated the audience of some 12,000 music lovers and won over the production crew from Atlantic Records, who were there to record the music at the festival for a double-LP anthology featuring a cut each from almost 20 of the artists there.
Based on producer Michael Cuscuna's enthusiastic response to the Art Ensemble's set, Atlantic signed the band to a two-record deal which would include the release of Bap-tizum and a second album, Fanfare for the Warriors, to be recorded later in a studio setting. This provided a major boost to their career and introduced the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago to a new and much expanded audience, many members of which stayed with the AEC throughout the band's existence.
It was my extreme pleasure to be able to present the Art Ensemble to the people at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival that sunny September afternoon in 1972, and it gives me even more pleasure to introduce their performance that day by means of this LP to listeners in the 21st Century. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and g s, because they re going to take you on one hell of a musical trip before this record is through.
New Orleans
February 15, 2001
(c) 2001, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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