|
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Fanfare For The Warriors |
E-mail |
|
Jazz
|
|
Saturday, 31 December 2005 09:29 |
Ancient to the Future:
Homage to the Art Ensemble of Chicago
By John Sinclair
TRUTH SAYS: No culture or community of people has provided as much latitude for creativity and uplifted as many other cultures as the Afrikan experience and input into the field of so called Art. These contributions were not only original, rich and innovative, but have continued throughout the ages to serve as a spiritual barometer of things to come! An indisputable fact of here, there and after &.
--Art Ensemble of Chicago
Only the sharpest observers of the free-jazz scene of the early 1960s could see it coming, and then it was only the individual genius of the four men who would become the Art Ensemble of Chicago that could readily be perceived. They worked and resided in Chicago, after all, and very little attention indeed was being paid to the adventures of freely improvising jazz artists in Los Angeles, Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit, Philadelphia or anywhere else outside the Big Apple New York City, where the Jazz Composers Guild movement had just barely put the new music on the map with its October Revolution in Jazz in the Fall of 1964.
Chicago, like Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, even Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Boston, St. Louis, Kansas City and so many other cities during the Golden Age of American Music between 1940 and 1965, was a great musical center bulging with all sorts of idioms of African-American derivation, from spiritual and gospel music to blues, R&B and jazz.
Chicago residents like Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Little Walter, Robert Lockwood Jr., Snooky Pryor, Sunnyland Slim and Willie Dixon had created a wholly distinctive school of urban electric blues; others, like Gene Ammons, Ira Sullivan, Johnny Griffin, Clifford Jordan, Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian and John Gilmore were generally recognized as important participants in the modern jazz movement headquartered in New York City. A second wave of Chicago blues titans emerged in the mid- 50s Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Freddie King, Jimmy Reed, Eddie Taylor, Junior Wells, James Cotton and a host of others giving the transplanted sound of the Mississippi Delta even further definition in the blues precincts of the Windy City.
Mahalia Jackson and Thomas A. Dorsey were based in Chicago, which made the city a central focal point of the modern gospel music movement, spawning spiritual stars of the caliber of Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers, the Staples Singers and many more. From the mid- 40s through the mid- 60s Chicago was also the home of a raft of black-oriented independent record companies some indeed black-owned including Old Swingmaster, Tempo-Tone, Parrot, Blue Lake, J.O.B., Chief, VeeJay and Cobra. Chess and Checker Records not only established the Chicago blues of their contract artists as a national and international phenomenon, they pioneered the R&B vocal group craze with stunning Willie Dixon productions on the Moonglows, Flamingos and others, and they were in at the very birth of rock & roll with their revolutionary recordings by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Bobby Charles and Dale Hawkins. They even put out sides by the Godfather of Funk, Eddie Bo, and the King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier.
And then there was the futuristic space music of Chicago-based pianist and composer Sun Ra and his Arkestra, which numbered fiercely innovative players like Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Julian Priester, Charles Davis, Ronnie Boykins, Pat Patrick, Hobart Dotson and James Spaulding among its members. Ra's music developed out of his late- 40s residency in the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and the swinging experimental music of his early- 50s octet, and by the time the Arkestra re-settled in New York City in late 1960, Sun Ra had created a mind-boggling body of original work which would have a lasting impact on the Windy City far beyond his tenancy there.
Following closely in the mental footsteps of Ra was another Chicago pianist and composer, Muhal Richard Abrams, whose idea was that music must be original and fresh and could incorporate any elements of any kind that its creators saw fit to include in their concepts. Abrams organized a large ensemble he called the Experimental Band and reached out to young and seasoned musicians of every stripe to join the orchestra and bring in their original compositions to be performed in a workshop setting.
Out of the Experimental Band Abrams developed another important concept: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an artists cooperative formed in May 1965 and dedicated to increasing the performance and work opportunities available to its members. Among the musicians in the Experimental Band who helped found the AACM were the men who would become the Art Ensemble of Chicago: trumpeter Lester Bowie, multiple reedmen Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, and bassist Malachi Favors.
Jarman assembled a quartet with pianist Christopher Gaddy, bassist Charles Clark and drummer Thurman Barker and, aided by trumpeter Bill Brimfield and saxophonist Fred Anderson, went into the studio for Delmark Records and made his first recording, Song For, in early 1966. Mitchell, Bowie and Favors formed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1967 and, with drummers Philip Wilson or Steve McCall, began performing around Chicago and recording in various combinations for Delmark (Sound) and Nessa Records (Numbers 1 & 2). When both Gaddy and Clark, both young men in their 20s, tragically succumbed in the same year, Jarman was taken in by the Mitchell group and they soon became known collectively as the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
the music
will sound for itself
it is a sound of rivers
we ve crossed
the sound of all
our secret memories
among each other
From the very beginning it was clear that these men were onto something musically that was extremely fresh and exciting. Each was a fully skilled player on virtually all of the instruments associated with his main horn: Bowie played flugelhorn, cornet, bugle and pocket trumpet, and Jarman and Mitchell were fluent on clarinet and alto, tenor, baritone, bass, soprano and sopranino saxophones. The Art Ensemble also sported an inexhaustible arsenal of percussion hand drums, tambourines, bells, triangles, gongs, shakeres, cowbells and claves and what they called little instruments : kazoos, whistles, toy flutes and whatever sound-makers might capture their fancies.
Each member of the Ensemble was also a brilliant composer with a distinctive approach to exploring the rich material of the African-American musical tradition and bringing it to bear upon the music of the present and the future. They mined not merely the entire jazz tradition ragtime, brass band music, early jazz, swing, bebop and free jazz but work songs, field hollers, spirituals, gospel, gut-bucket blues, classic and modern R&B as well, and each skillfully and imaginatively combined and recombined these divers elements into forms of their own devise.
In the course of a long residency in Europe that began at the end of the 60s, the Art Ensemble of Chicago completed itself when its members met a young American drummer, Don Moye, all the way from Rochester, NY by way of Detroit to the streets of Paris. They snatched him up at once, and the now-five-member AEC began to create a European audience for its performances. Before long they had managed to arrange with the French BYG label for the recording of several stupendous Art Ensemble albums, including A Jackson in Your House, Reese and the Smooth Ones, People in Sorrow and the film soundtrack Les Stances de Sophie.
While they enjoyed their European following and their French recordings were eagerly devoured by a small but dedicated cult of American fans, the Art Ensemble returned in 1972 to an indifferent United States that had little interest in their music whatsoever. Their first major American appearance was in September 1972 at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, where they appeared on a Saturday afternoon Music of Chicago showcase with Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, Koko Taylor, Wiillie Dixon, Lucille Spann, the Mighty Joe Young Blues Band and the great Muddy Waters Blues Band with George Mojo Buford.
The Art Ensemble made a tremendous hit with the festival audience of 12,000 music lovers and, simultaneously, with Atlantic Records producer Michael Cuscuna, who was on hand supervising the recording of the Festival for a double-LP Atlantic album release titled Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972. Cuscuna arranged for the Art Ensemble's magnificent festival performance, a far-ranging suite titled Bap-Tizm, to be released as an Atlantic album and signed the Art Ensemble for a second LP, this one to be cut in a series of studio sessions in the Windy City.
As Steve Smith relates in his fine liner notes for the 1998 Koch Records CD reissue of Fanfare for the Warriors, the music for this second album, recorded in September 1973, was selected to showcase the breadth and depth of the Ensemble's compositional strengths. The program was recorded in its entirety during each of three days in the studio, and the most effective of the three performances of each composition was then chosen for the album release.
The pieces by Lester Bowie ( Barnyard Scuffel Shuffel ), Malachi Favors ( Illistrum, with a poem composed and recited by Joseph Jarman), Roscoe Mitchell ( Nonaah, Tnoona, The Key ) and Jarman himself ( What's to Say and the title track) are lit up by the masterful improvisations of the members and further illuminated by the piano of their mentor, Muhal Richard Abrams, who adds his special insight and interpretive abilities to help the Ensemble realize its collective vision, which the AEC was just beginning to articulate as GREAT BLACK MUSIC Ancient to the Future.
Here, as on Bap-Tizm, the Art Ensemble pulls out all the stops to present a startling program of original music drawn from the historical spectrum, integrated with post-modern solo passages and group improvisations and propelled into the previously uncharted present and future of the idiom. One minute Lester Bowie is blowing a fiercely intelligent solo, the next the group swings into a vintage R&B groove from the late 40s, and the next minute they re rapping out a collective improvisation that's really way out there, but yet not unconnected to the developing aesthetic of the composition and the program as a whole.
GREAT BLACK MUSIC that's what they re playing, in all its splendor and glory, and they re not merely reconstructing historical styles but actually interpreting them and making an extension of them through the force of their own musical personalities, ever mindful of the need to link the past with the future by means of an ecstatic present that gives full articulation to the complex of feelings and thoughts embodied in each of the musical participants. Making Something New, and at once dedicating it to its sources as well.
WE dearly give this music
to the brothers
all over the planet
who have fought
for the freedom
of our people
The Art Ensemble of Chicago, in 1974 and equally a quarter of a century later, simply exemplifies freedom in all its musical and human dimensions. Its members made something that had never existed before, and they sustained their creativity, their intellectual and instrumental deftness over the entire course of a collective career that lasted more than 30 years. They added to, expanded and further developed the music that was their heritage, bringing in everything they d ever listened to without regard for source or category, and they amalgamated all these disparate elements into a body of original music quite beyond anything that d ever been heard before. That's quite an achievement, dear friends, and one for which we shall remain ever thankful. Long Live the Art Ensemble of Chicago!
Amsterdam Avignon via train
November 5, 2001/
Bonnieux, France
November 7, 2001
(c) 2001, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
3.1.6114 |
|
Share Link: 
