Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM 9780226820439

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Roscoe Mitchell, Sound :: Muhal Richard Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light
2 Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah
3 Anthony Braxton, Composition 76
4 Air, Air Time
5 George Lewis, Voyager
6 Fred Anderson, Volume Two
7 AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, At Umbria Jazz 2009
8 Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers
9 Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds
Conclusion
Notes
Recordings
References
Index

Citation preview

Sound Experiments

Sound Experiments The Music of the AACM PAUL STEINBECK

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or repro-

duced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, ex-

cept in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82009-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82043-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820439.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steinbeck, Paul, author.

Title: Sound experiments : the music of the AACM / Paul Steinbeck.

Other titles: Music of the AACM

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022003330 | ISBN 9780226820095 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226820439 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Association for the Advancement of Creative

Musicians. | Jazz—Illinois—Chicago—History and criticism. | Avant-garde (Music)—Illinois—Chicago—History. | African

Americans—Illinois—Chicago—Music—History and criticism. | African American jazz musicians—Illinois—Chicago. | African American musicians—Illinois—Chicago.

Classification: LCC ML28.C4 A874 2022 ML3508.8.C5 | DDC 781.65092/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003330 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

The contribution of the AACM to creative music is in evidence throughout the musical world. — wadada leo smith, notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music

contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1

Roscoe Mitchell, Sound :: Muhal Richard Abrams, Levels and

Degrees of Light 7

2

Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah 38

3

Anthony Braxton, Composition 76 60

4

Air, Air Time 88

5

George Lewis, Voyager 109

6

Fred Anderson, Volume Two 121

7

AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, At Umbria Jazz 2009 139

8

Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers 159

9

Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds 176 Conclusion 199 Notes 203

Recordings 231 References 237 Index 255

Figures follow page 120.

ac k now l e dgm e n t s

This book is an offering to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organization that has had a profound effect on my life. Indeed, I couldn’t have written Sound Experiments without the assistance and inspiration of the AACM members who have been my teachers and collaborators since the late 1990s. During my undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, former AACM chair Mwata Bowden invited me to play bass in the Jazz X-tet, a university ensemble that performed compositions by Douglas Ewart, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and other artists from the Association. Playing these scores made me want to compose for the X-tet, so Mwata connected me with his AACM colleague Ari Brown, who took me on as a composition student. Mwata also introduced me to Fred Anderson, an original AACM member and the proprietor of the Velvet Lounge performance space on Chicago’s South Side. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Velvet Lounge was the heart of the South Side jazz community as well as the unofficial headquarters of the AACM. From 1998 to 2002, I visited the Velvet Lounge once or twice a week, every week—participating in the Sunday-evening jam sessions, performing with my own bands, and sometimes just sitting with Fred and listening to his soliloquies about music and life. After college, Mwata and Fred sent me to Columbia University in New York, where I studied with another AACM member, George Lewis, and embarked on a research project that eventually became my first book, Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. While in New York, I began performing and recording with a number of AACM artists, from Mwata and Fred to Thurman Barker, Douglas Ewart, Alvin Fielder, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Thompson. These experiences were integral to my development as a musician and an author, and I am thankful for everything that the members of the Association have taught me. I am especially grateful to the AACM musicians (and their families) who contributed directly to Sound Experiments by giving interviews and permitting me to include their scores and sketches in the book: Dee Alexander,

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ack now l edgmen ts

Fred Anderson Estate/Many Weathers Music, Thurman Barker, Mwata Bowden, Anthony Braxton/Tri-Centric Foundation, Ernest Dawkins/Dawk Music, Douglas Ewart/Nkoranza Publishing, Alvin Fielder, George Hines, Fred Hopkins Estate/Frederic Publishing, Leonard Jones, George Lewis, Steve McCall Estate/Big Mac Publishing, Nicole Mitchell/Wheatgoddess Creations, Roscoe Mitchell/Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing, Dushun Mosley, Jeff Parker, Wadada Leo Smith/Kiom Music, Henry Threadgill/ Dubra Publishing, and Taalib-Din Ziyad. When I started writing Sound Experiments, my friends Julian Berke and Scott Garrigan helped me choose the compositions and recordings featured in each chapter. Later on, Julian and Scott carefully reviewed the entire manuscript—as did Marc Hannaford and John Litweiler. Other expert readers critiqued individual chapters: Tatsu Aoki, Brent Hayes Edwards, Luther Ivory, Andy Pierce, Chad Taylor, Carl Testa, Niklaus Troxler, and Alex Wing. Brad Short, the music librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, aided my research by acquiring an impressive collection of materials related to the AACM. Another colleague at Washington University, Felipe Guz Tinoco, drafted the musical examples that appear in chapter 4. Sound Experiments was acquired by University of Chicago Press executive editor Doug Mitchell not long before his retirement. After Doug retired, Elizabeth Branch Dyson (the Press’s assistant editorial director and executive editor) spearheaded the publication process, with the support of editorial associates Mollie McFee and Dylan Montanari. Elizabeth, Mollie, and Dylan were a joy to work with—my thanks to them and their team, especially copyeditor Marianne Tatom and production editor Caterina MacLean. Designer Ryan Li did a remarkable job with every part of the book, from the text and the musical examples to the gallery of photos by Lauren Deutsch, Lona Foote, Markus di Francesco, Michael Jackson (jackojazz.com), Leonard Jones, Mayumi Lake, Roberto Masotti, and Alan Teller. And University of Chicago Press publicist Carrie Olivia Adams ensured that Sound Experiments, much like the AACM, would reach a worldwide audience. Each individual named above played a key role in the making of Sound Experiments, and they have my enduring gratitude. But most of all I am thankful for my wonderful wife, Candice Ivory—and our children, Ellis and Nia, who truly light up my life. This book is dedicated to Candice, Ellis, and Nia, with all my love. Paul Steinbeck St. Louis, Missouri

Introduction

The AACM inspires people to band together to do what they do, because otherwise it wouldn’t be done.1

One night in the summer of 1968, the members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) came together for a concert at the Hyde Park Art Center on the South Side of Chicago. Fifty adventurous listeners were in the audience that evening, along with a music critic and a photographer from the Chicago Tribune, whose story about the performance gave the newspaper’s readers their first glimpse of an ensemble from the Association—the AACM Big Band, directed by Muhal Richard Abrams:2 Pianist Richard Abrams, who is also the concert-master, begins the program with a flick of the wrist. A somewhat unconventional flick of the wrist. Eugene Ormandy, Jean Martinon, or Leonard Bernstein might prefer to begin a concert with a downward sweep of a baton. Richard Abrams, of the Association, ordinarily prefers to begin by jangling an old, battered cowbell. Joseph Jarman, reed-thin and cool in a white Nehru jacket, colored braid at the throat, answers Abrams by laconically shaking a pair of maracas. . . . From the left side of the bandstand, a baritone sax begins lurching and wheezing. Flutes—fragile silver flutes, wood tribal flutes, cheap neon-sign-colored plastic Woolworth flutes—flutter alongside the kazoos and little zipping African pennywhistles. A mallet clicks against an ox jaw, more cowbells clang, a chain clanks, long leather cords like whips with scores of tiny bells attached jangle, blocks of wood imported from Africa emit eerie hooting noises when hammered, rivets dance on a cymbal like beads of mercury from a broken thermometer. . . . Sherry Scott rises to the microphone.  .  .  . Her eyelids drop shut, her mouth curls upward, and she begins her song, softly at first, then it rises

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to a strident wail, cutting through the swirling eddies of [the] band. . . . Five minutes, ten minutes, the crescendo builds and builds until there is no longer space in the sweltering room for more sound. . . . Fifteen, twenty minutes, Sherry’s face is no longer smiling; it is in agony, but her voice keeps tearing into the flesh of the music. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Forty minutes . . . and the cowbell rings again, the battered copper cowbell calls it off, and the cars outside the open door go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh before the audience casts off its trance and goes wild.3

This colorful account marked the first appearance of an AACM group in the pages of Chicago’s biggest newspaper. In 1968, very few of the Tribune’s half-million readers had ever heard or seen anything like the extraordinary performance given by Abrams’s band. However, in-the-know South Siders had been attending AACM events for the past three years, since the summer of 1965, when the Association presented its earliest concerts at a ballroom on East Seventy-Ninth Street.4 Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still active today, the AACM was—and is—the most significant collective organization in the history of jazz and experimental music. The AACM united dozens of African American musicians who were interested in experimental approaches to composition and improvisation. At the time of the Association’s founding, only a handful of its members were known outside Chicago. By the late 1960s, though, the AACM brand was recognized around the world. A number of AACM members became renowned performers on their instruments, and together they developed an array of creative practices that revolutionized jazz and experimental music. This revolution was more than musical. In the 1960s, music-industry gatekeepers viewed jazz and experimental music as separate spheres—one headlined by black artists and the other presided over by white composers. The members of the AACM broke down those racial barriers, moving freely between jazz and experimental music while demonstrating how African Americans could transform the music industry through collective action. Decades later, the Association’s impact can be seen in many corners of contemporary culture, including academia, visual art, and intermedia performance. Several AACM members took up teaching positions at leading colleges and universities, where they shared the Association’s practices and philosophies with thousands of aspiring musicians. AACM members’ paintings, sculptures, and installations have been exhibited in museums across North America, as have some of their spectacular graphic scores.5 And the intermedia performances of the Art Ensemble of Chicago—the Association’s flagship group—forever changed the field of performing arts.6 However, the AACM’s influence was the greatest in the realms of

introduction

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jazz and experimental music. AACM members combined composition and improvisation in unprecedented ways, creating modes of music-making that bridged the gap between experimental concert music and contemporary jazz. The AACM also pioneered new approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, technology, and musical form, opening up vibrant soundscapes that previous generations of musicians had never imagined.7 Some of these innovations took hold in the 1960s, and others emerged in the years that followed, as the Association built on the discoveries of the musicians who brought the collective into being. Sound Experiments is the first in-depth study of the AACM’s music, but it is not the first book about the organization. Four other books, all published by the University of Chicago Press, have examined the Association from a variety of perspectives.8 A Power Stronger Than Itself (2008), written by AACM member George Lewis, is the authoritative history of the collective. Ronald Radano’s New Musical Figurations (1993) is a profile of AACM composer Anthony Braxton, while my previous book, Message to Our Folks (2017), is a musicological study of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.9 And Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete’s The Freedom Principle (2015), published during the Association’s fiftieth-anniversary celebrations, is a survey of visual art related to the AACM. In contrast to those four books, Sound Experiments focuses on the Association’s music, as exemplified by a set of ten compositions, improvisations, and recordings. These landmark works, created by prominent AACM members at pivotal moments in the organization’s history, are investigated using a methodology that integrates musical analysis with historical inquiry. Close analyses of these pieces illustrate how AACM composers and performers advanced the Association’s signature musical practices, from extended forms and multi-instrumentalism to experimental approaches to notation and conducting. Sound Experiments also reveals the historical connections that link these pieces to the collective’s earliest innovations, and to subsequent work by AACM members whose explorations reached the frontiers of contemporary music. The book’s chapters, which are ordered chronologically, trace the evolution of the Association’s music over a period of six decades. Accordingly, Sound Experiments can be read as a sonic history of the collective, a narrative that follows the AACM’s forays into jazz, experimental music, electronic music, and computer music. This narrative is informed by research at multiple Chicago archives—the Center for Black Music Research, the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Jazz Archive, the Chicago Public Library—and by AACM members themselves. I consulted AACM members’ published writings and oral histories, and I interviewed most of the musicians who appear in the book (face-to-face whenever

[ 4 ]

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possible, and also via telephone and email). A number of AACM composers graciously shared their scores and sketches with me, which gave me invaluable insights into the workings of their music. I also transcribed many of the pieces featured in Sound Experiments, using listening strategies handed down from the AACM artists I have studied and performed with for more than twenty years. Musical examples based on these scores, sketches, and transcriptions can be found throughout the book. In most of the musical examples, pitches are notated in the instruments’ keys—as in a transposing score. The text, in contrast, usually refers to pitches in concert key, and adopts the convention in which middle C is labeled C4. To hear the recordings analyzed in Sound Experiments, go to paulsteinbeck .com/av. I recommend playing the audio while reading each chapter, treating the text like a guidebook to the music of the AACM. Chapter 1 examines two late 1960s albums, Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound (1966) and Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light (1968). On Sound, the first commercial recording by an AACM group, Mitchell and the members of his sextet play dozens of instruments, blending free jazz with countless other musical styles and textures. Shortly after the recording session, Mitchell founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a group that would spend decades developing the compositional and improvisational techniques employed on Sound. (For analyses of Art Ensemble concerts and recordings from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, see my book Message to Our Folks.) Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light, performed by musicians from his famed Experimental Band, takes the AACM’s formal investigations even further, as multi-section suites emerge from composed passages, collective improvisations, poetry recitations, and electronic sounds. The next three chapters are set in the 1970s, when many AACM members were touring internationally and recording for major labels. Chapter 2 centers on Roscoe Mitchell’s iconic 1976 solo performance of his composition Nonaah at a jazz festival in Switzerland. Mitchell begins by playing from a score for saxophone quartet, but instead of adhering to the notated form, he reshapes Nonaah into an improvised dialogue with the audience, at one point repeating a single phrase ninety-six times until he wins over every listener in the festival hall. Chapter 3 analyzes Anthony Braxton’s Composition 76 (1977), recorded and released by the major label Arista Records. Written for three musicians playing woodwinds as well as percussion, Composition 76 epitomizes many of the creative practices that arose from the 1960s Association, including multi-instrumentalism, graphic notation, and forms of music-making that combine composition and improvisation. The AACM’s explorations of visual media are also evident in the Composition 76 score, which would

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eventually be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.10 Chapter 4 is devoted to the album Air Time (1978), by Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall, known collectively as Air. The trio was regarded as one of the AACM’s best bands, and Air Time shows why: the album is made up of five very different compositions, each offering a unique framework for small-group improvisation. Chapter 5 focuses on George Lewis, who joined the AACM in 1971, and his groundbreaking computer-music composition Voyager. Premiered in 1987 and revised extensively in later years, Voyager is an interactive piece in which one or more human musicians improvise alongside a software-powered virtual orchestra. The Voyager program, like its human counterparts, improvises its own music in real time while responding to the other performers. Part computer-music program and part conceptualart piece, Voyager is AACM-style experimentalism in digital form, a constantly changing sonic environment that asks performers and listeners alike to think about music-making in novel ways. In the 1970s and 1980s, many AACM members relocated to New York, and a new group of leaders emerged in the collective’s hometown. By the 1990s, Fred Anderson and Mwata Bowden were heading the AACM’s Chicago contingent while creating music that was closely connected to the early years of the Association. Anderson cultivated a performance practice that fused jazz with contemporary improvised music, as heard on the album examined in chapter 6: Volume Two, recorded in 1999 at the Velvet Lounge, the South Side venue he owned and operated until 2010. Anderson’s Velvet Lounge was also the birthplace of the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, directed by Mwata Bowden. Chapter  7 centers on the Great Black Music Ensemble’s album At Umbria Jazz 2009, which reveals the musical practices used by Bowden to renew the AACM bigband format that Muhal Richard Abrams originated in the Association’s first decade. The final chapters of the book chronicle the 2010s. Like many of the AACM’s elders, Wadada Leo Smith was more productive than ever during this period. Chapter 8 concentrates on “Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless,” one of the pieces from the five-hour-long suite Ten Freedom Summers (2011), for chamber orchestra and Smith’s Golden Quartet. Dedicated to a martyr of the civil rights movement, “Emmett Till” is distinguished by its poignant melodies and harmonies, some written in traditional notation and others in Smith’s trademark Ankhrasmation language. Chapter 9 turns to next-generation AACM leader Nicole Mitchell, who was born in 1967, the same year Wadada Leo Smith joined the Association. Mitchell entered the AACM in the 1990s, and a decade later, she became the first woman to serve as the organization’s chair. In Mandorla Awakening II,

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premiered in 2015, Mitchell and the members of her Black Earth Ensemble use acoustic, electric, and electronic instruments from all over the world to depict two societies from a futuristic novella written by the composer herself. Sound Experiments concludes with a look at another AACM project launched in 2015: the Artifacts trio, with Nicole Mitchell and two of the Association’s younger members, Mike Reed and Tomeka Reid. The Artifacts trio started as a “repertory ensemble,” playing the compositions of senior AACM figures, then began performing original works by Mitchell, Reed, and Reid—showing how the Association’s musical legacy could inspire several more decades of innovation.11

1 * Roscoe Mitchell, Sound :: Muhal Richard Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light

The AACM represents a kind of unity that most people aren’t even used to.1

The Experimental Band and the AACM It all started with the Experimental Band. Muhal Richard Abrams formed the ensemble in 1962, three years before he, Jodie Christian, Philip Cohran, and Steve McCall founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).2 Many of the Association’s original members had played in Abrams’s ensemble, and nearly all of the musicians who joined the AACM later in the 1960s came to the organization through the Experimental Band. Of course, some AACM musicians spent only a short time in the Experimental Band, and a few early members of the Association never belonged to the ensemble.3 But even one encounter with Abrams was enough to teach a musician what the Experimental Band and the AACM were all about. “The first rule of the band,” according to Abrams, “was that all music had to be original material.”4 Abrams brought a new composition to the Experimental Band virtually every week, and the other members of the ensemble were encouraged to present their scores as well, provided that the music was their own, not an arrangement of someone else’s composition.5 The Experimental Band’s original-music rule was adopted by the AACM at the moment of its founding. During the Association’s initial business meeting, held in May 1965, the attendees decided that the organization would be dedicated to producing concerts of original music written by AACM members. Within weeks, the membership had elected several officers, including Abrams as AACM chair, and tasked them with fulfilling the Association’s mission.6 By August 1965, the AACM had registered as a nonprofit corporation with the state of Illinois and presented its first concerts—a series of performances by the Fred Anderson/Joseph

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Jarman quintet, Philip Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble, and Roscoe Mitchell’s quartet.7 In this concert series, the programs were made up of “new unrecorded compositions” by the ensemble leaders and their bandmates, a format that would be followed in every AACM-sponsored event for years to come.8 These concerts were truly groundbreaking. The AACM’s productions were among the first concerts in history to feature experimental music written and performed by African Americans, and soon they became the longest-running such concert series in the world.9 From the very beginning, the Experimental Band and the AACM were “composer-centered” organizations.10 However, composing original music—or “creative music,” the term favored by many AACM members— was not the only way to contribute to Abrams’s ensemble or to the larger collective.11 At the Experimental Band’s weekly rehearsals, Abrams might call on anyone, even a first-time visitor, to improvise over one of his compositions.12 Additionally, all Experimental Band musicians, from longtime participants to recent arrivals, were expected to give their best effort when rehearsing one another’s scores.13 Likewise, AACM members contributed to the organization by attending business meetings, paying membership dues, and working together to produce and publicize concerts.14 The members of the Experimental Band and the AACM valued originality and creativity above all else, but they realized that they could not reach their full potential by operating independently. Composing original music and engaging in other forms of creative expression were activities enabled by a supportive community, where sympathetic artists helped each other develop new ideas and drew inspiration from their colleagues’ latest advances. Anthony Braxton, who joined the Experimental Band and the AACM in 1966, described this community-oriented approach to creativity as “the complete freedom of individuals in tune with each other, complementing each other. . . . We’re working toward a feeling of one.”15 In the communal atmosphere cultivated by Abrams, the pace of musical innovation was remarkably rapid.16 One breakthrough led to another, and in just a few short years—from 1965 to the end of the decade—the members of the Association developed many of the musical techniques that would become synonymous with the AACM. These techniques, in turn, formed the foundation for additional discoveries made by AACM artists in later years. For decades, AACM composers and improvisers were able to build on the advances made by the collective’s “first wave” (the musicians who joined the Association in the 1960s).17 And, more often than not, these early innovations could be traced to Muhal Richard Abrams and the members of the Experimental Band.

Mitchell, Sound :: Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light

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Early Experiments Before Abrams formed the Experimental Band, he served as the codirector of a South Side workshop ensemble that had been rehearsing regularly since 1961. The ensemble’s other directors were, like Abrams, experienced bebop players who wanted to hone their skills as composers, improvisers, and section leaders by working in a big band. In 1962, one of the directors attempted to remake the workshop ensemble into a commercial big band that could contend for gigs at South Side venues such as the Regal Theater. Abrams, however, wanted the ensemble to remain a private forum where African American musicians could experiment with new approaches to composition and improvisation.18 The commercially minded members eventually left the ensemble, and several younger instrumentalists took their place, including Jack DeJohnette, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill, music majors from Woodrow Wilson Junior College who had been studying privately with Abrams.19 Soon, there were a dozen players in the ensemble—saxophonists Gene Dinwiddie, Jarman, Maurice McIntyre, Mitchell, and Threadgill, trumpeter Fred Berry, trombonist Lester Lashley, bassists Charles Clark and Donald Rafael Garrett, drummer Steve McCall, pianist-drummer DeJohnette, and Abrams himself.20 Abrams was the sole leader, and he gave the ensemble a new name: the Experimental Band. For the next several years, this ensemble would be the primary outlet for Abrams’s increasingly experimental compositions.21 Abrams was born on Chicago’s South Side in 1930.22 He attended DuSable High School, where the music program, directed by Captain Walter Dyett, was widely regarded as the best in the city. It was only after dropping out of DuSable, though, that Abrams began to pursue music, taking piano lessons with a private teacher and studying composition and theory at the Metropolitan School of Music in downtown Chicago.23 Outside the classroom, he spent countless hours at South Side jam sessions, acquiring vital performance experience that helped him grow from a novice musician into one of the city’s better bebop pianists.24 By the late 1950s, Abrams was also coming into his own as a composer, writing pieces for prominent Chicago jazz ensembles and learning orchestration techniques from South Side arrangers William Jackson and Charles Stepney. For Abrams, these one-on-one tutorials were much more congenial than his coursework at the downtown music school. Ultimately Abrams wanted to teach himself, and mentors like Jackson and Stepney gave him just enough guidance to find his own compositional voice.25 During one meeting with Stepney, Abrams was introduced to The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, an encyclopedic text that

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became central to his lifelong program of self-directed study.26 From this book, written by composer Joseph Schillinger, Abrams learned how to use mathematical principles to organize and generate musical material. Crucially, Schillinger’s methods could be applied to melody, rhythm, or any other element of music, and they did not constrain composers to a particular genre or style—an important consideration for Abrams, who was exploring twentieth-century concert music (Elliott Carter, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky) as well as modern jazz.27 The Schillinger system had a profound effect on the way Abrams composed.28 But the experience that truly transformed Abrams’s creative practice was his tenure as the director of the Experimental Band. Abrams had always been an adventurous composer, as evidenced by the music he wrote for the MJT+3 hard-bop quintet and pianist Walter “King” Fleming’s ensemble in the late 1950s and early 1960s.29 By the time he launched the Experimental Band, Abrams was breaking away from the stylistic conventions of bebop and creating pieces that called for new forms of notation and conducting. “The Experimental Band gave me a place to play this music I was writing,” Abrams remembered, “but the younger musicians couldn’t read the music, because it was too advanced for them. So I had to make up ways for them to play it, all these improvised ways for them to do stuff. I would have them learn a passage, do hand signals for them to play different things.”30 Abrams did not dispense entirely with traditional music notation. The scores he brought to the Experimental Band combined standard notation for pitch and rhythm with certain nontraditional techniques, from transposing clefs to written instructions outlining the actions that the musicians should perform. For instance: if Abrams wanted one of the Experimental Band’s saxophonists to play an ascending glissando spanning three octaves, he could employ conventional notation and write a rapid chromatic run from low B  ♭  into the altissimo register, but that approach might be needlessly complicated, difficult to sight-read, and unlikely to yield the desired result. Alternatively, Abrams could simply write a short description of what the saxophonist ought to do: “play a glissando from your instrument’s lowest note to its highest note.”31 To help the saxophonist interpret this visual-textual notation, Abrams would use a specialized conducting gesture—extending his arm to cue the glissando, perhaps, and then sweeping his hand upward to suggest the pacing and dynamics that he wanted to hear. By the mid-1960s, Abrams had created a comprehensive system of gestures and hand signals for conducting the Experimental Band, anticipating by several years the work of composers such as Butch Morris, Walter Thompson, and Alexander von Schlippen-

Mitchell, Sound :: Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light

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bach, who developed their own repertoires of gestures for conducting improvising ensembles.32 Abrams’s notation and inventive conducting techniques revolutionized his compositional style. Instead of producing complex scores to be played as written, Abrams conceived of his Experimental Band compositions as stories, “psychological plots,” or theatrical scripts, brought to life by his musicians at the moment of performance.33 A few bars of traditionally notated music might lead into an open-ended section featuring a brass soloist whose improvisation is guided by Abrams’s written instructions and animated conducting. Then: an impromptu bass duet accompanied by pre-composed countermelodies in the woodwinds, followed by an ensemble passage that Abrams assembles in real time using gestures and hand signals.34 Ultimately Abrams’s scores for the Experimental Band were about collaboration, and the ensemble’s concerts were “cast like plays,” with the music designed to spotlight each performer’s personality and improvisational skills.35 As Abrams explained in a 1967 interview, “You don’t need much to get off the ground when your musicians are spontaneous enough—just rehearse and let things happen. . . . I had to write quite a bit until I had musicians who could create a part, and then I wrote less and less. Now I can take eight measures and play a concert.”36 The innovations that Abrams introduced to the Experimental Band were embraced by other “first wave” AACM members. Several AACM composers—Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, Philip Cohran, Joseph Jarman, Maurice McIntyre, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Troy Robinson, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill—wrote pieces for the Experimental Band and conducted the ensemble when it rehearsed their music, experiences that helped them cultivate their own methods for directing improvising ensembles.37 Some of these composers explored alternative systems of music notation, from Abrams-influenced visualtextual scores to graphic scores that resembled works of art (see chapter  3). The members of the Association also began to investigate “extended forms,” a musical practice modeled on the Experimental Band’s performances, where brief composed passages served as the foundation for lengthy ensemble improvisations.38 In the mid-1960s, a number of AACM musicians formed their own small groups. Each of these ensembles engaged in its own way with the discoveries of the Experimental Band, translating Abrams’s ideas into the distinctive context of the jazz combo.39 A few of these small groups made lasting contributions to the AACM, and none were more influential than the bands led by Roscoe Mitchell. Not long after the Association’s founding, Mitchell’s ensembles developed a singular approach to the Experimental

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Band’s extended forms, one based on collective improvisation rather than the guidance of a conductor.40 In addition, Mitchell’s groups pioneered two other important musical practices—multi-instrumentalism and playing “little instruments”—that were adopted by almost every member of the 1960s AACM.41 At the end of the decade, Mitchell and his bandmates left the South Side and traveled to Paris, where they named themselves the Art Ensemble of Chicago and became the first AACM group to reach a “world audience.”42 The members of the Art Ensemble would perform together for some fifty years, bringing multi-instrumentalism, little instruments, extended forms, and the rest of the AACM’s sound experiments to listeners around the globe. Mitchell was born on the South Side in 1940, ten years after Abrams.43 His first instrument was clarinet, which he began playing at fourteen, when he moved with his father to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They returned to Chicago one year later, just in time for Mitchell to start the tenth grade at Englewood High School.44 While at Englewood, he took up two more instruments, the baritone and alto saxophones. After graduating from Englewood in 1958, he enlisted in the military, and during basic training, he passed an audition for the army band program.45 Mitchell would spend the next three years in the military, including a stint with the US Army Europe Band in Heidelberg, West Germany, where he ventured off-base to participate in jam sessions and take clarinet lessons with a member of the Heidelberg Philharmonic.46 In 1961, he finished his term of service, came home to Chicago, and enrolled in the music program at Woodrow Wilson Junior College. There Mitchell met Jack DeJohnette, who introduced him to Muhal Richard Abrams and recruited him into the Experimental Band.47 Mitchell, in turn, brought several other young players into Abrams’s orbit, including Joseph Jarman, his future bandmate in the Art Ensemble.48 Mitchell’s first small group, which he formed around 1963, had a lineup of alto saxophone, trumpet, bass, and drums, like Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking piano-less quartet.49 Coleman’s influence could also be heard in the group’s music: most of its compositions followed the head-solos-head format that Coleman adapted from bebop, and Mitchell and his bandmates based their improvisations on the melodic implications of the theme, not on a standard song form or a repeating chord progression.50 Mitchell led this quartet for two years, until 1965. At the end of 1965, trumpeter Fred Berry left the group, but bassist Malachi Favors and drummer Alvin Fielder stayed, and the Mitchell ensemble began to move beyond Coleman-style free jazz into a sound-world of its own creation.51 One of the major changes in the Mitchell ensemble’s sound came from

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the addition of a few new members, notably Lester Bowie, a trumpeter whose expressive tone was a perfect foil for the leader’s alto saxophone.52 The band members also started to explore multi-instrumentalism, the practice of playing many different instruments to obtain the timbral range of a large ensemble in a small-group setting. Mitchell added the recorder to his arsenal, Bowie began playing flugelhorn and harmonica, and Lester Lashley, another new member of the group, alternated between trombone and cello.53 Not to be outdone, Favors introduced his celebrated little instruments: bells, finger cymbals, and other small percussion instruments that brought a new dimension to the ensemble’s music.54 His bandmates responded by bringing in their own little instruments, found objects, and “sound tools.”55 Soon, the group’s instrument collection numbered in the dozens. The musicians’ forays into multi-instrumentalism and little instruments gave them access to timbral combinations that were unprecedented in jazz and experimental music. Mitchell, the band’s primary composer, was already writing music in a broad range of styles—and now it was as if he had a variety of ensembles at his disposal as well. The musicians’ expanded instrumental resources also reshaped their improvisations. In mainstream jazz, soloist and accompanist roles were often determined by the instrument one played, but the members of Mitchell’s ensemble were able to find novel pathways through the textures that the group assembled. With every new texture they created, the musicians discovered new uses for their arrays of instruments and new modes of interacting with their bandmates. Texture, timbre, and sound became the defining features of the group’s extended forms, which were built from a series of contrasting musical episodes, each with a distinctive blend of tone colors and possibilities for collective improvisation.56 The transformation of Mitchell’s music unfolded in just a few months’ time, during the first half of 1966. The group’s AACM colleagues witnessed these developments firsthand, and many felt compelled to investigate multi-instrumentalism and little instruments for themselves. A number of local jazz critics also took notice of these innovations and hailed Mitchell’s band as Chicago’s premier “avant-garde” ensemble, due to the band members’ “attention to the uses of sounds as such,” their “unique approach to free improvisation,” and the “empathy and technical fluency” of their performances.57 The critics’ praise for the Mitchell ensemble caught the eye of Chuck Nessa, an employee of Chicago entrepreneur Bob Koester, who owned the Jazz Record Mart retail store and Delmark Records, an independent label specializing in blues and traditional jazz. Nessa wanted the label to expand its coverage of contemporary music, and he persuaded Koester to let him produce a few recordings of South

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Side experimentalists.58 At an AACM concert in the summer of 1966, Nessa approached Mitchell and asked if he would be interested in recording an album for Delmark. Mitchell was intrigued by the proposal, and the next day, he and Muhal Richard Abrams headed to the Jazz Record Mart to meet with Koester. The principals quickly reached an agreement. Koester’s label would record the debut albums of three AACM members: Mitchell (Sound), Joseph Jarman (Song For), and Abrams (Levels and Degrees of Light).59 With these Delmark LPs, the AACM began to transition from a local musicians’ collective to an arts organization with a global reach. Although Delmark Records was a small operation, its releases were distributed across the United States and as far away as Japan. Before long, listeners around the world would be tuning in to the revolutionary sounds coming from Chicago’s South Side.

Sound Mitchell and his bandmates went into the recording studio in August 1966. By then, Mitchell had added saxophonist Maurice McIntyre to his ensemble, making the group a sextet—Bowie, Favors, Fielder, Lashley, McIntyre, and Mitchell.60 Mitchell’s sextet completed the recording in just two days (August 10 and 26), a typical timeframe for Delmark’s studio sessions.61 The music that Mitchell brought to the studio, though, was anything but typical. In addition to being the first album by an AACM ensemble, Sound was also the first recording to capture the musical techniques and instrumental combinations that Mitchell’s group had been developing since early 1966. Delmark hired an experienced engineer (Stu Black) for the Sound sessions, but the music was “by far . . . the strangest stuff he’d ever encountered,” according to Chuck Nessa, who supervised the recording.62 Mitchell’s ensemble played a number of instruments that rarely appeared on jazz recordings, and in the band’s extended forms, the texture could change radically from one moment to the next, making it difficult for the engineer to position microphones and set volume levels.63 Despite these technical challenges, the musicians were able to deliver strong performances in the studio, thanks to their extensive preparation for the Sound sessions.64 As soon as Mitchell signed the recording contract, he started teaching the music to his bandmates in “the oral tradition”: “I used to just play my saxophone and give people different parts to play. . . . You can do that kind of thing when you’ve got time to get together and really rehearse.”65 And rehearse they did. As Mitchell recalled, “we rehearsed daily for a month and a half leading up to the recording date. This gave everyone a chance to internalize the music.”66 Mitchell created three compositions for the album, each showcasing a

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different aspect of the group’s music. “Ornette,” the LP’s opening track, pays tribute to Ornette Coleman while revealing the unique compositional and improvisational strategies that define the Mitchell sextet’s approach to playing free jazz. Side A continues with “The Little Suite,” the first of the album’s two extended forms. As its title indicates, this composition is structured as a suite, a multi-part piece based on a handful of contrasting themes. In “The Little Suite,” much of the contrast between themes is timbral in nature: Mitchell arranges each theme for a different set of instruments, and even more instruments emerge during the improvised transitions that link the themes together. Multi-instrumentalism and little instruments also figure prominently in “Sound,” the extended form that fills all of side B. Here, a moody theme sets the stage for a stunning, twenty-two-minute collective improvisation, where colorful ensemble textures alternate with solo passages decorated by the musicians’ little instruments. “Ornette” opens with a startling fanfare (see example 1.1). Bowie (on trumpet), Mitchell (on alto saxophone), and McIntyre (on tenor saxophone) reach for a high note, then fall into the middle register. An instant later, the other musicians enter: Favors (on bass) and Lashley (on cello) create a pointillist background texture by plucking their instruments’ strings, while Fielder (on drumset) doubles the horn players’ rhythms. Together, Bowie, Mitchell, and McIntyre play a four-note leaping figure, then a chromatic ascent from E  ♭  to A, and finally a longer phrase that begins with a six-note stutter and ends with a playful tag in the key of B  ♭ . The B  ♭ -major tag sounds a lot like something Ornette Coleman could have written, as does the next phrase—a slow-paced interlude, starting at 0:11, where Bowie and Mitchell play in harmony rather than in unison. These two phrases, according to one critic, seem to emulate the “capering and plaintive veins of Coleman’s melodic sensibility,” and it is easy to hear this portion of the piece as a straightforward homage to the saxophonist-composer who was one of Mitchell’s formative influences.67 But then McIntyre returns to the texture, interrupting Bowie and Mitchell’s low-register chord with a shrill, altissimo squall. After several seconds, McIntyre runs out of air, allowing Bowie and Mitchell to begin another phrase. The next phrase also ends with a low-register harmony, and once again McIntyre attempts to interject. This time, however, Bowie and Mitchell do not concede so easily. As McIntyre holds on to his high note, Bowie and Mitchell bring back the B  ♭ -major tag heard some thirty seconds earlier. Now Bowie and Mitchell have the advantage: they play a bit louder than before, overshadowing McIntyre’s upper-register squall and closing off the theme. Then Mitchell takes control, launching into a solo as Bowie and McIntyre fade out.

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Example 1.1 “Ornette”: opening theme.

In this chapter, the transcriptions (1.1, 1.4–1.5) and score excerpts (1.7–1.8) are notated in the instruments’ keys, while the text refers to pitches in concert key.

Mitchell’s improvised solo is a mirror image of the composed theme. The solo and the theme are nearly the same length, at just over forty seconds each, but their other qualities are reversed (see example 1.2). The theme moves at a moderate-to-slow pace, and the melody given to the horn players is almost songlike—with the exception of McIntyre’s saxophone squalls at 0:26 and 0:40, which sound more like mid-1960s Albert Ayler than late 1950s Ornette Coleman.68 In contrast, there are only a few flashes of familiar melody in Mitchell’s solo, at 0:51 and 1:00, when he alludes to the B  ♭ -major tag from the theme. The rest of Mitchell’s impro-

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vised line is dense and timbrally complex, qualities associated with the “energy-sound” playing of Ayler and other second-generation free-jazz saxophonists.69 In AACM circles, this saxophone performance technique would be described as “intense,” especially when employed in an “intensity structure,” a distinctive texture where all the members of an ensemble maximize the density, complexity, and energy of their playing.70 Here, though, the musicians accompanying Mitchell do not move into an intensity structure. Instead, they keep developing the parts they created during the opening theme: Favors and Lashley’s pizzicato texture grows

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Example 1.2 “Ornette”: formal diagram.

opening theme

0:00–0:45

Mitchell solo

0:45–1:26

Bowie solo

1:26–2:25

McIntyre solo

2:25–3:32

string and percussion texture

3:32–4:36

closing theme

4:36–5:25

more interactive, while Fielder chatters away on his cymbals and drums, changing tempos spontaneously and never settling into a steady groove. After Mitchell’s improvisation, the performers continue to strike a balance between melody and intensity, between Ornette Coleman’s brand of free jazz and the sound-based approach to improvisation that was so compelling to many members of the 1960s AACM.71 The next soloists are Bowie and McIntyre, whose lines are more spacious than Mitchell’s, with brief silences between their phrases. The other musicians respond to these drops in intensity by playing faster—especially Fielder, who accelerates to a breakneck tempo at the beginning of Bowie’s solo and summons another burst of speed during the latter half of McIntyre’s improvisation. At the end of McIntyre’s solo, Fielder crashes a cymbal and then yields to Favors and Lashley, the ensemble’s two string players. For a moment, Favors and Lashley perform unaccompanied, shifting their pizzicato dialogue from the background to the foreground. Soon, though, Fielder returns, as does Mitchell, who picks up a pair of finger cymbals and plays a few accents, adding some little-instrument coloration to the vibrant string and percussion texture. A minute into the texture, Fielder outlines a fast tempo on his cymbals, the same gesture he used at pivotal points in the two previous solos. Bowie, Mitchell, and McIntyre pick up on Fielder’s cue, and at 4:36 they bring back the theme. This time, the theme has a different effect. The horn players’ opening fanfare and McIntyre’s altissimo notes no longer feel like out-of-place interjections. During the horn solos, the musicians found ways to combine contrasting approaches to music-making into a single texture, and they employ this strategy again as they perform the closing theme. When McIntyre reaches the midpoint of the theme, he transforms his altissimo line, using a warmer tone to match Bowie and Mitchell’s rich timbre while also changing the pitches he plays. Now McIntyre’s last note is a strato-

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spheric F6, which he sustains through the end of the theme, harmonizing the B  ♭ -major tag—and uniting the theme’s most Ornette-esque phrase with the cutting-edge sounds of the Roscoe Mitchell sextet. For Mitchell and his bandmates, it seems, the best tribute one can offer a fellow experimentalist is to build something new atop the foundation he has laid.72 Next up is “The Little Suite,” an extended form with an intricate design. There are three separate themes, connected to one another by short improvised transitions, as well as a longer ensemble improvisation and a final restatement of the first theme (see example 1.3). In the sextet’s 1966 performances, the musicians could turn three themes into forty minutes of music—a practice that would be further advanced by Mitchell’s Art Ensemble, whose concerts were structured as multi-theme suites lasting an hour or more.73 However, on Sound the Mitchell sextet plays all of “The Little Suite” in just ten minutes, an approach that dramatizes the stylistic contrasts between—and within—the three themes. The first theme is divided into two parts: a bluesy riff for harmonica, guiro, and strings, followed by a curious sequence of long tones, which starts out soft and ends with a colorful upper-register tremolo (see example 1.4). The musicians play the theme twice, perhaps to make its rather different halves sound more like a whole, then proceed immediately into an improvised transition. This transition is very brief, at only eighteen seconds—just enough time for the band members to develop a bit of the previous theme, switch instruments, and pivot to the theme that comes next. Here, Bowie is the first to change instruments, moving from harmonica to muted trumpet, while the others create a new texture that Example 1.3 “The Little Suite”: formal diagram.

theme 1

0:00–0:49

transition

0:49–1:07

theme 2

1:07–2:08

transition

2:08–2:36

theme 3

2:36–3:04

transition

3:04–3:16

theme 1, return

3:16–3:39

collective improvisation

3:39–9:56

theme 1, return

9:56–10:27

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Example 1.4 “The Little Suite”: theme 1, first statement.

The triangle used in this transcription is a graphic symbol that means “improvise(d).”

echoes the figuration heard at the end of the first theme. Then McIntyre and Mitchell switch instruments, relying on Bowie to fill the space left by their temporary absence. Once the process is complete, Mitchell blows a whistle, and at this cue, the musicians begin the next theme. Like the first theme, the second theme is made up of two parts: a sparse 12 introduction and a playful march in  8 time. The march tune (starting at 1:33) is worlds away from everything the group has played so far—in 12 fact, it is the only metered passage on the entire album—and the  8 groove

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seems as if it could go on for quite some time. But after thirty seconds, the musicians abruptly break up the theme and initiate another improvised transition. The new transition takes the form of an intensity structure, with raucous contributions from all of the performers, particularly Bowie, who places his flugelhorn in one hand and his trumpet in the other and blows both horns simultaneously. And then, just as suddenly as it began, the intensity structure runs its course. While the texture grows quieter, Mitchell moves from alto saxophone to recorder and prepares to play the third theme. This theme is the shortest of the three: a mysterious elevennote line for recorder and bowed bass (see example 1.5). Mitchell and Favors state the theme twice, then lead the group into an improvised passage with a bright, active texture reminiscent of the first transition. It sounds like “The Little Suite” has come full circle, especially at 3:16, when the band wraps up the transition and brings back the first theme. And this feeling of arrival propels the ensemble into the next stage of the performance: a collective improvisation for all six musicians. The collective improvisation begins with a lively texture that sounds much like the transitions heard earlier in the piece. The longest transition, though, lasted less than thirty seconds—and by the half-minute mark of the collective improvisation, it is clear that the performers are just getting started. The group members gradually introduce a number of new colors to the music: McIntyre picks up his tenor saxophone, Mitchell starts playing little instruments, and Fielder modifies the sound of his drumset by alternating between mallets and sticks. Because the performers do not have to quickly pivot to an upcoming theme, they can take their time exploring their instrument collections and creating novel textures. Soon the musicians settle into a rhythm, wholly transforming the texture every minute or so, with smaller timbral shifts in between. These textural transformations happen spontaneously, often in response to an especially evocative sound from one of the band members. At the Example 1.5 “The Little Suite”: theme 3.

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outset of the collective improvisation (3:39), the texture is rather sparse, but before long it begins to grow denser. Then, at 4:31, Mitchell blows a whistle, and the other musicians react immediately, playing softer and thinning out the texture. A moment later, Mitchell reenters on recorder, prompting McIntyre to move from tenor saxophone to guiro and tambourine. Most of the other performers start switching instruments too (except Lashley, who keeps playing cello, and Fielder, who stays on drumset). Favors moves from bass to small percussion, while Bowie and Mitchell change instruments after almost every phrase, trading melodic lines on harmonica and clarinet, trumpet and recorder, flugelhorn and alto saxophone. As the texture evolves, it becomes busier and louder—until 7:03, when all of the musicians fall silent for an instant. A split-second later, Fielder breaks up the silence with a rim shot and cymbal crash, inviting his bandmates back into the texture. Mitchell enters right away, with an explosive alto saxophone phrase that could trigger an intensity structure. Bowie and Lashley join in and try to help Mitchell shift the texture in this direction, but McIntyre and Favors have other ideas. Instead of moving toward an intensity structure, they tinker with some of their little instruments— guiro, tambourine, rattles, and a cowbell—keeping the ensemble poised between two different textural possibilities. The musicians maintain this sonic equilibrium though another unexpected silence, at 7:45. Then Mitchell and Bowie pick up where they left off, adopting an intense playing style and encouraging their bandmates to follow suit. Finally, at 8:35, McIntyre switches from percussion to tenor saxophone, and the intensity structure takes hold. Bowie, Fielder, and the two saxophonists play with great energy, creating a dense mass of sound that drowns out Lashley’s cello and Favors’s bass. Mitchell lets the intensity structure develop for nearly a minute, then blows his whistle five times, telling his bandmates to bring their volume down and conclude the intensity structure. One by one, the performers exit, until only Bowie and Fielder remain. Over Fielder’s cymbal commentary, Bowie ad-libs a harmonica melody that closes off the six-minute ensemble improvisation and cues the extended form’s final event: the return of the first theme. The musicians play the theme one last time, and with this, “The Little Suite” comes to an end. The album’s second side contains just one track: “Sound.” Devoting an entire album side to a single piece was uncommon in jazz and experimental music prior to 1966, but after the Sound sessions, this practice became a trademark of the AACM. The members of the Association recorded nearly two dozen LPs between 1966 and 1969, and all but Joseph Jarman’s Song For contained at least one side-length extended form.74 This was a natural outgrowth of the AACM’s concerts, where extended

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Example 1.6 “Sound”: formal diagram.

first take

second take

opening theme

0:00–3:00

opening theme

0:00–3:09

little instruments

3:00–4:00

little instruments

3:09–4:09

Bowie solo

4:00–7:31

Bowie solo

4:09–6:13

McIntyre solo

7:31–11:44

McIntyre solo

6:13–8:52

Lashley solo

11:44–16:12

Lashley solo

8:52–11:25

Mitchell solo

16:12–22:06

Mitchell solo

11:25–15:08

Favors solo

22:06–24:20

Favors solo

15:08–17:20

closing theme

24:20–26:36

closing theme

17:20–19:24

The complete first and second takes of “Sound” can be heard on the 1996 reissue of the album. The track that appeared on the original 1966 release was a composite, made from the selections highlighted above.

forms were the order of the day. However, some extended forms did not fit neatly into the time limits imposed by 1960s recording technology, as Mitchell discovered during the Sound sessions.75 Mitchell’s band recorded two versions of “Sound,” one on August 10 and another on August 26. The first take was twenty-six minutes in length—shorter than concert performances of the work, which often exceeded thirty minutes, but still too long to be placed on the album’s B-side.76 The second version, at less than twenty minutes, was well under the time limit (see example 1.6). It also featured an additional performer: Thurman Barker, the Experimental Band’s eighteen-year-old percussionist.77 Barker was one of several AACM members who came to the recording studio on August 26 to support their colleagues, and Mitchell asked him to play finger cymbals on the second take of “Sound.”78 Although the second take would have fit perfectly on Sound’s B-side, Mitchell preferred some of the solos from the first version. So for the album, he and Delmark’s Chuck Nessa created a composite track that incorporated portions of both performances.79 They accomplished this with a single splice, selecting the initial eleven and a half minutes of the second take (from the opening theme to the end of Lashley’s solo) and linking this passage to the final ten and a half minutes of the first take (from Mitchell’s solo to the closing theme). The result was a twenty-twominute track that seems like a continuous performance, with the editing

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audible only to those who listen carefully for the moment—just before the 11:30 mark—when Thurman Barker’s finger cymbals disappear. Indeed, the edit is virtually seamless, but not because of any note-for-note similarities between the two takes at the point of the splice. Aside from the opening and closing themes, there are no passages in the two performances that sound exactly alike. Instead, what unites the two versions of the work are the ways that Mitchell and his bandmates respond to the sonic architecture of the composition—and to one another. The musicians set the atmosphere right away, during the composite track’s opening theme. The piece begins with Fielder rolling his cymbals, a technique that yields sustained sounds rich in overtones rather than percussive attacks that rapidly fade away.80 Fielder keeps this sound layer going throughout the theme, a “stately lament” by the horn players: Lashley on trombone, Mitchell on alto saxophone, McIntyre on tenor saxophone, and Bowie on muted trumpet.81 The theme is a beautifully constructed ABA form, with the horn lines arranged into a series of duets that move in counterpoint, then harmony, and finally in unison (see examples 1.7 and 1.8).82 In Mitchell’s view, though, the cymbal roll played by Fielder is just as important as the intricate horn lines. The rest of the Example 1.7 “Sound”: opening theme, first A section.

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Example 1.8 “Sound”: opening theme, B section.

performance, in fact, is based on the sonic relationships that Fielder establishes during the theme. As Mitchell observed: “The cymbals are part of the compositional structure[,] and the sustained sound created by the cymbals manifests a sound environment that induces each musician to create an improvisation based on sound instead of notes following notes to create a melody.”83 When Mitchell and Lashley reach the end of the theme, Fielder silences his cymbals, and the performers move into the next stage of the piece, a quiet collective improvisation on little instruments—bells, recorder, a “half-filled water-can,” and so on.84 Remarkably, the collective improvisation seems to flow naturally from the theme, even though the ensemble’s dynamics and instrument palette have completely changed. In the expansive “sound environment” that the musicians created during the opening moments of the performance, nothing is off-limits, and listeners quickly learn to expect the unexpected.85 During the collective improvisation, the players infuse their little-instrument lines with plenty of space, creating a “breathtaking tension [between] sound and silence.”86 As the collective improvisation approaches the one-minute mark, Bowie enters on trumpet, subtly introducing new timbres into a texture that had consisted only of little instruments. Before long, the other group members exit, letting Bowie play unaccompanied, like Fielder did at the beginning of the piece. And, like Fielder’s cymbal roll, Bowie’s shadowboxing with silence is essential to the design of Mitchell’s composition. “To me,” Mitchell explained, “music is fifty percent sound and fifty percent silence. Silence is already perfect so, as musicians, when we make a sound we have to make sure that sound carries the same power as the silence around it.”87 Bowie’s solo improvisation is the first of many. After Bowie, McIntyre takes a solo, followed by Lashley, Mitchell, and Favors—every member

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of the sextet except Fielder, whose solo playing is confined to the cymbal rolls that precede the opening and closing themes. Each performer brings a unique sonic sensibility to his solo, in keeping with Mitchell’s conception of the piece: “the musicians are free to make any sound they think will do, any sound that they hear at a particular time. That could be like somebody who felt like stomping on the floor . . . well, he would stomp on the floor.”88 Despite these differences, though, all of the solos adhere to the same underlying form, an indication that “Sound” is less about free improvising and more about exploring the parameters of Mitchell’s composition. The soloist enters in the background, listening to his bandmates and blending into the texture they have set up. Moments later, the other musicians drop out, closing off the ensemble texture and yielding to the soloist, who “proceeds to create a sound sculpture that fits the constraints of the sound environment created by the compositional framework,” as Mitchell put it.89 In other words, when the soloist takes over, he focuses on timbral development—on sounds and tone colors rather than notes and melodic lines. Eventually the other musicians return, surrounding the soloist’s “sound sculpture” with complementary instruments and timbres. Bowie, for instance, begins his trumpet solo with half-valve playing and other techniques that make his horn sound like a human voice. Some of the performers respond by humming and singing, others start playing little instruments, and Fielder uses his cymbals to entice Bowie into a percussion-trumpet exchange. The next two improvisations follow a similar pattern, opening with voice-like sounds from the soloist (McIntyre on tenor saxophone, then Lashley on trombone) and gradually moving toward more active textures, with continuous ornamentation from the band’s collection of little instruments. As Lashley’s solo winds down, Mitchell decides to guide the music into new territory. He picks up his alto saxophone and plays an altissimo long tone, echoing Lashley, who is concluding his solo by exploring the trombone’s upper register. When Lashley exits, Mitchell keeps experimenting with altissimo playing, using multiphonic fingerings to split his saxophone notes into two simultaneous pitches. Then he starts making peculiar noises with his voice, growling and gasping in between each burst of sound from his saxophone. Mitchell’s adventurous improvising draws his bandmates back into the fray. Favors and Lashley enter on bass and cello, respectively, trailed by Bowie or McIntyre on bells and Fielder on cymbals. (Fielder’s drums do not appear in “Sound”—at Mitchell’s request, he only plays cymbals, which are “used for their overtone effect.”)90 It feels as if “Sound” has reached a long-awaited climax, and the musicians continue to develop this kaleidoscopic texture for the rest of Mitchell’s solo. Near the end of Mitchell’s improvisation, Favors takes a brief rest,

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then returns just as the saxophonist is primed to exit. He builds his bass solo out of double stops, harmonics, and bowed tremolos, techniques that recall the saxophone multiphonics and arco cello sounds heard in the preceding texture. Favors’s bandmates let him play unaccompanied for nearly two minutes, longer than any of the earlier solo passages. At last, Fielder joins in and dialogues with the bassist for a moment. Then Favors drops out, and Fielder shifts from accompanying a soloist to preparing the closing theme. He starts rolling his cymbals, creating a transitional sound layer that connects Favors’s bass solo to the final statement of the theme. With this sound layer in place, the horn players bring back the theme. They begin at the bridge (skipping the first A section), and conclude with the second A section. Even after the theme is over, Fielder continues rolling his cymbals until the recording fades out, restoring the “already perfect” silence that brought Mitchell’s “Sound” into being.91

Levels and Degrees of Light Abrams recorded Levels and Degrees of Light on June 7 and December 21, 1967, a year after the sessions for Mitchell’s Sound. As Mitchell had done the year before, Abrams prepared three compositions for the album—two pieces for side A and a longer work for side B. And, like the sextet that recorded Sound, all of the performers on Levels and Degrees of Light were connected to the Experimental Band. However, instead of using the same ensemble for the entire album, as on Mitchell’s Sound, Abrams brought three different groups to the recording studio, one for each track. This strategy ensured that each of the album’s three compositions would have a distinctive character and instrumentation. It also enabled Abrams to spotlight some of his closest collaborators from the Experimental Band in unique musical settings that made the most of their individual talents.92 The album begins with the title track, “Levels and Degrees of Light.” Compared to the other pieces on the LP, it has a relatively simple form: one theme, repeated with variations, then another theme, repeated and varied. It also features the album’s smallest ensemble, a quartet that sounds more like a classical chamber group than a jazz combo—vocalist Penelope Taylor, vibraphonist Gordon Emanuel (aka Emanuel Cranshaw), percussionist Thurman Barker, and Abrams, who plays clarinet rather than piano.93 On the next track, “My Thoughts Are My Future—Now and Forever,” Abrams moves to piano, and three additional musicians join in: Anthony Braxton on alto saxophone, Maurice McIntyre on tenor saxophone, and Charles Clark on bass. “My Thoughts Are My Future” is an extended form, as is “The Bird Song,” the twenty-three-minute work on the album’s B-side. For “The Bird Song,” Taylor and Emanuel are replaced

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by two string players: violinist Leroy Jenkins and bassist Leonard Jones. Abrams plays both clarinet and piano on “The Bird Song,” and at certain points in the piece, some of the musicians employ bells and other little instruments, forming an orchestra-esque ensemble that is evenly divided between strings, winds, and percussion. “The Bird Song” also includes a poetry recitation by AACM member Amus Mor (born David Moore), one of the most influential performing poets of his generation.94 In the 1960s, many AACM groups incorporated poetry recitations into their concerts and recordings, but none of these collaborations were quite like “The Bird Song,” where Abrams uses textural contrasts and electronic effects to combine music and poetry into an intermedia work that is much more than the sum of its parts.95 The first instruments heard in “Levels and Degrees of Light” are Emanuel’s vibraphone and Barker’s cymbals. Emanuel plays an ascending line that spans the entire three-octave range of his vibraphone, followed by a trill on E6 and F6, the instrument’s highest notes. Barker employs a similar technique, rolling one of his cymbals to create an upper-register shimmer that grows louder and brighter as Emanuel’s vibraphone trill continues. After building this sound layer for a few seconds, the musicians suddenly stop, allowing the metallic tones of the vibraphone and cymbal to ring out, then gradually fade away. This tantalizing introduction sets the stage for Taylor, who enters with the piece’s first theme. The theme is fairly simple, at least on the surface: ten (or so) phrases, none longer than ten notes, all based on the G-minor pentatonic scale. Taylor, though, takes this simple melody and transforms it into a soaring aria, repeating some of the phrases with slight variations and shaping each phrase with precise dynamics, rich vibrato, and resonant vowel sounds. Emanuel supports Taylor’s vocal line with sounds drawn from the opening of the performance: trills, tremolos, and sweeping glissandos. Barker, too, echoes the brief introduction, rolling and crashing his cymbals—and studiously avoiding the rest of his drumset, as Alvin Fielder did on Roscoe Mitchell’s “Sound.” However, instead of staking out their own sonic space, like Fielder’s cymbals on “Sound,” Barker’s cymbals share the upper register with Emanuel’s vibraphone and Taylor’s soprano voice. Barker revels in this unconventional sonic environment, responding to Taylor’s high notes with energetic cymbal playing that floods the upper register and brings a feeling of focused intensity to the music. Four minutes into the performance, Taylor sings the final phrase of the first theme. Barker and Emanuel answer her with a cymbal roll and an ascending vibraphone line that ends on an E6-F6 trill—the same figures heard at the beginning of the piece. They pause for an instant, then repeat the cymbal roll and the vibraphone ascent and trill, resetting the texture

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and ushering in the second theme. This theme belongs to Abrams, who enters after Taylor leaves the texture. Abrams plays the theme on clarinet, not piano, a choice that may have surprised listeners who were acquainted with his work as a pianist in Chicago-based modern jazz groups such as the MJT+3 quintet and saxophonist Eddie Harris’s band.96 However, by 1966, the year when multi-instrumentalism took hold in the AACM, Abrams was playing clarinet as much or more than piano.97 The clarinet, unlike the piano, was an instrument he could play while standing up—which was also his preferred position for conducting. During the rehearsals and recording sessions for Levels and Degrees of Light, Abrams spent nearly every moment conducting with clarinet in hand, moving to the piano only when necessary—and even then finding ways to conduct the ensemble with a head nod or a raised arm.98 He could also conduct and play clarinet simultaneously, as he does on the second half of “Levels and Degrees of Light.” The second theme is even simpler than the first. Instead of several different phrases, there are just a few short motives, which are combined to form two phrases, both in the key of D minor. Abrams plays these phrases again and again, introducing new variations each time while never straying far from the original theme. Abrams ends some of the phrases by transposing his line down an octave or two, momentarily shifting the theme into the lowest part of the clarinet’s range. The rest of the theme, though, is situated in the instrument’s clarion and altissimo registers, right alongside the high-pitched, metallic tones of Barker’s cymbals and Emanuel’s vibraphone. This concentration of bright timbres in the upper register is crucial to the sound of the second theme, even more so than the first theme. As Abrams’s improvisation unfolds, he keeps returning to the altissimo register, devoting much of his attention to the two-note motive (A5-E6) that initiates each phrase. He often repeats this motive several times in succession, adding trills and tremolos, using rougher timbres, bending certain notes upward, and occasionally transposing the entire motive higher. At the same time, Abrams uses his conducting skills to shape his bandmates’ accompaniment—giving Barker and Emanuel cues so they know when he is about to start a new phrase, and indicating when they should adjust their dynamics or change the texture. The musicians play the theme seven times in the span of six minutes, making each phrase more active than the last while still preserving the sense of spaciousness that has characterized the piece since it began. At 10:08, Abrams returns to the A5-E6 motive once again, and the other musicians await a signal that will tell them whether to continue with the rest of the theme. He lands on the motive’s last note, decorating it with a trill, then bends the note all the way up to A6, higher than every other pitch

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Example 1.9 “Levels and Degrees of Light”: formal diagram.

theme 1

0:00–4:03

theme 2

4:03–10:34

Example 1.10 “My Thoughts Are My Future—Now and Forever”: formal diagram.

theme

0:00–0:22

Abrams solo

0:22–2:10

Braxton solo

2:10–3:55

Barker solo

3:55–4:57

McIntyre solo

4:57–6:43

Clark solo

6:43–7:51

ensemble texture

7:51–9:07

coda

9:07–9:42

in the performance. At last, he releases the clarinet from his embouchure, prompting Barker and Emanuel to end the piece. They play the cymbal roll and the vibraphone ascent and trill one more time, and “Levels and Degrees of Light” comes to an end (see example 1.9). The next piece on side A, “My Thoughts Are My Future—Now and Forever,” diverges from the title track in almost every way. “Levels and Degrees of Light” revolves around a pair of composed themes, but “My Thoughts Are My Future” has only one theme, which is presented at the start of the piece and never stated again (see example 1.10). Instead of a spacious, unmetered texture—“rubato carried to an extreme,” as Abrams would say—“My Thoughts Are My Future” is propelled by the up-tempo playing of Barker and bassist Charles Clark.99 “My Thoughts Are My Future” also features a wider range of textures: three distinct trio configurations, two unaccompanied solos, and a conclusion that incorporates sounds first heard in “Levels and Degrees of Light.” Some of the transitions between these textures are cued in real time, while others are achieved electronically through mixing-board fades, a recording-studio technique that Abrams uses as an extension of his conducting methods. “My Thoughts Are My Future” starts at full tilt. Barker (on drumset) and Clark (on bass) play as fast as they can, but at slightly different

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speeds, creating the dense, polyrhythmic foundation that underlies much of the performance. A few seconds later, Abrams brings in the theme, an epigrammatic line made up of just eleven notes, one for each syllable of the composition’s title: my thoughts / are my fu-ture / now and for-ev-er. Taylor and one of the musicians sing the line in octaves, Abrams doubling the vocal melody on piano. Then, at 0:22, the vocalists exit, and Abrams launches into his piano solo. He begins his improvisation in the middle of the keyboard, positioning his hands close together and playing a pair of churning, interlocking lines atop Barker and Clark’s driving accompaniment. As the piano solo continues, Abrams starts to venture beyond the middle register, letting his hands—first the right, then the left—explore the rest of the keyboard. He also plays with increased intensity, and Barker and Clark follow his lead. Finally, a minute and forty-five seconds into the solo, Abrams moves both of his hands toward the upper reaches of the keyboard to play a long, descending glissando. This gesture performs two functions at once, marking the end of Abrams’s improvisation and summoning Anthony Braxton, the piece’s second soloist. Braxton responds immediately to Abrams’s cue. At 2:10, before Abrams can finish his glissando, Braxton starts his alto saxophone solo, quoting the first few notes of the piece’s theme and then inventing his own melodies, one angular phrase after another. During Braxton’s solo, Abrams moves away from the piano, giving the saxophonist space to develop his improvised line in dialogue with Barker and Clark. But Abrams still makes his presence felt through his conducting and compositional design. The saxophone-bass-drums texture takes the same shape as Abrams’s solo, growing more intense with each phrase and concluding—after precisely one minute and forty-five seconds, just like the piano improvisation— with a descending line from the soloist. Then Abrams guides the ensemble into the next section of “My Thoughts Are My Future”: an unaccompanied drum solo. This is the biggest change in the texture since the piece began, and Barker takes full advantage. He begins by rolling his snare drum, and uses this simple musical idea as the basis for the entire improvisation, coaxing a variety of sounds from his snare and coloring the solo with tom-tom accents and cymbal crashes. Barker’s minute-long improvisation prepares the way for two more soloistic passages, each modeled after a previous solo. At 4:57, Abrams adds Clark and Maurice McIntyre to the texture, recreating the saxophone-bass-drums trio heard earlier, now with McIntyre’s fierce tenor playing at the forefront. One minute and forty-five seconds later, McIntyre and Barker drop out and Clark takes over. There are echoes of Barker’s improvisation in Clark’s virtuosic bass solo, especially his rapid-fire strumming, an extended technique that makes his strings pulsate and pop like a snare drum.

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By 7:43, one minute into the solo, Clark is playing more forcefully than ever. Rather than alternating between different playing techniques, like he did at the outset of the improvisation, Clark keeps strumming a low-register chord, waiting for a signal from Abrams to end the bass solo. At this point in the performance, each instrumentalist has taken a solo, and some listeners might expect the musicians to return to the opening theme. Instead, Abrams does something unexpected and extraordinary. As Clark strums his bass, Abrams slowly fades in a new audio track featuring an expanded ensemble that includes Gordon Emanuel as well as Penelope Taylor. This fade-in is quite unlike the tape splice from Roscoe Mitchell’s “Sound,” which created an almost-imperceptible transition between two performances by essentially the same ensemble. In contrast, the mixing-board fade from “My Thoughts Are My Future” connects Clark’s unaccompanied bass solo to a multilayered ensemble texture that sounds different from everything that came before. It is as if Abrams has transported Clark from one room of the recording studio to another, so the bassist can join a septet performance that is already in progress. As the ensemble texture fades in (starting at 7:51), the first sounds that can be heard are the fast, polyrhythmic playing of Barker and Clark and crisscrossing melodic lines from Abrams, Braxton, and McIntyre. A few seconds later, Emanuel and Taylor enter the texture, contributing upper-register harmonies and long tones that move at a slower pace than the other musicians’ lines. To make the texture even more complex, Abrams adds a dose of reverb, an electronic effect that lends an ethereal quality to Emanuel’s vibraphone and Taylor’s voice, which seem to float above the dense thicket of drum, bass, piano, and saxophone sounds.100 The performers quickly work the texture into an intensity structure and sustain this energetic playing style for a full minute, until 8:57. Then Abrams gives a cue, and Braxton, Emanuel, McIntyre, and Taylor land on the highest notes they can reach, distilling the intensity structure into a dazzling beam of light.101 After this climactic moment, four of the musicians exit, leaving only Barker, Emanuel, and Taylor—a trio last heard during the first theme of the previous track, “Levels and Degrees of Light.” Together they perform a brief coda, uniting “My Thoughts Are My Future” with sounds from the album’s opening track and bringing side A to a close. Levels and Degrees of Light concludes with another extended form: “The Bird Song.” In this piece, there are no instrumental solos, not even by the bandleader. Instead, the composition is based on three different depictions of birds and birdsongs, each associated with a particular texture (see example 1.11). The first texture is the most conventional: a composed theme for Abrams’s clarinet and Leroy Jenkins’s violin. Abrams

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Example 1.11 “The Bird Song”: formal diagram.

theme

0:00–1:07

Mor recitation

1:07–5:25

ensemble improvisation

5:25–22:53

builds the theme from wide intervals (fifths, sevenths, octaves), some of which are connected by narrower steps or skips, much like the birdsonginspired melodies written by other twentieth-century composers such as Eric Dolphy and Olivier Messiaen.102 Many of these melodies use lively rhythms and shorter durations, in emulation of the actual birdsongs that the composers transcribed, but Abrams and Jenkins’s line is made up of longer, sustained notes, a technique that enables listeners to attend to each pitch of the theme—and the theme’s placement at the upper limits of the clarinet’s and violin’s ranges. Indeed, Abrams and Jenkins’s playing is so unhurried that time seems to slow down, while the reverb that saturates the track makes the clarinet and violin sound like two songbirds serenading a desolate cityscape. The next texture is even sparser than the last. When Abrams and Jenkins arrive at the final note of the theme, Amus Mor enters, intoning the first line of his poem: “birds and prophecy.” Then Abrams and Jenkins exit, and for the next four minutes, Mor performs without instrumental accompaniment. This is an unusual texture, at least in comparison to other early AACM recordings, where singers and poets are always backed up by instruments—for instance, Penelope Taylor’s vocal performances on “Levels and Degrees of Light” and “My Thoughts Are My Future,” or Joseph Jarman’s poetry recitation on “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City” (from his Delmark album Song For).103 However, the electronic reverb on “The Bird Song” functions almost like another instrument, resonating with Mor’s voice and placing his recitation in the same sonic space as the opening theme.104 Mor, too, uses his voice like an instrument, changing his dynamics, tone color, and register when he wants to emphasize crucial words and phrases.105 The poem is prophetic in nature, as its first line suggests. Mor laces his text with apocalyptic imagery: “when the final trumpet  .  .  . shines down,” “the beast of eleven horns,” “the end of Armageddon,” and so on. The book of Revelation describes a battle between good and evil in the land of Israel, but Mor’s apocalypse unfolds on the streets of Chicago.106 The champions in Mor’s narrative are “the children of the sun,” an African people brought to a forbidding metropolis where “the snow flurries

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[fall] sterile, making the walks of concrete a stark photograph.” Although they may be strangers in a strange land, the children of the sun are never alone. Wherever they wander, they are watched over by winged prophets: “golden doves . . . of Eden” that look out “through the windows of high-rise ruins,” “sparrows of yellow” taking flight like “the marching troops of Kenya,” and “silver doves” perched atop the “Midwestern maroon brick bungalows” that line Chicago’s avenues. And now the children of the sun are protected by a “new breed,” songbirds whose melodies are no longer “shrouded in what was jazz.” This new breed sings a new song, prophesying to the children of the sun “in [their] abodes beneath the living light.”107 Mor’s recitation leads into the last section of the piece: a seventeenminute ensemble improvisation, conducted by Abrams, that can be heard as a musical response to the narrative of the poem.108 The first group members to enter are the two bassists, Charles Clark and Leonard Jones, playing quiet, bowed harmonics in the extreme upper register. At 6:56, a minute and a half into the texture, Abrams brings in two more musicians, Jenkins and Thurman Barker. Jenkins imitates the bassists’ high harmonics on his violin, starting out hesitantly and then playing more melodically, while Barker softly rolls his cymbals, taking care to match the string trio’s dynamics. The performers continue in this vein for a few minutes, gradually increasing their volume as the texture evolves. Then, at 9:15, Abrams gives a cue, and everything begins to change. Jenkins bows his violin furiously, transforming his upper-register harmonics into chirping, chattering sounds suggestive of a songbird’s melody. A second later, Abrams, Anthony Braxton, and Maurice McIntyre join the texture, shaking small bells and playing mouth-blown bird calls—“sound tools,” as Braxton would say, used to create a unique textural layer that would not be possible with standard musical instruments.109 If Jenkins’s violin evokes a lone songbird, the bird calls conjure up an entire flock, blending the sounds of Mor’s doves and sparrows with the other musicians’ strings, cymbals, and bells. Three minutes later, the texture shifts again. The players bring their dynamics down, bit by bit, until the ensemble’s volume is at a whisper. Suddenly, at 12:53, Abrams fades in a new track, shattering the peaceful soundscape heard just seconds before. This is the same mixing-board technique that Abrams employed in “My Thoughts Are My Future,” but here the effect is even more jarring, because so many elements of the texture change so quickly. Five of the performers—Abrams (piano), Barker (drumset), Braxton (alto saxophone), Clark and Jones (basses)—launch into an intensity structure, while Jenkins and McIntyre play bells, the lone sound layer connecting the old track to the new. For now, the bird

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calls are silent: Mor’s sparrows and doves have yielded to a new breed whose prophecies are revealed through intensity structures and electronic effects. The intensity structure lasts for nearly seven minutes (from 12:53 to 19:38), longer than any other passage on the album. During this stage of the ensemble improvisation, the texture is remarkably stable, with only a few changes in the instrumentation. Early on, McIntyre moves from little instruments to tenor saxophone, and a while later, Abrams steps away from the piano, playing bells when Jenkins rests and keeping the texture balanced between strings, winds, and percussion. Like many AACM intensity structures, this texture is driven by the saxophonists, Braxton and McIntyre, who use altissimo squalls and other extended techniques to spur their bandmates into playing with more and more energy.110 But the ensemble’s intensity level peaks only after 18:19, when Abrams and Jenkins switch from percussion to mouth-blown bird calls, answering Braxton and McIntyre’s fiery saxophone lines with a chorus of upper-register birdsong. This thrilling exchange brings all the elements of the ensemble improvisation together—sonically and poetically—assuring the children of the sun that the new breed’s melodies carry the same prophetic message as the dove and sparrow songs that comforted them in times past. The performers work this complex texture for more than a minute, until it is time for “The Bird Song” to wind down. Abrams opened the ensemble improvisation with strings and cymbals before adding little instruments to the texture, and now he retraces his steps, bringing the music back to where it began. At 19:38, the saxophonists exit, and Abrams directs Clark, Jenkins, and Jones to return to the bowed harmonics they played earlier in the piece. Barker focuses on his cymbals while the other musicians play bells and bird calls, recreating the texture heard just before the intensity structure. Eventually the ensemble’s little instruments start to fade away, leaving only the strings and cymbals. And this is how “The Bird Song” ends, with upper-register harmonics and cymbal flourishes that shine as brightly as Mor’s golden and silver doves.

Kindred Spirits The long ensemble improvisation from “The Bird Song” is not the only episode on Levels and Degrees of Light where Muhal Richard Abrams and his bandmates use sound to convey “deeper levels of meaning [that go] beyond pitches and intervals.”111 Indeed, Abrams claimed that the entire LP could be heard as a spiritually charged dialogue with the artists he entrusted to perform his compositions. As he explained in the album’s liner notes, “the musicians involved tried to join their thoughts to mine. We

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tried to join together in a kind of prayer. This recording constitutes the capturing of a moment in that constant prayer. What is here is what we are and what we hope to be.”112 The liner notes do not disclose the precise meaning of this musical prayer, but insights can be found elsewhere on the album’s packaging, specifically the cover art, a painting by Abrams.113 Abrams completed the painting in 1968, not long after the Levels and Degrees of Light recording sessions.114 The production team at Delmark Records needed artwork for the album cover, and Abrams offered to provide it himself. The painting, also titled Levels and Degrees of Light, is steeped in symbolism that Abrams encountered while studying Rosicrucianism, an esoteric philosophy influenced by Freemasonry, Kabbalah, and Egyptology.115 The Rosicrucian symbols deployed in the painting have multiple meanings, but Abrams uses them to deliver one unified message in three different ways, like the contrasting yet harmonious melodies sung by the doves, sparrows, and “new breed” prophets in “The Bird Song.” Moreover, each part of this threefold message corresponds to one of the keywords in the album’s title (levels, degrees, light), helping listeners unlock the meaning of the cover art—and the music inside. The painting’s focal points are a staircase and a magenta-colored, human-like figure, placed side-by-side in a landscape topped by a sunlit mountain range.116 Instead of extending above the landscape, the staircase descends into the earth, a sign that new levels of spiritual understanding can only be attained by turning inward. There are Hebrew letters on the staircase—kaf, ayin, nun, and gimel, each with its own constellation of Kabbalistic meanings—and on the mountain range, whose highest peak is capped by the letter qof, which in Freemasonry symbolizes the highest degrees of wisdom. The letter qof also represents a life path based on constant communication with the spiritual realm, drawing on one’s inner light as well as the eternal source from which it comes. And this is the path chosen by the magenta figure who stands next to the staircase, holding an Egyptian ankh in one hand and a golden lamp in the other. The ankh, a symbol of life and eternity, faces west, and the lamp faces the east, keeping the figure connected to the spiritual light that illuminates the world.117 The AACM’s earliest business meetings started with Abrams and the other members of the Association facing east for a moment of silent prayer.118 A number of AACM bands brought this practice into their performances, most famously the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who began every concert by facing the east and preparing to receive the inspiration that fueled their music.119 Rituals like this were potent reminders that the AACM was about more than musical experimentation. For many AACM artists, the experimental practices that the Association developed in the

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1960s were ultimately the means to an end, ways to access sounds and spirits that could not be reached by musicians who remained beholden to tradition. And because AACM members collaborated with one another so avidly—in Abrams’s Experimental Band, Mitchell’s Art Ensemble, and countless other groups—they were able to take their investigations even further, discovering new approaches to instrumentation, form, notation, and conducting that few could have foreseen. As Joseph Jarman observed in a discussion of the Art Ensemble’s unique instrumentation: “One of the things, one of the elements that made the Art Ensemble search so diligently, was for the manifestation of the true sound. So that’s why we had so many instruments. [We] were looking for specific sounds to express the music that was flowing through [our] consciousness. And that sound could be a bowl, a table, a piece of wood; whatever it took.”120

2 * Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah

The thing about Nonaah is that once you put yourself in that atmosphere you can ride on forever.1

Willisau Roscoe Mitchell was minding his own business. He and his bandmates in the Art Ensemble of Chicago were one month into a long tour of Europe, and as August 1976 came to a close, they were enjoying a rare weekend off.2 The members of the Art Ensemble chose to spend their downtime in Willisau, Switzerland. A picturesque village near Lucerne, Willisau was home to one of the largest European jazz festivals of 1976, along with San Sebastián, Pescara, Montreux, Moers, Juan-les-Pins, and Châteauvallon.3 The Art Ensemble performed at Châteauvallon on August 22, then headed to Switzerland, where they opened the Willisau festival on August 26.4 Their next concert—in Italy—was still a few days away, so the musicians stayed in Willisau to experience the rest of the festival. This would give Mitchell and his bandmates a chance to hear their AACM colleague Anthony Braxton, who was scheduled to perform in Willisau on August 28.5 As luck would have it, Braxton’s arrival in Willisau was greatly delayed. By late afternoon on August 28, it was clear that Braxton would not make it to the festival on time. So Niklaus Troxler, the festival organizer, asked Roscoe Mitchell to take Braxton’s spot on the program and perform a solo saxophone concert.6 Mitchell agreed. “I ran to the hotel and got my alto,” he recalled. “I had an hour to warm it up.”7 Mitchell tried to make the most of the time he was granted—on the Willisau concert recording, he can be heard playing long tones backstage while he is being introduced by the emcee.8 Ordinarily he would have preferred to spend several hours warming up, not sixty minutes. But in another sense, he had been preparing for this moment for a decade. Like many AACM musicians, Mitchell started performing unaccompanied solos during the early days of the Association.9 Around 1967, Muhal

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Richard Abrams encouraged everyone in the organization to give a solo concert, and a number of AACM members rose to the challenge.10 By 1969, Abrams, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and Mitchell had recorded solo pieces.11 That same year, Braxton tracked his double LP For Alto, the first-ever solo saxophone album.12 Before long, solo performances would become central to the musical practices of several other AACM artists, including Douglas Ewart, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, George Lewis, Famoudou Don Moye, Amina Claudine Myers, and Wadada Leo Smith.13 Like Smith’s solo outings (see chapter 8), Mitchell’s solo pieces were rigorously structured. He described these performances as “practiced solo improvisations”—improvisations based on compositional structures and instrumental techniques that he had been exploring for months, or even years.14 According to Mitchell: The point of playing solo is to prove you can sustain a structure for longer and longer periods of time, so I develop exercises to increase my power of concentration, starting off with small sections at first, and while I’m doing that, I’m also working on technique—things like . . . breathing and fingering. It would be nice if every time you started playing . . . the light comes down from the heavens, and you can do no wrong. And you reach that point sometimes—but not every night. So there’s always at least a germ of thought I start off with, even on a completely open improvisation.15

Mitchell decided to begin the Willisau performance with his composition Nonaah. The piece had been in his repertoire since 1972, when he composed a brief score consisting of several angular phrases that use “very large skips” to traverse the entire range of the alto saxophone (see example 2.1).16 By 1973, Mitchell was including minute-long renditions of Nonaah in his solo concerts.17 He also wrote expanded versions of the piece for various small groups: a score for the Art Ensemble and guest pianist Muhal Richard Abrams; a duet for saxophone and piano; an arrangement for saxophone, trombone, piano, and guitar; and a sketch for saxophone quartet.18 Mitchell drafted the saxophone quartet in 1976, shortly before the Willisau festival, and he used the Alto I part as the basis for his impromptu solo performance (see example 2.2). The quartet is divided into three sections. The first section, labeled quick, consists of a single phrase that spans more than two octaves. As indicated by the vamp marking and the brackets above the staff, the opening phrase can be repeated any number of times (see example 2.3). Next is the slow second section, where a series of short motives combine to form a longer theme (see example 2.4). The third and final section of the quartet, also labeled quick, is based on the original 1972 solo score (see example 2.5).

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Example 2.1 Nonaah: score for solo alto saxophone.

The opening phrase returns midway through this section, giving the performer(s) an opportunity to “[pull] together” the first and third sections and create an elegant ABA form.19 And indeed, that is what Mitchell intended to do at Willisau. But when he took the stage, he was faced with an unforeseen obstacle, and he had to adjust his plans to contend with a new reality. In other words, he had to improvise. Of all the artists slated to appear in Willisau, Anthony Braxton was the most popular by a wide margin. In an audience poll taken at the festival, Braxton was voted “musician of the year.”20 He placed first and second, respectively, in the “miscellaneous instruments” and alto saxophone categories, and his most recent recording, Creative Orchestra Music 1976, was named the year’s best album.21 Roscoe Mitchell’s Art Ensemble also earned accolades at Willisau, winning the “group of the year” category in the festival poll, with Anthony Braxton’s quartet finishing second.22 But many in Willisau considered Braxton to be the biggest name on the festival roster. Some audience members, in fact, had traveled hundreds of kilometers to hear his set.23 When the emcee announced that Braxton

Example 2.2 Nonaah: sketch for saxophone quartet.

Example 2.3 Nonaah: sketch for saxophone quartet, Alto I, first section.

Example 2.4 Nonaah: sketch for saxophone quartet, Alto I, second section.

Example 2.5 Nonaah: sketch for saxophone quartet, Alto I, third section.

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would not be performing, the festivalgoers were incensed, and they did not hide their displeasure.24 Once Mitchell strode onto the stage, half of the 1,000-member audience greeted him with catcalls.25 To twenty-first-century listeners, the crowd’s hostility might seem inexplicable. At Willisau, Mitchell was no interloper; rather, he was a highly regarded performer, as shown in the festival poll, where he placed third in the alto saxophone category.26 He and his Art Ensemble bandmates, moreover, had given a well-received concert on the Willisau stage just two nights before.27 Indeed, the reception of the Art Ensemble’s Willisau set casts doubt on one writer’s conjecture that the audience’s reaction to Mitchell was about aesthetics—in particular, a desire to hear the “intense, dense ‘energy music’” often performed at 1970s European jazz festivals.28 To Mitchell, intensity was only one part of a broader sonic palette, an approach that he shared with his AACM colleagues, including Anthony Braxton. As Mitchell noted, “the Chicago people got intense, but they also got soft, and they also were incorporating other sounds into their music.”29 Festivalgoers craving “energy music” would not have eagerly waited all day for Braxton’s concert, nor would they have reacted so negatively when they learned that he would not be performing. The crowd’s response, therefore, could not have been an aesthetic critique of Mitchell’s playing style. Instead, it was a protest by Braxton’s loyal fans, who were upset at Mitchell for daring to take their favorite musician’s place. In the words of a French critic who was in the audience that night, “replacing Braxton was unforgivable.”30

First Section As the concert recording reveals, Mitchell is surprised, though not subdued, by the crowd’s reaction. Without hesitation, he addresses the microphone and starts to play the opening phrase of Nonaah, stuttering just a bit on the first pitch, a high E6 (see example 2.6). At the end of the phrase, he holds the last note for a little more than a second. Then an audience member near the stage shouts at Mitchell—loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the festival hall.31 Mitchell responds by repeating the opening phrase, this time holding the final G   ♯  4 for two full seconds, a preemptive strike against another audience outburst. The sustained G  ♯ 4 serves two purposes: it quiets the hostile audience members, at least temporarily, and it opens up a unique performance strategy—a way to navigate Nonaah as well as “the environment the piece was to take place in.”32 Mitchell came to the stage to play a solo concert, but he soon found himself in an unexpected showdown with Anthony Braxton’s supporters. Instead of confronting his antagonists

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Example 2.6 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 1–2.

In this chapter, the transcriptions (2.6–2.23) are notated in the alto saxophone’s key.

directly or attempting to ignore them, Mitchell resolved “to make the noise and whatever was going on with the audience part of the piece.”33 To accomplish this, he would have to transform the sounds of the crowd’s reaction into material for a musical interaction. Mitchell’s strategy for engaging the Willisau audience is based on two techniques: repetition and variation. He repeats the opening phrase again and again, showing his determination to keep playing in face of the crowd’s animosity. As he later explained, “The music couldn’t move [until] they respected me, until they realized that I wasn’t going anywhere, and if someone was going it would have . . . to be them.”34 At the same time, he introduces subtle variations to the opening phrase, demonstrating that he is indeed interacting with the festivalgoers—but on his terms, not theirs. If the audience members want to get the most out of Mitchell’s performance, they need to stop protesting and start listening. The first variations to the phrase center on the final note, G  ♯ 4. Mitchell initiates this process immediately, during the second statement of the phrase, when he stretches the concluding G  ♯ 4 to twice its original duration, filling up the silent space that a heckler might be tempted to exploit. With each statement of the phrase, the final G  ♯ 4 grows longer and longer. By the fifth statement, Mitchell is holding the G  ♯ 4 for more than four seconds, long enough that the note almost sounds like a separate phrase in its own right (see example 2.7). At this point, Mitchell’s extension of the phrase ending is fast approaching a limit. If he attempts to sustain the next G  ♯ 4 for much more than four seconds, it could consume most of his airstream and affect the way he plays the rest of the phrase. So he stabilizes the phrase ending, holding each subsequent G  ♯ 4 for approximately four seconds. With this transformation complete, Mitchell can shift his focus to E6, the phrase’s

Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah

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Example 2.7 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 3–5.

Example 2.8 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 6–7.

first note. He tunes this note differently on each repetition of the phrase, sometimes playing it as much as a half step flat and at other times bending the pitch to create two or three distinct microtones (see example 2.8). Mitchell’s interpretation of the phrase invites the audience members to listen closely to each E6. It was already one of the most salient notes in the phrase, due to its high pitch, its placement near the top of the alto saxophone’s natural range, and its role as the note that announces each new phrase statement. Now Mitchell is giving every E6 additional emphasis through his intonation. In contrast, the rest of the phrase remains

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much the same, further highlighting the note that varies from one repetition to another. However, these slight tuning variations do not elicit an immediate reaction from the audience. Neither does the following variation: a series of dynamic shifts applied to the final G  ♯ 4, beginning in the eighth statement. The festivalgoers must be anxious for the next major event in the performance, but Mitchell makes them wait, as he develops the phrase at an astonishingly deliberate pace (see example 2.9). A minute and a half into the performance, the rate of development suddenly accelerates. In the fifteenth statement, Mitchell introduces two new variations, one after another. When he reaches the triplets partway through the phrase, he adopts a much rougher timbre, partially obscuring the pitches he is playing. At the phrase’s end, he lands on G  ♮ 4, a semitone below the usual pitch, then gradually bends the note upward so the phrase can conclude on G  ♯ 4 (see example 2.10). These variations catch Example 2.9 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 11–12.

Example 2.10 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 15–16.

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the festivalgoers’ attention, and a few start to applaud. Mitchell picks up on their reaction and decides to repeat these variations in the next phrase statement. This time, the crowd’s response is even bigger. As Mitchell sustains the final note, a number of audience members clap, whistle, and cheer. When he pauses to breathe, the ovation spills over into the space between phrases—the same interval where, less than two minutes earlier, a heckler yelled at Mitchell. Now the saxophonist is discovering how to win the audience over. The audience members seem most responsive to two aspects of Mitchell’s playing. One is his use of complex timbres: as the performance unfolds, the loudest ovations tend to follow phrase repetitions where Mitchell employs a rougher tone. The festivalgoers also respond favorably to Mitchell’s persistence. After every few statements of the phrase, they offer another round of applause, as if to salute the saxophonist for continuing to repeat and develop the opening phrase in ways that defy all expectations. Mitchell’s commitment to repetition is epitomized by the drawn-out G  ♯ 4 that ends each phrase. He holds these notes as long as he can, until just before his breath runs out, transforming each phrase repetition from a compositional choice into a demanding physical feat. In the twenty-fifth statement, he plays the triplets with a raspy timbre, then slides into the final G  ♯ 4 and sustains it for 4.3 seconds, matching the longest duration heard so far (see example 2.11). The audience erupts into an ovation that lasts for twenty seconds, through three more repetitions of the phrase. By the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth statements, Mitchell’s G  ♯ 4 has stretched to almost five seconds in length, and the crowd responds in kind, falling silent only when the saxophonist rests. After this exchange with the audience, Mitchell stabilizes the phrase once again. During the next minute of the performance, no new variations emerge, but the festivalgoers keep encouraging the saxophonist, whistling and cheering at the end of every other phrase. Meanwhile, Mitchell is pacing himself and looking ahead to another round of development.35 This process begins in the thirty-fifth phrase statement, when he starts changing the pitches in the first group of triplets. Mitchell also reintroduces the complex timbres he employed earlier, this time focusing on the midrange A4s and A5s just before the G  ♯ 4 at the phrase’s end. Finally, in the forty-fourth statement, Mitchell is ready to apply his timbral transformations to the longest note of the phrase (see example 2.12). He plays through the phrase using an incredibly rough tone—so coarse, in fact, that when he arrives at G  ♯ 4, the note breaks apart. The festivalgoers, already on alert for changes to the final G  ♯ 4, respond with another ovation, the loudest one yet. Some five minutes into Nonaah, Mitchell’s strategy for interacting with

Example 2.11 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 25–28.

Example 2.12 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 44–46.

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the audience has paid off. He has established a strong rapport with the festivalgoers, who offer immediate, audible feedback whenever he plays something they like. Mitchell is also feeling more comfortable with his saxophone, after having to hurry through his pre-concert warm-up. At this point in the performance, Mitchell later recalled, “my alto had just given in to me. . . . I started to open it up soundwise by putting in smears and different sounds.”36 Now that his instrument is cooperating, Mitchell can push the phrase to its limits. With each repetition, another note is choked, smeared, vibrated, growled, or otherwise subjected to extremes of timbre and articulation (see example 2.13). Mitchell’s timbral experiments culminate in the sixtieth statement of the phrase (see example 2.14). Every note is played with a variant of the complex tone color that he has been developing for almost seven minutes. And then, in the sixty-first statement, Mitchell suddenly returns to the relatively clean tone that he used at the beginning of the performance. By the sixty-second statement, the phrase’s original timbral profile has been restored. Mitchell pauses for an instant before playing the last note, then holds the G  ♯ 4 for just over a second, as in the very first statement of the opening phrase. Example 2.13 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 54–57.

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Example 2.14 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 60–62.

Now Mitchell has a choice to make. Except for a few details—notably the slight vibrato applied to the final G  ♯ 4—the sixty-second statement sounds much like the first. To the festival audience, it must seem as if Mitchell has returned to the place where Nonaah began, nearly seven minutes earlier. This moment of arrival has major formal implications. At this point, Mitchell could end the first section of the piece and proceed directly into the second section. He could even bring Nonaah to a close and start playing the following piece on his set list, Joseph Jarman’s composition “Erika.”37 Instead, he decides to keep developing the opening phrase. The next series of variations begins right away, in the sixty-third statement (see example 2.15). Here, Mitchell holds the G  ♯ 4 for less than a second, a shorter duration than any other G  ♯ 4 heard so far. This allows him to expand the phrase in other ways, and he adds a brief tag ending, repeating the last three notes. He uses a similar tag to introduce the sixtyfourth statement of the phrase, and the festivalgoers applaud as he leads them into unexplored territory. Only seconds after an arrival that could have ended the piece, Mitchell is venturing deeper into the sound-world of Nonaah. As he observed after the concert, the musical ideas on which the composition is based “all come from the same world or atmosphere. The thing about Nonaah is that once you put yourself in that atmosphere you can ride on forever. The world has the properties of very large skips and it has notes that have accidental qualities that are kept.”38 In other words, Nonaah offers Mitchell endless possibilities for variation, from the

Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah

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Example 2.15 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 63–64.

phrases that make up the composition to the new ideas that emerge spontaneously during performance. Mitchell’s description of “accidental qualities that are kept” could refer to the changes introduced in the sixty-third statement: a shorter G  ♯ 4 and the added notes of the spontaneous tag ending. In each of the phrases that follow, Mitchell keeps paring down the duration of the final G  ♯ 4, until it becomes as clipped and detached as all the other notes. He also adds and subtracts notes from the phrase, one or two at a time, creating expanded or contracted versions of the phrase that soon return to the original nine-note configuration (see example 2.16). This new approach to variation transforms the phrase’s sound. Earlier in the performance, the “accidental qualities that [Mitchell] kept” became the objects of further variation, and the music developed in a linear way, with each version of the phrase building on those that preceded it. Now, Mitchell’s variations are based on addition and subtraction. Each time he makes a change to the phrase, he immediately strikes it and starts the process over again. Additionally, because the concluding G  ♯ 4s are much shorter in duration, Mitchell can play the entire phrase in three seconds or less. By the eighty-second statement, he is cycling through the phrase at a rapid rate (see example 2.17). The opening phrase has become an unrelenting loop. Seven statements later, Mitchell finally moves away from the repeating loop. He gradually works his way back to the original interpretation of the phrase, eliminating all added notes and once again sustaining each G  ♯ 4 for about a second. Mitchell also starts drawing out the low C4s, D  ♯ 4s, and midrange A4s and A5s, creating a sense of steady deceleration. He launches into the phrase for the ninety-sixth time, then breaks it off midway through, closing the statement with a B   ♭  -major arpeggio and a smeared descent to G  ♯ 4 (see example 2.18). At last, the first section of

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Example 2.16 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 67–71.

Nonaah has come to an end, after nine minutes and ninety-six statements of the opening phrase.

Second Section Mitchell rests for a few seconds, letting the last G  ♯ 4 echo throughout the concert hall. When he returns at 9:07, the next sound to emerge from his saxophone is not a high E6 but a quiet, midrange long tone (see example 2.19). This is the second section of Nonaah, which contrasts with the first section in virtually every way. The opening phrase and the second section’s theme do share one common element—“very large skips” between notes—but everything else has changed.39 The complex timbres of the first section have given way to clean tones, the pace is slower, and the dynamics are much softer. At Mitchell’s current dynamic level, he would be no match for the

Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah

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Example 2.17 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 82–88.

unruly festivalgoers who interrupted the beginning of the concert. Now, however, the audience members are fully invested in the performance, and they take care not to overshadow Mitchell’s playing. For two minutes (9:07–11:02), they listen expectantly as Mitchell plays the second section’s theme. Next, Mitchell improvises on the line, using shorter note values but the same subdued dynamics. In his improvisation, Mitchell never strays far from the theme. He often focuses on one of its seven motives, reordering its notes or distilling the motive into a single gesture. At other times, he treats the theme more strictly, playing a few motives in sequence with minor alterations (see example 2.20). During this passage, the audience maintains a respectful silence. In their earlier interactions, Mitchell and the festivalgoers resolved their initial conflict and showed that they were indeed listening to each other. Now they can adopt another mode of engagement, where the musician performs and the audience listens, actively yet silently.

Example 2.18 Nonaah: opening phrase, statements 93–96.

Example 2.19 Nonaah: second section theme, motives 1–2.

Example 2.20 Nonaah: second section improvisation, excerpt.

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Third Section At 13:24, Mitchell concludes his improvisation on the second section’s theme and introduces the third section of Nonaah. Like the first section of the piece, the new texture is loud and dense, with a fast-moving theme. And as in the opening, Mitchell builds the third section on repetition and variation. He begins by playing the composed line, then a brief improvised interlude. Longer interludes follow the next two statements of the theme (see example 2.21). Mitchell starts to play the line again, but during the last phrase, he shifts into an open improvisation, never quite reaching the end of the theme. For the first time in the performance, Mitchell has moved away from the score. In this improvisation, Mitchell finally unleashes the development strategies and saxophone techniques that, earlier in the performance, he had kept under tight control. He takes repetition and variation to a new level: at one point, he plays the same low B3 fourteen times in a row (17:03– 17:40), using a growling, buzzing timbre that grows rougher with each repetition. Before and after this episode, he ventures into the altissimo register, a range he avoided during the first fourteen minutes of the piece. He also experiments with an extraordinarily wide vibrato and a gleaming saxophone tone that seems to shine brighter than the spotlight at center stage.40 Mitchell’s improvisation is stunning to hear, so much so that the audience only dares to applaud when he pauses for a moment to catch his breath (see example 2.22). After the last of these exchanges with the audience, some twenty minutes into Nonaah, Mitchell returns with a new kind of melody: rapid runs where he plays more than a dozen notes in the span of one or two seconds. He explores this texture for a minute and a half, bringing his improvisation to a state of peak intensity. And then, at 21:49, he finds his way back to the third section’s theme. Mitchell plays the theme just once, and caps it off with one last low-register run and another B  ♭ -major arpeggio, the same motive he used to signal the end of the first section (see example 2.23). With this gesture, Mitchell brings Nonaah to a close, and the festivalgoers respond with an extended ovation, acknowledging the saxophonist for a performance that went well beyond what they expected.

Reverberations One year after the Willisau festival, the recording of Roscoe Mitchell’s solo performance was released by the Nessa label, as the lead track of the double LP Nonaah.41 The album also included another version of Mitchell’s composition—the arrangement for saxophone quartet—but the Willisau

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Example 2.21 Nonaah: third section theme, statement 3.

solo would become the definitive rendition of the piece. Mitchell’s performance left a deep impression on all who heard it, from those who were present in the festival hall to researchers who have studied the recording.42 Mitchell, too, was profoundly affected by his experience in Willisau. He considered the solo concert one of the most memorable performances of his career, and it forever changed how he thought about Nonaah.43 In the decades that followed, he composed several more versions of the

Example 2.22 Nonaah: third section improvisation, excerpt.

Example 2.23 Nonaah: third section theme, statement 5.

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piece, all of which bore the influence of the Willisau performance. This was most evident in the saxophone quartet, which Mitchell recorded in January 1977.44 Like the Willisau solo, the quartet score begins with a single opening phrase, labeled repeat several times from soft to loud.45 That directive could be interpreted in many different ways, and on the Nonaah album, the four saxophonists play the phrase more than a hundred times, surpassing the ninety-six phrase repetitions heard in the Willisau solo concert.46 Related approaches to repetition and variation can be found in subsequent versions of Nonaah, from the cello quartet (1980) and the arrangement for flute, bassoon, and piano (1987) to the scores for chamber orchestra (2010) and full orchestra (2013).47 Mitchell’s two orchestral scores are loosely modeled on the earlier flute-bassoon-piano trio.48 At certain points in the trio, the pianist improvises, but for the orchestral versions of Nonaah, Mitchell did not ask the musicians to extemporize—a tall order for most symphony players.49 Instead, he incorporated into the orchestral scores all of the techniques that he had been cultivating in his improvisatory solo performances of Nonaah since the 1970s. Timbral variety, already exceptional in the 1976 Willisau performance, is exponentially greater in the orchestral works, particularly the version for full orchestra. Mitchell also updates the ways he uses repetition and variation, transforming the passages that were based on repeating phrases into colorful, constantly evolving episodes where the woodwinds, brass, percussion, and string sections play contrasting, angular lines. This kind of orchestral writing—infused with an improvisatory spirit, even when the score was fully notated—was almost unheard of in the symphonic repertoire, but AACM composers had been moving in this direction for decades.50 In Muhal Richard Abrams’s 1960s scores, notated sections alternated with solo and group improvisations, and some of Mitchell’s early pieces were influenced by musical ideas that emerged while he was improvising. Indeed, the original 1972 version of Nonaah sounded so much like Mitchell’s alto saxophone improvisations that Abrams assumed the composition “[came] from . . . writing down what [he was] playing on [his] horn.”51 For Mitchell, though, improvisation and composition were defined not by musical notation but by his attitude toward creation. As he declared, “if you study improvisation you’ve got to look at it as paralleling composition—it’s basically the same process[,] except you’re trying to do it spontaneously. . . . You’ve got to understand the big word ‘music.’ Then you can let go of the different categories.”52

3 * Anthony Braxton, Composition 76

The post-AACM cycle of the music calls for a new kind of instrumentalist and structural context.1

Anthony Braxton was an unusually prolific artist, even by AACM standards. He wrote more than five hundred compositions in several different genres, from solo piano pieces (beginning with Composition 1, his first numbered work) to his Trillium series of operas. Braxton’s catalog of recordings was just as extensive, with hundreds of albums to his name and dozens more appearances as a sideman.2 In the 1970s, Braxton began writing books as well as music, and within a decade he had produced two massive tomes: the three-volume Tri-Axium Writings (1985), a wideranging treatise on the history and philosophy of music, and the fivevolume Composition Notes (1988), a collection of essays about his early compositions.3 During the 1980s, he embarked on a career as a music professor, starting out at Mills College in Oakland, California, and then moving to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.4 Braxton stayed at Wesleyan for a quarter century, until 2013–2014, educating many young musicians who went on to become important composers and performers in their own right, including Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson, Steve Lehman, and Tyshawn Sorey.5 Outside the classroom, his teachings reached another audience—a circle of critics and researchers who learned everything they could about Braxton’s music and then shared these discoveries in their own writings. Over the years, Braxton would become the subject of twelve books and countless articles, each shedding light on some of the composer’s scores and recordings.6 Certain Braxton pieces were especially intriguing to his audience— none more so than Composition 76 (1977), for three musicians playing woodwinds as well as percussion.7 Braxton created Composition 76 for the album For Trio, released by Arista Records, a major label that gave Braxton’s music unprecedented exposure.8 Excerpts from Composition 76’s

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vivid graphic score were prominently displayed on the For Trio album cover, inspiring much speculation about the piece’s workings (see example 3.1).9 These investigations, however, were undertaken without access to the complete score. Braxton wrote the piece in September 1977 but waited almost forty years to make the score available, publishing it in conjunction with a 2015 exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where Composition 76 and graphic works by other composers were shown alongside paintings, installations, and videos created by AACM members and visual artists connected to the Black Arts Movement.10 Listening to the Arista recording with the Composition 76 score at hand can reveal much about the piece—including the strategies that Braxton and his collaborators employed while performing 76’s complex graphic notation, which combines five-line staves with colors, geometric shapes, and symbols that link composed passages to spaces for improvisation. Some of these scoring techniques had appeared in Braxton’s earlier music, but many were developed expressly for Composition 76, then integrated into subsequent pieces. An exploration of 76, therefore, can also offer insights on Braxton’s later works—and on the formative influences that shaped his compositional practice, especially his experiences in the 1960s AACM.

Beginnings Anthony Braxton was born in 1945 on the South Side of Chicago. He attended Chicago Vocational High School, where he took up clarinet and saxophone. After graduating in 1963, he entered the music education program at Woodrow Wilson Junior College, where he studied alongside a number of future AACM members, including Ari Brown, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors, Roscoe Mitchell, John Powell, and Henry Threadgill. However, Braxton did not stay at the college for long. A few months into his studies, he passed an audition for the US Armed Forces band program and enlisted in the military. He would spend the next two-plus years performing with US Army bands, principally in Seoul, South Korea.11 In late 1966, Braxton left the military and returned to Chicago.12 Within weeks, he had joined the AACM and Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band.13 By 1967, Braxton was forming his own small groups that featured his new friends from the AACM. In many ways, his early ensembles continued the investigations of the Experimental Band. Multiinstrumentalism was the order of the day: on his Delmark debut album, Three Compositions of New Jazz (recorded with Leroy Jenkins, Wadada Leo Smith, and guest performer Abrams), Braxton played alto and soprano saxophones, clarinet, flute, accordion, bagpipes, bells, and snare

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Example 3.1 Composition 76: excerpts from the cover of For Trio.

drum.14 He also explored different scoring techniques, writing traditionally notated pieces (Composition 2), wholly graphic works (Composition 10), and scores that combined standard and experimental notation (Composition 3).15 Braxton’s inventive compositions and performances earned him a strong reputation on the South Side’s nascent experimental-music scene. But his career began to flourish only after he left Chicago again, this time for good. Braxton and his bandmates had been working tirelessly to build an audience for their music. However, these efforts did not always bear fruit. As he remembered: “We’d give concerts, work all week or two weeks to get the music right, then maybe get three people [to]

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turn up. . . . You couldn’t make a living performing your music.”16 So in 1969, Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, and Wadada Leo Smith set out for Paris.17 In Paris, Braxton found sizeable audiences and plenty of gigs. Yet he struggled to win the acceptance of French critics, who viewed him as not black enough for jazz and too black to be a composer of experimental concert music. For decades, Paris had welcomed black performers, as long as they conformed to French cultural expectations—in Braxton’s case, Jazz Age stereotypes of African American musicians. But AACMstyle fusions of black-identified jazz and white-identified experimental music were off limits.18 “It became very clear to me,” Braxton recalled, “that I could be successful if I would accept black exotica, but I could

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never have my notated music ever respected or performed. [The French public broadcaster] ORTF had set aside a sector, like ‘Le Hot Jazz,’ and it was going to be that or nothing.”19 His ambitions temporarily thwarted, Braxton left Paris in early 1970. Instead of resettling in Chicago, he headed to New York City, and immediately made his presence felt on the jazz and experimental-music scenes.20 That spring, he went on the road with Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum’s experimental ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV).21 In May, Braxton helped stage the first AACM concert in New York, at a downtown church.22 By the summer of 1970, he was recording and touring with Circle, an avant-garde jazz quartet led by Chick Corea. The quartet performed until mid-1971, when Corea left the group.23 After a period of reflection, Braxton decided that he was ready to take on France again. At the end of 1971, he landed in Paris, and before long, he had gained the critical recognition that eluded him during his first stay in France. Braxton would be based in Paris for the next three years.24 All the while, though, he was plotting his return to America. Braxton’s homecoming opportunity arrived in 1974, when he signed a contract with Arista Records, a newly formed major label. Braxton had become a critical success during his second sojourn in Europe, and Arista’s producers figured that he could achieve the same level of renown in the United States. The label’s bet soon paid off. The sales numbers for Braxton’s first few Arista albums reached well into the five figures, quite good for releases marketed in the jazz category. However, in an echo of his early reception in France, many American critics struggled to reconcile Braxton’s image as a jazz improviser with his ongoing work as an experimental composer.25 To be sure, Braxton never claimed to be only—or even primarily— interested in jazz. This perspective was hardly unusual for an artist who came up in the AACM. But to many members of the jazz community, Braxton’s refusal to put their music first was controversial. Braxton might have tried to salvage his jazz bona fides by putting his compositional pursuits on hold. Instead, he doubled down on experimentalism.26 By the late 1970s, Braxton was recording a series of experimental compositions for orchestras and chamber ensembles. By departing so dramatically from jazz orthodoxy, Braxton all but guaranteed that Arista’s executives would eventually drop him from the label. Now he was in a race against time, rushing to record as many projects as he could before he lost Arista’s financial backing.27 The four albums that followed would be among the most significant of Braxton’s career.28

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Composing for Creative Musicians For Trio was the first album in Braxton’s farewell-to-Arista series.29 This forty-one-minute LP contained just two tracks: contrasting performances of Composition 76, for three multi-instrumentalists. Composition 76 was the first Braxton piece to employ “modular notation,” his term for a scoring technique that represents composed as well as improvised passages with a shared graphic syntax.30 The score of Composition 76 is made up of forty unique modules written on twenty-seven cards, which can be arranged in any order.31 There are also a few “structural sequences”: traditionally notated sections where the trio plays in unison (or octaves), rather than in the contrapuntal style of the modules.32 On the Arista LP, each take gets its own pair of structural sequences, one of several differences between the two album sides. But the performances are primarily distinguished by the decisions made by the musicians as they navigate Braxton’s modular notation. Each of the score’s twenty-seven cards contains “both fixed and open material,” in Braxton’s description.33 Although the terms “fixed” and “open” can be glossed as composed and improvised, such an interpretation does not really capture what Braxton and his collaborators are up to. In many fixed passages, the performers must choose which clefs to use and even which instruments they will play, decisions that can transform the register and timbre of the notated lines. Additionally, the fixed material is notated in various colors—blue, red, green, purple, brown, and orange— each of which corresponds to an emotional state that the performers are asked to bring out (see example 3.2, module {A1}).34 The fixed material, in other words, is formed in dialogue with the musicians, not dictated to them. This collaborative approach is also evident in the open sections. At first glance, the open material looks nothing like the fixed material. Instead of melodies notated on single staves, there are fragmented lines on threedimensional systems, some of which seem to leap out at the performer or recede to a vanishing point. Color is used more liberally, on noteheads as well as in the interior of geometric shapes that extend out into space (see example 3.2, module {A2}). The musicians can take a number of pathways—or “routing[s],” as Braxton would say—through these graphic arrays.35 But in every potential routing, the performers must develop their musical contributions in exchange with the composer’s ideas. The colorfilled geometric shapes are designed to elicit “improvisation burst[s]”: “short improvisational statements” that make use of silence as well as sound.36 Attached to each shape is a special code that helps guide the

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Example 3.2 Composition 76: fixed module {A1} and open module {A2}.

musician’s improvisation (see example 3.3). Digits ranging from 1 to 4 indicate how many phrases or notes to play, parentheses tell the performer to switch instruments, boxes denote percussion or other “little instruments,” and Xs invite the performer to improvise not with an instrument but with the voice. Additional codes suggest when a musician’s improvised line should “dominate” the three-part texture, “support” another part, or adopt an “open” orientation that is neither dominant nor supportive.37 In all of these ways, the performers’ improvisations are shaped by the score. Much like the fixed modules, which are hardly as rigid as Braxton’s terminology implies, the open modules are circumscribed by the composition. Indeed, the musicians’ improvisations can be heard as realizations of the sonic possibilities outlined in Braxton’s inventive notation. The scoring techniques used in 76 are reminiscent of a number of graphic works by other experimental composers. In a lecture about Composition 76, Braxton “cite[d] as inspirations” Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zyklus (1959), for a soloist playing thirteen percussion instruments, as well

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as the five pieces in John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape series (1939–1952), some of which employ unconventional percussion akin to the AACM’s little instruments.38 All of these pieces are aleatoric—in other words, the performers have to improvise (although Stockhausen and Cage would instead use terms like “intuitive music” and “indeterminacy”).39 Composition 76 also recalls other improvisatory Stockhausen works for winds, percussion, and voice, including Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Sternklang (1971).40 However, few of the musicians in Stockhausen’s orbit could have played the dozens of instruments that Braxton wanted to feature in Composition 76. Fortunately, Braxton could turn to another community of musicians, one much closer to home. Example 3.3 Composition 76: instructions to performers.

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Almost all of Braxton’s Arista albums were recorded in New York. But to translate the Composition 76 score into sound, Braxton decided to venture to Chicago. He wrote the piece for multi-instrumentalists—in particular, musicians who had mastered several woodwinds as well as various percussion instruments. Braxton, of course, fit this description, as did a number of his AACM colleagues, who had been cultivating their own multi-instrumental practices since the 1960s. Accordingly, in the fall of 1977, when Braxton arrived in Chicago for the For Trio recording session, he was able to assemble not one but two trios, both made up of musicians from the AACM. On the first performance of Composition 76: Douglas Ewart, Henry Threadgill, and Braxton himself. On the second take: Braxton again, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell. Each participant in the session would play at least a half-dozen woodwinds, along with gongs and other percussion instruments.41 The performers’ AACM training also prepared them to interpret Braxton’s modular score, with its blend of graphics, codes, and traditional staff writing. This is not to say that the musicians had previously encountered every aspect of Composition 76’s notation. In fact, this may have been the first Braxton score to employ “color and shape variables,” devices that later appeared in works written after 76 (notably Composition 82 for four orchestras and Composition 95 for two pianists).42 However, familiarity with Braxton’s scoring techniques would prove less crucial than the musicians’ embrace of the responsibilities involved in performing a highly collaborative piece.43 Each of the five performers on For Trio joined the AACM in the 1960s, when the members of the Association were transforming themselves from jazz players into experimental composers.44 Crucially, the AACM’s compositional turn did not lead to a wholesale adoption of classical-music ideology. AACM members were especially reluctant to perpetuate the outmoded divide between composers and performers, inventors and interpreters. Such distinctions made little sense to Braxton and his AACM colleagues, who played all of these roles at a single concert. With every piece they composed, AACM members provided one another with platforms for improvisation. These improvisations, in turn, yielded musical ideas that became new compositions. Accordingly, the AACM began to view composition and improvisation as two sides of the same coin, two facets of a creative practice that was collaborative at its core. This, according to Braxton, is why he “integrate[d] color and shape variables into the operational scheme of [Composition 76]”: he wanted “to generate fresh creative responses from [the] instrumentalists,” who could create— collectively and spontaneously—a work richer than what he might have constructed on his own.45

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Composition 76 Braxton’s two trios recorded both takes of Composition 76 on the same day: September 22, 1977. This first take, with Douglas Ewart and Henry Threadgill, appeared on side A of For Trio and was titled “Version I.” Side B of the album carried the second take, “Version II,” featuring Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell.46 There are a few notable differences between the performances, some of which are related to the arranging decisions that Braxton and his collaborators made during the week of intensive rehearsals that preceded the recording session.47 On the first take, Braxton, Ewart, and Threadgill often change systems from one card to the next. In contrast, the performers on the second take rarely deviate from their staff assignments: Jarman plays the top system, Mitchell plays the bottom system, and Braxton stays in the middle. Another difference between the two takes is the order in which the modules and structural sequences are played (see example 3.4). The contrasting orderings affect the performances in several ways. For instance, on “Version I” the structural sequences do not emerge until the latter half of the performance, but “Version II” reaches its initial structural sequence almost immediately, less than two minutes into the take. This arrangement gives “Version II” an audacious opening, with the members of the trio playing an angular line on some of the lowest instruments in their arsenals: Jarman and Mitchell on baritone saxophone and Braxton an octave lower on E  ♭  contrabass saxophone. The low-register structural sequence must have been thrilling to play, but it presents the musicians with a major dilemma, just three minutes into “Version II.” The next card begins with module {G1}, a solo for Mitchell, notated on the bottom system (see example 3.5). (Here, the diagonal arrows that replace the top and middle systems tell the other two performers to rest.) Mitchell’s solo is an open module (not fixed), with a configuration of three staves that recurs throughout the Composition 76 score: two staves intersect with each other, and the third staff stands alone.48 Curiously, none of the three staves is coded as “dominant,” even though Mitchell is the only active performer. Instead, the staves are coded “support” and “open”—descriptions that might make Mitchell wonder how to present his improvisation. However, Mitchell quickly finds a path through this ambiguous notation. He enters module {G1} via the supportive staff, written in blue ink. Because Jarman and Braxton are silent, Mitchell’s improvisation cannot support another part that sounds simultaneously. So he decides to use his improvisation to support the fixed modules that surround {G1}. Mitchell removes the mouthpiece from his baritone saxophone and

Example 3.4 Composition 76: “Version I” and “Version II,” formal diagrams.

“Version I”

“Version II”

modules {H1}–{H2}

0:00–0:56

modules {D1}–{D2}

0:00–0:41

modules {I1}–{I2}

0:56–1:33

modules {S1}–{S2}

0:41–1:59

modules {L1}–{L2}

1:33–2:27

first structural sequence

1:59–3:26

modules {P1}–{P2}

2:27–3:18

modules {G1}–{G2}

3:26–3:49

modules {Q1}–{Q2}

3:18–4:16

modules {E1}–{E2}–{E3}

3:49–4:44

module {B2}

4:16–4:44

modules {P1}–{P2}

4:44–6:03

modules {J1}–{J2}

4:44–5:58

modules {B1}–{B2}

6:03–6:59

modules {F1}–{F2}

5:58–6:53

modules {H1}–{H2}

6:59–8:11

modules {C1}–{C2}

6:53–7:45

modules {I1}–{I2}

8:11–9:18

modules {D1}–{D2}

7:45–8:39

modules {Q1}–{Q2}

9:18–10:36

modules {A1}–{A2}

8:39–9:44

modules {A1}–{A2}

10:36–11:35

modules {M1}–{M2}

9:44–10:32

second structural sequence

11:35–12:41

first structural sequence

10:32–12:18

modules {M1}–{M2}

12:41–13:18

modules {S1}–{S2}

12:18–12:54

modules {T1}–{T2}

13:18–14:04

modules {O1}–{O2}

12:54–13:55

modules {K1}–{K2}

14:04–14:42

modules {R1}–{R2}

13:55–14:39

modules {L1}–{L2}

14:42–15:17

modules {G1}–{G2}

14:39–15:01

modules {O1}–{O2}

15:17–16:21

modules {E1}–{E2}–{E3}

15:01–15:46

modules {J1}–{J2}

16:21–17:07

modules {B1}–{B2}

15:46–16:33

modules {N1}–{N2}

17:07–18:00

second structural sequence

16:33–18:16

modules {F1}–{F2}

18:00–18:59

modules {N1}–{N2}

18:16–19:10

modules {C1}–{C2}

18:59–19:51

modules {T1}–{T2}

19:10–19:33

modules {R1}–{R2}

19:51–20:51

modules {K1}–{K2}

19:33–20:10

Module {B2} is played twice in “Version I,” the only repeated passage on the album.

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Example 3.5 Composition 76: modules {G1}–{G2}.

plays a C  ♯ 4, echoing the final pitch of the preceding structural sequence (see example 3.6). (Here, Mitchell is likely reading the second-space sharp at the center of the supportive staff.) Next, he moves off the staff and lands on the green rhombus. The code attached to this shape calls for improvised phrases of two, three, and three notes, any of which may be performed with the voice—either unaided or with “airhorns” made from sections of a water hose.49 The latter two phrases can also be played on little instruments, as the boxes indicate. Mitchell strikes a balance between all of these timbral possibilities, using his natural voice for the first phrase and then employing small percussion, his saxophone mouthpiece, and an airhorn. Throughout his improvisation, Mitchell plays in a “calm,

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Example 3.6 Composition 76: “Version II,” module {G1}.

In this chapter, the transcriptions (3.6–3.9, 3.12–3.21) are notated in the instruments’ keys, while the text refers to pitches in concert key.

restrained” manner, the mood indicated by the shade of green that fills the rhombus.50 If Mitchell’s initial C  ♯ 4 reached back to support the just-concluded structural sequence, his improvisation on the color-shape notation of {G1} looks ahead to the upcoming module, {G2}. By building his improvised phrases from a combination of vocal and instrumental sounds, he prepares Jarman and Braxton for what they will encounter in module {G2}, where a brief instrumental phrase leads into a two-note vocal figure (written with X-shaped noteheads). Mitchell’s improvisation, moreover, supports Jarman and Braxton in yet another way. The structural sequence was dense and energetic enough to make anything played after it sound anticlimactic. But Mitchell’s sparse, quiet performance of module {G1} creates an extraordinarily effective contrast—a clean slate for what comes next. When Jarman and Braxton finally enter, on soprano and sopranino saxophones, respectively, it feels like a natural response to the spaces and silences of Mitchell’s improvisation (see example 3.7). As Mitchell would say, “Every time you interrupt space in a very confident, secure manner, then music happens.”51 In “Version I,” modules {G1}–{G2} have a rather different effect, for reasons related to musical form. The card containing these modules occurs two-thirds of the way through the performance, rather than near the beginning of the take, as in “Version II.” Moreover, the {G1}–{G2} card

Anthony Braxton, Composition 76

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Example 3.7 Composition 76: “Version II,” module {G2}.

is preceded not by a structural sequence for low-register saxophones but by modules {R1}–{R2}, featuring open-ended material for woodwinds and voice (see example 3.4). Like {R1}–{R2}, module {G2} is written for woodwind instruments and vocals, which has important consequences for {G1}. Here the musicians do not have to use {G1} to bridge the gap between two divergent passages. Instead, they can take the opposite approach, using the module to generate contrasting textures that will keep the {R1}–{R2} and {G1}–{G2} cards from sounding too much alike. The solution that the performers devise for module {G1} is based on register and timbre. In {R1}–{R2}, the primary instruments are Braxton’s clarinet and Ewart’s flute, and the opening phrase of {G2} is also designed for high-pitched woodwinds. In between these modules is the bottomsystem solo {G1} (see example 3.5). Usually this system would belong to Ewart, but the lowest saxophone in his arsenal is an E ♭  alto, an instrument similar in range and tone color to the clarinet that Braxton played during {R1}–{R2}. So Ewart trades systems with Threadgill, who brought a baritone saxophone to the recording studio. Threadgill improvises a few phrases on baritone sax, landing intermittently on B  ♭ 3, which sounds as concert D  ♭ 2, the instrument’s lowest pitch (see example  3.8). After Threadgill plays his last note, the other musicians wait a few seconds before entering with module {G2}. Braxton and Ewart play the first phrase on piccolo and soprano saxophone, respectively, and then end the module with their voices, performing the two-note vocal phrase with crisp plosive sounds that are more percussive than songlike (see example 3.9). Formal considerations significantly influence how the performances

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Example 3.8 Composition 76: “Version I,” module {G1}.

Example 3.9 Composition 76: “Version I,” module {G2}.

unfold, as in each trio’s rendition of modules {G1}–{G2}. The musicians think carefully about possible paths from one module to another, and the decisions they make frequently center on finding the sounds—and silences—that can best prepare the next module. These aims, though, can be achieved in a variety of ways. Indeed, Braxton’s two trios seem to develop distinctive strategies for performing their modules, and this gives each take a unique feel. In “Version I,” Threadgill, Braxton, and Ewart often proceed quickly through the fixed material to spend more time

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exploring the open portions of the modules. Sometimes they interpret the open material rather freely instead of adhering to the notation, and these passages tend to sound more improvisatory, with fast-paced, linear melodies that depart from the steady rhythms and wide intervals of the Composition 76 score. In contrast, the performers on “Version II” tend to devote equal time to the fixed and open material, and their improvisations typically begin with gestures derived from the notated contours, colors, and codes. This approach allows Jarman, Braxton, and Mitchell to move effortlessly between fixed material, open material, and passages that are mostly improvised yet sound as if they were composed. The trios’ unique strategies for realizing the score can be heard in their performances of modules {H1}–{H2} and {I1}–{I2}. On “Version I” as well as “Version II,” the card containing {H1}–{H2} leads immediately to the card with {I1}–{I2}, one of the few recurrent orderings on the album (see example 3.4). In his notes about the piece, Braxton asserts that “there is no development at all in Composition 76,” and indeed there are no passages that take a motive presented earlier in the score and develop it further—nor could there be, given that the cards can be performed in any order.52 Yet for both takes Braxton decided to group the {H1}–{H2} card with the {I1}–{I2} card. Although this ordering does not necessarily establish a developmental relationship between the two cards, they do share a common element: long tones. The middle system of module {H1} ends with a long tone, which in turn introduces {H2} (see example 3.10). Similarly, a bottom-system long tone joins {I1} to {I2}, a rare piece of connective tissue in a work that Braxton characterizes as a sequence of independent happenings, a “series of events hung in space” (see example 3.11).53 In “Version I,” modules {H1}–{H2}–{I1}–{I2} are placed at the very beginning of the performance. Because the {H1}–{H2} card is not preceded by another module, the musicians do not have to switch instruments on the fly or prepare for {H1} in any other way. Instead, they may realize module {H1} as they see fit, and this passage can be heard as an opening gambit, a preview of how the trio will perform Composition 76. The musicians enter the module together, but each moves through the material at his own pace. Braxton picks up his flute and plays the middle system’s fixed line in just four seconds (see example  3.12). Threadgill, on E  ♭  clarinet, operates more deliberately. He plays all three of the staves on the top system, starting with the “open” staff and then proceeding clockwise through the “support” and “dominant” staves. Then he veers off the staff, selecting the red triangle and improvising phrases of three, two, and three notes on zither, cymbals, gong, and a pitched bell. Like Threadgill, Ewart starts out on E ♭  clarinet,

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Example 3.10 Composition 76: modules {H1}–{H2}.

but his improvisation is only loosely related to the notation. He plays a rapid flourish ending on G5, then switches to harmonica and blows a few high-register chords. Once Ewart and Threadgill have finished their improvisations, Braxton returns to complete the module, playing the four-note phrase that ends {H1} (see example 3.13). The phrase concludes with a long-tone F5, the trio’s cue to begin module {H2}. Here the score directs Threadgill and Ewart to “match instrument[s]” with Braxton—that is, choose woodwinds in the same key as Braxton’s flute, so they can play the fixed melody in unison or octaves.54 Braxton’s bandmates have only a few C instruments

Anthony Braxton, Composition 76

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Example 3.11 Composition 76: modules {I1}–{I2}.

on hand, most of which belong to the flute family. Ewart and Threadgill move to piccolo and bass flute, respectively, and they surround Braxton’s line with octaves above and below. The following card, {I1}–{I2}, starts out much like module {H2}. One performer sounds a long tone, signaling the others to enter. Here the long tone appears on the bottom system—Ewart’s area—but the musicians decide to give it to Threadgill (see example 3.14). The long tone is notated in bass clef, and Threadgill’s bass flute was the lowest instrument used in the previous module. If he plays the long tone, the trio can import the flute texture from {H1}–{H2} into the new card without changing

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Example 3.12 Composition 76: “Version I,” module {H1} (first part).

the registers in which the {I1}–{I2} melodies are written. Threadgill and Ewart’s system trading is not the only liberty taken by the performers at the outset of the card. According to the score, the musicians not playing the {I1} long tone should wait six to eight seconds before initiating the next module, {I2}. But Braxton jumps in right away, staying on flute and playing the fixed melody from the middle system. A few seconds later he reaches the end of the line, creating a problem that Ewart has to solve. Braxton is done with the first part of {I2}, and Threadgill, who has remained on Ewart’s system after playing the opening long tone, has finished almost half of his fixed line. The top system, ordinarily assigned to

Example 3.13 Composition 76: “Version I,” modules {H1} (second part)–{H2}.

Example 3.14 Composition 76: “Version I,” modules {I1}–{I2} (first part).

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Threadgill, is the only territory yet to be claimed. Ewart enters here, after switching from piccolo to flute. This is an open system, like Ewart’s part in module {H1}, but here he sticks closer to the musical ideas outlined in the notation. He starts with the “dominant” staff, moves off the staff to play an improvised melody in the key of D minor, and then returns to the notation, reading from the “support” staff at lower left. Ewart’s improvisation unfolds quickly, like everything else on the {I1}–{I2} card. By the time Ewart plays his final note, Threadgill has completed nearly all of the bottom system. Only twenty seconds have elapsed since the musicians began modules {I1}–{I2}, and they may want to avoid arriving at the next card too early. Braxton buys his bandmates some time, moving off the page and improvising a major-key line on soprano saxophone (see example 3.15). Threadgill joins in with an offscript idea of his own—three percussion accents—and Braxton responds with one more ad-lib melody, this one played on clarinet, the instrument he will use in the next module, {L1}. Braxton and Threadgill’s improvised extension does the trick, nearly doubling the duration of the {I1}–{I2} episode to thirty-seven seconds, a time span more in keeping with the minute-per-card pace the trio will maintain throughout the rest of “Version I” (see example 3.4). In “Version II,” the musicians encounter module {H1} not at the start of the take but just before the seven-minute mark. At this point in the performance, Braxton is playing bass clarinet, and he has the fixed melody written on the middle system, while Jarman and Mitchell have material that can be interpreted in multiple ways (see example 3.16). Mitchell,

Example 3.15 Composition 76: “Version I,” module {I2} (second part).

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Example 3.16 Composition 76: “Version II,” module {H1} (first part).

reading the bottom system (as usual), takes the leftmost rhombus, which calls for an improvisation on little instruments. This shape is also coded as “open”—not dominant, not supportive—and Mitchell responds accordingly, placing his percussion sounds in the spaces between Braxton’s bassclarinet notes. Meanwhile, Jarman is given a system with even more improvisational possibilities, and he chooses a routing that will enable him to take control of the texture, at least momentarily. He picks up his flute and plays the line labeled “dominant” and written in red, a color intended to convey “intense, explosive emotions.”55 Instead of stopping there—

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and letting Braxton get the last word—Jarman ad-libs two more notes on flute, then jumps to the orange rhombus below the staff and begins to improvise with his voice, humming a melody that hints at the key of B ♭ . During Jarman’s vocal improvisation, Mitchell keeps playing percussion, but Braxton rests. Then, as soon as Jarman finishes, Braxton reenters the texture, playing the last four notes of module {H1} (see example 3.17). This is the moment in the card when Jarman and Mitchell have to “match instrument[s]” with Braxton in preparation for the upcoming {H2} melody, which he will play on B  ♭  bass clarinet.56 Jarman switches from C flute to B  ♭  clarinet and plays a quick run in the key of E  ♭  major, decorating Braxton’s concert E  ♭ 4, the long tone that links {H1} to {H2}. At the same time, Mitchell moves away from his gong rack and reaches for his tenor saxophone, which will become the third B  ♭  woodwind in the texture. With these instruments at hand, the musicians are ready to proceed into module {H2}. Braxton pauses for an instant to breathe and then announces {H2} with another long tone (see example 3.18). Two seconds later, Jarman and Mitchell join in, adopting Braxton’s soft dynamics and deliberate pace. Braxton and his collaborators take their time: {H2} consists of just a few short phrases, but they make the module last for more than thirty seconds, giving each note its due. The next pair of modules, {I1}–{I2}, also starts out with a long tone, and now it is Jarman who leads the ensemble, shifting to sopranino saxophone and borrowing the long tone from Mitchell’s system at the bottom Example 3.17 Composition 76: “Version II,” module {H1} (second part).

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Example 3.18 Composition 76: “Version II,” modules {H1} (third part)–{H2}.

of the card (see example 3.19). This exchange of systems lasts for just eight seconds, the duration of Jarman’s long tone—unlike the system trading in “Version I,” where the musicians often occupy one another’s systems for extended stretches of time. Here the temporary trade-off gives both Braxton and Mitchell time to consider how they will approach {I2}. Braxton changes instruments, moving from bass clarinet to soprano saxophone, a woodwind that offers a better blend with Mitchell’s tenor saxophone and Jarman’s E ♭  sopranino. Mitchell could switch instruments if he wanted, but instead he focuses on switching clefs. He reads the first three notes of the bottom system on bass clef, shifts to treble clef for the third-space sixteenth note, and then alternates between bass and treble clefs, never reading more than four consecutive notes on the same clef. This inventive strategy allows Mitchell to find the best possible counterpoint for his bandmates’ lines while preserving the character of the notated melody. It also seems to capture the attention of Jarman and Braxton, who respond thoughtfully to Mitchell’s playing as they approach the second half of module {I2}. Mitchell’s ingenious interpretation of his fixed melody sets the stage for the conclusion of {I2}. In a span of just ten seconds, the musicians completely reshape the texture, brilliantly timing a series of staggered exits and entries without making the music sound hurried or dense. When Mitchell arrives at the rest midway through his line, Jarman puts down his sopranino saxophone and picks up a pair of percussion mallets. Once Mitchell returns, Jarman enters on vibraphone, playing the kinds of “harmonious [and] balancing” chords suggested by the brown rhombus at the

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Example 3.19 Composition 76: “Version II,” modules {I1}–{I2} (first part).

lower-right corner of the top system (see example 3.20).57 Like Jarman, Braxton pays close attention to how Mitchell’s part unfolds. While Mitchell plays the remaining phrases of his notated melody, Braxton grabs his contrabass clarinet, the lowest instrument in his renowned collection of extreme-range woodwinds.58 An instant after Mitchell reaches the final note on his system, Braxton leaps in, three-plus octaves below his collaborator’s tenor saxophone. Braxton builds his improvisation from all three of his staves: he starts with a three-note figure from the “open” staff, takes the second-line B  ♯ 2 from the supportive staff, plays the entire “dominant”-coded melody, and ultimately returns to B  ♯ 2—sounding

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as A  ♯ 0, the deepest pitch his contrabass clarinet can produce. Jarman, whose vibraphone could overshadow Braxton’s low-register line, lets one last chord ring out and then exits the texture. Now Braxton has the floor. He plays three more B  ♯ 2s, coaxing startlingly high harmonics from his contrabass clarinet and using fluttertongue techniques to break up the notes (see example 3.20). Then Braxton takes the instrument from his mouth and turns his extended woodwind techniques into devices for vocal improvisation. He vibrates his lips, slaptongues the air, and growls into the microphone, closing module {I2} with an impromptu vocal solo (see example 3.21). Example 3.20 Composition 76: “Version II,” module {I2} (second part).

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Example 3.21 Composition 76: “Version II,” module {I2} (third part).

Collective Creativity Braxton’s brief vocal improvisation ends module {I2} in much the same way as {H1}, earlier in “Version II,” when Jarman transitioned from an instrumental melody into a vocal solo guided by Composition 76’s colorshape notation. Not every module calls for vocals, but in those that do, the performers rise to the occasion, demonstrating the creativity and musicianship needed to realize the Composition 76 score. Some of their vocal lines are songlike, such as Jarman’s improvisation in “Version II,” module {H1}, while other vocal sounds are rather percussive in nature, like Braxton’s and Ewart’s plosive consonants in “Version I,” module {G2}. The musicians also use their voices to emulate woodwind instruments, as in Braxton’s flutter- and slap-tonguing from “Version II,” module {I2}, or Mitchell’s airhorn sounds from “Version II,” module {G1}, where he sings into a water hose while playing percussion. In both “Version I” and “Version II,” the performers employ a broad spectrum of vocal sounds— “extended vocalization,” in Braxton’s terminology—from woodwind-like tones and percussive articulations to more conventional timbres.59 An even greater variety of tone colors can be heard in their woodwind and percussion playing, where each musician has a dozen or more instruments at his disposal. With all these sounds on hand, the performers can summon an orchestra’s worth of textures and timbral combinations as they explore Composition 76. In fixed modules as well as open modules, Braxton and his collaborators make numerous performance decisions ordinarily reserved for composers, choosing their own instruments, clefs, tempos, and pathways

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through the score. They also develop their own melodies and accompaniment figures in response to the codes, contours, and colors appearing on each card. Similar techniques can be found in other Braxton pieces utilizing color-shape notation, such as Composition 82 for four orchestras, written in 1978, one year after 76.60 However, these performance strategies have implications that move beyond Braxton’s 1970s colorshape scores to encompass countless other works by the composer and his AACM colleagues. The For Trio liner notes credited Anthony Braxton as the sole composer of the piece.61 But in many ways, Ewart, Jarman, Mitchell, and Threadgill were the co-creators of Composition 76. The work could only have been performed by musicians committed to multi-instrumentalism, a practice that the AACM pioneered in the 1960s.62 Little instruments and the musicians’ voices were just as integral to Composition 76. For Braxton, his For Trio collaborators, and other AACM multi-instrumentalists, there were no barriers between instrumental sounds or vocal sounds, or indeed between composition and improvisation. In the AACM’s musical philosophy, conventional instruments, little instruments, and voices were simply seen as different tools for experimenting with sound—just as composition and improvisation were united as twin expressions of the same creative impulse.63 Some musical situations, for instance an album project for the Arista label, allowed Braxton and his AACM colleagues to engage in notation-centered approaches to music-making, while other circumstances called for “collective creativity,” in which concert-length works were generated in real time, from start to finish.64 And in all of these contexts, the Association’s extended instrumental and vocal practices gave the performers access to almost any sound imaginable—whatever the music seemed to require. In order to perform Composition 76, the members of Braxton’s two trios had to give their all, as instrumentalists, vocalists, and in-the-moment creators. Much more than a graphic score, 76 was a forum for collective composition and improvisation, a sonic environment where the performers could explore every dimension of their musicianship. For Braxton, this made Composition 76 a prime example of the collaborative practice that the AACM called “creative music.” “As is always the case with creative music,” Braxton declared in the For Trio liner notes, “the actual creativity is an affirmation and testament to all the people participating in the music.”65

4 * Air, Air Time

Improvisation is really about ensemble playing.1

In November 1977, eight weeks after the recording session for Anthony Braxton’s Composition 76, another AACM group gathered in Chicago to make a trio album that would prove to be just as historic.2 The LP was Air Time, by Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall, known collectively as Air.3 Air Time and Braxton’s album were tracked at the same North Side facility, Streeterville Studios, albeit under rather different circumstances. Braxton recorded his LP for the major label Arista, while Air Time was commissioned by Nessa Records, an independent label founded by former Delmark employee Chuck Nessa.4 Braxton’s collaborators came together expressly for the recording session and never played Composition 76 again. In contrast, Air Time was Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall’s third studio album, and the pieces they recorded at Streeterville Studios in the fall of 1977 were soon incorporated into the group’s concert repertoire.5 Even before the Air Time sessions, Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall had attracted a sizeable audience, especially in New York. By the end of 1977, critics were hailing Air as “the number two band out of Chicago, after the Art Ensemble”—the latest, greatest group to emerge from the AACM.6 Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall debuted their trio in 1972, but Air’s roots can be traced back much further, to the early 1960s. All three members of the group were born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, and Threadgill and McCall both attended Englewood High School a decade apart. (McCall was born in 1933, and Threadgill was born eleven years later in 1944.)7 McCall spent much of the 1950s exploring America, first as a serviceman in the US Air Force and then as an airline worker. In the mid-1950s, McCall decided to become a professional musician, and he took flight after flight from Chicago to the East Coast—using the free travel passes provided by the airline—for drum lessons with the

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Philadelphia-based percussionist Charles “Specs” Wright. McCall was a quick study: by the early 1960s, he was an in-demand sideman, playing drums for some of the best jazz combos in Chicago.8 He also started investigating experimental music with fellow South Side resident Muhal Richard Abrams, forging a creative partnership that culminated in 1965, when McCall became one of the four co-founders of the AACM.9 Unlike McCall, who waited until his twenties to pursue music, Threadgill was a child prodigy. Around the age of four, he taught himself to play piano by imitating the boogie-woogie tunes he heard on the radio.10 During his high school years, he took up the tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, and clarinet, performing in the ensembles at Englewood High and studying privately with Roosevelt University professor Jack Gell, who also taught Anthony Braxton.11 After high school, Threadgill continued his education at Woodrow Wilson Junior College, where he found himself in the same music theory classes as Joseph Jarman and Englewood High School alumnus Roscoe Mitchell.12 Jarman, Mitchell, and Threadgill had many shared interests, from visual art, theater, and poetry to hard bop, free jazz, and contemporary classical music. They were also taking oneon-one lessons with the same private teacher—Muhal Richard Abrams, the South Side’s leading experimentalist, who met the young musicians after a concert he gave at Wilson Junior College.13 Soon Abrams invited the three college students to join his Experimental Band, giving Threadgill his first opportunity to work with established professionals such as Steve McCall.14 Threadgill, however, left the Experimental Band after a few rehearsals.15 He had just started playing alto saxophone in church, and an inspired performance one Sunday led to a job offer from the itinerant evangelist Horace Sheppard. For a year and a half, from early 1965 to mid-1966, Threadgill traveled with Sheppard, backing up the evangelist at revivals held in cities across the United States.16 Threadgill’s next stop was the army. He enlisted in the summer of 1966, serving initially as a bandsman and arranger at Fort Riley, Kansas. Then he was sent to Vietnam, like so many young men of his generation. Threadgill stayed in Vietnam until the fall of 1968. When his tour of duty in Vietnam was finally over, he came back to the United States and was posted at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. From there he applied for an early discharge, with an assist from his friends in Chicago, who wrote Threadgill a letter promising him a teaching position at the AACM School of Music.17 The army granted Threadgill’s request in April 1969, and he hurried home to the South Side.18 Threadgill picked up where he had left off four years earlier, practicing and performing with his associates from Wilson Junior College and the Experimental Band.19 Meanwhile, McCall was on the other side of the world, blazing a trail

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for the AACM in Europe. Ever the adventurer, McCall left Chicago for Europe in 1967, becoming the first member of the AACM since the organization’s founding to live and work overseas. He spent a year in Amsterdam performing with fellow African American expatriates Don Byas and Dexter Gordon. Then he moved to Paris, a hotbed for free jazz and experimental music. In Paris, McCall began collaborating with Claude Delcloo, a French drummer who was also active as a magazine editor and record producer.20 McCall introduced him to the AACM’s early albums, and Delcloo was captivated by what he heard.21 Delcloo struck up a correspondence with AACM chair Muhal Richard Abrams and encouraged the members of the Association to join McCall in Paris, where gigs were plentiful for black experimental musicians.22 In the summer of 1969, two AACM groups accepted Delcloo’s invitation: the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the trio of Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, and Wadada Leo Smith.23 After arriving in Paris, Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith teamed up with McCall, making their trio a quartet.24 The four musicians worked together in Paris for several months, then returned to the United States. Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith set up shop on the East Coast, but McCall headed to Chicago, intent on reconnecting with the AACM.25 Back home in Chicago, McCall reunited with Abrams, Threadgill, and the rest of the first-wave members who had joined the AACM in the 1960s. He also met a new figure on the South Side scene: bassist Fred Hopkins. Born in 1947, Hopkins attended DuSable High School during Captain Walter Dyett’s final years as the director of the music program.26 Dyett taught him well, and Hopkins went on to study with Joseph Guastafeste, the principal bassist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO).27 Guastafeste trained several other AACM bassists, including Charles Clark, who passed away in April 1969, shortly after he was accepted into the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s training program for aspiring symphony players.28 The CSO established a scholarship in his name for young African American classical musicians, and Hopkins became one of the first recipients, inheriting Clark’s place in the bass section of the Civic Orchestra.29 Outside of the Civic Orchestra, Hopkins maintained a low profile, bagging groceries at the A&P supermarket and practicing bass in his home near Forty-Eighth Street and Drexel Avenue, in the Kenwood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Threadgill lived in the building next door, and the two musicians became fast friends after hearing each other practice.30 Before long, McCall had moved into the same neighborhood, just down the street from Hopkins and Threadgill.31 At last, the pieces were in place. Now all that Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall needed was a gig. The trio’s debut performance took place at a Chicago theater, not a

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jazz club or concert hall. In 1972, Threadgill was making his living by writing music and playing woodwinds for theater companies and dance troupes on Chicago’s North Side.32 He also collaborated with theater and dance artists at several Chicago colleges and universities, including Columbia College, which hired him to provide the music for a stage play in the fall of 1972.33 The collected works of Scott Joplin had been published the previous year, and the play’s director asked Threadgill to arrange some of the pioneering ragtime composer’s music for the production.34 Virtually all of Joplin’s instrumental rags were written for solo piano, but Threadgill decided to arrange the music for an ensemble: a woodwindsbass-drums trio featuring Hopkins and McCall, his neighbors from the South Side. The three musicians played Threadgill’s ragtime arrangements almost every day for several months, from their first rehearsal through the entire run of the Columbia College production.35 Even after the play ended, the trio continued to explore Joplin rags (“The Ragtime Dance,” “Weeping Willow”) and related compositions in rehearsals, a routine they would follow for years to come.36 “The rags helped shape the group,” Threadgill observed, “because this was music we got into over a period of time. We work[ed] on concertos, marches, Mozart, James P. Johnson to warm up in rehearsal. It’s important to do that to build an ensemble kind of thinking.”37 For Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall, the Joplin arrangements were more than raw material for rehearsals. They performed rags in their concerts and even recorded a few of them, on the albums Air Lore (1979) and 80° Below ’82 (1982).38 Indeed, the trio’s investigations of ragtime influenced every aspect of their musical practices, from the ways they improvised together to the compositional strategies employed by Threadgill and the other members of the group. The rags in Air’s repertoire were sectional compositions—“little suites,” as McCall put it, “with three or four parts.”39 In this respect, classic rags resembled AACM-style extended forms, which were made up of several distinct sections, from fully notated passages to open improvisations where the musicians could create contrasting textures. However, the members of Air adopted a different approach for their ragtime performances, utilizing each section of the composition as a “point of departure” for an ensemble improvisation that “stuck very close” to the notated material.40 “When we played those Joplin pieces,” McCall explained, “we gave each rag its full due”: “We found we could improvise on each change without losing the feeling of the rag itself. When you improvise, you use whatever knowledge you have to express what you feel about the musical form you’re using.”41 For the trio, improvising on rags was about cultivating a unified sound and developing a given musical idea to the fullest, an

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approach they would bring to performances of their own compositions.42 Playing ragtime pieces also affected how the musicians related to each other. In his ragtime arrangements, Threadgill avoided textures where “one instrument [is] out front, and these other two instruments are some kind of accompaniment.”43 Instead, he treated the trio’s instruments as essential parts of an integrated whole, like the left- and right-hand lines in Joplin’s piano textures. This technique placed all three group members on “equal footing,” rather than confining them to roles defined by the instruments they played.44 Threadgill brought this democratic ethos into the original pieces he composed for Air: “I began thinking about the personalities in the group and how they played. I kind of got into writing for people rather than just writing music.”45 The same impulse guided the trio’s improvisations, which were distinguished by the musicians’ responsiveness to one another and their “unprecedented ensemble sensitivity.”46 And this, according to McCall, is what gave Air its unique sound: “We’ve blended our three personalities into a single musical expression. We want to be a group with a very high musical concept, rather than a particular stylistic concept. . . . It’s about individuals merging their concepts with other individuals.”47 During the early 1970s, Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall rehearsed as often as they could. But after the Columbia College play ended, performance opportunities for the trio were hard to come by, and the musicians had to take other gigs. Threadgill worked in Venezuela with Vytas Brenner and in Trinidad with Lord Kitchener, Hopkins performed in Canada, and McCall made regular visits to Europe, touring West Germany and Spain.48 Finally, in 1975, McCall returned to the United States for good, and he and his bandmates decided to breathe new life into Air.49 In September of that year, they recorded their first album, Air Song, for the Japanese label Whynot.50 Then, one by one, the musicians packed their bags and moved from Chicago to New York.51 “At the time in Chicago,” Threadgill remembered, “there was only so much you could do. It seemed like we’d done everything that we could do, so it was time to move on.”52 Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall were not the only AACM artists to relocate to New York in the mid-1970s. All in all, a dozen members of the Association moved to the East Coast during this period.53 But unlike most of the mid-1970s migrants, Air “came [to New York] as a group,” as Threadgill pointed out, and once the musicians moved east, their careers took off.54 Air fit right into New York’s downtown scene, performing at lofts like Sam Rivers’s Studio Rivbea and even headlining at a few jazz clubs.55 Hopkins and McCall became the house band at one downtown club, the Tin Palace, teaming up with pianists such as Stanley Cowell, John Hicks,

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and Hilton Ruiz and billing themselves as “the Great Jazz Rhythm Section.”56 The release of Air’s debut album gave Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall another boost. They were able to take their trio on the road for the first time, playing concert tours in Europe and Japan and traveling up and down the East Coast for gigs at college campuses, nightclubs, and jazz festivals.57 In the summer of 1976, they recorded another album: Air Raid, their second LP for the Whynot label.58 Threadgill wrote all of the music for Air Raid, as he had done for the trio’s debut album. By 1977, though, Hopkins and McCall were becoming more active as composers, and both contributed original pieces to the group’s next album, Air Time.59 These pieces added new dimensions to the band’s sound— textures, colors, and rhythms that helped make Air Time an extraordinary portrait of the AACM’s premier trio.60

Air Time There are five pieces on the album: one composed by Hopkins, another by McCall, and three by Threadgill. According to Hopkins, each track was “[recorded] in one take. . . . direct to the disc” with no edits, giving the recording the same immediacy and impact as the trio’s concerts.61 Crucially, Air Time captures the full spectrum of the band’s musical practices, more so than any other Air LP. No two tracks are alike: each piece has a unique form, and each combines composition with improvisation in different ways. “Subtraction,” from the album’s B side, is mostly composed, while the A-side track “No. 2” features only a few bars of written music. In the other pieces—“I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . . ,” “G. v. E.,” and “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water”—the performers integrate repeating themes with solo and ensemble improvisations. For musicians and anyone else who listens to the album, Air Time is a forty-four-minute master class in the possibilities of small-group improvisation and composition, as well as an illustration of why McCall considered the trio to be “beyond category”: “We’re known for our collectivity, but we play in all the different forms. . . . some pieces we play strictly from the paper [with] no improvisation . . . [other pieces] have a very minimal amount of music [with] about ninety-nine percent improvisation, and everything in between. . . . We decided to embrace as much of the music as we could.”62 The album opens with McCall’s composition “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . . .” Unlike the other tracks on Air Time, which range from seven to thirteen minutes in length, “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .” is relatively short—only two and a half minutes from start to finish (see example 4.1). This is time enough, though, for the musicians to give a compelling

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Example 4.1 “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–0:08

theme

0:08–1:16

theme

1:16–2:37

performance that makes the most of McCall’s compositional design, an ingenious AB form. Threadgill introduces the piece with an unaccompanied tenor saxophone line that sounds a bit like his childhood idol Sonny Rollins.63 At 0:08, he slides down to the tenor saxophone’s low register, changing his articulation from staccato to a smoother legato and playing the pickup notes that mark the beginning of the theme’s A section (see example 4.2). Two beats later, the other members of the group join in. Hopkins harmonizes Threadgill’s melody with a descending bass line, firmly rooting the theme in the key of B  ♭  minor, while McCall uses his cymbals and brushes to keep time. The musicians set the tempo at just under sixty beats per minute, and for a moment, “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .” appears to be a conventional jazz ballad. However, the saxophone melody and bass line begin to repeat after three bars rather than four, creating a pair of three-measure phrases, a pattern rarely heard in jazz ballads of any era.64 The next phrase, at 0:37, also spans three measures, but it departs from the opening phrases in every other way. The melody and bass line are new, and the musicians play these figures with a rubato feel, obscuring the steady tempo they established earlier in the piece. They conclude the phrase on a D major-seventh chord, a harmony far removed from the key where the piece began, and proceed from the A section into the second half of the theme. The B section (from 0:48) continues in the same vein (see example 4.3). Instead of returning to the key of B  ♭  minor, the musicians move through a contrasting series of chords rooted on A, G  ♯ , and C  ♯ . They play this progression once, then twice, using the rubato feel that they employed at the close of the A section: Threadgill cues each harmony, Hopkins and McCall follow his lead, and the ballad tempo recedes into the background. When the performers transition from one chord to the next, it feels like an event, and it is easy to imagine the trio developing this rubato texture into a flowing ensemble improvisation. But then, at 1:16, Hopkins plays a booming E  ♭ 2, breaking up the circular chord progression that defines the B section. An instant later, Threadgill brings back the two pickup notes from the top of the A section, and the theme begins again. In some respects, the second theme statement is much like the first. The two-part

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AB form remains unchanged, and the saxophone melody is nearly identical, except for the trills and runs that Threadgill adds to the end of certain phrases. With the saxophone line in place, Hopkins and McCall are free to improvise more elaborate variations on the theme. Hopkins starts right away, during the first bar of the theme, alternating low notes with upperregister fills. McCall answers with a string of subdivided rhythms that reconcile Hopkins’s busy bass part with the slower saxophone melody. In the very next measure, though, Hopkins and McCall simplify their playExample 4.2 “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .”: lead sheet, A section.

In this chapter, the transcriptions (4.2–4.3, 4.5–4.6, 4.10) are notated in the instruments’ keys, while the text refers to pitches in concert key. The triangle used in this transcription is a graphic symbol that means “improvise(d).”

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Example 4.3 “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .”: lead sheet, B section.

ing, momentarily restoring the “elegiac and sentimental” mood that prevailed during the first statement of the theme.65 They repeat this pattern throughout the second theme statement, creating waves of tension and relaxation that reach an emotional peak and then quickly fade away. By 1:59, when the musicians arrive at the concluding B section, the texture’s peaks and valleys are even more dramatic. And this is how the piece ends, with a surge of energy on the next-to-last chord, followed by ten somber G  ♯ 3s from Threadgill, as Hopkins and McCall bring the texture to silence. Next up is “No. 2,” one of three Threadgill compositions on Air Time. Threadgill, the trio’s only multi-instrumentalist, plays a different instrument (or combination of instruments) on each track, and for “No. 2” he moves to alto saxophone, setting aside the tenor he used on “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . . .” But the biggest distinction between “No. 2” and the previous piece is the way the performers improvise. Instead of improvising inside the confines of the theme, as in the second half of “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting  .  .  .  ,” the musicians take their cues from only the most abstract features of the composition’s first and second themes—the independence of the saxophone, bass, and drumset parts, as well as the leaps and spaces within each line.66 Their improvisations on “No. 2” are also shaped by a process of textural layering, which reverses the usual order of solos in a jazz performance in order to “[change] the whole frame of

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reference . . . of what accompaniment is all about,” as Threadgill would say (see example 4.4).67 “No. 2” begins with a very brief group improvisation, lasting just long enough for listeners to notice that Threadgill is now playing alto saxophone rather than tenor. Five seconds later, the composer brings in the first theme, and the texture changes completely, from a fairly dense, free4 tempo improvisation to precisely scripted counterpoint in 4 time. The rhythms of Threadgill’s line are reminiscent of the march tunes that Air practiced in rehearsals, but his bandmates’ parts have another feel altogether.68 Hopkins’s notes fall in the silences between Threadgill’s phrases, rarely landing on the downbeat, and McCall echoes the asymmetrical rhythms of the bass line instead of playing a march pattern (or any other familiar groove). The saxophone, bass, and drumset parts finally come together in the last bar of the theme, at 0:27, the first instance in the performance when all three musicians play the same figure at the same time. And then, Threadgill and Hopkins suddenly drop out, leaving McCall to improvise by himself for ten seconds. McCall starts his improvised interlude with a handful of snare-drum and tom-tom strokes, and finishes it with a series of drum rolls that set up the next theme. Like the previous theme, the second theme is based on staggered rhythms and interlocking lines that converge only in the final measure. And once again, Threadgill and Hopkins exit immediately after playing the figure that ends the theme, yielding to McCall. This time, McCall’s improvisation is much more than a ten-second interlude between themes. He plays unaccompanied from 0:49 to 3:48, developing material from the two themes into a fascinating solo line. Example 4.4 “No. 2”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–0:05

theme 1

0:05–0:29

McCall interlude

0:29–0:39

theme 2

0:39–0:49

McCall solo

0:49–3:48

 + Hopkins solo

3:48–7:52

  + Threadgill solo

7:52–11:46

theme 2

11:46–12:00

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McCall juxtaposes cymbal crashes and rim shots, bass-drum accents and high toms, creating percussive melodies that emulate the angular contours played by Threadgill and Hopkins during the theme. He also uses a great deal of silence, placing a rest after every phrase, as if he is dialoguing with one of his bandmates. McCall’s thoughtful, spacious approach leaves plenty of room for another player, and three minutes into the drum solo, Hopkins enters the texture. Importantly, McCall keeps on improvising as before, instead of wrapping up his solo and taking on the role of Hopkins’s accompanist. Now both soloists must work together to move the music forward. Hopkins takes his time building the bass solo, starting out with concise, pointillist phrases and then incorporating double stops, long tones, and other devices that make his melodies more complex. At 6:07, two-plus minutes into the duo texture, Hopkins quotes the closing figure of the first theme, playing the line at top speed and with a forceful tone. McCall responds right away, matching the density and dynamics of Hopkins’s playing. The two soloists develop the increasingly intricate bass-and-drums texture until 7:52, when they are joined by Threadgill. His improvised line begins like the other solos, with angular phrases made of equal parts sound and silence. As the saxophone solo progresses, Threadgill introduces novel tone colors and techniques that gradually reshape the texture. By 9:47, the midpoint of the saxophonebass-drums texture, Threadgill is repeating the same low-register phrase again and again, distorting his line with rough timbres and microtonal smears. Hopkins and McCall answer Threadgill by playing with new levels of intensity, bringing the trio texture to a climax that lasts for two minutes, until the musicians decide that it is time to return to the theme. They reduce their volume slightly, just enough for the texture to resemble the improvised introduction that opened the performance. “No. 2” has come full circle. With a snare roll and a cymbal crash, McCall cues the short second theme, and a few bars later, the piece is over. The last track on side A is “G. v. E.,” composed by Hopkins and dedicated to his partner Gisela von Eicken.69 Hopkins was inspired to write the piece after hearing the inanga, an unfretted zither played in Burundi and neighboring countries in east-central Africa.70 The inanga’s strings are tuned to a pentatonic scale, and Hopkins uses a similar five-note scale—D, E, F  ♯ , A, C—for the bass vamp that underlies much of “G. v. E.” (see example 4.5). Hopkins plays two of these notes (D and A) on open strings, a technique that makes his instrument sound something like an inanga, while creating sympathetic vibrations with McCall’s drums, which are tuned to resonate with the bass. The influence of the inanga repertoire is also evident in the theme. Hopkins scores the theme for

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Example 4.5 “G. v. E.”: bass vamp.

Threadgill’s bass flute, an instrument that mimics the breathy timbres employed in inanga songs, where vocalists whisper rather than sing.71 Hopkins and McCall start the piece together. The bass vamp divides each measure into four even beats, with quarter notes on beats one and three and a pair of shorter notes on each upbeat. McCall echoes these duple rhythms with his hi-hat, but a few bars into the performance, his tomtom and snare patterns take on a triple feel, dividing each half measure into three beats and creating a polyrhythm with the bass line. Hopkins responds by meeting his bandmate in the middle, adjusting his subdivisions slightly so he and McCall can groove together without losing the two-against-three “rhythmic thing” that defines “G. v. E.”72 Threadgill enters at 0:03, as his bandmates are settling into their polyrhythms. Instead of picking up his bass flute and playing the theme, though, Threadgill begins by taking a solo on a very different instrument. Hopkins wanted the composition to “convey the quality and sound of African percussion,” so Threadgill moves to the only percussion instrument in his arsenal—one that originated some eight thousand miles from Burundi.73 This remarkable instrument, known as the hubkaphone, was invented by Threadgill himself when he still lived in Chicago. While driving on the Dan Ryan Expressway near the old Maxwell Street market, Threadgill noticed a collection of hubcaps that was perfectly positioned to catch his eye: The sun was hitting them, and they were shining, it was just lighting up the whole expressway—it was blinding. So I came off the expressway to see what it was. . . . [W]hen I was going through them, I would drop some trying to get to others, and I got involved in the sound when I was dropping them. I took some of them home and cleaned them up and began to beat on them and test them for sound.74

Threadgill built a metal frame and suspended the hubcaps from it, along with a few bells, cymbals, and gongs.75 In certain settings, Threadgill could make his hubkaphone sound like a Trinidadian steel drum or even a scaled-down gamelan, the percussion orchestra heard in the traditional

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music of Indonesia.76 But in “G. v. E.,” Threadgill uses the hubkaphone to deliver a percussive commentary on Hopkins and McCall’s Burundian groove. He flits from one hubcap to the next, creating bursts of metallic sounds as well as linear rhythmic patterns that link up with the bass and drums. Then, after improvising on hubkaphone for a minute and a half, Threadgill puts down his mallets and prepares to play the theme. Hopkins and McCall keep the groove going, repeating the bass vamp and drum pattern from 1:42 to 1:49 as they wait for Threadgill to enter on bass flute. The theme begins with a lyrical A section, eight bars in length, which is based on essentially the same scale as Hopkins’s vamp (see example 4.6). Threadgill’s A-section melody fits perfectly over the bass line, as does his part in the four-measure B section, where a short trill figure from the bass flute accentuates the D-major chord that Hopkins strums Example 4.6 “G. v. E.”: lead sheet, A, B, and C sections.

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Example 4.7 “G. v. E.”: formal diagram.

hubkaphone solo

0:00–1:42

interlude

1:42–1:49

theme

1:49–3:09

bass flute solo

3:09–4:27

interlude

4:27–4:34

theme

4:34–5:53

coda

5:53–7:12

on each downbeat. After playing the A and B sections once, the musicians repeat the entire twelve bars, then head into the next section of the theme, where everything changes. On the very first beat of the eight-bar C section (starting at 2:33), the musicians move to a new key, E minor. More significantly, Hopkins and McCall break up the two-against-three polyrhythm that they have maintained since the start of the piece, temporarily replacing it with a simpler duple feel. When the C section is over, Hopkins and McCall restore the opening groove, playing as a duo for four bars before Threadgill returns with a final statement of the A-section melody, ending the theme. Then, at 3:09, Threadgill proceeds directly into his bass-flute solo (see example 4.7). Unlike the open-ended hubkaphone solo from the start of “G. v. E.,” Threadgill’s bass-flute improvisation follows the same forty-four-measure form as the theme. McCall keeps Threadgill tethered to the form, playing drum accents on the first beat of nearly every section, with an assist from Hopkins, who marks the two B sections by incorporating the trills from the theme into his bass vamp. Once Threadgill finishes his solo, he rests for four measures while his bandmates keep playing, resurrecting the bass-and-drums interlude heard after the hubkaphone solo. Then the musicians restate the theme, all forty-four bars of it. They could easily conclude the piece here, at 5:53, having played through the form three times—theme, solo, theme— but the groove is too good to cut short. Threadgill takes another brief solo, then steps aside at 6:10. Hopkins and McCall ride out the groove for another minute, until the recording fades to silence, bringing side A to a close. Side B opens with Threadgill’s “Subtraction,” an extended form with themes and textures borrowed from kabuki, the Japanese art form that combines music, dance, and theater (see example 4.8). Threadgill attended

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Example 4.8 “Subtraction”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–0:12

theme 1

0:12–2:49

bass solo

2:49–5:26

theme 2

5:26–7:46

interlude

7:46–8:23

theme 3 + ensemble texture

8:23–13:36

a number of kabuki performances when he was living in Chicago, and in “Subtraction,” he and his bandmates recreate some of the form’s distinctive timbres and techniques.77 McCall uses his drumset to emulate the percussion section of the kabuki ensemble, Hopkins’s bass stands in for the shamisen lute, and Threadgill selects a different instrument for each section of the piece, playing C flute, bass flute, and hubkaphone. In another echo of the kabuki tradition, the spaces and silences between the musicians’ notes are just as important as the sounds they play. Indeed, in “Subtraction,” no one employs space more effectively than McCall. He begins the piece with a loud thump of his bass drum, followed by a long silence. Next, he repeats this gesture a few more times, accelerating gradually so the drum strokes grow closer together. Then his bandmates enter with the phrase (0:08–0:12) that sets up the first theme. Threadgill plays C flute during the first theme, and his line is made up of short phrases drawn from a six-note scale: A, B, C, D, E, and F. Hopkins’s part is based on a complementary scale, with G replacing D, but instead of harmonizing the flute melody, he partners with McCall, playing sparse, contrasting figures when Threadgill sustains a long tone or pauses to breathe. The musicians state the theme three times, at 0:12, 1:27, and 2:12, interpreting their lines differently during each rendition, as if they are responding to the movements of a kabuki dancer.78 But the most extensive development of the first theme takes place after it ends, at 2:49. Threadgill leaves the texture and Hopkins takes a solo, using the six-note scale from the theme to generate new melodic ideas.79 At first Hopkins’s improvised line is supported only by the remarkably sparse drumming of McCall, who plays just six cymbal and drum strokes during the first thirty seconds of the bass solo. At 3:17, though, Threadgill returns on hubkaphone, adding a new layer of percussion sounds without making the bass-driven texture too dense. The bass solo continues for two more minutes, until 5:26, when

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Threadgill switches from hubkaphone to bass flute and introduces the piece’s second theme. For this theme, the musicians move to a different scale—E, F  ♯ , G, A, B, C  ♯ , D—and the texture changes as well, with longer lines from Threadgill and Hopkins in place of the two-, three-, and four-note phrases heard during the previous theme. As with the first theme, the performers state the new theme three times, with subtle variations in timing and timbre—especially from Hopkins, who plays much of the second statement (6:13–7:03) with a shamisen-like tone obtained by striking his strings with the wood of his bow. This theme ends differently than the first. Instead of transitioning to an improvised solo, the musicians perform a kabuki-style ensemble passage led by McCall. At 7:46, he strikes his low tom with a mallet, creating a sound that recalls the bassdrum thump from the start of the piece. Hopkins and Threadgill enter a split-second later, playing a two-note chord (G3 and C  ♯ 4). They hold this chord for several seconds, waiting for McCall to cue the next event. This time, all of the group members enter together, playing the same gesture (tom-tom stroke and middle-register harmony) twice in the span of four seconds—and then doubling the speed of the gesture again and again, until the texture becomes a blur of competing pulses. When this process of rhythmic acceleration breaks down, the musicians shift gears, playing a brief but explosive ensemble improvisation, the piece’s loudest moment so far. Then they quickly bring down their volume in preparation for the third theme, which begins at 8:23. The earlier themes featured independent melodic lines from the flute and the bass, but here, just as the third theme is getting underway, Threadgill lays out. Hopkins has the only melody, a line made up of probing quarter notes, vibrato-laden long tones, and forays into the bass’s upper register. This enigmatic solo line, even more than the two previous themes, gives the piece a sense of “mystery,” according to Threadgill: “It’s a force that we sense and relate to . . . any part could be absent, or we could switch parts.”80 As Hopkins repeats the third theme, McCall improvises on drumset, playing delicately at first and then with periodic surges of intensity. At 9:51, midway through the fifth statement of the theme, Threadgill enters on hubkaphone, and the texture begins to build to a peak. Hopkins plays more aggressively, snapping his bass strings against the fingerboard and even drumming on the instrument’s hollow body. Threadgill crashes one of his gongs, then gently rolls it (at 12:57), producing a low, sustained hum that seems to envelop the entire texture. McCall responds immediately, returning to the quiet, spacious playing style that he employed for much of the piece. As McCall softly taps his cymbals, Hopkins repeats the theme one last time, ending “Subtraction” with the same “air of mystery” with which it began.81

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The final track on Air Time is “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water” (see example 4.9). Written by Threadgill, the composition comes from a multi-movement suite for percussion, and McCall is the featured soloist, improvising continuously throughout the piece.82 “That’s the whole idea,” Threadgill explained, “keep right on playing.”83 McCall starts the performance on brushes, drawing out different sounds from each part of his drumset—first his hi-hat, then the rest of his cymbals, and on to his tom-toms, snare, and bass drum. With every new sound McCall introduces, his dynamics increase, and by 0:51, he is playing significantly louder than before. This is Threadgill and Hopkins’s cue to join in, and they enter on tenor saxophone and bass, respectively, playing the theme, which is divided into two sections (see example 4.10). In the first section, Threadgill outlines an A  ♭ -minor chord, then slowly climbs the A  ♭ -minor scale over Hopkins’s bass line. Next, Threadgill and Hopkins pivot to another key, B minor, so they can play the second section of the theme. This section, which begins at 1:12, is based on a single phrase—a descending tenor-saxophone line harmonized by an ascending figure in the bass. The musicians perform the phrase three times from 1:12 to 1:55, transforming the saxophone-bass counterpoint into a minor-key lament. (Hopkins uses his bow here, giving the bass line a particularly poignant sound.) Then Threadgill and Hopkins exit, ending the theme—but McCall “keep[s] right on playing.” During this segment of his solo, McCall switches from brushes to mallets, giving each drum stroke more sustain and making the texture denser. He also plays with Example 4.9 “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water”: formal diagram.

McCall solo

0:00–0:51

theme

0:51–1:55

McCall solo

1:55–3:06

theme

3:06–4:02

McCall solo

4:02–4:17

theme

4:17–5:22

McCall solo

5:22–5:28

intensity structure

5:28–8:01

 + theme

8:01–8:42

coda

8:42–9:16

Example 4.10 “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water”: opening theme.

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greater energy, crashing his cymbals and playing long rolls and fills that cascade across his drumset. Threadgill and Hopkins pay close attention to the changes in McCall’s playing. They return at 3:06 with the second statement of the theme, which is louder than the first version and more active as well, thanks to Hopkins, who sets his bow aside so he can rapidly pluck his strings. Like the first rendition of the theme, the second statement lasts about a minute and leads into another improvisation by McCall. This time, though, the drum solo is much shorter. McCall plays unaccompanied for only fifteen seconds (4:02–4:17), just enough time to exchange his mallets for a pair of drumsticks. The move to drumsticks sharpens McCall’s articulations and further elevates his dynamics, setting the stage for the third statement of the theme. The third theme statement is much more intense than its predecessors: Threadgill plays with a gritty tone and heavy vibrato, and Hopkins adds thunderous octave tremolos to every phrase. At any moment, it seems, one of the musicians could break away from the theme and lead his bandmates into an intensity structure, a “dense, fast-moving” texture heard in many performances by AACM groups.84 Instead, though, Threadgill and Hopkins wrap up the third theme statement right on schedule (at 5:22), in keeping with the pattern they established earlier in the piece. McCall, however, has other ideas. He immediately summons Threadgill and Hopkins back into the texture, cutting his solo short and inviting his bandmates to play the theme again.85 Then McCall lets loose, drumming so forcefully that Threadgill and Hopkins are swept up into an intensity structure. The musicians do not abandon the form entirely: fragments from the theme’s first section appear in their playing, especially Threadgill’s tenor-saxophone line. But the ensemble texture is dominated by complex timbres, loud dynamics, extended techniques, and other markers of sonic intensity. Finally, at 8:01, the group members return to the theme, playing the closing phrase three times, just as in the first statement. As soon as the theme ends, the intensity structure subsides, releasing all the tension that the ensemble created in the past three minutes. Hopkins picks up his bow again, and the musicians close the piece with a tranquil coda—long tones from the saxophone and bass, decorated by quiet tones from McCall’s cymbals, the very sounds that he used to open the performance.

After Air Air Time was a major success. Released by Nessa Records in the spring of 1978, the album quickly became one of the label’s top-selling LPs, along with Roscoe Mitchell’s Nonaah.86 Music critics appreciated the al-

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bum just as much as record buyers. In Down Beat magazine’s annual poll of jazz journalists, Air Time placed highly in the “record of the year” category, and Air finished second in the very competitive category of best jazz combo, right behind Weather Report, the fusion band co-led by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter.87 In July 1978, just as the Down Beat critics’ poll was going to press, Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall played a high-profile concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival, the biggest jazz festival in all of Europe.88 That same year, the trio signed a new recording contract, moving from Nessa to Novus, an imprint of Arista, the major label that had brought Anthony Braxton such renown.89 Air would make three albums for Arista Novus: Open Air Suit (1978), Montreux Suisse Air (a live recording of their set from the 1978 Montreux festival), and Air Lore (1979)—the group’s most popular LP.90 On Air Lore, the musicians returned to their ragtime roots, recording new arrangements of Scott Joplin’s “The Ragtime Dance” and “Weeping Willow”—along with two Jelly Roll Morton tunes (“Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” “King Porter Stomp”) and a Threadgill original entitled “Paille Street.” Air Lore was named “record of the year” in the 1980 Down Beat critics’ poll, and once again, the trio took second place in the jazz combo category, with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in first.91 For Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall, the sky was the limit. Their albums were selling well, and their reputation as innovators, coupled with their ragtime bona fides, made Air “one of the most graceful tightrope acts of modern times”—a band that was perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between AACM-style experimentalism and the traditionalist movement that dominated the 1980s jazz scene.92 But Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall’s time together was nearing its end. After Air Lore, the trio made just three more albums: Live Air (1980) and Air Mail (1981), both for the Italian label Black Saint, and 80° Below ’82 (1982) for Antilles, a subsidiary of Island Records.93 Then McCall left New York and moved back home to the South Side of Chicago. Threadgill and Hopkins hired a replacement drummer, Pheeroan akLaff, and gave the group a different name, New Air. The reconstituted trio would remain active for a few years, until 1988. However, Threadgill was already devoting much of his attention to another group, his seven-member Sextett, which featured Hopkins on bass, two drummers (including akLaff), and a rotating cast of brass and string players.94 The Sextett disbanded at the end of the 1980s, and some years later, Hopkins followed in McCall’s footsteps, returning to Chicago and becoming a mentor to the next generation of South Side experimental musicians.95 But Threadgill stayed in New York, composing theater pieces, classical scores, and film music, and forming a series of acclaimed groups, including the WindString Ensemble, the Society Situa-

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tion Dance Band, Very Very Circus, and Make a Move.96 All of the ensembles that Threadgill led in the 1980s and 1990s were critically acclaimed, and most of them recorded for major labels such as Columbia and RCA.97 But none of these bands stayed together as long as Air—that is, until the dawn of the new millennium, when Threadgill founded a chamber-music ensemble he called Zooid. Formed in 2000, Zooid began as a quintet (accordion, drums, oud, tuba, woodwinds), expanded to a sextet (cello, drums, guitar, oud, tuba, woodwinds), and later downsized to a quintet (cello, drums, guitar, trombone/tuba, woodwinds).98 The music that Threadgill wrote for Zooid was based on a compositional system that he started developing for Make a Move in the late 1990s.99 By the mid-2000s, Threadgill had created a multifaceted “intervallic language” that structured all of Zooid’s compositions and improvisations.100 In the pieces performed by Zooid, each measure of music was based on a unique three-pitch cell (and the three intervals between its notes). When improvising, Threadgill and his bandmates could manipulate these intervals to create new, complex harmonies that echoed the simpler cell given in the score. More than a compositional technique, Threadgill’s intervallic language was also a performance practice that enabled the members of Zooid to improvise atonal counterpoint in real time. In the worlds of jazz and experimental music, this practice was unprecedented, and many critics considered Zooid’s intervallic language to be the greatest achievement of Threadgill’s solo career.101 The Pulitzer Prize organization agreed: in 2016, the Zooid album In for a Penny, In for a Pound was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, one of the highest honors in American arts and letters.102 Back in the 1960s, the AACM’s founders dreamed of carving out a space for African American composers in the realm of experimental music. A half century later, the founders’ dream became a reality. The Association finally had its first Pulitzer-winning composer. And, with the AACM’s sound experiments still in motion, Threadgill would surely not be the last.

5 * George Lewis, Voyager

Voyager [is] a kind of computer music-making embodying African American cultural practice.1

From the very beginning, the members of the AACM were united by a commitment to support one another’s creative pursuits. This commitment was evident in countless concerts and recording sessions, when AACM composers called on fellow members of the organization to help bring their music to life. The AACM’s supportive ethic also operated behind the scenes, making the Association a dynamic community of “dedicated creative artists” who constantly encouraged their colleagues to keep practicing, studying, and developing their music.2 In this creative environment—or “atmosphere,” the term favored in the 1960s AACM—musicians were expected, even required, to be innovative.3 The members responded to this mandate by developing a number of musical practices that would become synonymous with the Association, from multi-instrumentalism, “little instruments,” and extended forms to new approaches to notation and conducting.4 The AACM’s 1960s advances attracted immediate attention from Chicago audiences and critics, and a series of recordings with local independent labels like Delmark and Nessa carried the music from the South Side to listeners far and wide. Indeed, albums such as Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound (1966) and Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light (1968)—both examined in chapter 1—were so revolutionary that the AACM’s place in history would be secure even if the organization had disbanded at the end of the 1960s, like most other musicians’ collectives formed during that decade.5 Instead, the Association continued to thrive. In 1969, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the trio of Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, and Wadada Leo Smith ventured to Paris, where they brought the AACM’s innovations to an international audience. The

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Chicagoans would remain in Europe until the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the AACM was welcoming a steady stream of new members, throughout the 1970s and in every decade thereafter. Of all the musicians who joined the AACM during its 1970s “second wave,” few did as much to shape the organization as George Lewis. He came aboard in 1971, and four years later served briefly as the chair of the Association, directing its tenth-anniversary festival (1975), a landmark event that established a precedent for AACM anniversary concerts presented at high-profile venues in Chicago.6 Lewis also functioned as the organization’s in-house historian. From the 1970s to the twenty-first century, he published a number of important writings about the AACM, including the book A Power Stronger Than Itself (2008), the definitive history of the Association.7 Additionally, Lewis’s performances and compositions left a lasting mark on the AACM. In the mid-1970s, he established himself as one of the world’s top trombonists, recognized for his virtuosic technique and his imaginative approach to improvisation. By the end of the decade, he was creating music with computers and synthesizers, often blending electronic sounds with traditional acoustic instruments. These early experiments were successful, and during the 1980s and 1990s, computer music became central to Lewis’s compositional practice. He also composed for acoustic ensembles, writing chamber music, orchestral scores, pieces for improvising groups of all sizes—and even a few operas, including Afterword (2015), based on the final chapter of A Power Stronger Than Itself.8 Lewis’s best-known work was Voyager, a pioneering piece in which a human musician and a software-powered “virtual orchestra” improvise together.9 A number of leading improvisers have performed with Voyager—Vijay Iyer, Miya Masaoka, Jason Moran, Roscoe Mitchell, Evan Parker, and many more—but often the featured instrumentalist was Lewis himself on trombone.10 The premiere took place in 1987 at the Massachusetts College of Art, with Lewis as soloist.11 In the decades after, Voyager was played in hundreds of concerts around the world, making it Lewis’s most-performed piece, and perhaps the mostperformed work by any AACM artist.12 Another measure of Voyager’s significance: the prominent place it occupies in histories of computer music, which portray the piece as a major breakthrough in humancomputer interaction.13 These histories tend to emphasize Voyager’s technical features, its connections to comparable works, and other topics of interest to computer-music researchers. What made Voyager truly unique, though, was the piece’s relationship to the musical practices of the AACM.14

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Prelude Lewis attended his first AACM event when he was still in high school. Born in Chicago during the summer of 1952 and raised on the city’s South Side, he attended public schools for a few years before receiving a scholarship from the Laboratory School, a prestigious K–12 academy operated by the University of Chicago. Lewis took up the trombone at the Lab School, playing in the concert band, jazz band, and orchestra. By his mid-teens, he was listening to bebop, avant-garde tape compositions, and late-period John Coltrane—an array of contemporary-music styles that should have prepared him for his first AACM concert, a 1968 performance by tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson.15 Anderson sounded a bit like Coltrane in those days, and his group played compositions modeled on the music of another free-jazz icon, Ornette Coleman.16 However, Lewis had a hard time comprehending Anderson’s fierce performance. “It was . . . too far out for me, and I just couldn’t figure it out,” he remembered.17 Still, Lewis was intrigued, and he attended several more AACM concerts during his senior year at the Lab School. One of these AACM experiences was especially unforgettable: the Art Ensemble of Chicago, in one of the last performances given by Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell before their 1969 move to Europe. The Art Ensemble event took place on the University of Chicago campus, and Lewis had a front-row seat. As he recalled: “I was stunned by Joseph Jarman’s body-painted arms, attacking a vibraphone with mallets swishing dangerously close to my nose. I remember being so frightened that I literally seemed to faint. When I came to, Lester Bowie’s trumpet squeals and raspberries were leading to long drone sections where Malachi Favors’s bass unwound long strings of melody, while Roscoe Mitchell contentedly puttered about in a secret garden of percussion.”18 Not long after the Art Ensemble concert, Lewis finished high school. As a Lab School graduate, he had the credentials to be admitted to an elite university, and he chose Yale, becoming one of ninety-six black students in the 1969 freshman class—then the largest cohort of black undergraduates in the institution’s history.19 At Yale, Lewis hoped to major in music. Unfortunately, the university’s music professors were less than welcoming to students without extensive training in the European classical tradition. One professor told Lewis that “there was no chance of [him] becoming a composer or a musician.”20 By his sophomore year, Lewis had become disenchanted with Yale. So he took a break and spent 1971–1972 back in Chicago, working a nine-to-five job and practicing his instrument. One day in the summer of 1971, he was walking home from

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work when he heard a band rehearsing—it was Muhal Richard Abrams’s group. Lewis introduced himself to Abrams’s crew and revealed that he played trombone. Within weeks, he was invited to perform with some of the AACM’s foremost musicians, including Abrams, Douglas Ewart, Steve McCall, and the members of the Art Ensemble. Soon Lewis was formally accepted into the Association, and 1971–1972 became his “AACM year,” a period of intensive study that gave him a thorough grounding in the AACM’s practices.21 In the fall of 1972, Lewis returned to Yale. He changed his major to philosophy, bypassing the university’s conservative music faculty, and earned his bachelor’s degree in 1974. Then he headed home to Chicago, where he reunited with the AACM and worked as a freelance trombonist. He also began to delve into composition, studying with Abrams as well as with Richard McCreary, an African American composer of electronic music who taught at Governors State University in south suburban Chicago.22 Before long, Lewis’s performance career was on the rise, and he was coming into his own as a composer. By 1976, he was touring internationally with artists such as Count Basie and fellow AACM member Anthony Braxton.23 He was also developing electroacoustic compositions like Homage to Charles Parker, for electronics, percussion, piano, saxophone, synthesizers, and trombone.24 In 1977, while visiting California, he met David Behrman, a computer-music wizard who devised software that enabled personal computers—aka “microcomputers,” then a brandnew technology—to interact sonically with other computers and even with human instrumentalists.25 After the encounter with Behrman, the possibilities of computer music seemed endless to Lewis, and he “rushed home . . . determined to get a microcomputer.” He “postpone[d] paying the rent that month to buy the thing,” and started teaching himself how to program while in the process of moving from Chicago to New York.26 Lewis was a quick study: in 1979, at the Kitchen performance space in downtown New York, he premiered his first computer-music piece, The KIM and I, in which his trombone interacted with a custom-built computer controlling a Moog synthesizer.27 Interactive compositions such as The KIM and I opened numerous doors for Lewis. He already had a name on the jazz scene, especially along the European and American corridors where AACM musicians toured and recorded, but now his pieces were gaining an audience in the world of experimental music. By the late 1980s, Lewis’s credentials as an experimental composer would enable him to pursue a career in academia, after many years as an “itinerant artist.”28 He was eventually recognized as one of the world’s leading composers and experimental-music researchers, with a long list of prestigious awards—including a “genius grant”

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from the MacArthur Foundation (2002), an endowed professorship at Columbia University (2004), honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh (2015), New College of Florida (2017), and Harvard University (2018), and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2015), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015), the British Academy (2016), the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (2020). The first fruits of Lewis’s computer-music efforts, though, were invitations to return to the Kitchen, first as a performer, and later as the venue’s music director from 1980 to 1982.29 The connections Lewis made at the Kitchen helped him secure his next position, a residency at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. While at IRCAM, Lewis composed and premiered a new computer-music piece, Rainbow Family (1984), which would form the foundation for Voyager. Rainbow Family, like its famous successor, was conceived as an interactive work for human instrumentalist(s) and an improvising orchestra. In this work, the orchestral textures came from a trio of Yamaha DX-7 synthesizers controlled by Apple II computers running Lewis’s own software. At the heart of the software was a group of algorithms that created music in real time while also generating sonic responses to the playing of four improvising soloists: Derek Bailey, Douglas Ewart, Steve Lacy, and Joëlle Léandre.30 Performed to a “packed” house at IRCAM, the Rainbow Family premiere was a technical and creative triumph.31 IRCAM’s old-guard directors—then engaged in a power struggle with Lewis and his sponsors—reacted less favorably, but they could not dim Lewis’s enthusiasm for his project.32 He started searching for a friendlier work environment, and found one at the Studio voor Electro-Instrumentale Muziek (STEIM) in Amsterdam. Lewis left Paris at the end of 1985 to take a resident-artist position at STEIM, and immediately after his arrival, he began developing his next series of interactive pieces, culminating in Voyager.33

Voyager The Voyager program that Lewis premiered in 1987 was the first of many versions of the piece. In the decades that followed, Lewis continued to revise the work in response to advances in technology and new performance opportunities. Initially, Voyager’s musical output was sent from a computer to a Yamaha synthesizer (as in Rainbow Family), but during the 1990s, Lewis updated the software so that it could generate sounds directly using MIDI samples. And for a 2004 concert at Carnegie Hall, Lewis and his student Damon Holzborn recreated the entire piece in a

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new programming language—Max/MSP rather than Forth—allowing the software to play a concert grand piano, the MIDI-capable Yamaha Disklavier.34 All of these versions, though, relied on the same underlying architecture, and reflected Lewis’s original vision for Voyager: a softwaredriven, improvising entity that could create orchestral textures based on the musical concepts of the AACM.35 The AACM’s musical practices influenced Voyager in a number of areas, especially the work’s distinctive instrumentation. Voyager was an orchestra piece, but the virtual instruments heard in performances were not limited to those found in a European symphony orchestra. Instead, Voyager combined symphonic strings, winds, and percussion with instruments from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East. These sonic resources could—theoretically—yield textures as dense as a tutti orchestra, but ordinarily Lewis’s software chose much sparser groupings of instruments, often forming unconventional “ensembles” rarely encountered in the concert hall.36 These configurations sounded less like a handful of players plucked from a symphony and more like a gathering of AACM multi-instrumentalists—groups such as Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band or the Art Ensemble of Chicago, in which the musicians had an array of instruments at their fingertips. The Association’s explorations of multi-instrumentalism began in the mid-1960s, when the Art Ensemble, the Experimental Band, and other AACM improvisers “moved to develop multiple voices on a wide variety of instruments.”37 By the decade’s end, the members of the Art Ensemble were playing dozens of different instruments each, as Lewis discovered during that late 1960s concert at the University of Chicago, where Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell performed on percussion as well as various woodwinds.38 The next time Lewis encountered the Art Ensemble, at the 1972 show documented on the Delmark album Live at Mandel Hall, the band’s instrument collection had grown exponentially.39 “When I saw the Art Ensemble in 1972,” he remembered, “they’d have like a thousand instruments on stage.”40 In performances such as this, Lewis observed, “the extreme multiplicity of voices, embedded within an already highly collective ensemble orientation, permitted the timbral diversity of a given situation to exceed the sum of its instrumental parts, affording a wider palette of potential orchestrations to explore.”41 Voyager’s relationship to the AACM’s practice of multi-instrumentalism was evident in every performance, and at times its sound could uncannily resemble certain groups from the Association. One such moment can be heard in Lewis’s September 16, 1995, performance of Voyager, at a concert produced by the AACM. (The concert recording appears on Lewis’s album Endless Shout.)42 As the performance approaches the seven-minute

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mark, the texture created by Voyager grows more and more complex. Sounds reminiscent of a vintage analog ring modulator are joined by other synthesizers, percussion instruments, and even a harmonica. The orchestra begins to grow louder, then suddenly falls silent, and a few seconds later, Lewis drops out too. At 7:10, when Voyager returns, it is playing five new instruments: drumset, a log drum, marimba, double bass, and a low-pitched saxophone. This particular combination of instruments can be heard in numerous performances by the Art Ensemble, with Famoudou Don Moye on drumset, Lester Bowie on log drum (or bass drum), Joseph Jarman on marimba, Malachi Favors on bass, and Roscoe Mitchell on baritone or bass saxophone. In this Art Ensemble–esque passage, Voyager’s playing is spacious and searching, and when Lewis rejoins the texture, he adopts a similar improvisational approach, sounding quiet tones on his trombone and waiting for the orchestra to respond. The texture continues until 7:46, when several winds, strings, and synthesizers enter in short succession, drowning out all of the old instruments except the drumset and marimba. It is as if an Art Ensemble concert has been interrupted by another group, perhaps Misha Mengelberg’s ICP Orchestra or one of Muhal Richard Abrams’s big bands from the 1980s and 1990s.43 Lewis, too, hears this intervention as a break from the previous texture, and he decides to lay out, allowing Voyager to take the lead. Lewis remains silent for quite some time: thirty seconds elapse before he plays his next note. This period of rest, though, is brief in comparison to the way Lewis elected to open the performance, when he let Voyager play unaccompanied for almost three minutes before entering. During these orchestra-only passages, Voyager demonstrated to the concert audience that it was able to create its own music in real time, with or without Lewis’s trombone. Indeed, in any Voyager performance, all that the human instrumentalist needed to do was type the commands “start playing” (to begin the piece) and “stop playing” (to bring the concert to a close). In between “start playing” and “stop playing,” the musician did not have to make a sound or provide the software with any additional input.44 The Voyager orchestra, in other words, could conduct itself. For Lewis, this meant that Voyager was “incarnatic,” not “prosthetic”—it made independent musical decisions and was not a mere extension of the human performer.45 According to Lewis: “If you choose to go in and play [with Voyager], it’s happy to listen to you and dialogue with you, or sometimes ignore you, but the conceptual aspect of it is that it’s pretty autonomous. You can’t tell it what to do. . . . So improvisation becomes a negotiation where you have to work with [Voyager] rather than just be in control.”46 Voyager used a software sequence called setphrasebehavior to generate its music. This sequence determined which virtual instruments would

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play, and arranged these instruments into one or more “ensembles,” each with its own distinctive musical behavior.47 Ensembles were assigned different pitch sets and tuning systems, algorithms for spontaneously composing melodies, and many other parameters that shaped their sonic output, including event density, melodic range, tactus, tempo, and volume. The setphrasebehavior routine ran every few seconds, forming new ensembles and transforming the old ensembles by recombining or even silencing their instruments. At the same time, setphrasebehavior decided how each ensemble would interact with the human improviser, either “imitating, directly opposing, or ignoring” the sounds the musician played.48 If the human performer was resting, Voyager could keep making music by itself. But while the instrumentalist was playing, Voyager listened closely, converting his or her sounds into MIDI data and tracking some thirty musical parameters.49 In the rhythmic realm alone, Voyager measured sounding duration, interonset duration, interonset duration range, and frequency of silence.50 MIDI listening gave Voyager a detailed and continuously updated map of the human musician’s input. However, the program did not use this data to detect melodic motives or store up musical ideas for later use. In Lewis’s view, those techniques were “essentially Eurocentric” and would conflict with Voyager’s non-hierarchical, AACMinspired approach to open improvisation, in which the performer and the software worked together in real time to create musical form.51 Instead of merely echoing the notes played by the human musician, Voyager engaged in non-motivic, “state-based” approaches to listening, analysis, and interaction.52 Voyager’s state-based analyses processed the performer’s sounds not as isolated melodies and rhythms but rather as complex contributions to an ever-evolving texture. The software’s setresponse sequence, working independently of setphrasebehavior, aggregated and then averaged all of the musical parameters emerging from the instrumentalist’s audio-to-MIDI input, de-emphasizing “moments of linear development” to more accurately represent the “sonic environment [in] which musical actions occur.”53 This unconventional analytical technique enabled Voyager to respond to the human performer with astonishing sensitivity. During passages when Voyager was following the instrumentalist, it could emulate his or her input across virtually every parameter, and it often seemed to be reading the musician’s mind. To describe this phenomenon of “bidirectional transfer of intentionality through sound,” Lewis coined the term “emotional transduction,” an allusion to electroacoustic devices like microphones and loudspeakers that transduce—that is, convert—sound waves into electrical impulses, and vice versa.54 According to Lewis, “musical behavior is a carrier for complex symbolic signals. [In Voyager,] [g]esture is construed as an intentional act, that is, an

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act embodying meaning and announcing emotional and mental intention. Through gesture the emotional state of the improviser may be mirrored in the behavior of the computer partner—a kind of ‘emotional transduction’ which is essential to a feeling of dialogue.”55 There were many instances of emotional transduction in the September 16, 1995, Voyager performance, none more striking than an exchange early in the concert, shortly after Lewis’s initial entrance. Prior to Lewis’s entry, Voyager had been performing independently and creating a series of contrasting textures. The first orchestra-only episode lasts a minute and a half. During this passage, Voyager introduces ten different instruments, none of which move to take charge of the texture—not even the piccolo and harp, which overlap in register and share the same melodygenerating algorithm. After a brass-and-drums burst at 1:30, the orchestra resets itself: new ensembles are formed, and the texture gradually becomes denser. By 2:48, several instruments—balafon, koto, drums, and saxophone—are playing much faster and louder than before. Lewis seems to want Voyager to do something else, and at 2:57 he finally picks up his trombone and proposes an alternative musical idea, playing a lone E  ♭ 3 at a moderate volume. One of the orchestra’s ensembles immediately follows suit. A few woodwinds play a quiet melody, G4-E  ♭ 4-D4, and the strings repeat this line an octave higher, joining with the wind instruments to form a delicate harmony. The new texture, however, is short-lived. The balafon, which had been playing unobtrusively underneath the winds and strings, begins to perform frantic glissandos in the upper register, rejecting Lewis’s attempted intervention and pushing all the other orchestral instruments to the background. As the new texture unfolds, the balafon sounds as if it could continue in this vein indefinitely, and at 3:24, Lewis intervenes again with a markedly oppositional gesture. He plays an inversion of the winds’ G-E  ♭ -D melody, drawing out each note and using a loud, brassy tone that covers up the balafon. Voyager’s other ensembles react instantly. Synthesizers and strings enter first, followed by brass and woodwind instruments that precisely match Lewis’s durations, volume level, and tone color. This musical consensus emerges so quickly that even the balafon seems compelled to respond. It drops out briefly, then resurfaces at 3:30, performing sparsely and softly, with no hint of the busy glissandos it was playing just seconds before. The texture has been transformed, not only through Lewis’s incisive musical gestures but also because of how Voyager interpreted his intentions. This is exactly how Voyager’s emotional transduction was meant to work. “When everything is going properly,” Lewis affirmed, “what people play into the computer should come out of the computer with some aspect of the emotional and other messages that are part of

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the sound intact. What people are playing are carriers for another signal; the sounds we hear aren’t the main thing. . . . You have to approach it on the level of emotion, on the level of creating dialogue.”56 In Voyager performances, the process of emotional transduction was not always led by the human musician. Emotional currents could also flow from Voyager to the performer, when the orchestra suggested a particularly evocative musical state and the instrumentalist played a phrase that confirmed the new texture. One such interaction takes place around the nine-minute mark of the September 16, 1995, performance. At this point in the concert, every facet of Lewis’s formidable technique is on display, as he plays virtuosic runs spanning the trombone’s range. Voyager’s orchestral contributions are just as colorful, with a number of different instruments chattering away, from brass, saxophones, and strings to drums, synthesizers, and a Zimbabwean mbira. Then, at 9:03, the orchestra’s strings land on a low E  ♭ 2, creating a dramatic pedal point that demands a response. Lewis answers right away. A split second after the orchestra’s arrival on E  ♭ 2, he plays the same note two octaves higher, holding E  ♭ 4 for a moment and then bending it upward through E4 and F4—a chromatic climb that pulls hard against the low pedal point in the strings. When Lewis pauses for an instant to breathe, Voyager keeps the texture going, using the saxophones to add a few more high-register long tones. Once Lewis catches his breath, he returns with another E  ♭ 4-E4-F4 ascent, and this time Voyager assembles its pedal-point texture from the top down. The orchestra’s instruments enter one by one, playing a descending series of long tones that form a lush E  ♭  dominant-thirteenth chord, capped off by another low E  ♭  in the strings. Lewis chimes in with a low E  ♭  of his own, reinforcing the chord outlined by Voyager. At 9:12, the orchestra’s chord begins to recede, and Lewis offers yet another supportive gesture, stepping down from E  ♭ 3 to D3 as the orchestra fades to silence. Lewis’s adroit resolution of the E  ♭  harmony gives the orchestra space to establish a new texture, and Voyager does just that, directing a few instruments to dialogue with Lewis while forming additional ensembles that gradually lead the improvisation in a different direction.

Postlude The September 16, 1995, Voyager performance continued for another eleven minutes—twenty minutes in all—with fascinating exchanges throughout. Lewis or Voyager would present a compelling musical idea, and the other would respond in ways that kept the improvisation moving forward into new textures and possibilities. For some in the audience, passages characterized by audible agreement and emotional transduc-

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tion would have been the highlights of the concert, and they might have concluded that Lewis’s ambition for Voyager was designing a “creative machine” capable of passing a musical Turing test by improvising as intelligently as a human instrumentalist.57 However, the AACM members in the house might have heard the performance differently, as a real-time demonstration of the ethics of improvisation.58 The members of the Association had long been attuned to the social implications of music, as Lewis learned when he joined the organization: “I hadn’t thought much about the process of creating music until I met people from the AACM in 1971 . . . play[ing] with people like Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell. We talked about where music was coming from and what it was for—were we just making sounds and that’s it? It seemed pretty clear that the tradition, at least in African American music, was really not centered around making sounds for their own sake. There is always an instrumentality connected with sounds; you make sounds for pedagogical purposes, to embody history or to tell stories, and so on.”59 The AACM’s ideals were at the core of Voyager, even though the piece involved a human improvising with a computer rather than an in-person encounter between multiple human performers. “When the computer possibilities came along I tried to maintain that [AACM] sensibility,” Lewis stated, “so I still think the interesting thing about computer music is focusing on the process of musical creation as done by humans. When you play Voyager the idea is that you put the computer on the stage in order to focus on the people.”60 In the opening moments of a Voyager performance, listeners discovered that the software could create its own music without external input, just like a human improviser. As the performance continued, they heard Voyager engage with its human partner in every conceivable fashion, from sympathetic interaction (“emotional transduction”) to opposing or ignoring the musician’s sonic input. These were exactly the kinds of musical decisions made by the human performer—Voyager’s way of revealing to the audience the essential processes at the core of any group improvisation, whether human-computer or human-human. When musicians improvise together, no matter the genre or style, they must listen to one another, analyze the texture as it takes shape, and choose the kinds of sonic responses that will best serve the music. In an AACM-style open improvisation, moreover, the performers’ responsibilities are even greater. Improvisers who move away from standard musical forms take on a shared responsibility for determining how the performance will unfold. Furthermore, because all participants in an open improvisation can contribute musical ideas, no one possesses sole authority over the performance, and the ultimate trajectory of the piece

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must be determined by real-time negotiations in which everyone has the right to be heard. Entering into such an open-ended musical environment would be a considerable challenge for some improvisers, but not for George Lewis and his AACM colleagues, who had been developing novel approaches to improvisation since the Association’s founding.61 Indeed, the very history of the AACM can be understood as an open improvisation writ large. Establishing a new musical community on Chicago’s South Side, advancing the practice of multi-instrumentalism, carving out territory for African American composers on the experimental-music scene— all of these AACM accomplishments were without precedent and could only have been achieved by a group of artists working together to create order spontaneously, without relying on existing models. No two AACM members contributed to these efforts in the same way: Muhal Richard Abrams was the visionary leader, musicians like Anthony Braxton, Douglas Ewart, and the members of the Art Ensemble were the most committed to multi-instrumentalism, and Lewis was the Association’s primary exponent of cutting-edge computer music. But they all gave something of lasting significance, and in more than a few cases— including Lewis’s Voyager—their musical offerings resounded for years on end.

Figure 1 Roscoe Mitchell (alto saxophone), Lester Lashley (cello), and Lester Bowie (flugelhorn) rehearsing on the University of Chicago campus, prior to the recording sessions for Sound. Photo © Alan Teller.

Figure 2 Thurman Barker (left) and Muhal Richard Abrams (right) in the recording studio, Chicago, 1968. Photo © Leonard E. Jones.

Figure 3 Sherry Scott (left) and Muhal Richard Abrams (right) in the recording studio, Chicago, 1968. Photo © Leonard E. Jones.

Figure 4 Roscoe Mitchell (alto saxophone) performing Nonaah at the Jazz Festival Willisau ’76. Photo © Markus di Francesco.

Figure 5 Anthony Braxton (contrabass saxophone) at the Berliner Jazztage, 1976. Photo © Roberto Masotti.

Figure 6 Air—Henry Threadgill (flute), Fred Hopkins (bass), and Steve McCall (drumset)—at the Chicago Jazz Festival, 1981. Photo © Lauren Deutsch.

Figure 7 Henry Threadgill (hubkaphone, flute) at a concert in New York, 1980s. Photo © Lona Foote.

Figure 8 George Lewis, with electronic mbira and Apple II computer, circa 1985. Courtesy of the Michel Waisvisz Archives.

Figure 9 Jeff Parker (guitar), Hamid Drake (drumset), Fred Anderson (tenor saxophone), and Tatsu Aoki (bass) at the old Velvet Lounge, Chicago, 1999. Photo by Mayumi Lake. Courtesy of Asian Improv aRts Midwest.

Figure 10 Fred Anderson (left) and Muhal Richard Abrams (right) at the old Velvet Lounge, Chicago,

2006. Photo © Michael Jackson.

Figure 11 Mwata Bowden (baritone

saxophone) at the new Velvet Lounge, Chicago, 2009. Photo © Michael Jackson.

Figure 12 Mwata Bowden directing the Great Black Music Ensemble at Estrada Poznańska,

Poznań, Poland, 2010. Left to right: Mwata Bowden, Douglas Ewart, Fred Jackson Jr., Edward House (obscured), Jerome Croswell, Ernest Dawkins (obscured), Tomeka Reid, Leon Q. Allen, Renée Baker, Avreeayl Ra (obscured), Nicole Mitchell, Harrison Bankhead, Taalib-Din Ziyad. Out of frame: Dee Alexander, Mike Reed. Photo © Lauren Deutsch.

Figure 13 Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) at the premiere of Ten Freedom Summers, REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles, 2011. Photo © Michael Jackson.

Figure 14 The Golden Quartet at the premiere of Ten Freedom Summers, REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles, 2011. Left to right: Anthony Davis (piano), John Lindberg (bass), Susie Ibarra (drumset), Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet). Photo © Michael Jackson.

Figure 15 Nicole Mitchell (flute) at the Chicago Jazz Festival, 2001. Photo © Michael Jackson.

Figure 16 Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble after the premiere of Mandorla Awakening II.

Left to right: Renée Baker, Tatsu Aoki, JoVia Armstrong, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Alex Wing, avery r. young. Not pictured: Kojiro Umezaki. Photo © Michael Jackson.

Figure 17 The Artifacts trio—Nicole Mitchell (flute, electronics), Tomeka Reid (cello), and Mike

Reed (drumset)—performing at Constellation, Chicago, 2015. Photo © Lauren Deutsch.

6 * Fred Anderson, Volume Two

You can only contribute, and your reward is the fact that you can contribute.1

Fred Anderson was there from the beginning. He joined the AACM at its founding, in May 1965, after meeting Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell at a jam session on Chicago’s West Side. A few months later, in August 1965, Anderson performed at the Association’s inaugural concert, in a quintet that included trumpeter Billy Brimfield, bassist Charles Clark, drummer Arthur Reed, and fellow saxophonist Joseph Jarman.2 Later in the 1960s, Anderson appeared on Jarman’s first two Delmark albums, Song For (1967) and As If It Were the Seasons (1968).3 But Anderson’s greatest contributions to the AACM would take place in the decades to come. Anderson was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1929. When he was still in elementary school, he and his mother joined the great migration of African Americans out of the southern United States, leaving Louisiana and settling in Evanston, Illinois, a lakefront suburb just north of Chicago. Before he left Louisiana, Anderson had taught himself to play the piano, but a few years after he arrived in Evanston, he decided to take up another instrument.4 World War II was over, and jazz labels such as Savoy were rushing to record bebop artists like the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, who had stayed out of the studio during the wartime recording ban. When Anderson heard Parker’s 1945 recording of “Now’s the Time,” he was hooked.5 He borrowed a horn from his cousin, and eventually saved enough money to purchase his own instrument, a tenor saxophone that cost him $45.6 This saxophone and the recordings of Charlie Parker would become Anderson’s constant companions. Soon Anderson was practicing for hours every day. But instead of attempting to make a living as a professional musician, he supported his family by working full-time jobs (hotel porter, carpet installer), while

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devoting his evenings and weekends to intensive study, learning every facet of the tenor saxophone.7 He found a private teacher in Evanston, Martin Bough, who showed him advanced saxophone techniques and introduced him to music theory. In the 1950s, Anderson delved deeper into his studies, enrolling in music theory courses at the Roy C. Knapp School of Percussion in downtown Chicago. The theory instructor, Al Poskonka, taught him jazz harmony as well as composition and arranging, and Anderson’s musicianship reached new heights.8 By the early 1960s, he was developing his own saxophone exercises, carefully constructed études that traced a chord progression, scale, or melodic figure through all twelve keys. These études, which Anderson eventually published in a book he titled Exercises for the Creative Musician (2002), became the foundation of his saxophone practice routine.9 And his exercise-driven practice routine transformed the way he improvised: As I started playing these [exercises], everything started coming together. It took a long time, and it probably would take a long time for anybody. You’re not going to just pick it up, playing it one time. You have to play them over and over, in different ways, different rhythms, and study the different connections: one chord going into another chord, one key going into another key. You’ll find out you can do almost anything. Once you hear these sounds, things will automatically come to you.10

Working on the saxophone exercises also inspired Anderson to create his own compositions.11 When he was ready to rehearse these pieces, he and Billy Brimfield formed an Evanston-based, piano-less quartet (saxophone, trumpet, bass, and drums) modeled after Ornette Coleman’s group.12 Anderson’s compositions were Coleman-esque too, with themes based on contrasting phrases—and ensemble passages where the musicians engaged in open improvisation instead of following standard song forms.13 Twenty miles south of Evanston, Muhal Richard Abrams and the members of the Experimental Band were exploring the same concepts, and a number of South Side musicians found their way into Anderson’s group over the years, beginning with Joseph Jarman.14 By 1965, most of Anderson’s bandmates hailed from Chicago’s South Side.15 The only group members from the northern reaches of the city were Anderson and his longtime collaborator Brimfield—a duo also known as the AACM’s Evanston “chapter.”16 For the next few years, Anderson would work with Brimfield and a rotating cast of South Side AACM members. However, the late 1960s travels of Anderson’s favorite drummers, Alvin Fielder and Steve McCall, made it difficult to keep the band together. So Anderson took a hiatus

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from performing. He resurfaced in the 1970s, leading a new ensemble whose members were a generation younger than him. Some were AACM members from the South Side (Douglas Ewart, George Lewis), others were former Northwestern University music students who went on to join the Association (Soji Adebayo, Iqua Colson), and two were recruited from the North Side rock band Kart-Wolf (Felix Blackmon, Hamid Drake).18 Anderson’s 1970s group attracted a great deal of attention in Chicago, much more than the bands he led in the 1960s. Musicians and critics alike were “enthralled” by the “powerfully evocative timbral quality” of Anderson’s saxophone playing, which was central to the group’s sound.19 The ensemble was also defined by Anderson’s mentorship of the younger musicians. Anyone could bring a composition to the band, and Anderson let his protégés “play as long as [they] wanted,” taking extended solos that helped develop their improvisation skills.20 He even invited dancers onto the bandstand, merging the ensemble’s music with the improvised movements of artists such as Kai El’Zabar, Tsehaye Geralyn Hébert, Rrata Christine Jones, Marilyn Lashley, and Althea Teamer.21 The site for many of these intermedia performances was J’s Place, a North Side juice bar where Anderson’s group had a regular gig in 1975 and 1976—Fridays from 8:00 p.m. to midnight, and Saturdays from midnight to 5:00 a.m.22 At one of these engagements, Anderson met the Austrian pianist Dieter Glawischnig and the German musicologist Ekkehard Jost, author of the book Free Jazz, a pioneering academic study of black experimental music.23 They invited Anderson and Billy Brimfield to Europe, and in 1977, the two Evanstonians embarked on their first international tour, performing with Glawischnig’s trio Neighbours and recording the album Accents.24 The following year, Anderson toured Europe twice and made his second LP, Another Place, recorded live at the 7th International New Jazz Festival in Moers, West Germany.25 17

Fred’s Place After his first European tour, Anderson resolved to open a performance space. He had “always wanted a place of [his] own to practice and play and a place for other musicians to come and sit in,” and when he found a North Side storefront that was available to rent, he “decided to grab it.”26 The storefront, which Anderson named the Birdhouse (after Charlie “Bird” Parker), was located at 4512 North Lincoln Avenue—a few miles north of J’s Place, and just up the street from the headquarters of Delmark Records. Anderson’s band and other AACM ensembles performed at the Birdhouse on the weekends, and during the week, the storefront was made available for art exhibitions, music workshops, and theater

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rehearsals. Unfortunately, the venture did not last long. Anderson was new to the neighborhood, and without the support of the ward’s alderman, he was unable to protect the Birdhouse from repeated closures at the hands of the Chicago police and other city officials.28 Opened in May 1977, Anderson’s performance space “operated but intermittently from its inception,” and by June 1978, the Birdhouse was closed for good.29 The demise of the Birdhouse did not slow Anderson down. He continued to perform locally and internationally, and in 1979 he recorded two more albums: Dark Day and The Missing Link.30 That same year, he took on another project—running a South Side bar owned by his friend Ford “Tip” Manyweathers, who had been hospitalized.31 In 1982, Manyweathers passed away after a long illness, and Anderson took sole ownership of the tavern, changing its name from Tip’s Lounge (“Where Friendly People Meet”) to the Velvet Lounge.32 Anderson’s new acquisition was located at 2128½ South Indiana Avenue, in a working-class district a few blocks from Chicago’s Chinatown and the high-rise housing projects on State Street. For several years, Anderson operated the Velvet Lounge as a “neighborhood bar,” serving the customers he inherited from Manyweathers.33 Eventually, though, Anderson began to remake the Velvet Lounge into a performance space. In the late 1980s, he started hosting jam sessions at the Velvet Lounge on alternate Sundays.34 By 1990, the Velvet Lounge sessions were among the premier musical events on the South Side, and the National Endowment for the Arts’s Midwestern bureau named Anderson the first recipient of its Jazz Masters Award, in recognition of his contributions as a musical innovator and community builder.35 During the 1990s, the Velvet Lounge’s music program grew by leaps and bounds. Late-night sets drew audiences from the annual Chicago Jazz Festival, the jam sessions became weekly events, and Anderson started booking performances on Fridays and Saturdays, then on Wednesdays and Thursdays as well.36 By the end of the decade, the Velvet Lounge was known throughout Chicago—and around the world—as the home of the AACM, and of countless other musicians inspired by the Association’s sound experiments.37 Anderson’s performance space even took on some pop-culture cachet: the NBC medical drama ER portrayed the Velvet Lounge as a hip after-hours hangout for the doctors working at a fictional Chicago hospital.38 But for Anderson, the Velvet Lounge was all about the musicians: 27

I don’t look at [my role] as being a club owner. . . . My main thing is thinking about the music, and making sure the musicians are happy and enjoy playing. If they enjoy playing, they can make the people come in and

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enjoy them. I’m running this as a musician and a person who loves music. I just sit back and let [them] do what they do, and treat [them] with respect. They know they can be here and play and express themselves. They don’t have to worry about somebody telling them how to play. This is the freedom that people have here. We come here, we don’t judge. This is what this place is for.39

Anderson’s “mentorship and example of openness” made him the heart of the Velvet Lounge community.40 He was also the performance space’s biggest draw: whenever his band appeared there, usually one weekend per month, the Velvet Lounge was packed to capacity.41 Over the years, every Chicago-based AACM artist played there, from original members like Jodie Christian and Malachi Favors (both of whom held down regular gigs at the Velvet Lounge) to representatives of the Association’s second, third, and fourth waves.42 A number of AACM bands debuted at Anderson’s performance space, including the Great Black Music Ensemble and Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble.43 But the Velvet Lounge was not just for AACM members. Under Anderson’s stewardship, the venue came to have one of the most inclusive stages in a notoriously segregated city.44 In any given month, the Velvet Lounge might host performances by musicians affiliated with Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW), improvisers from Chicago’s predominantly white North Side, students from local universities, and artists visiting from overseas, such as the expatriate saxophonist Steve Lacy—who commemorated his first appearance at the venue by writing “THIS PLACE IS A TEMPLE!” on a poster that Anderson hung on the wall across from the old hardwood bar.45 Some of these musicians went on to perform in Anderson’s ensemble, an experience that was “both humbling and strengthening,” especially for younger players.46 In this way, the Velvet Lounge became an important site for collaboration across generational and cultural lines, renewing a tradition that Anderson had started decades earlier at J’s Place and the Birdhouse.

Volume Two One of Anderson’s finest intergenerational/multicultural ensembles can be heard on the album Volume Two.47 Anderson recorded prolifically in the 1990s and 2000s, making dozens of albums with a variety of small groups.48 Many of these discs were recorded live in concert at the Velvet Lounge—including Volume Two, which was tracked in 1999 and released a year later by Asian Improv, an independent label headed by Tatsu Aoki, the bassist in Anderson’s band.49 Aoki was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1958.50 His father was a filmmaker

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and his mother was a professional geisha who introduced Aoki to traditional Japanese art forms as well as American music. During his childhood, Aoki learned to play several different instruments, from Japanese percussion and the shamisen lute to piano and guitar. He started on bass as a teenager, and a few years later, he moved to the United States to study filmmaking. In the mid-1980s, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Aoki joined the school’s faculty soon thereafter.51 He also worked as a professional musician, playing bass in a number of Chicago jazz, blues, and rock groups. By the 1990s, he was performing and recording with Anderson while leading his own ensembles.52 One of these ensembles, Tricolor, featured guitarist Jeff Parker (born in 1967, nine years after Aoki). Parker grew up in Hampton, Virginia, and arrived in Chicago in 1991 after attending the Berklee College of Music.53 He became an AACM member in 1995.54 By then Parker was a fixture across the city, performing with South Side groups such as AACM saxophonist Ernest Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble—and with North Side “post-rock” bands like Tortoise and Isotope 217.55 It was Parker’s work with Tricolor, though, that earned him an invitation to play with Anderson.56 The guitarist became a part of Anderson’s ensemble in 1997, two years before Volume Two was recorded.57 The fourth member of the group that recorded Volume Two was percussionist Hamid Drake, who had been collaborating with Anderson since the 1970s. Drake was born in Monroe, Louisiana—Anderson’s hometown—in 1955. His family moved to the Chicago suburbs in 1956, and for a few years, they lived in the same house as the Anderson clan, who were friends of theirs from Monroe. Drake began playing drums around the age of ten, and when he was in his late teens, he started working with Anderson.58 The young percussionist fit right in—after all, he had been listening to Anderson’s music since he was a child, “daydreaming to the sound[s]. . . . floating up from the basement of the house” they once shared in Evanston.59 Back in the mid-1970s, when Drake was new to Anderson’s group, their performances centered on the bandleader’s original compositions. However, by the 1980s, Anderson was focusing on open improvisation, in part because his ensemble was unable to rehearse as often as he wanted. Anderson was occupied with the Velvet Lounge, and Drake’s frequent tours with bands such as the Mandingo Griot Society kept him away from Chicago for months on end.60 For Anderson, open improvisation became the best way to structure his concerts. Other drummers didn’t have to learn all of Anderson’s compositions before a gig—they just had to listen closely and respond to his saxophone lines. But when Drake was in the drum chair, Anderson could play anything he wanted, from completely

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improvised pieces created in real time to the oldest compositions in his repertoire.61 As Anderson explained, “[Hamid] understands my music better than anybody. . . . [W]e developed it together; he was part of it. He contributed to it.”62 On Volume Two, five of the six tracks are open improvisations, created spontaneously and collectively by Anderson, Aoki, Drake, and Parker. Only one piece is composed: “December 4th,” an Anderson original that had been in the group’s repertoire for a few years.63 No two pieces are alike, though they do share one common feature—extended solos by Anderson and his bandmates. Some of the improvised solos are quite lengthy, as are the tracks themselves, which range from twelve to thirtyseven minutes in duration. All of this music would not fit on a single compact disc, so Anderson, Aoki, and their co-producer Clarence Bright made Volume Two a double album, with three long tracks on each CD.64 The pieces on Volume Two are also distinguished by the ensemble’s attention to rhythm and groove. The performers explore different rhythms and feels on every track, from jazz grooves to rock, reggae, and house-music beats that thrill the hundred or so audience members crowded into the Velvet Lounge. The album opener is “Look Out!,” a lively open improvisation by Anderson, Aoki, and Drake. (Parker does not appear on this track.) Like most of the open improvisations on Volume Two, “Look Out!” begins with an unaccompanied line from one of the musicians, and here it is Anderson who leads off, playing a series of descending phrases in the middle register of his tenor saxophone (see example 6.1). Drake strikes his snare drum several times, then softly closes his hi-hat, as if he is taking a moment to adjust his drumset before joining the performance. Then he lays out, giving Anderson more time to experiment with his solo line. One minute into Anderson’s solo, Drake returns with a few more hi-hat sounds, and Aoki enters at 1:35, filling out the texture. Drake and Aoki set up a swing groove at about 240 beats per minute, with hi-hat rhythms and bass fills that hint at a faster double-time feel. Neither tempo, however, is perfectly aligned with Anderson’s part, which seems to lie somewhere in between. Drake finds a solution at 2:29, using a sequence of triplet rhythms to progressively increase his tempo. By 2:47, Drake’s beat and Aoki’s walking bass are locked in at 300 beats per minute, the same pace as Anderson’s rapid-fire saxophone line. With all the musicians in sync, the groove takes off, and so does Anderson’s saxophone solo. He plays one spirited phrase after another, improvising a seemingly inexhaustible stream of melodies for eight more minutes. Then, at 10:41, he suddenly changes gears, transforming his line into a repeating half-time riff (A3, C  ♯ 4, E4, D4). Aoki follows suit, harmonizing the saxophone ostinato with a repeating figure

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Example 6.1 “Look Out!”: formal diagram.

Anderson solo

0:00–12:37

Drake solo

12:37–15:42

coda

15:42–15:59

(C  ♯ 2, B2, B  ♭ 2, A2) of his own. Anderson works his riff for two more minutes, then leaves the texture at 12:37. Aoki decides to keep the vamp going, and Drake takes control, playing a drum solo over the repeating bass line. Drake’s rousing solo, built from thunderous rudiments that start on his snare drum and radiate out to the rest of the kit, brings “Look Out!” to a climax. At 15:38, he plays a vigorous cadence pattern on his snare, then falls silent, signaling to his bandmates that the drum solo is over. Anderson answers with the same cadence rhythm, and then he and Aoki exit the texture together, just two seconds after Drake—an abrupt yet effective ending that earns the band a raucous ovation from the Velvet Lounge audience. Drake starts the next track, “Road Trip,” by gently rolling his snare. Then he lays down a relaxed, medium-tempo beat with Afro-Latin syncopations. The other musicians take their time entering the texture. At 0:53, Aoki introduces a one-bar, minimalist bass vamp: a tumble of sixteenth notes during the first two beats of each measure, followed by two beats of silence. Parker joins in at 1:15, playing cluster chords on his guitar and giving the groove a minor-key feel. Anderson lets the texture develop for another minute and a half, then enters at 2:52 and begins his solo (see example 6.2). The saxophonist takes his cue from his bandmates, improvising a syncopated, spacious line in the key of D minor. He plays for nearly eight minutes, until 10:48, then passes the baton to Parker, whose solo picks up where Anderson left off, with short phrases and plenty of space. The next soloist, Aoki, takes this concept even further: at 16:40, midway through his improvisation, he interrupts his line with several seconds of silence, long enough that some of the audience members begin to applaud, thinking the piece has ended. However, the musicians are just getting started. Aoki resumes his solo, playing for another minute before yielding to Drake at 17:44. Like Aoki, Drake divides his solo into two sections, separated not by a long silence but by changes in timbre. During the first part of his improvisation, Drake transforms the sound of his drumset by playing it with his hands, then with shells, shakers, and brushes. At 22:00, he picks up his drumsticks, which he last used during his bandmates’ solos. Drake’s switch to drumsticks could set up a return

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Example 6.2 “Road Trip”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–2:52

Anderson solo

2:52–10:48

Parker solo

10:48–15:20

Aoki solo

15:20–17:44

Drake solo

17:44–23:12

transition

23:12–23:43

Anderson solo

23:43–32:06

Parker solo

32:06–37:43

to the opening groove, but instead he keeps improvising while steadily increasing his dynamics. A minute later, at 23:12, he finishes his solo and starts playing a loud, insistent pulse on his snare drum and cymbals at a tempo of over 120 beats per minute, considerably faster than the tempo from the beginning of the piece. Parker and Aoki return a few seconds later, and Drake’s snare-and-cymbal pulse evolves into a house-music beat, complete with open hi-hat strokes. The new groove is irresistible to Anderson, who takes another solo at 23:43, bringing back some of the phrases from his first improvisation and playing with much more intensity than before. Anderson concludes his solo with a pentatonic riff in C  ♯   minor, which Parker doubles on guitar. When Anderson exits (at 32:06), Parker uses this pentatonic figure as the point of departure for his second solo, a virtuosic outing that brings the texture to an even higher level of intensity. He plays louder and louder, overdriving his amplifier, and uses bent notes and crashingly dissonant chords to draw Drake and Aoki away from the house groove into a pounding rock beat. At the close of his solo, Parker breaks up the rock groove and leads the ensemble into yet another texture—a dissonant, free-tempo workout reminiscent of the 1970s performances of AACM guitarist Pete Cosey.65 And this is where “Road Trip” ends, thirty-seven minutes after it started, with one last line from Parker and sustained tones from Aoki and Drake. The third track, “Tomato Song,” begins with Parker’s guitar (see example 6.3). He plays an A-minor blues phrase, then another, and another. As his line takes shape, he finds a four-note motive—A, C, E, D—and makes it the focal point of his improvisation, working it into nearly every phrase. Although Parker does not explicitly refer to the harmonies

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Example 6.3 “Tomato Song”: formal diagram.

Parker solo

0:00–5:26

Anderson solo

5:26–10:53

coda

10:53–12:25

and song forms associated with the blues, his playing has a deep blues feeling, much like Anderson’s own saxophone style.66 If he wanted, Anderson could enter the texture right away and fit in seamlessly, either by harmonizing the guitar line or by playing the first extended solo. But the saxophonist chooses to stay silent, letting Parker take the lead. Thirty seconds into the performance, Aoki and Drake join in, assembling a sparse backdrop for Parker’s improvisation. Their accompaniment becomes increasingly rhythmic, as does the guitar solo. By 2:28, Aoki and Drake are playing a head-bobbing reggae beat. Parker answers by incorporating staccato chords into his line, building on the rhythms of the bass-and-drums groove. He ends his solo by strumming a chord on the bottom strings of his guitar, creating a low-register tremolo that beckons the bandleader into the texture. Anderson has been listening carefully to Parker: he begins his saxophone improvisation with a series of long tones on A3, the top note of the guitar chord. Then, at 5:52, he brings back the motive (A, C, E, D) from the opening of Parker’s solo. Even though Anderson uses the same notes as Parker, the motive takes on a new sound in the saxophonist’s hands, transforming from a bluesy guitar figure into a poignant, soulful cry. The other musicians respond accordingly, reshaping the reggae groove into a ballad texture, with delicate countermelodies from the guitar and a half-time feel in the bass and drums. Anderson floats above his bandmates’ atmospheric accompaniment, gradually venturing away from the motive he borrowed from Parker while remaining rooted in the minor key that the guitarist established at the outset of the piece. At the close of the saxophone solo, Anderson returns to the motive, repeating it several times with subtle variations. This is a perfect ending, not just for the saxophone improvisation but for the entire performance. Once Anderson exits, his bandmates slowly break down the ballad texture, fading out the music as the Velvet Lounge audience listens intently.67 The album’s second disc opens with “December 4th.” Anderson’s bandmates know this composition well, having performed it “quite a few times” before the Volume Two live recording.68 To cue the piece, all that Anderson has to do is start playing the theme. An instant later, the other musicians enter the texture—Parker doubling the melody on guitar, with

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rhythmic accents from Drake and Aoki. Anderson dedicated many of his compositions to family members and close friends, including “December 4th,” which he wrote for Aoki: “That tune, that melody reminded me of how [Tatsu] played. That’s his feeling. When I created that tune I had him in mind.”69 Indeed, the first section of the “December 4th” theme sounds like some of the bass vamps Aoki plays elsewhere on Volume Two: six quarter notes connected by wide leaps, followed by a pair of eighth notes that ends the phrase and sets up an immediate repeat (see example 6.4). Anderson plays the first section of the theme five times, then pivots to the second section, a pentatonic flourish that spans an octave and a half. The theme’s second section moves away from the key expressed in the Example 6.4 “December 4th”: opening theme.

In this chapter, the transcriptions (6.4, 6.8) are notated in the instruments’ keys, while the text refers to pitches in concert key.

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Example 6.5 “December 4th”: formal diagram.

theme

0:00–0:21

Anderson solo

0:21–8:01

Parker solo

8:01–11:49

theme

11:49–12:41

Aoki solo

12:41–15:07

first section (E minor), and it is also more rhythmically ambiguous, with flowing subdivisions instead of a regular pulse. The tonal and rhythmic contrasts presented in the theme can also be heard in the solos, especially Anderson’s improvisation, which begins as soon as he finishes playing the theme, at 0:21 (see example 6.5). During the early stages of the saxophone solo, Drake, Aoki, and Parker experiment with different accompaniment patterns, waiting until 1:00 to lay down the swing beat implied by the quarter- and eighth-note rhythms from the first section of the theme. Anderson uses a similar strategy in his saxophone line, alternating between swing rhythms and blazing sixteenth-note figures at the very bottom of his instrument’s range. He also changes keys freely, starting his improvisation in D minor before exploring several other tonalities. Throughout the solo, Anderson returns to the theme, bringing back the first section at 3:36 and 4:43 and playing the entire melody at 6:41 and 7:15. After Anderson ends his solo, Parker takes over, improvising a line that stays close to the contours and tonal centers of the theme. Like Anderson, Parker concludes his solo by revisiting the theme, and after a few statements of the first section, the saxophonist joins in (at 11:49). Together, Parker and Anderson play the theme’s first section sixteen more times, developing this simple two-measure figure into a swinging, 32-bar shout chorus. While Parker and Anderson repeat the theme’s first section, Aoki and Drake take charge of the dynamics, building up the ensemble’s volume and then bringing it down to a whisper. Finally, at 12:35, the musicians proceed to the second section of the theme. This section of the theme is only a few measures long, and the performers could easily use it to conclude the piece. But as Anderson, Drake, and Parker are sounding the final notes of the theme, Aoki steps up, launching into an unaccompanied bass solo that takes his bandmates by surprise. He improvises for two minutes, working a few fragments of the theme into his line, and closes his solo with a flurry of upper-register harmonics. Aoki’s improvisation ends just like it began, audaciously and unexpectedly—and as the

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audience applauds, Drake asks the bassist, half-seriously, if his solo is really finished: “Is that it, Tatsu, is that it?” Anderson, who already knows the answer, laughs aloud. The next track, “Exotic Dreams,” begins with Drake sounding a meditative rhythmic pattern on his low tom-tom. Instead of using drumsticks, Drake plays with his hands, treating the tom-tom like a frame drum— gently striking different parts of the head and bringing out its rich, resonant overtones. Parker joins in at 0:22, using long tones and touch harmonics to emulate the overtones emanating from Drake’s low tom. At 1:11, Aoki enters, playing short sound bursts on the high G string of his bass. Anderson shows up three minutes later, at 4:07, adding another layer to the texture: breathy long tones and brief melodic figures separated by stretches of silence (see example 6.6). As the ensemble texture evolves, it becomes considerably denser, especially after 7:33, when Anderson shifts from single-line playing to multiphonics, an extended technique that enables him to produce “two notes at one time,” with a throaty timbre.70 Anderson experiments with multiphonics for two and a half minutes, then exits at 9:58. The other musicians keep developing the texture. Drake settles into a steady tempo (around 100 beats per minute), Parker aligns his guitar part with the drum rhythms, and Aoki makes his bass sound like a shamisen, with heavy vibrato and a percussive tone. But the biggest change in the texture takes place after 11:10, when Anderson returns with a solo melody. Parker reacts immediately, strumming his guitar rapidly to form a tremolo on D  ♭ 3. Suddenly, the texture seems much more energetic than before. The performers could quickly bring the texture to a climax, but instead they build it up slowly, creating a palpable sense of anticipation. Two minutes into the saxophone solo, Anderson distills his solo line into a repeating phrase based on a three-note figure—A  ♭ , D  ♭ , E  ♭ . This figure galvanizes the ensemble. Parker joins forces with Anderson, doubling the saxophone line an octave lower, and for the first time in the piece, the musicians begin to groove together. However, the groove proves to be short-lived, lasting only from 13:44 to 14:26. After 14:26, Anderson and Parker break up their repeating line and start playing long tones, tremolos, and runs in the key of A  ♭  major. Drake Example 6.6 “Exotic Dreams”: formal diagram.

ensemble texture

0:00–11:10

Anderson solo

11:10–14:26

ensemble texture

14:26–22:31

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switches to drumsticks, and the performers leave the groove behind to dialogue freely with each other. The ensemble texture grows more and more active, until 18:15, when Anderson lays out for a moment. At 19:24, he rejoins his bandmates, and they transform the texture one last time, reducing their volume dramatically and playing with a “quiet intensity” that captivates the audience.71 From this point in the performance onward, the crowd gathered around the Velvet Lounge stage listens reverently, in absolute silence. And when the musicians finally end the piece, the audience waits several seconds before interrupting the silence with a round of applause. “We had the people’s attention,” Anderson observed after listening to the master recording of “Exotic Dreams”: “You didn’t hear nobody saying anything.”72 The album concludes with “Jeff’s Turnaround.” Unlike the other open improvisations on Volume Two, three of the musicians start the piece together, instead of entering one-by-one. Aoki and Parker play openstring drones and high harmonics, while Drake uses his drumset, bells, and a shaker to create a series of intermittent pulses. Anderson joins in a little later, at 1:53, taking the first solo (see example 6.7). As he improvises, the other performers continue to explore the texture they assembled at the beginning of the piece, letting it evolve alongside Anderson’s saxophone line. By the six-minute mark, Aoki, Drake, and Parker have changed their texture into an up-tempo groove, with synchronized pulses in the bass and drums, counterpointed by upper-register chords and harmonics from the guitar. The emerging groove is in the key of G, but Anderson gravitates toward the key of D, building some tension into the texture. The tension escalates for several minutes, until 10:59. Then Parker starts playing a one-bar chordal vamp—“Jeff’s Turnaround”—that cycles back and forth between both keys, bridging the gap between Anderson’s improvised line and Aoki’s G-string drones (see example 6.8). Anderson responds right away to the guitar vamp, playing with renewed Example 6.7 “Jeff’s Turnaround”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–1:53

Anderson solo

1:53–16:30

Parker solo

16:30–21:28

Drake solo

21:28–25:50

Anderson solo

25:50–31:30

riff texture

31:30–34:47

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Example 6.8 “Jeff’s Turnaround”: guitar vamp.

force and focus, while Drake and Aoki reshape their groove into a driving funk beat. Drake and Aoki keep the funk beat going until the end of Anderson’s improvisation, then break it down, giving the next soloist (Parker) a clean slate. Parker’s improvisation, which begins at 16:30, follows the same path as the saxophone solo, starting amidst a free-tempo texture that Drake and Aoki gradually develop into an updated version of the funk groove. At 21:28, Parker yields to Drake, who takes a very different approach to texture and time. Drake improvises over Aoki’s funk ostinato, then continues to play in tempo after the bassist drops out. Finally, as the drum solo nears its end, Drake abandons the tempo he has maintained for almost six minutes. He starts to improvise pointillistically, playing just one note at a time on his drumset, with split-second silences between each stroke. Anderson returns at 25:50, and Aoki and Parker join in soon thereafter, imitating Drake’s pointillist playing style and creating a bouncy new groove—the backdrop for the second saxophone solo. The bandleader improvises until 31:30. Then he introduces a repeating four-note riff that sounds a bit like the turnaround figure Parker played twenty minutes earlier. Anderson uses this technique in virtually every track on Volume Two, concluding his solo with a repeating motive designed to “catch the audience’s ear” and help the musicians transition to the next stage of the piece.73 Here, though, the saxophone riff takes on a life of its own. Anderson varies the figure until it morphs into a new riff, then repeats this process again and again. Aoki, Drake, and Parker follow Anderson’s lead, developing their own lines at the same deliberate pace and drawing the Velvet Lounge audience into the textural transformation that is unfolding onstage. The performers sustain the riff texture for three minutes, until they are ready to bring the piece to a close. At last, they fall silent, and the audience erupts with cheers and applause, giving Anderson and his bandmates the biggest ovation on all of Volume Two.

Velvet Legacy The final minutes of “Jeff’s Turnaround”—from the evolving riff texture to the audience’s ovation—can be heard as an audible expression of the

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community that Fred Anderson cultivated during his decades-long stewardship of the Velvet Lounge. This community, according to Anderson, was modeled on the relationships he formed with collaborators like Tatsu Aoki, Hamid Drake, and Jeff Parker: “I think we just have a feeling for the music and for each other as a person, as [people] who are interested in trying to make music together and do something positive.”74 The Velvet Lounge community also comprised hundreds of other musicians who played at the venue, Anderson’s employees and volunteer staff, and the faithful patrons who supported the performers from their seats in front of the stage, or their regular perches at the bar.75 The members of the Velvet Lounge community helped Anderson stay in business for more than twenty-five years, including a trying time that began shortly after Volume Two was released. In the early 2000s, the city of Chicago was undergoing rapid gentrification, and few areas changed more rapidly than the South Loop neighborhood, where the Velvet Lounge was located. By 2002, the buildings across the street from Anderson’s performance space had been demolished to make room for bank branches and insurance offices.76 Before long, condominium developers were bearing down on the Velvet Lounge.77 Anderson held on for a while, until circumstances forced his hand. The century-old structure that housed the Velvet Lounge was crumbling, and Anderson’s landlord suggested moving the Velvet Lounge to another property he owned, a newly constructed storefront just two blocks away at 67 East Cermak Road.78 However, the cost of outfitting the new space was much more than Anderson could afford.79 He asked for help, and the Velvet Lounge community sprang into action. AACM flutist Nicole Mitchell, who began her career at the Velvet Lounge, formed a coalition that organized benefit concerts and solicited donations from contributors across Chicago and around the globe.80 The campaign raised $120,000, precisely what Anderson needed to relocate.81 As the moving date grew closer, Anderson’s right-hand man Andy Pierce led a crew that restored the Velvet Lounge’s vintage furnishings—everything but the floral wallpaper and kente-cloth curtains—and installed them at the storefront on Cermak Road.82 The new performance space opened in July 2006, after months of diligent labor by the Velvet Lounge community.83 No one gave more to this effort than Nicole Mitchell, but from her perspective, Anderson deserved all the recognition: “Few people on the planet—but clearly a person like Fred—could have inspired the love, work, and the faith to make that happen.”84 Anderson, never one to claim credit for himself, pointed to a higher authority: “Somebody had their arms around us.”85 Anderson turned eighty in 2009. In years past, Anderson had celebrated his birthday with a few nights of performances at his establish-

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ment, but for his eightieth, the Velvet Lounge community went all-out. The Velvet Lounge hosted a weeklong series of concerts featuring collaborators from every period of Anderson’s career, from Billy Brimfield to fourth-wave AACM members such as bassist Junius Paul and drummer Isaiah Spencer.86 Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley issued a special proclamation declaring March 22, 2009, to be “Fred Anderson Day,” and that evening—in between slices of birthday cake—Anderson recorded a live album for the Delmark label.87 In August 2009, Anderson was honored again, this time by some of Chicago’s leading arts organizations. The Jazz Institute of Chicago and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs organized a symposium about Anderson’s life and career, and the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble presented a concert of his music at Pritzker Pavilion, the four-thousandseat amphitheater in Chicago’s Millennium Park.88 The pieces on the concert program were new arrangements of Anderson’s compositions, with one exception: “Something Like Fred,” George Lewis’s orchestration of the eight-minute saxophone solo from the Volume Two track “December 4th.”89 This was perhaps Anderson’s best-known solo, thanks to his book Exercises for the Creative Musician, which included a note-for-note transcription of the improvisation by Paul Steinbeck.90 When Lewis was working on the orchestration, he considered giving Anderson’s intricate solo line to one of the Great Black Music Ensemble’s saxophonists, with the rest of the band accompanying. However, Lewis soon realized that “if [he] assigned one person the entire solo, they’d never be able to play it.” Instead, he “opted for orchestrating [Anderson’s improvisation] from beginning to end, so that. . . . everybody has a piece of [the] solo”: “I can give the flute these four notes, and give the saxophone these four notes, and give the singers these five notes.”91 Lewis also discovered the “inner logic” underlying Anderson’s improvised line, where each phrase seemed to flow naturally from what came before.92 “I thought, well, maybe I should take a passage and cut here and cut this part out, but you couldn’t do it. If you cut it, it [was] ruined. And suddenly you think, now I see why. . . . that moment in the solo did work. . . . [The] logic was inescapable.”93 Ultimately, Lewis had to orchestrate the solo just as it was, a testament to the originality and rigor of Anderson’s improvisation on “December 4th,” and of everything he played each time he took the stage. Anderson’s offstage contributions were just as inimitable as his performances. He mentored generations of musicians, built the Velvet Lounge, and dedicated his life to advancing the mission of the AACM.94 For decades, Anderson worked day and night at the Velvet Lounge—stocking the bar, collecting cover charges at the door, and making sure all the bills were paid, so that AACM members and other like-minded musicians

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would have a place to play. Only he knew how to do the thousand things needed to keep the performance space operating, which meant that the Velvet Lounge could not outlive him. Anderson passed away on June 24, 2010, and a few months later, the venue permanently closed.95 The Velvet Lounge community lived on, though, in the hearts of those who knew Anderson and on recordings such as Volume Two—and at places like Constellation, AACM drummer Mike Reed’s performance space on the North Side of Chicago. Reed, who performed with Anderson during the final decade of the saxophonist’s life, opened Constellation in 2013, and the venue became a destination for the musicians and listeners who used to congregate at the Velvet Lounge.96 At Constellation, Reed mounted a photographic portrait of Anderson over the bar, to remind all who came through the venue’s doors that musical innovation and community building go hand-in-hand.97 As Anderson used to say, “If you’re not going to fight for your own culture, no one’s [going to] fight for you.”98

7 * AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, At Umbria Jazz 2009

Things happen in this ensemble that never happened before in the AACM Big Band.1

In the 2000s, a number of AACM artists formed new ensembles that went on to earn critical acclaim, including Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, and the trio of Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell.2 But the band that had the greatest impact on the Association as a whole during this period was the Chicagobased Great Black Music Ensemble (GBME). Founded in 2005 by secondwave AACM member Mwata Bowden, the Great Black Music Ensemble was a twenty-first-century successor to the Experimental Band, the workshop ensemble that served as the Association’s creative nexus during the 1960s. In the Experimental Band’s weekly rehearsals, the group members learned the AACM’s signature musical practices directly from Muhal Richard Abrams—and responded by developing their own approaches to composition and improvisation. Abrams continued this tradition with his next workshop ensemble: the AACM Big Band, where first-wave AACM musicians worked alongside the second-wave members who joined the Association in the 1970s.3 By the end of the 1970s, though, Abrams’s workshop ensemble was no more.4 The AACM Big Band dissolved after the Association’s “exodus” to New York, an event that changed the organization forever.5 During the latter half of the 1970s, Abrams and eleven other members of the Association left Chicago and moved to the New York metropolitan area, reuniting with Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Wadada Leo Smith, and AACM saxophonist John Stubblefield, who had relocated to the East Coast earlier in the decade.6 When Abrams arrived in New York, he founded an AACM chapter there—an East Coast counterpart to the original collective on the South Side of Chicago. Before long, the AACM’s New York and Chicago chapters were operating independently and pur-

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suing two very different missions. The AACM members who moved to New York started touring more extensively, and many began recording for major labels.7 However, the members of the New York chapter did not form a workshop ensemble, and it took them several years to secure the funding needed to stage their first concert series.8 Back in Chicago, the AACM’s work proceeded without interruption, thanks to the efforts of the members who chose to stay in the Midwest. The Chicago chapter kept producing concerts on the South Side and elsewhere in the city, and the AACM School of Music was “running at full force,” teaching dozens of students every weekend.9 New members continued to join the Chicago chapter—not only in the 1970s, but also in the 1980s, the 1990s, and into the twenty-first century—in contrast to the New York chapter, which never recruited new members.10 Over the years, the Chicago chapter organized a few big bands, but these groups did not rehearse or perform as regularly as the ensembles led by Muhal Richard Abrams in the 1960s and 1970s.11 Finally, in 2005, the members of the Chicago chapter decided that the time had come to revive the Association’s workshop ensemble—so they turned to Mwata Bowden, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and conductor who had played in the last edition of the AACM Big Band some thirty years before.12

Mwata Bowden Bowden was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947. When he was ten years old, his family moved to Chicago, settling in Bronzeville, the African American neighborhood that was the heart of the midcentury South Side.13 Two years later, at the age of twelve, Bowden took up the clarinet so he could play in the newly formed youth band at his church, Ebenezer Baptist—the historic congregation where Thomas A. Dorsey had directed the first gospel choir.14 After joining the Ebenezer youth band, Bowden enlisted in the concert band at his neighborhood grammar school. By the eighth grade, he had become the assistant to the school’s band director, who let the young clarinetist try his hand at conducting the ensemble.15 Bowden continued his studies under Captain Walter Dyett at DuSable High School, where there were a number of future AACM members in the music program, including bassist Fred Hopkins and saxophonist Edwin Daugherty.16 However, unlike many of his high school classmates, Bowden was more interested in the classical repertoire than jazz. Bowden graduated from DuSable in 1966 and entered the American Conservatory of Music in downtown Chicago, where he played in the school’s symphony while earning a bachelor’s degree in music education.17 During his final year at the conservatory (1970–1971), he

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started performing professionally in orchestra concerts sponsored by the R.  Nathaniel Dett Club, a Chicago organization affiliated with the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM). Through the Dett Club, Bowden met Charles Walton, an accomplished percussionist who directed the jazz ensemble at Malcolm X College on Chicago’s West Side. Walton needed a baritone saxophonist for his ensemble, and he asked Bowden to fill the role, lending him a saxophone a few days in advance of the group’s next rehearsal. Although Bowden was proficient at sight-reading woodwind parts, thanks to his classical training, transitioning from the clarinet to the much larger baritone saxophone was “very frustrating”: “I was used to playing a note and hearing it come out right away. The bari took forever to make a sound.”18 He kept at it, though, and soon he was able to play saxophone with South Side jazz bands and tour with national blues and R&B acts, from Bobby “Blue” Bland and Albert King to the Chi-Lites and the Emotions.19 At one R&B gig circa 1973, he met Rasul Siddik, a trumpeter who had joined the AACM a year or so before.20 The two musicians took to practicing together, and Bowden became a regular attendee at AACM events. He also started studying with Douglas Ewart and George Lewis, who helped Bowden uncover the connections between the classical techniques he had learned in school and the Association’s approaches to composition and improvisation.21 Bowden joined the AACM in 1975. Shortly thereafter, Muhal Richard Abrams invited him to play in the AACM Big Band.22 Like its 1960s predecessor, the Experimental Band, Abrams’s 1970s ensemble had a formidable woodwind section—Chico Freeman, Joseph Jarman (of the Art Ensemble), Maurice McIntyre, Wallace McMillan, Henry Threadgill—and Bowden feared that he wouldn’t “measure up.”23 His first rehearsal with the AACM Big Band was overwhelming: “There was so much energy from the brass section and the rhythm section that my pant legs were flying, being in the middle of that kind of excitement.”24 At times, Bowden felt like he was “hanging on for dear life,” but he soon became an integral part of Abrams’s ensemble and other AACM groups.25 Before long, he was performing in the Association’s weekly concert series with several different bands, including Quadrisect, his quartet with Douglas Ewart, George Lewis, and bassoonist-saxophonist James Johnson. By 1976, Bowden was ready to dedicate himself to performing and composing original music. He left his day job as a junior high band director and enrolled in the graduate music program at Governors State University.26 During his time at Governors State, Bowden studied with Richard McCreary, the electronic-music composer who taught Abrams and Lewis.27 McCreary “loved the AACM,” and he introduced Bowden to an “extensive vocabulary” of graphic-scoring techniques that the up-and-

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coming composer would use in his own pieces.28 The biggest influence on Bowden’s musicianship, though, was the time he spent in Abrams’s group. When Bowden joined the AACM Big Band, he was a novice improviser, and Abrams’s conducting methods and visual-textual scores gave him the guidance he needed to create his own parts and play extended solos. Bowden was also inspired by Abrams’s philosophy of leading a band, in which all the musicians, not just the director, were encouraged to “develop their own practice[s]” as composers and conductors.29 Although Bowden did not conduct the 1970s AACM Big Band, he always paid close attention to the director, and years later, he discovered that some of Abrams’s methods had shaped his own approach to conducting: “Muhal wasn’t a standard conductor, counting one, two, three, four. . . . [H]e gave very small cues, and you knew what to do. That was instrumental for me coming up with my own conducting style, using parts of what I had seen and heard.”30 The lessons Bowden learned from Abrams would pay dividends for years. In 1979, after the New York exodus, Bowden starting teaching at the AACM School of Music.31 His subjects were music theory and woodwinds, the same classes that Abrams’s protégés Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell had taught when the school first opened, in 1967.32 By the early 1980s, Bowden was serving as the school’s dean.33 In 1983, when his time in the dean’s office came to an end, he chose as his successor the pianist-vocalist Ann Ward, who “transformed the AACM School” during her quarter century at the helm.34 Bowden’s next role in the Association— after leaving the AACM School in Ward’s capable hands—was chairing the Chicago chapter. He became the chair in 1989, a critical moment in the collective’s history.35 The twenty-fifth anniversary of the AACM’s founding was rapidly approaching, and the members were hoping to commemorate the milestone with a weekend-long festival in Chicago, as they had done every few years since 1975.36 However, the Chicago chapter’s bank account was empty—“we’re down to zero,” Bowden told a newspaper reporter—and the Association could not afford to produce the anniversary festival without outside funding.37 Still, Bowden forged ahead with the festival, persuading twenty-plus AACM members from New York and elsewhere to pay their own way to Chicago in November 1990.38 Fortunately, right before the festival began, Bowden secured a generous grant from the MacArthur Foundation, putting the twenty-fifthanniversary celebration on firm footing. This grant helped the Association establish an ongoing funding relationship with the MacArthur organization, a major coup for Bowden and the Chicago chapter.39 Bowden’s AACM colleagues asked him to continue as chair for several more years, through the Association’s next big anniversary. In 1995, when the AACM

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celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, Bowden pulled out all the stops. One year before, Bowden had been appointed as the University of Chicago’s director of jazz ensembles, and his academic connections enabled him to produce an anniversary festival that set a new standard for AACM events.40 There were three days of concerts, a gallery exhibition of AACM members’ scores and invented instruments, and a symposium—hosted by Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research—where scholars and artists discussed the cultural significance of the Association’s “Great Black Music.”41

The Great Black Music Ensemble The members of the AACM had been using the slogan “Great Black Music” to describe their work for many years. In 1968, when the Art Ensemble’s Lester Bowie succeeded Muhal Richard Abrams as chair of the AACM, he decided that the Association was in need of a slogan: “We had these bumper stickers saying ‘Jazz is Alive,’ and the membership didn’t go for jazz. I suggested ‘Great Black Music’ to make it broader, and it stuck.”42 By 1969, the members of the Art Ensemble had adopted the slogan as their own (later adding Malachi Favors’s tagline “Ancient to the Future”).43 Even after the Art Ensemble laid claim to Great Black Music, the slogan continued to resonate with many AACM members, especially in Chicago, where the chapter was deeply engaged with the “sound spectrum” of the African diaspora, including African American music—from blues, gospel, and R&B to the experimental forms developed by the Association.44 During the AACM’s fortieth-anniversary year in 2005, Great Black Music was front and center. The members of the Chicago chapter assembled a big band they called the Great Black Music Ensemble, and chose Mwata Bowden as the group’s director.45 Bowden was the perfect candidate for the job—a veteran composer and conductor, a respected elder in the Association, and one of the few Chicago-based AACM members who had firsthand experience performing in Muhal Richard Abrams’s influential workshop ensembles. From the beginning, Bowden consciously modeled the Great Black Music Ensemble after the Experimental Band and the AACM Big Band. The Great Black Music Ensemble only played original music, and every member had an open invitation to compose for the group and conduct his or her own pieces.46 At the same time, though, the Great Black Music Ensemble had a noticeably different aesthetic than Abrams’s 1960s and 1970s groups, as the band’s name made clear. “We had been doing this for forty years,” Bowden explained, “and this was no longer just experimental. The music that we love and nurture is black creative music, the black music experience.”47 The advances made in Chi-

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cago after the New York exodus were also evident in the Great Black Music Ensemble’s personnel, which offered composers a “diverse set of possibilities” never before seen in earlier AACM bands.48 In addition to woodwinds, brass, piano, drums, and percussion, the Great Black Music Ensemble boasted multiple vocalists and a string section, with a violinist, a cellist, and one or more bassists. Moreover, several of the performers were women, an important step forward for an ensemble representing the Chicago chapter, which for many years had just one or two active women members, after Iqua Colson and Amina Claudine Myers moved to the East Coast.49 The Great Black Music Ensemble debuted at the Velvet Lounge during the first few weeks of 2005. The group started with fifteen musicians, and added new members throughout the winter and spring.50 By May 2005, the Great Black Music Ensemble had grown to “a truly orchestral scale,” with more than fifty performers on hand for the band’s headlining appearance at the AACM’s fortieth-anniversary festival, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art.51 Later in 2005, the Great Black Music Ensemble played an “exultant, often-dissonant, [and] spiritual” set at the Chicago Jazz Festival, with guest soloist Roscoe Mitchell in the woodwind section.52 After these profile-raising performances, the Great Black Music Ensemble settled into a new groove. The band downsized to some twenty pieces and returned to the Velvet Lounge, launching a long-running concert series.53 The Great Black Music Ensemble would remain in residence at the Velvet Lounge for five years (from 2005 to 2010), a period when “the group really grew,” according to Bowden.54 The musicians learned to work together as one, whether they were performing Bowden’s scores or a piece written by another of the band’s many composers.55 Some of the members became especially close: the band’s four singers—Dee Alexander, Ann Ward, and the father-and-son team of Taalib-Din Ziyad and Saalik Ziyad—joined forces as the AACM Vocal Ensemble, performing a cappella pieces as a quartet and taking on prominent roles within the larger group.56 The vocalists also united with a few of the Great Black Music Ensemble’s instrumentalists to form another band-within-a-band, the AACM Experimental Chamber Ensemble, which played original chamber works.57 All of these vocal, instrumental, and orchestral configurations were endlessly inspiring to the members of the Great Black Music Ensemble, who produced dozens of new compositions for the band and its various subgroups.58 By 2008, the Great Black Music Ensemble had released its first album, Sparx of Love—Sparx of Fire!, recorded live at the Velvet Lounge.59 The band also started playing concert dates across Europe, from Paris to Perugia.

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At Umbria Jazz 2009 In February 2008, the Great Black Music Ensemble traveled to France to give a concert at Sons d’hiver, a music festival held every winter in the Paris suburbs. This was the Chicagoans’ first international performance as well as their first collaboration with New York chapter member George Lewis, who had composed three pieces for the ensemble to premiere at the festival. The Sons d’hiver concert was a success, and when Lewis was asked to curate a series of performances for the July 2009 Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy, he invited the Great Black Music Ensemble to join him, extending the collaboration that had begun in France. During their stay in Italy, Lewis and the Great Black Music Ensemble appeared at Perugia’s Teatro Morlacchi six times in three days (July 14, 15, and 16), performing every day at 5:00 p.m. and again at midnight.60 The band played a different program in each concert, exploring the compositions of Lewis, Mwata Bowden, and eight other members of the Great Black Music Ensemble: Renée Baker, Edwin Daugherty, Ernest Dawkins, Douglas Ewart, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Ann Ward, and Saalik Ziyad.61 Lewis recorded all six concerts, and after the festival, he worked with Filippo Bianchi, the editor of the Italian monthly Musica Jazz, to select some of the best pieces and compile them into a compact disc titled At Umbria Jazz 2009.62 This compilation—released twelve months after the festival by Musica Jazz’s in-house record label—became the Great Black Music Ensemble’s second album. Every facet of the Great Black Music Ensemble’s compositional and improvisational practices can be heard on At Umbria Jazz 2009.63 The album’s six tracks employ a wide array of compositional structures, from extended forms inspired by the 1960s Experimental Band to simpler settings that showcase the ensemble’s talented improvisers. Some pieces are written in standard notation, one combines traditional scoring with graphic symbols, and another is improvised “on the spot” by four members of the band.64 In most of the performances, the ensemble is guided by a conductor, but the instrumentalists and singers also make their own decisions about form and texture throughout the album, reshaping the music in real time.65 The most striking feature of At Umbria Jazz 2009, though, is the incredible range of sounds and timbres produced by the band—a twenty-one-member ensemble that is large and diverse enough to make multi-instrumentalism a luxury. Only five of the musicians pull double (or triple) duty: Mwata Bowden plays clarinet and baritone saxophone; Douglas Ewart performs on flutes, saxophones, and percussion; Nicole Mitchell sings when not playing flute; Ann Ward alter-

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nates between voice, piano, and percussion; and Dawi Williams plays bass guitar as well as double bass. The other sixteen members of the group play single roles: voice (Dee Alexander, Saalik Ziyad, and TaalibDin Ziyad), alto saxophone (Edwin Daugherty and Ernest Dawkins), tenor saxophone (Edward House), trumpet (Leon Q. Allen, Jerome Croswell, and Ben LaMar Gay), trombone (Isaiah Jackson, George Lewis), violin (Renée Baker), cello (Tomeka Reid), double bass (Leonard Jones), drumset (Dushun Mosley), and percussion (Art “Turk” Burton). At Umbria Jazz 2009 opens with “Esoteric Intrusiveness,” composed and conducted by Saalik Ziyad.66 The longest track on the album, “Esoteric Intrusiveness” is an extended form, based on a sequence of contrasting meters, tempos, and grooves (see example 7.1). The piece begins with the two alto saxophonists, Daugherty and Dawkins, who introduce the theme, an angular line taken at a tempo of nearly 270 beats per minute. When the ensemble enters one measure later, the other horns play a short-long figure that repeats every six beats—moving in and out of sync 4 with the alto saxophones’ phrases, which are in 4  time. The theme ends at 0:19, before the band can resolve the tension between the alto saxophone line and the horns’ short-long rhythm. Then the bass guitar, double bass, cello, drumset, and conga drums bring in the next section of the piece, a 5 B  ♭ -minor funk vamp in 4 , with a tempo half as fast as the theme. Baker enters at 0:34, improvising on violin over the strings-and-drums groove. Just fifteen seconds into Baker’s solo, Ziyad starts to cue the background 5 parts, which add new layers to the texture—a 4 chordal figure in the brass 6 and a 4  riff played by the woodwinds. These background figures eventually overtake the violin line, and after Baker ends her solo (at 2:16), the brass and woodwinds fade away, clearing the texture for the next improvisation. This time there are two soloists, Ewart and Mitchell, both 5 on flute. Their improvisation begins like Baker’s: accompanied by the 4 funk groove at the outset, then joined by a background figure in a con4 trasting meter (a catchy, pentatonic line in 4 ). Near the end of Ewart and 6 5 Mitchell’s improvisation, the 4  woodwinds riff and 4 brass chords return, recreating the polyrhythmic texture from the conclusion of the violin solo. Then, at 5:59, Daugherty and Dawkins intervene, bringing back the first phrase of the theme—and the theme’s brisk tempo. An instant later, the ensemble abandons the multilayered vamp that anchored the violin and flute improvisations. By 6:10, the basses and drums have assembled 4 a new texture: an up-tempo, freebop groove in 4 that matches the pace set by Daugherty and Dawkins. With the rhythm section locked in, the alto saxophonists launch into a duo improvisation that becomes the most pivotal passage in the performance. During Daugherty and Dawkins’s improvisation, the horn background

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Example 7.1 “Esoteric Intrusiveness”: formal diagram.

theme

0:00–0:19

vamp

0:19–0:34

Baker solo

0:34–2:16

vamp

2:16–2:44

Ewart/Mitchell duo

2:44–5:45

vamp

5:45–5:59

transition

5:59–6:10

Daugherty/Dawkins duo

6:10–10:03

Jackson solo

10:03–12:03

Alexander solo

12:03–15:06

 + coda

15:06–16:01

parts are in the same meter and tempo as the rhythm section, which gives the texture a powerful sense of forward motion. As the texture develops, the alto saxophonists play with increasing energy, bringing the performance to a climax. The alto saxophone duo is the last section of the “Esoteric Intrusiveness” score, and if Ziyad wanted, he could end the piece at any moment. Instead, as the performance approaches the nine-minute mark, Ziyad suddenly silences everyone but Daugherty and Dawkins, a dramatic gesture that opens up a new space in the form. After a few seconds, both basses return to the texture, playing medium-tempo walking lines in the key of C minor. Soon, the drums and piano join in, changing the texture to a minor-key shuffle. One minute into the shuffle groove, the alto saxophonists exit, and another soloist emerges—Jackson on trombone. Jackson’s swaggering, bluesy line wins over his fellow horn players, who cheer him on before picking up their instruments to perform a background riff. The dialogue between Jackson and the ensemble sets the stage for the final section of the piece, a vocal solo by Alexander. She uses some of the same blues inflections as Jackson, and her bandmates respond in much the same way, shouting and clapping along with her vocal line. Alexander sings for three minutes, unwinding a lyrical narrative about the Great Black Music Ensemble members’ devotion to their shared creative pursuits, and to one another:

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this is the time we are intrusive with our esoteric love. . . . the lesson learned is to be true to ourselves is to be true to our ways in which we have found peace in the way of love

At 14:59, Alexander arrives at the final line of her text—“esoteric intrusiveness”—and repeats the words again and again. Ward, who played piano earlier in the piece, turns to her vocal microphone and sings, harmonizing Alexander’s melody. At the same time, the violin, cello, woodwinds, and brass abruptly reenter the texture, playing the repeating shortlong figure last heard during the opening theme. The instrumentalists steadily increase their volume, until Alexander and Ward are drowned out by the “intrusive” strings, horns, and percussion. Seconds later, with the ensemble’s volume at its peak, Ziyad finally gives the signal to conclude the piece, letting the sound of the last, loudest chord reverberate throughout the theater. The second track is “Nebulisium-Cipher,” an Ernest Dawkins composition performed by the Great Black Music Ensemble’s saxophone section.67 The piece starts with a twelve-measure theme, composed of a two-bar melody in eighth notes (played four times), a two-measure ascending line, and a two-bar tag ending where the saxophonists form a syncopated rhythmic pattern based on dotted quarter notes (see example 7.2). Example 7.2 “Nebulisium-Cipher”: theme, alto saxophone key.

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Example 7.3 “Nebulisium-Cipher”: formal diagram.

theme

0:00–0:33

ostinato texture

0:33–4:53

reprise

4:53–7:31

Instead of performing the theme in unison, the saxophonists play the line as notated, using their instruments’ transpositions to generate stark harmonies that move up and down in parallel. During the first statement of the theme (0:00–0:17), Bowden’s E  ♭  baritone is on the bottom, an octave below Daugherty and Dawkins’s E  ♭  altos, with House’s B  ♭  tenor in the middle. For the second theme statement (0:17–0:33), Ewart joins in on E  ♭  sopranino, adding a slow-moving countermelody in the upper register, well above the other saxophones. After the second statement, Ewart keeps playing for a few measures, improvising in the same high register he explored during the theme. But the focal point of the texture that emerges from the theme is Bowden’s baritone line. Bowden transforms the theme’s tag ending into a low-register ostinato in B minor that sounds a bit like the syncopated guitar vamp from James Brown’s “The Payback.”68 For the next several minutes, Bowden repeats the baritone ostinato with only the slightest variations, laying down a foundation for his bandmates’ improvisations (see example 7.3). The other performers enter one by one, playing solo melodies and harmonizing Bowden’s repeating line. Daugherty shows up first, followed by Ewart, who moves from sopranino saxophone to cowbell and helps keep the beat (with a little assistance from vocalist-pianist-percussionist Ward on tambourine).69 House and Dawkins join in a moment later, filling out the texture. After the three-minute mark, Ward drops out, and Ewart switches back to sopranino. No longer anchored by the cowbell and tambourine, the saxophonists start to improvise more freely, experimenting with new rhythmic figures and building up their dynamics. Then, at 4:05, they bring down their volume to a whisper and perform the ostinato together, with the same transposition technique they employed in the opening theme. The tempo begins to slow, and at 4:39, they land on a richly voiced B-major triad, concluding the performance—or so it seems. While the audience applauds, Dawkins gives a quick count-in, and the saxophonists pick up where they left off, reprising the ostinato as they exit the stage and parade through the concert hall.70 During their impromptu procession, Bowden, Daugherty, Dawkins, Ewart, and House play with such verve that the festivalgoers start clapping in time with the music. Finally, after

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letting the anticipation build for almost a minute, the performers make a triumphant return to the stage. When all five saxophonists reach their places, Bowden lets loose—leaving the ostinato behind and leading his bandmates into an explosive group improvisation. The musicians sustain this loud, intense texture from 6:19 to 7:14, then arrive at another big B-major chord, now with an added seventh. This harmony brings the exciting, highly theatrical reprise to an end, and the audience salutes the saxophonists with a riotous ovation. The next piece on At Umbria Jazz 2009 is George Lewis’s “Fractals.”71 The composition, according to Lewis, offers a musical “impression” of Brownian random motion, a phenomenon studied by physicists and mathematicians and heard in certain sounds, from rainfall to electronic noise.72 In the piece’s opening measures, the feeling of multidirectional motion comes from the cello, piano, violin, and woodwinds, which perform a continuous stream of sixteenth notes at an extraordinarily quiet dynamic level. The melodies played by these instruments share the same contour but are transposed into five different keys, creating a sense of soft, diffused dissonance that permeates the texture. While the sixteenth-note lines undulate up and down, the brass and double basses introduce a contrasting layer to the texture, playing long tones separated by rests of varying durations. All of these textural layers are tied together by the drumset and voices, which alternate bright cymbal rolls and breathy “aahs” with metronomic rim clicks and percussive “pa” sounds. This complex texture lasts for twenty-eight measures, until 1:33 (see example 7.4). Then Lewis cues the first soloist, House on tenor saxophone—and the Great Black Music Ensemble begins to conduct itself. The group members start by repeating the final bar of the composed ensemble passage, giving House a moment to carve out his own space in the texture. As House develops his solo line, some of the performers choose to drop out, while the others create new background figures derived from the written parts they played earlier in the piece.73 At 4:30, three minutes into the tenor saxophone solo, Lewis brings back the entire ensemble and directs the musicians to

Example 7.4 “Fractals”: formal diagram.

ensemble texture

0:00–1:33

House solo

1:33–4:46

strings/piano/voices

4:46–7:40

ensemble texture

7:40–10:01

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Example 7.5 “Vocaleidoscope”: formal diagram.

mbira texture

0:00–2:53

hindewhu texture

2:53–3:54

percussive texture

3:54–5:10

repeat the last measure of the opening texture, building a bridge to the next improvisation. House retreats into the ensemble, and five more soloists step up: Baker, Reid, Ward, and both Ziyads. By 5:01, only fifteen seconds into the new improvisation, most of the other performers have left the texture, and the five soloists initiate a spontaneous tonal transition.74 Reid decides to change one of the notes in her repeating cello figure, and Baker and Ward answer immediately, making adjustments to their violin and piano lines.75 An instant later, the two Ziyads follow suit. In just a few seconds’ time, the improvisers have shifted into the key of D  ♭ —worlds away from the atonality of the opening ensemble texture and saxophone solo.76 Baker, Reid, Ward, and the Ziyads explore this tonal realm until 7:40, when Lewis cues the concluding passage, a return of the composed ensemble texture. The musicians play the entire passage as written, then repeat the final measure, as they did during the early phases of House’s solo. Instead of using this loop to set up another improvisation, though, the performers play softer and softer with each repetition. By 9:45, the ensemble is almost inaudible. The musicians repeat the closing measure one last time, then stop on Lewis’s cue, as silence washes over the stage. The album’s fourth track is “Vocaleidoscope,” a collective improvisation by the AACM Vocal Ensemble (see example 7.5).77 Alexander leads off, singing a four-bar phrase and then repeating it as the other vocalists join in, surrounding her line with their own melodies and rhythms. The phrase that Alexander uses to start the piece is in the key of D major, with a buoyant, pentatonic melody reminiscent of Zimbabwean mbira music. Ward and Saalik Ziyad enter around 0:12, singing sparser lines that complement Alexander’s repeating phrase. Taalib-Din Ziyad comes in eight measures later, at 0:24, adding a lively, triplet-based figure 12 in 8  time. With the four-voice texture in place, the singers begin to develop their individual parts. Ward’s line becomes a flowing solo melody, and the Ziyads dialogue with each other, trading on-beat and off-beat accents. At the same time, Alexander experiments with different timbres and rhythms, shifting the dimensions of her repeating phrase. By 2:11, she has distilled the four-measure phrase into a two-bar vamp. The other performers respond by reworking their own lines. The Ziyads sing drum-

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like tones in the middle and lower registers, while Ward improvises a playful line made up of squeaks and squalls. The vocalists continue in this vein until 2:53, when Alexander introduces another Great Black Music motif—an upper-register melody that sounds like a hindewhu whistle song from Central Africa. Before long, the other singers reduce their volume, ushering Alexander’s hindewhu melody to the front of the texture. Then, at 3:19, Saalik Ziyad reshapes his percussive middle-register pattern into a walking bass line, a development that sets up the next textural transformation. Ward and Taalib-Din Ziyad answer Saalik Ziyad with swing rhythms, signifying on the jazz connotations of his walking bass. Alexander joins in at 3:45, dropping her hindewhu melody and improvising a raspy-toned line that could be a jazz drummer’s hi-hat or ridecymbal pattern. A few seconds later, Saalik Ziyad gives up his walking bass line, and all four singers start using percussive timbres, changing the texture into a vocal version of the drum solos heard near the end of many jazz performances. The vocalists sustain this percussive texture for a minute before they gradually fade away, bringing the collective improvisation to a close. Then they exhale dramatically and laugh, sharing with the audience the joy that the members of the AACM Vocal Ensemble felt every time they improvised together. “That is what I loved about singing with Ann, Saalik, and Taalib-Din,” Alexander remembered, years after the Umbria Jazz Festival performance: “It was always creative and magical.”78 Up next is “Concentric,” composed by Douglas Ewart.79 “Concentric” is an extended form, built from a series of composed passages, improvised solos, and group improvisations (see example 7.6). However, unlike Example 7.6 “Concentric”: formal diagram.

modules {A}–{F}

0:00–2:59

modules {C}–{D}

2:59–4:34

modules {A}–{C}, {F}+{G}

4:34–5:57

 + Bowden solo

5:57–8:21

modules {A}–{C}, {E}+{F}+{G}

8:21–9:44

interlude

9:44–10:19

Ewart/Mitchell duo

10:19–12:30

Ewart solo

12:30–13:59

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Example 7.7 “Concentric”: modules {A}–{G}, principal lines, concert key.

most AACM-style extended forms, Ewart’s piece is a modular composition, structured similarly to some of the “cards” that make up Anthony Braxton’s Composition 76 (see chapter 3).80 “Concentric” is based on seven musical modules, labeled {A}–{G} in the score (see example 7.7). All of the “Concentric” modules are exactly one measure long, and Ewart can combine them in different ways to create a wide variety of ensemble tex-

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tures. Ewart begins the performance by presenting the first six modules in the order of their appearance in the score, a process that takes about a minute. Module {A} is first (played by the trumpet, violin, and cello), followed by {B} at 0:07 (trumpet and double bass), {C} at 0:24 (voices and violin), {D} at 0:30 (trumpet and double bass), and {E} and {F} at 0:59 (piano). Instead of directing the ensemble to play each figure in isolation, Ewart layers the modules—initiating each module with one or more performers, then adding a few new musicians to the texture before bringing in the next module with yet another group of players. By 0:59, all of the ensemble members have joined in. For the next two minutes, the musicians develop modules {A}–{F} together, using the repeating melodic lines that define each module to assemble a colorful, multilayered texture. Then, at 2:59, Ewart silences everyone except Mitchell (on flute), the vocalists, and Reid (on cello), who perform module {D} in octaves. The alto saxophones enter next, playing module {C} at twice the original tempo. A moment later, the trumpets, double basses, and drums return, echoing each statement of module {D} by the flute, voices, and cello. This call-and-response texture lasts for a minute and a half, until 4:34, when Ewart quiets the ensemble so he and fellow flutist Mitchell can play module {C} together. Then he builds up the texture again, a handful of instruments at a time. For the first time in the piece, one of the musicians ventures away from the modules—Ward performs cluster chords on the piano, a gesture drawn from the previously unheard prelude to “Concentric,” where graphic symbols tell the musicians to play in their instruments’ high (H), middle (M), and lower (L) registers (see example 7.8). This section of the performance is also the first to feature an improvised solo, played by Bowden on baritone saxophone. When Bowden finishes his solo, Ewart leads the musicians into another modulebased ensemble texture (8:21–9:44). After this passage, the performers finally start to move off the notated page, leaving the modules behind and exploring other facets of the composition. At 9:44, Ward plays an unacExample 7.8 “Concentric”: prelude, detail of piano part.

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Example 7.9 “Under the Sun”: formal diagram.

theme

0:00–0:49

Mosley break

0:49–1:00

House solo

1:00–4:41

Alexander/Ziyad/Ziyad trio

4:41–6:56

collective improvisation

6:56–7:19

shout chorus

7:19–8:06

Daugherty solo

8:06–10:58

shout chorus

10:58–11:21

theme

11:21–12:01

Bowden solo

12:01–13:09

 + collective improvisation

13:09–14:54

companied interlude that begins with material from modules {E} and {F} and becomes a Latin-tinged piano vamp. Once Ward’s interlude comes to an end, two performers take her place: Mitchell on C flute and Ewart on bamboo flute. The flutists embark on an improvised duet, backed up by drumset, percussion, strings, and Alexander’s voice. At 11:52, while Ewart is still playing bamboo flute, he crouches down and launches a Sonic Top—a handcrafted “little instrument” that makes “rumbling . . . rubbing . . . [and] rattling sounds” as it spins across the Teatro Morlacchi stage.81 A few seconds later, Ewart releases one Sonic Top after another, until a half-dozen Sonic Tops are in motion at once. Soon, Ewart’s instruments take over the texture, and the other performers exit. Ewart spins his Sonic Tops until 13:37, then reaches for a microphone and says to the audience, “Thank you very much,” concluding the piece. As the audience applauds, the musicians can be heard marveling aloud at the way Ewart used his Sonic Tops to end “Concentric”—an unconventional finish to a remarkable piece of music. The album’s last track is “Under the Sun,” a Nicole Mitchell composition dedicated to her mentor, AACM saxophonist Fred Anderson (see example 7.9).82 “Under the Sun” begins with a four-measure theme that sets the tone for the entire piece: a fast-paced melody and a slower counterline in the horns, strings, and voices, over a hard-swinging C-minor groove

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played by the rhythm section (piano, both double basses, drumset, and conga drums). The musicians repeat the theme several times, then break for eight bars, letting Mosley (on drumset) set up the next section of the piece. At the end of the drum break, House enters on tenor saxophone, trailed a few beats later by Mosley’s rhythm-section partners, who reprise the C-minor swing groove from the opening theme. House improvises over the swing groove for almost four minutes, as Mitchell cues one background part after another, some composed and others spontaneously conceived. When House’s solo winds down, Alexander and the Ziyads take the lead, improvising together atop the rhythm section’s minor-key groove. At 5:46, a minute into the vocal trio, Mitchell tells the rhythm section to lay out, so the three singers can perform unaccompanied. A moment later, she brings back the rhythm section, then gradually ushers the other instrumentalists into the texture. By 6:56, she has transformed the vocalists’ feature into a lively collective improvisation that resembles the intensity structures played by the 1960s Experimental Band. After just sixteen measures, though, Mitchell changes the texture again, guiding the ensemble into a composed, big-band-style shout chorus (7:19– 8:06) that channels the energy of the brief collective improvisation into a driving swing groove. Like the theme, the shout chorus is based on a repeating melody and countermelody, with a new, chromatic chord progression. However, unlike many big-band shout choruses—which usually conclude the piece or prepare the closing theme—this shout chorus leads to another improvised solo, by Daugherty on alto saxophone. Soon, the shout chorus’s melody and countermelody return to the texture, first as background figures underneath Daugherty’s improvisation, and then as a sixteen-bar ensemble passage (10:58–11:21) that marks the end of the saxophone solo. This time, the ensemble proceeds directly from the shout chorus to the closing theme. The closing theme statement sounds just like the opening theme—until 12:01, when Bowden suddenly emerges from the ensemble and starts improvising on baritone saxophone. The strings, voices, and rhythm section keep repeating the theme, but the woodwinds and brass follow Bowden, adding their own improvised lines to the texture. Before long, the other performers join in, abandoning the theme and plunging headlong into another Experimental Band–esque intensity structure. Mitchell takes an active role in shaping the texture, telling each musician when to enter or exit—and answering Bowden’s increasingly intense saxophone phrases with shatteringly dissonant chords played on cue by the entire ensemble. The climactic dialogue between Bowden and the band continues for more than a minute, as the dynamics grow louder and louder. Then, at 14:23, Mitchell calls for one more raucous ensemble chord, and “Under the Sun” comes to an end.

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The Next Generation In October 2009, a few months after the Perugia concerts, the Great Black Music Ensemble returned to Italy to perform at An Insolent Noise, a jazz festival held in Pisa. Mwata Bowden did not make the trip to Pisa, so Douglas Ewart led the band in his stead, directing a scaled-down Great Black Music Ensemble with twelve performers, plus one special guest— Fred Anderson, in one of his final overseas appearances.83 A year later, in November 2010, the Great Black Music Ensemble played a major role in the events commemorating the Association’s forty-fifth anniversary, performing with George Lewis and the German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach at the University of Chicago.84 At the month’s end, the ensemble continued the anniversary celebration in Poznań, Poland, giving a series of concerts at the city’s annual Made in Chicago music festival.85 After a weeklong stay in Poznań, Bowden and the band flew back home to the Midwest, expecting to resume their regular routine of rehearsals and performances at the Velvet Lounge. However, when they landed in Chicago, they discovered that the Velvet Lounge had closed its doors for the last time.86 The Great Black Music Ensemble took a short hiatus, then resurfaced in 2011, staging concerts at venues across the South Side of Chicago and representing the AACM at local festivals.87 In 2015, the members of the AACM marked their fiftieth anniversary in grand fashion, giving high-profile performances in cities around the world. The Chicago chapter’s celebration, held in April 2015 at the University of Chicago, culminated with a set by the Great Black Music Ensemble, just like the fortieth-anniversary festival a decade before. And, as in 2005, the anniversary edition of the Great Black Music Ensemble featured more than fifty performers, from Association co-founder Philip Cohran and forty other members of the Chicago chapter to AACM artists who flew in from New York, Europe, and Israel.88 The band’s set list included Saalik Ziyad’s “Esoteric Intrusiveness,” Renée Baker’s “Untitled,” and Mwata Bowden’s “Well Woven Web,” which closed with all the performers chanting “it’s our fiftieth anniversary, fifty years of Great Black Music.”89 The fiftieth-anniversary concert, witnessed by an audience of several hundred, was a momentous occasion for everyone in the Chicago chapter—especially Bowden. His son, “Discopoet” Khari B., who attended the AACM School of Music and came of age performing with Douglas Ewart and Ernest Dawkins, was concluding his term as chair of the Chicago chapter.90 Bowden had occupied the same office years earlier, serving as the Chicago chapter’s chair from 1989 to 1998. And now Bowden was preparing to step down as the director of the Great Black Music Ensemble, after leading the band for a decade.91 He conducted the group

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just one more time, at the May 2015 opening of a newly constructed Chicago park named for Fred Anderson.92 Then saxophonist-composer Ernest Dawkins took over as the ensemble’s director.93 Born in 1953 and raised on the South Side, Dawkins studied bass and percussion in childhood and began playing woodwinds in his late teens. He attended Governors State University not long after Mwata Bowden, and joined the AACM in 1978, in the wake of the New York exodus.94 By the 1990s, Dawkins had become one of the most visible members of the Chicago chapter. His New Horizons Ensemble was taking off, he was touring and recording with Kahil El’Zabar’s internationally known Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and he was chosen to succeed Bowden as the Chicago chapter’s chair.95 He also became a resident artist in Englewood, the South Side neighborhood where he lived, founding an annual jazz festival and training scores of young musicians, several of whom went on to join the AACM.96 Indeed, many of the musicians who entered the Association after 2000—the AACM’s “fourth wave”—were Dawkins’s protégés, including Isaiah Collier, Jeremiah Collier, Micah Collier, Jerome Croswell, Justin Dillard, Ben LaMar Gay, Aaron Getsug, Tony Herrera, Marquis Hill, Jabari Liu, Kevin Nabors, Norman Palm, Junius Paul, Corey Wilkes, and Adam Zanolini.97 From the beginning, the Great Black Music Ensemble was an intergenerational endeavor, with members from the Association’s first, second, third, and fourth waves.98 When Dawkins became the Great Black Music Ensemble’s director, even more fourth-wave AACM members joined the band, taking the places of senior figures who left the group or moved away from Chicago. Creating an intergenerational community, which had always been integral to the mission of the Great Black Music Ensemble— and the Chicago chapter as a whole—took on a deeper meaning after 2015, when the first- and second-wave members who had led the AACM since the 1960s and 1970s were approaching the ends of their careers. By consciously cultivating a new generation of AACM artists, Dawkins ensured that the Association’s “continually renewable notion of Great Black Music” would live on, in Chicago and across the globe.99 In 2018, three years into Dawkins’s tenure, the members of the Great Black Music Ensemble released their third album, a concert recording titled Live at the Currency Exchange Cafe Volume 1.100 The band also became a fixture at major citywide events, from the Pitchfork Music Festival (directed by fourth-wave AACM member Mike Reed) to the Chicago Jazz Festival.101 Above all, the musicians kept the group going into the 2020s, tending the flame lit six decades earlier by Muhal Richard Abrams and the members of the Experimental Band.

8 * Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers

Creative music has absorbed all the discoveries of the ancient traditions and classical music.1

Wadada Leo Smith spent the 1970s in seclusion. He came to Chicago in January 1967, joined the AACM immediately, and remained an active member of the Association for three years.2 Then, in August 1970, he left Chicago and headed east to New Haven, Connecticut. Smith’s new home was just seventy miles from New York City, where his friends Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins had relocated a few months earlier, but the lifestyle he adopted there was far removed from the hubbub of 1970s Manhattan.3 Instead of hustling for gigs, as Braxton and Jenkins were doing in New York, Smith set out on another path, dedicating himself to “research on different kinds of music and different kinds of philosophical and spiritual thinking.”4 Smith’s decade-long retreat was a transformative experience. The research he conducted during the 1970s inspired a series of groundbreaking compositions, recordings, and writings that brought him from relative obscurity into international acclaim—while showing generations of AACM members how the Association’s sound experiments could form the foundation for a “new American music.”5 Smith was born in 1941 in Leland, Mississippi, a small Delta town east of Greenville.6 He took up the trumpet just before his thirteenth birthday. Soon he was playing in local blues groups, including a band led by his stepfather, guitarist Alex “Little Bill” Wallace.7 Smith also performed with school ensembles and started writing his own compositions, impressing his teachers, who gave him the nickname “Schubert” (after the Austrian composer).8 Following high school, Smith worked as a touring musician for a year or two. Then he joined the US Army, enlisting in the early 1960s and serving as a military bandsman.9 During his time in the army, he read about the AACM in Down Beat magazine, and when his term of service came to an end, he decided to move to Chicago.10 In

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January 1967, he arrived in Chicago with Anthony Braxton’s telephone number in his pocket, courtesy of a fellow army musician who had served with the saxophonist in South Korea. Smith called Braxton as soon as he made it to Chicago, and several weeks later, he met another South Side saxophonist, Roscoe Mitchell, who recommended him for membership in the AACM. In no time at all, Smith became one of the busiest members of the Association. He was rehearsing with (and composing for) the Experimental Band—and meeting up with Braxton and Joseph Jarman to analyze a wide range of compositions, from their own scores to pieces by Claude Debussy, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Anton Webern. Smith also began to form ensembles with his AACM colleagues, including a trio with Braxton and Leroy Jenkins.11 In the spring of 1968, Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith recorded their debut album, Three Compositions of New Jazz, for the Delmark label.12 The three pieces featured on the LP were Braxton’s Composition 6D and Composition 6E and Smith’s The Bell, which the trumpeter wrote in 1967, not long after he joined the AACM.13 Like many 1960s scores by AACM composers, The Bell employed new forms of notation. The contrapuntal lines performed by the ensemble were notated traditionally, but in the final section of the score, Smith introduced a simple graphic symbol—an unbeamed eighth note with a horizontal flag—that told the musicians to add a silence after each sound they played.14 This was the first appearance of a “rhythm unit,” a notational device and aesthetic concept that became essential to Smith’s compositions and performances (see example 8.1).15 “The rhythm unit concept,” Smith explained, “is one that accepts a single sound or rhythm, a series of rhythm-sound, or a grouping of more than one series of sound-rhythm as a complete piece of music [that] need not be  .  .  . developed further.  .  .  . These rhythm units are interpreted  as  such: whatever duration is given a unit, its equivalence in silence must be supported—meaning that the audible, inaudible, and space aspect of the music is realized: the whole music—its sound, silence, and space.”16 Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith tracked their second album, Silence, in the summer of 1969.17 Then the trio decamped to Paris, where they joined forces with AACM co-founder Steve McCall. The Chicagoans performed together in France for several months, until early 1970, when they came home to the United States.18 In May 1970, Braxton, Jenkins, McCall, and Smith gave the first New York concert by an AACM ensemble, with guest artists Muhal Richard Abrams and Chicago-born bassist Richard Davis.19 After this concert, the musicians went their separate ways. Braxton launched his solo career, while Jenkins formed the New York–based Revolutionary Ensemble with bassist Norris Jones

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Example 8.1 Rhythm unit set no. 1. The top row of the diagram shows Wadada Leo Smith’s notation for a long sonic (white) and a short sonic (black). The bottom row indicates how a performer should interpret the notation: play a long sound (a) followed by a long silence (a-1), then a short sound (b) followed by a short silence (b-1).

(aka Sirone) and percussionist Frank Clayton (soon replaced by Jerome Cooper).20 Smith briefly returned to Chicago, then packed his bags and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, his home for the next ten-plus years.

New Music, New Ideas In New Haven, Smith began researching “a variety of music cultures” from nearly every continent: Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America.21 His penchant for research would eventually lead him into academia, as a student of world music at Wesleyan University and subsequently as a professor at institutions across the United States.22 The first outlet for Smith’s research, though, was his ensemble New Dalta Ahkri. Smith formed New Dalta Ahkri in late 1970, a few months after he moved to Connecticut.23 “The premise of that group,” Smith recalled, “was . . . to research and perform world music, based on my theories and concepts and systems.”24 Over the years, some of the best musicians in the New Haven area worked with Smith in New Dalta Ahkri—Dwight Andrews and Anthony Davis, who were studying at Yale University; Wes Brown, a Wesleyan University student; Pheeroan akLaff; and Bobby Naughton.25 Although New Dalta Ahkri rarely toured, Smith kept the group together

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for twelve years, creating for the ensemble a series of compositions written in his own notation system, then known as Ahkreanvention.26 The Ahkreanvention pieces that Smith wrote in the 1970s further developed the notation techniques he introduced in 1960s compositions such as The Bell. The sounds and silences of each piece were shaped by Smith’s trademark rhythm units, and all of the musicians played from the full score, so they could proceed through the notated material at their own pace while remaining attuned to what their bandmates were doing. Smith also began to experiment with graphic symbols for short and long durations, fast and slow “velocities,” and improvised lines.27 Although Ahkreanvention was designed as a “system . . . for scoring improvisation,” Smith discovered that virtually anyone could learn to perform his music, including classically trained players who had never improvised before.28 Moreover, the Ahkreanvention system worked just as well for notating Smith’s solo pieces, in which he improvised on several different instruments in succession.29 In 1972, Smith formed an independent label, Kabell Records. The label’s first release was Creative Music-1, a six-track album featuring Smith’s multi-instrumental solo improvisations on trumpet, flugelhorn, seal horn, flute, harmonica, zither, and percussion.30 Later in the decade, Kabell would issue a few more LPs: two by New Dalta Ahkri (Reflectativity, Song of Humanity) and another collection of Smith’s unaccompanied improvisations (Solo Music).31 But the first project that Smith undertook after founding Kabell Records was writing a book entitled notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music.32 Completed in 1973, notes was the very first English-language monograph about contemporary improvisation, predating other musician-authored texts such as David Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand (1978), Derek Bailey’s Improvisation (1980), and Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Axium Writings (1985) and Composition Notes (1988).33 Smith’s notes is made up of eight concise essays—the 8 pieces in the book’s title—that outline his philosophy of music.34 First up is a short history of the AACM, followed by a second essay that contrasts “euroamerican” composed music with the “creative music of afro-america, india, bali, and pan-islam,” in which improvisation plays a central role. The third essay describes the attributes of a true “creative musician”: an “improviser [with] the absolute ability to instantaneously organize sound, silence, and rhythm with the whole of his or her creative intelligence . . . including faculties of rightreasoning and . . . his or her psychological and physiological existence.”35 Next is “an introduction to an exposition,” a meditation on music criticism and Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, the 1970 album by Marion Brown, Smith’s neighbor in New Haven.36 In the fifth essay, Smith offers a sweeping history of music since the dawn of the twentieth century, when “a new creative black music emerged in north

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america,” an event that “forecast the end of european music (composition) as the dominant form of expression, and lifted the boundaries from its performers (improvisers), giving them a part in the creation of the music.” Smith then examines the major styles of African American creative music—spirituals, ragtime, blues, bebop, and free jazz—with an emphasis on the AACM’s signal contributions to free jazz, from multiinstrumentalism to extended forms. The book concludes with a trio of essays about Smith’s own work. In the sixth essay, Smith discusses the key features of his ensemble pieces: rhythm units, multi-instrumentalism, and the individual “autonomy” enjoyed by each performer, which “frees the sound-rhythm elements in an improvisation from being realized through dependent re-action.” The seventh essay reveals Smith’s sources of inspiration—“the wonder and gorgeousness of nature,” his African American heritage, and the eternal interplay between sound and rhythm that he calls “spirit-drum.” The book’s eighth and final essay analyzes Smith’s solo LP Creative Music-1, showing how each track on the disc exemplifies “different principles or attitudes involving improvisation.”37 One year after Smith published notes, his article “(M1) American Music” appeared in The Black Perspective in Music, an academic journal founded by the renowned scholar Eileen Southern.38 “(M1)” picks up where notes left off, extending the ideas that Smith laid out in his book—and anticipating the directions his music would take in the decades to come. The article begins much like notes, with a comparison of “two distinct traditions of art music—creative music and classical music.” However, instead of playing up the differences between the traditions, Smith focuses on what they have in common. According to Smith, America’s twin art-music traditions began simultaneously, with the compositions of two turn-of-the-century “pioneers”: creative musician Scott Joplin and classical musician Charles Ives, both of whom “show[ed] the influence of African and European principles in their music.”39 Joplin was succeeded by Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Earl Hines, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and “creative orchestra” leaders such as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson; and Ives by a multicultural battery of modernist and experimental composers—T. J. Anderson, Milton Babbitt, Henry Brant, John Cage, Carlos Chávez, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, William Grant Still, Edgard Varèse, and Olly Wilson.40 By the 1970s, the time had come for the two traditions to unite, forming “a music that [would] truly be representative of the American culture”: The laws and aesthetic principles underlining creative music, its technique of improvisation, theory of harmony, melodic inventions, concepts of free-rhythm-structures and aesthetic sense should be thoroughly brought together with the most positive discoveries that have been found in the

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classical music of America. The creative result of this coming together would be something wholly different from either composed or improvised music, and that difference would provide the element contents and the aesthetic for a music equally participated in by all—an American music.41

Smith concludes the article in a prophetic mode. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he declares, “that we will soon come into a world music . . . derived from the musics of the many different peoples of earth.” Like Smith’s new American music, this new world music “will not use the form of improvisation”—“nor will there be . . . a composer . . . by whom the music will be interpreted.” Instead, the world music imagined by Smith will be made by “creators” who have researched the “applied mechanics and performing techniques of the musics found on all continents of the world” as well as the “social and philosophical and religious systems of all people.” In this way, Smith’s creators will “be able to absorb the wholeness of these musics . . . through consciousness manifested in intellect, emotion, and intuition.” Smith’s dream of a new world music is ambitious—and for that very reason, worth striving for. As he proclaims, “we are indeed in a position to form a world community, and it is from this community that the new music will arise.”42 Unfortunately, the world music that Smith envisioned in the early 1970s did not come to pass. Instead of an entirely new form that would “embrace . . . the collective human experience,” what emerged was a commercial genre that record companies dubbed “world music.”43 So Smith decided to create his very own “world community.” He enrolled in the world music program at Wesleyan University in 1975–1976 and then started exploring the globe, visiting dozens of countries, sometimes as a performer and always as a student of music, culture, and religion.44 As Smith investigated various religions, his own beliefs gradually evolved, a spiritual journey documented in musical projects like his 1979 ECM Records debut Divine Love (“an expression out of my Christian zone,” he recalled, “talking about the love of God”), his mid-1980s album Rastafari, and a number of subsequent pieces influenced by Islam, such as Tabligh.45 He also renamed his notation system, replacing the term Ahkreanvention with Ankhrasmation. As Smith stated: “The first part, Ankh, comes from the Egyptian cross. Ras comes from the Ethiopian head, meaning the leader. And [Ma] comes from mother. . . . In the early years of it, we talked about it being a notation system. But since [then], it has moved into a [musical] language.”46 By the 1980s, more and more musicians were speaking Smith’s language. He was performing and recording with artists from every corner of the world: the German bass-and-drums team of Peter Kowald and Günter “Baby” Sommer, Icelandic guitarist Thorsteinn Magnússon, Japanese koto-

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ist Tadao Sawai, and many others. During the same decade, Smith left Connecticut and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he found another circle of collaborators, including AACM transplants such as Thurman Barker.48 Also in the 1980s, Smith started writing operas, adding to a repertoire of contemporary concert music that he had been building since the 1960s, when he wrote his first string quartet.49 A “new American music” had come into being, just as Smith predicted in his 1970s writings, and he and his AACM colleagues could take much of the credit.50 “It [was] the AACM generation,” Smith affirmed, “[that] caused the gap between classical music and other musics to erase. And especially Anthony Braxton, myself, George Lewis, and Douglas Ewart—we have specifically sought out this expansion. We looked at it as breaking down the barriers.”51 Smith returned to academia in the late 1980s, taking a faculty position at Bard College.52 Then, after several years at Bard, he was hired by the California Institute of the Arts as the director of the school’s African American Improvisational Music program.53 While teaching at CalArts, Smith began to compose for various West Coast chamber ensembles, including the California EAR Unit and the New Century Players.54 He also received a series of commissions from Southwest Chamber Music, a Grammy Award–winning ensemble that would become an integral part of Smith’s magnum opus, Ten Freedom Summers.55 47

Ten Freedom Summers Ten Freedom Summers, performed by Southwest Chamber Music and Smith’s own Golden Quartet, is an epic work in every sense.56 The score is nearly two hundred fifty pages long, with a running time of more than five hours, and its subject—the civil rights movement—is equally monumental.57 The work’s title alludes to a period when African Americans fighting for equality won some of their greatest victories, from the 1948 executive order that ended segregation in the US Armed Forces to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, signed into law one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.58 This pivotal era is the subject of most of the twenty-one compositions that make up Ten Freedom Summers. There are also a few compositions inspired by earlier and later events, such as the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.59 However, the pieces are not ordered chronologically, and Smith does not use the music to convey a historical narrative.60 As he explained: “The music is not programmatic; it’s actually more expressionistic. . . . I looked at the psychological impact that this movement had on America, and I try to convey it through cultural means.”61 The premiere performance took place over three evenings, October 28–

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30, 2011, at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles. For the premiere, Smith presented seven compositions each night, giving the three concerts different themes: Defining Moments in America, What Is Democracy?, and Ten Freedom Summers (see example 8.2).62 None of the concerts were alike, but they all opened with a piece played by a small group, either the Golden Quartet (with Smith on trumpet, Anthony Davis on piano, John Lindberg on bass, and Susie Ibarra on drums) or Southwest Chamber Music’s string quartet (first violinist Shalini Vijayan, second violinist Lorenz Gamma, violist Jan Karlin, and cellist Peter Jacobson). These opening pieces set the tone for each concert and prepared the audience for the climactic compositions that followed, when Smith’s Golden Quartet united with Southwest Chamber Music (Vijayan, Gamma, Karlin, and Jacobson, plus flutist Larry Kaplan, clarinetist Jim Foschia, percussionist Lynn Vartan, harpist Alison Bjorkedal, and bassist Tom Peters) to form an ensemble with the versatility and timbral range of an orchestra.63 Smith composed some of the pieces in the 1990s and early 2000s, including “The D.C. Wall,” “Emmett Till,” “September 11th, 2001,” and the three scores for string quartet. Another piece, “Medgar Evers,” was commissioned decades earlier, in 1977, by Smith’s friend and longtime collaborator Leroy Jenkins.64 But most of the pieces were written between 2009 and 2011. Smith received a series of grants—from Chamber Music America, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Southwest Chamber Music’s funding partners—that enabled him to devote the better part of three years to completing Ten Freedom Summers.65 Much of this time was spent putting pen to paper, although certain pieces seemed to flow effortlessly onto the pages of Smith’s score. According to Smith, the seventh composition, a twenty-two-minute piece dedicated to President John F. Kennedy, “came out so fast . . . I think I wrote it in maybe ten or fifteen days.”66 He also took time to engage in “research and reflection concerning the philosophical, social and political history of the United States of America.”67 For Smith, this was living history, something that he witnessed firsthand. He came of age during the civil rights movement, and many of the events depicted in Ten Freedom Summers took place in his home state: the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the assassination of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, voter-registration drives, Freedom Rides, and the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955—not long before Smith’s fourteenth birthday.68 “When Emmett Till was killed,” Smith remembered, “he was about the same age as I was. . . . He was killed less than 30 miles from where I lived and grew up. I watched people in the military who were against [President Kennedy] dance when he was assassinated. I had people abuse me just like they did

Example 8.2 Ten Freedom Summers: list of compositions.

First Collection: Defining Moments in America 1. “Dred Scott: 1857” (Golden Quartet) 2. “Malik Al Shabazz and the People of the Shahada” (Golden Quartet) 3. “The D.C. Wall: A War Memorial for All Times” (Golden Quartet) 4. “Black Church” (string quartet) 5. “Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless” (Southwest Chamber Music + Golden Quartet) 6. “Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs. Board of Education: A Dream of Equal Education, 1954” (Golden Quartet) 7. “John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and the Space Age, 1960” (Southwest Chamber Music)

Second Collection: What Is Democracy? 8. “Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 Days” (Golden Quartet) 9. “String Quartet No. 4, Mvmt. 2” (string quartet) 10. “Democracy” (Golden Quartet) 11. “Freedom Summer: Voter Registration, Acts of Compassion and Empowerment, 1964” (Golden Quartet) 12. “Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years’ Journey for Liberty and Justice” (Southwest Chamber Music + Golden Quartet) 13. “The Freedom Riders Ride” (Golden Quartet) 14. “Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964” (Southwest Chamber Music + Golden Quartet)

Third Collection: Ten Freedom Summers 15. “In the Diaspora: Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions” (string quartet) 16. “America, Parts 1, 2, & 3” (Golden Quartet) 17. “The Little Rock Nine: A Force for Desegregation in Education, 1957” (Southwest Chamber Music + Golden Quartet) 18. “Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press” (Golden Quartet) 19. “September 11th, 2001: A Memorial” (Golden Quartet) 20. “Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964” (Golden Quartet) 21. “Martin Luther King Jr.: Memphis, the Prophecy” (Southwest Chamber Music + Golden Quartet)

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everybody else. So the experience is direct. It’s not across the country or across the world; it comes directly from my own life.”69 “Emmett Till,” the fifth composition in Ten Freedom Summers, opens with Ibarra (drums), Lindberg (bass), and Davis (piano) playing a shortlong rhythm in the key of E minor (see example 8.3). Smith enters at 0:12, sounding a high A as the bass steps down to D, changing the harmony. After this, the musicians reset the texture and repeat the opening material (0:15–0:35). Then they start moving in two directions at once. Lindberg and Ibarra, whose parts are written in traditional notation, return to the short-long figure from the start of the piece. At the same time, Smith and Davis perform a chromatic, upper-register melody—notated on the top staff of the piano part, in the Ankhrasmation symbolic language—that departs from the minor-key tonality where the piece began. As the melody unfolds, it reaches higher and higher, past the upper bounds of Smith’s range. So Davis finishes the line by himself, as Lindberg and Ibarra play one last set of short-long rhythms, bringing the piece’s introduction to a close (see example 8.4). At 1:19, Smith reenters the texture with a new melodic line (see example 8.5). This is the first appearance of the “Emmett Till” theme, Smith’s Example 8.3 “Emmett Till”: introduction.

Example 8.4 “Emmett Till”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–1:19

trumpet theme

1:19–3:55

Lindberg solo

3:55–5:11

 + strings

5:11–6:06

string texture

6:06–8:35

cello theme

8:35–11:18

transition

11:18–12:34

ensemble texture

12:34–16:02

conclusion

16:02–18:02

The timepoints refer to the performance on the Ten Freedom Summers album, recorded in early November 2011, a few days after the premiere. Drummer Pheeroan akLaff joined Smith’s ensemble for the recording session, substituting for Susie Ibarra on three tracks and playing alongside her on several others, expanding the Golden Quartet to a quintet.

Example 8.5 “Emmett Till”: trumpet theme.

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musical portrait of the African American boy whose murder in mid-1950s Mississippi caused an international outcry. Instead of performing the theme exactly as written, though, Smith “add[s] more to it,” developing the simple, poignant line notated on the trumpet staff.70 He plays the theme twice over the Golden Quartet’s sparse, sensitive accompaniment, which hints at the keys of D minor and G minor. Then, at 3:14, Smith pivots to the figure that ends the theme—a descending augmented-triad arpeggio, harmonized by the dramatic B  ♭  chord that Davis plays on piano. For the next twenty seconds, the musicians explore the harmony outlined by Davis, increasing their dynamics and bringing some tension into the texture. Then they resolve the chord, releasing the tension and setting up the next section of the piece. Smith, Davis, and Ibarra drop out at 3:55, and Lindberg takes a bass solo. His line is spacious at first, then becomes more active, as long tones and lyrical phrases give way to fast runs and virtuosic double stops. But the biggest change in the texture occurs midway through the solo, at 5:11, when Southwest Chamber Music’s director, Jeff von der Schmidt, brings in the ensemble’s string section: harp, first and second violin, viola, cello, and bass. The strings surround Lindberg’s line with a sparse accompaniment pattern based on the short-long figure from the introduction. A minute later, Lindberg wraps up his solo, but the strings keep playing, moving to a contrasting passage derived from the introduction’s last five measures. The string texture is beautifully orchestrated, with shimmering harmonies supporting a melody that surges in intensity as it climbs into the upper register. At the end of the passage, all of the strings fall silent except for the first violin, which sustains its final note a moment longer before exiting. Then, at 8:35, cellist Peter Jacobson emerges from the silence with an unaccompanied line—the second statement of the “Emmett Till” theme. The first phrase of the cello theme is new, though it recalls certain figures that Smith played during the introduction.71 By 8:51, however, Jacobson is closely tracking the earlier trumpet theme, tying the two theme statements together, musically and emotionally. “The listener and the performer have already heard that line,” Smith observed, “so when the cello takes over, the psychological reflection is already there.”72 The psychological reflection described by Smith is deeply personal, a memory of his own response to Till’s lynching: “When we look at Emmett Till and we see how his rights were violated, I wanted to show how I felt.”73 Mournful at the outset, the cello theme takes on a “majestic” tone after 8:54, when the rest of the strings enter the texture.74 The line moves into the cello’s upper register—higher than every other instrument but the harp and first violin—and stays there for two full minutes, paying homage to

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the “young man with a gentle face,” as Smith put it, whose tragic death “pushed forward this movement for human rights and justice.”75 Near the end of the cello theme, the other strings drop out for a moment. Jacobson concludes the theme with an exquisite artificial harmonic on C  ♯ 7, an octave above the top of the cello’s natural range. Seconds later, at 11:18, von der Schmidt gives the string players their next cue. The violins and viola return with a cluster of high-register harmonics, echoing the final note of the cello theme. Then they shift from harmonics to microtones, playing sustained notes tuned a quarter-tone sharp or flat. The cello and bass follow suit, adding another layer of microtones to the texture, now in the lower register (see example 8.6). This delicate and evocative episode is reminiscent of another microtonal moment in the preceding piece—“Black Church,” for string quartet.76 Here, though, the string players’ microtonal chorus has a profound new meaning. This is Example 8.6 “Emmett Till”: transition, cello and bass entrances.

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the moment of Emmett Till’s “transition,” according to Smith: “The microtonal sounds represent [Till’s] transformation back into the cosmos.”77 Till’s soul has “left his body,” and the musicians proceed toward the most gripping passage in all of Ten Freedom Summers.78 At 12:34, the Southwest Chamber Music strings introduce six previously unheard lines to the texture. All of the lines are highly angular, and each uses a different sequence of intricate Ankhrasmation rhythms. As the texture takes shape, the lines grow more independent, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the musicians to remain in sync. This is by design: Smith structured the passage “so that it would break down before they get to the end.”79 Around the thirteen-minute mark, the string players feel the texture threatening to come apart. They perform one more measure of written music at 13:09, then change gears, and start to invent new material based on the contours and rhythms of the score—“add[ing] create elements  .  .  . [to] their performance,” as Smith would say (see example 8.7).80 An instant later, at 13:12, the Golden Quartet returns, spontaneously creating another textural layer on top of the strings’ complex, interwoven lines. “Now you have two ensembles moving across this improvisatory zone,” Smith noted, “one completely structured but with new and constantly fresh material being added to it, while the other has the more open responsibility of improvising.”81 This is the only point in the piece where all ten performers “create” simultaneously, and the ensemble texture quickly becomes charged with great energy and emotion.82 The emotional intensity that the players summon here is fitting, for this passage “represents . . . the brutal beating” of Emmett Till’s body after his death, the culmination of the composition’s psychological narrative.83 The musicians create together for almost three minutes, bringing the ensemble texture to a peak. Then, at 15:33, the Golden Quartet performs a composed fanfare—the cue for the strings to wind down their textural layer and look ahead to the piece’s conclusion. The conclusion begins at 16:02 with a series of lush harmonies played by the Southwest Chamber Music strings and the Golden Quartet. Then Smith puts down his trumpet and leads the ensemble through the last page of the score, which returns to the material from the introduction. Lindberg and Ibarra bring back their short-long rhythmic pattern, while the other musicians perform the introduction’s chromatic melody in octaves, uniting their parts into a powerful orchestral line. The melody steadily ascends into the upper register, as in the closing measures of the introduction. But instead of ending the melody on the triumphant high note heard at 17:24, the performers answer the climactic pitch with a thunderous, dark, low-register chord, condensing the entire emotional trajectory of the composition into a single, spectacular gesture.84 They

Example 8.7 “Emmett Till”: ensemble texture, excerpt.

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repeat this striking gesture two more times, then conclude the piece at last. As the strings exit, the Golden Quartet lingers on the final chord for a few more seconds, taking one last look at the “gentle, majestic . . . image of Emmett Till.”85

Creative Music In Smith’s long career, he composed over a thousand pieces, none more extraordinary than his tribute to Emmett Till.86 “I think it’s one of my most unusual pieces,” Smith mused, “because of the way it’s constructed—it gives allusions to all kinds of notions about tonality and tonal centers, and it also expresses one of the largest ranges of emotional content that I can recall in one of my works.”87 In fact, the composition’s emotional impact was so great that several critics considered “Emmett Till” to be one of the highlights of Ten Freedom Summers.88 But for many listeners—including the musicians, scholars, and journalists who named Ten Freedom Summers a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize—the entire work was consistently compelling, from start to finish, because the other twenty compositions employ some of the same techniques heard in “Emmett Till.”89 There are fully notated passages and open-ended “create situation[s],” solo themes and forceful ensemble lines (often written in octaves), rich harmonies, and textures based on the Ankhrasmation language’s array of “proportional” short and long rhythms rather than conventional “time signature[s]” and meters.90 Most of all, Ten Freedom Summers is distinguished by the way Smith combines multiple notation systems, instruments, and musical styles to create a complex work that is much more than the sum of its parts. As Smith observed, Ten Freedom Summers “has these qualities of classical music and contemporary music. Qualities of what we’d call the jazz tradition, but something else, too.”91 Just as the civil rights movement brought about a new America, Smith created a “new American music” with Ten Freedom Summers.92 Smith retired from teaching in 2013, after twenty years on the faculty at CalArts. Then he moved back to New Haven, Connecticut, where he continued to compose new music, keeping up the daily regimen he had maintained for decades.93 “Making art has been my lifestyle,” Smith explained. “I work the same way I worked when I taught school. Every day I get up at sunrise. I do my morning prayer. I have food and coffee or tea. I work until 11:00, 12:00, or 1:00—another hour or so if I have a deadline.”94 He was also recording more than ever, and by 2015, his Ankhrasmation symbolic language was beginning to attract the attention of art-museum curators, who mounted exhibitions of his graphic scores in Chicago and Los Angeles.95 In the spring of 2017, just months after

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his seventy-fifth birthday, Smith presented the first edition of his annual CREATE Festival, where he performed pieces both new and old with collaborators from every stage of his career.96 Later that year, he swept the Down Beat critics’ poll, winning the awards for best jazz artist, best trumpeter, and best album (America’s National Parks).97 Smith was reaching a creative peak in his seventies, a rare achievement for a musician or any other kind of artist. But he made it look routine, just like several more first-wave AACM members—including Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill, all of whom did some of their best work in their seventies. As Smith affirmed, “I’ve grown, of course. . . . [since] I was a young, developing artist. . . . but I do the same thing I’ve done all along.”98

9 * Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds

Narrative is definitely at the core of my work.1

Nicole Mitchell took a roundabout path into the AACM. Unlike many members of the Association, she was not born or raised in Chicago, and her early investigations of improvisation and composition took place far from the South Side—in San Diego, California, and Oberlin, Ohio.2 In 1990, when she first tried to connect with the AACM, she was rebuffed, in contrast to many other would-be members who were accepted into the Association right away. It would take her five years to gain entry to the AACM. When Mitchell finally joined the Association, in 1995, she represented “the advent of a new generation of AACM musician.”3 She and Jeff Parker were the first AACM members to be born after the organization was founded.4 Mitchell came into the AACM’s Chicago chapter with two other women musicians, Maia and Shanta Nurullah. With Maia, Mitchell, and Nurullah in the fold, the formerly male-dominated Chicago chapter finally had a critical mass of women members. Mitchell quickly became a key player in the Chicago chapter, and during the 2000s and 2010s, her leadership helped bring the AACM into the twenty-first century. Mitchell was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1967. When she was eight, her father (an engineer) moved the family from central New York to Anaheim, California, just outside of Los Angeles in suburban Orange County.5 The move to California was hard on the Mitchells. Nicole’s mother, a painter and writer, had to leave behind the community of Syracuse-based artists who had supported her creative work.6 Moreover, the Mitchells were “one of only two black families” in their Anaheim neighborhood, and young Nicole was treated badly by most people she met: “I was chased by white boys who tried to whip me like a slave, got in fights with white girls who taunted me, told by neighbors that I was downgrading their property value, and was constantly referred to as a n— and spat on.”7 Mitchell found her solace in music. Shortly after she

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arrived in Anaheim, she started studying piano and viola. But the instrument that she truly wanted to play was the flute. For years, Mitchell begged her parents for a flute, and when she reached the eighth grade, they finally relented, giving her the instrument that she had been dreaming about since elementary school.8 In high school, Mitchell divided her time between academics and music, taking honors courses and playing flute in a youth orchestra. She graduated in 1985 and headed to the University of California, San Diego, planning to major in computer science.9 However, she soon changed her major to music: “I was in the practice rooms . . . from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. several times a week, so I figured that’s where my heart is.”10 Mitchell started attending experimental-music concerts on campus, and her flute professors helped her develop her playing technique.11 But the most influential professor that Mitchell encountered at UC San Diego was the trombonist Jimmy Cheatham, who directed the university’s jazz program. Cheatham invited Mitchell into his courses and shared with her his philosophy of improvisation—or “permutation,” as he would say. He also introduced Mitchell to the renowned flutist James Newton, who later became her private teacher.12 By 1987, Mitchell was ready to take her musical education to the next level, so she transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she was one of the first students to major in jazz.13 Unfortunately, Mitchell did not fit in at Oberlin. She did have a few mentors on the faculty, including bell hooks (a professor of African American studies, English, and women’s studies) and the composer Wendell Logan.14 But Oberlin’s cutthroat “conservatory culture” was not to Mitchell’s liking: “For me, it was about doing my best, but not trying to compete with others.”15 Mitchell took some time off from Oberlin College and returned to southern California, taking a day job as a welder. She also busked on the streets of San Diego, and used the “nickels, dimes, and quarters” she earned with her flute to pay for weekly lessons with James Newton (then on the faculty at CalArts).16 In 1989–1990, Mitchell came back to Oberlin, but the atmosphere at the conservatory was no better than before, and she decided against finishing her degree. Instead, she obtained a grant from the Ford and Mellon foundations that would enable her to spend the summer of 1990 studying house music at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago.17 Then she set out for the city that would become her new home. “I got to Chicago,” Mitchell remembered, “and I never left.”18 Mitchell had always wanted to live in Chicago. She spent months-long stretches of her childhood there, visiting her maternal grandparents, who lived on the South Side. In 1990, when Mitchell moved to Chicago for good, “it was . . . the first time in my life I actually felt like I fit somewhere.”19 On the South Side, she stated, “I was just a regular person”:

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In Orange County, being one of two black families in the neighborhood . . . and not being a kid into sports . . . I didn’t fit, but [in] Chicago, it’s like, “Oh, you must be from Hyde Park.”  .  .  . I mean, there’s more diversity within African American culture there, so it was a lot easier. But most importantly, the arts community . . . was really strong, really vibrant, and welcoming. . . . So it was exciting, making friends my age that were interested in things I was interested in, and putting projects together.20

Mitchell quickly found her way into the South Side arts community. When she completed her summer research project, she applied for a job at Third World Press, the oldest black-owned independent publisher in the United States.21 Mitchell was immediately hired as an intern, and then became Third World Press’s graphic designer, a position she would hold for thirteen years, until 2003.22 Her next stop was the AACM. She had heard about the Association from Leroy Jenkins, who gave a lecture at Oberlin College during Mitchell’s time as a student. One day in 1990, Mitchell looked up the AACM in the Chicago telephone directory and headed to the organization’s office—then located on Seventy-First Street, not far from Third World Press’s headquarters at Seventy-Fifth Street and South Cottage Grove. She was met at the front door by “a big tall guy,” AACM trumpeter Ameen Muhammad: He’s looking at me . . . “Yes?” “I want to take lessons in the AACM School.” He was like, “No, we’re not taking adult lessons right now,” and he closed the door.23

Mitchell did not walk through the Association’s door that day, but she was about to make the connection that would bring her into the AACM. During her first summer in Chicago, Mitchell worked as a street performer, as she had done in San Diego. “I actually got arrested the first day I played on the street [in Chicago],” she recalled. “They said I was too loud.”24 She soon found a new spot on Wabash Avenue in the downtown Loop district, near the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her performances on Wabash caught the attention of Maia (formerly Sonjia Hubert), an actress, dancer, and multi-instrumentalist who was studying at the Art Institute. Maia introduced herself to Mitchell, and they began practicing flute together. In 1991, they brought another musician into their circle—the bassist-sitarist Shanta Nurullah, who had worked with Maia in a group led by AACM co-founder Philip Cohran. The three women decided to form their own ensemble, which they called Samana.25 In Samana, all three members sang and played multiple instruments (Mitchell

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performed on percussion as well as flute), and each contributed original compositions to the band.26 A few years into the collaboration, Maia became convinced that Samana belonged in the AACM—the city’s premier collective of composers and multi-instrumentalists. However, the Chicago chapter of the AACM had not admitted any women since 1981—when Ann Ward joined the Association—and Maia’s application for membership became the subject of a protracted debate.27 The AACM ultimately accepted Maia’s application, with assists from Ward and Ameen Muhammad, who recommended her for membership.28 Then Maia ushered her Samana bandmates into the organization, beginning with Mitchell, who joined the AACM in 1995.29 Nurullah was the next to join, and Samana became the first “all-women’s ensemble” in the history of the AACM.30 Around the time that Samana entered the AACM, Mitchell started working in a trio with percussionist Hamid Drake and vocalist Glenda Zahra Baker.31 Drake was impressed by Mitchell’s musicianship, and he urged her to visit the Velvet Lounge and introduce herself to his mentor, AACM saxophonist Fred Anderson. One evening in 1997, Mitchell paid her first visit to the Velvet Lounge, where she heard Anderson performing with fellow saxophonist Ken Vandermark.32 In the audience that night was another Chicago woodwind player, David Boykin.33 By then, Samana had dissolved, as had Mitchell’s trio with Hamid Drake.34 So Mitchell joined Boykin’s ensemble, which performed at the Velvet Lounge and elsewhere in the city. She also became a regular at the Velvet Lounge’s Sunday-night jam sessions, a vital outlet for many Chicago improvisers.35 During this period, Mitchell was composing more than ever before, and when she asked Boykin if his band would perform her pieces, he suggested that she start her own group. Mitchell had received the same advice from Drake a few years earlier, and now she was ready to take the plunge. “It was out of a desire for the music, not out of any desire to be a bandleader,” she explained. “It was empowering to finally play and share this huge stack of compositions that I had . . . [after] years of contributing to and supporting other musicians.”36 Mitchell debuted her new band at the Velvet Lounge in 1998.37 She called the group the Black Earth Ensemble, a name meant to “honor the feminine source that our lives depend on: Mother Earth.”38 Many of the ensemble’s early members were affiliated with the AACM, including percussionist Avreeayl Ra, bassist Darius Savage, and violinist Samuel “Savoir Faire” Williams.39 However, the Black Earth Ensemble was never intended to be an all-AACM band. Over the years, Mitchell brought a number of non-AACM musicians into the group, often using a unique configuration of performers for each of the ensemble’s projects. According to Mitchell, the Black Earth Ensemble was “a forum for my compositions,

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so I may have a project where I want all strings, or I may have a project where I want more traditional jazz instrumentation, or a twenty-piece ensemble. . . . I think of it like a big family of maybe thirty musicians . . . it was always like that from the beginning.”40 Mitchell worked tirelessly to make the Black Earth Ensemble into one of the top groups in Chicago. She staged concerts across the city and released a series of Black Earth Ensemble albums on Dreamtime Records, the label she co-founded with David Boykin.41 By the 2000s, the Black Earth Ensemble was performing at major venues in Chicago, recording for commercial labels, and appearing at European jazz festivals.42 At the same time, Mitchell was taking on an increasingly prominent role in the AACM. She had been teaching at the AACM School of Music and serving on the Association’s executive board since the late 1990s.43 In 2006, she became the first woman to lead the AACM, co-chairing the Chicago chapter with Douglas Ewart (until 2009) before taking over as sole chair (through 2011).44 During this period, Mitchell recruited several new members into the Association, including violinist Renée Baker, drummer Mike Reed, and cellist Tomeka Reid.45 “I felt I could be a bridge to bring the younger musicians in and try to close the gap between the generations,” Mitchell stated. “Because when I came in, it was just me, and everyone else on the [executive] board was . . . fifteen and twenty years older. But the younger musicians, they have a completely different idea of who they are and what music is and what is this ‘AACM stuff,’ so I’m trying to make that connection.”46 Building a bridge between the AACM’s old guard and fourth-wave members like Baker, Reed, and Reid was not Mitchell’s only contribution to the Association. She also forged alliances between the AACM and a number of other organizations—in Chicago and as far away as France. Mitchell found a permanent home for the AACM School of Music, moving the institution to the South Side campus of Chicago State University (where she finished her undergraduate degree in 1998, prior to earning her master’s in music from Northern Illinois University). After a 2005 Black Earth Ensemble performance in Paris, she persuaded the French music festivals Sons d’hiver and Banlieues Bleues to present a three-year series of concerts featuring various AACM groups—including the Great Black Music Ensemble performance examined in chapter 7. And Mitchell brought in grant funding that kept the Association on firm financial footing into the 2010s.47 These achievements made her one of the most effective leaders the AACM ever had. “I felt I was needed,” she declared, “to help move the organization forward.”48 In 2011, when Mitchell was finishing her term as the Chicago chapter’s chair, she was offered a faculty position at the University of Cali-

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fornia, Irvine. The professorship was in a new program called Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT)—a “dream job” for Mitchell, who had been “combining the different disciplines” of composition and improvisation since the 1990s.49 The university’s location was also attractive: UC Irvine was just fifteen miles south of Mitchell’s childhood home in Anaheim, and her father and brothers still lived nearby.50 Moreover, two of the professors in the ICIT program (Michael Dessen and Christopher Dobrian) had studied composition with AACM member George Lewis, one of Mitchell’s closest mentors.51 So, in the summer of 2011, Mitchell left Chicago, her home for two decades, and moved back to California.52 The job at UC Irvine proved to be a perfect fit. Mitchell was promoted to full professor after just two years, an astonishingly fast climb up the academic ladder.53 Her ICIT colleagues inspired her to explore music technology, and she began to incorporate electronics and video into her improvisations and compositions. Some of Mitchell’s sound experiments had their first hearings at UC Irvine, while others were premiered in Chicago, New York, and Europe by the American Composers Orchestra, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Tri-Centric Orchestra (founded by Anthony Braxton), and other top-flight performers.54 Mitchell also continued to compose for the Black Earth Ensemble, writing new music for the group every year, including a 2015 suite that would become one of her most acclaimed works.55

Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds Mitchell premiered Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds on May 2, 2015, at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). AACM artists had been debuting new works at the MCA since 1971, and in 2015— when the Association was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary—the museum sponsored five major premieres by AACM composers: Renée Baker’s Sunyata, Douglas Ewart’s Homage to Malachi Maghostut Favors, George Lewis’s opera Afterword, Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening II, and Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells for the South Side.56 The first Mandorla Awakening (presented at UC Irvine in 2013) was an intermedia performance by a group of musicians and dancers, with an accompanying video by visual artist Ulysses Jenkins.57 Jenkins also contributed to Mandorla Awakening II, providing video projections and lighting design for the 2015 premiere at the MCA.58 But the element that ties the seventy-four-minute suite together is a novella-length narrative written by Nicole Mitchell herself.59 The narrative’s protagonists are a woman and man who, in the year 2099, escape a dystopic society and seek refuge on an island called Mandorla. The inhabitants of Mandorla

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live in communion with one another and with the Creator, and their lifestyle—technologically advanced yet “in tune with nature”—has protected them from war and from a virus that threatens to destroy humanity.60 The protagonists are faced with a choice: they can “adapt to Mandorla,” abandoning everything they once knew, or they can use what they have learned on the island to save the dying world they left behind.61 Mitchell’s narrative was influenced by The Chalice and the Blade, a book by Riane Eisler that examines two kinds of societies, one egalitarian and the other hierarchical (symbolized, respectively, by the “feminine chalice” and the “masculine blade or sword”).62 However, rather than idealizing the egalitarian social model, as Eisler does, Mitchell “recogniz[es] that there are clearly definable assets to each model and that humanity [has] not yet manifest[ed] any one model that is completely optimal.” Instead, the Mandorla narrative “embrace[s] dualities” by “merging the chalice with the blade,” as well as “the urban with the earth-focused, the electronic/electric with the acoustic, [and] the female with the male.”63 The words of the Mandorla narrative are not heard until the seventh movement, more than halfway through the ten-movement suite (see example 9.1). The spirit of the narrative, though, can be seen in the makeup of the Black Earth Ensemble, which represents an “organic expression of diversity,” as Mitchell put it.64 Four of the eight musicians are African American women, and the other four performers are men. According to Mitchell, “in the work we do as a group trying to create the music. . . . Example 9.1 Mandorla Awakening II: list of movements.

1. “Egoes Wars” 2. “Sub-Mission” 3. “The Chalice” 4. “Dance of Many Hands” 5. “Listening Embrace” 6. “Forestwall Timewalk” 7. “Staircase Struggle” 8. “Shiney Divider” 9. “Mandorla Island” 10. “TimeWrap”

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we’re working out some of the questions and curiosities and challenges that come up with the actual idea of coexistence.”65 The four women— JoVia Armstrong, Renée Baker, Tomeka Reid, and Mitchell—are longtime members of the Black Earth Ensemble family, as is one of the men, Alex Wing. There are also three new members: Tatsu Aoki, UC Irvine professor Kojiro Umezaki, and avery r. young.66 Together, the performers play more than a dozen different instruments. Each of the ensemble’s instruments has a counterpart with a contrasting tone color, an orchestration technique that resonates with the “cultural collision[s]” that are at the heart of the Mandorla narrative.67 Mitchell’s flute “collide[s] . . . with . . . Umezaki’s shakuhachi,” Wing’s electric guitar complements the trio of orchestral strings (Baker’s violin, Reid’s cello, Aoki’s bass), Armstrong’s cajón kit (bells, cajón, chimes, cowbell, cymbals, gongs) links up with Aoki’s taiko drum, and Reid’s banjo bounces off Aoki’s shamisen and Wing’s oud.68 Mitchell also plays electronics, and Wing plays theremin, adding an array of electronic sounds to the band’s collection of acoustic and electric instruments. And in the suite’s final movements, when young joins the ensemble to perform excerpts from the Mandorla narrative in his rich baritone voice, Mitchell echoes him, inserting soprano-register vocal lines into the phrases she plays on flute. Mitchell takes full advantage of the Black Earth Ensemble’s distinctive instrumentation, employing a compositional technique that she terms “phasing or blurring”—“where you have things that are moving together in unison but they’re not synced up perfectly.”69 In the Mandorla Awakening II score, she utilizes the blurring technique with a number of instrument combinations, especially the two flutes: her C flute and Umezaki’s bamboo shakuhachi. This approach makes even the simplest melodies sound more intricate, while highlighting the subtle differences between the ways the musicians interpret their parts. To help the performers develop their own interpretations of the music, Mitchell uses a set of scoring techniques that AACM composers had been investigating since the 1960s, including visual-textual notation and evocative graphic symbols. As Mitchell observed: “It’s a mixture of [traditional] notation and gestural images and verbal communication and gestural communication in the concert and all of that. Making sure there was enough space for the improvisation.”70 Although improvisation is essential to Mandorla Awakening II, the suite does not center on improvised solos by the musicians—not even by Mitchell, one of the finest flute soloists in the history of jazz and improvised music. Instead, many of the improvisations in Mandorla Awakening II emerge from the ensemble, as Mitchell and her bandmates explore the moods and textures outlined in the beautiful, handwritten score.

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Mandorla Awakening II begins with “Egoes Wars,” a depiction of the conflict that led the narrative’s protagonists to flee to Mandorla (see example 9.2). The movement opens with a chorus of gong strokes and foreboding electronic sounds—the ensemble’s realization of Mitchell’s graphic notation, a field of jagged black lines and pink teardrop shapes under a heading that reads dystopic (see example 9.3). At 1:19, Armstrong lays down a driving beat on cymbals and cajón, and forty-five seconds later, Aoki adds a low-register bass line. Then, at 2:23, Wing enters the texture on electric guitar, playing the first phrase of the “Egoes Wars” theme. The first phrase is notated traditionally, but the second, third, and fourth phrases conclude with “gestural images”: graphic symbols that prompt the players to improvise.71 Wing performs the second phrase at 2:53, then starts improvising on the graphic notation, using his distorted tone, wahwah pedal, and whammy bar to conjure up the sound of a hard-rock power trio. He is still improvising at 3:48, when the other members of the group join in. Baker, Mitchell, Reid, and Umezaki (on violin, flute, cello, and shakuhachi, respectively) perform the theme, beginning with the first phrase, while Wing moves on to the third phrase. By 4:43, all of the musicians have arrived at the fourth phrase’s final bar, a pentatonic pattern in the key of E  ♭  minor. They play the pattern a few times, capping off the theme, then proceed into an ensemble improvisation based on three pitch cells given in the score: (A ♮ , A  ♭ ), (B  ♭ , B  ♮ , C), and (G/B  ♭ , C/B, C  ♯ /G, G). As the texture evolves, the performers gradually increase their dynamics—a buildup that lasts until 6:16, when Mitchell ends the ensemble improvisation and cues the figure that closes the piece. This figure, a five-note descending line, is labeled together/not together, a marking that tells the group members to use Mitchell’s blurring technique. The musicians repeat the figure for over a minute, playing it more out-of-sync each time and transforming the simple descending line into a swirling, downward spiral. Finally, at 7:32, Mitchell silences the band, concluding “Egoes Wars” and spiriting the protagonists away to Mandorla. Example 9.2 “Egoes Wars”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–2:23

guitar theme

2:23–3:48

 + flutes/strings theme

3:48–4:48

ensemble improvisation

4:48–6:16

conclusion

6:16–7:36

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Example 9.3 “Egoes Wars”: score.

The following three movements—“Sub-Mission,” “The Chalice,” and “Dance of Many Hands”—are performed as if they were one piece. Each movement flows into the next without a pause, and several of the musicians get a moment in the spotlight, as they take turns portraying aspects of life on Mandorla (see example 9.4). “Sub-Mission” begins with Aoki improvising on shamisen, accompanied by Armstrong’s bells and gongs. Reid comes in at 0:53, contributing an improvised countermelody on cello. In contrast to the first movement, “Sub-Mission” is quiet

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and spacious at the outset, and remains so even after 2:02, when Baker, Mitchell, and Umezaki enter. The ensemble slowly works its way through a series of colorful background chords—briefly sustaining each harmony, then waiting while Aoki, Reid, and Umezaki respond with interwoven improvised lines. At 4:58, Baker starts soloing too, just as the musicians are approaching the eighth and final chord. After Aoki, Mitchell, Reid, and Umezaki play the last chord, they fade out, but Baker keeps improvising, and her violin melody becomes the thread that connects “SubMission” to the following piece. “The Chalice” is introduced by Mitchell (on electronics), who surrounds Baker’s violin line with “short spurts” of electronic tones that represent Mandorlian birdsong.72 Half a minute into the birdsong passage, Reid reenters the texture, while Aoki picks up his drumsticks and prepares to play taiko. Next, at 1:03, Reid and Umezaki play the movement’s theme, an austere line decorated by percussion and string sounds from Aoki, Armstrong, and Baker. The theme leads into a short improvised transition, which sets up the fourth movement. Wing, on clean-toned electric guitar, initiates “Dance of Many Hands” by play5 ing a Mixolydian vamp in 4  time (see example 9.5). After a few repetitions, Armstrong and Reid add their own parts to the vamp. At the same time, Baker, Mitchell, and Umezaki begin to improvise over the interlock5 ing guitar, percussion, and cello parts, and the 4  vamp becomes a joyous, folksy dance. Aoki adds a few accents on taiko, and for the first time in Example 9.4 “Sub-Mission”/“The Chalice”/“Dance of Many Hands”: formal diagram.

Aoki solo

0:00–0:53

 + Reid solo

0:53–2:02

  + Umezaki solo

2:02–4:58

   + Baker solo

4:58–5:35

birdsong texture

0:00–1:03

“The Chalice” theme

1:03–2:17

transition

2:17–2:49

dance texture

0:00–2:21

Aoki solo

2:21–3:04

“Dance of Many Hands” theme

3:04–4:08

Reid solo

4:08–5:48

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Example 9.5 “Dance of Many Hands”: score.

Mandorla Awakening II, all seven instrumentalists are grooving together. The dance texture lasts for two minutes, until 2:21, when Aoki performs a taiko solo, backed up by Armstrong. The taiko solo is in the same meter as the dance texture, and when Aoki finishes his improvisation (at 3:04), 5 the musicians could easily end the piece by reprising the 4  vamp. Instead, they proceed to the final part of the movement, a minor-key lament. The 5 new texture is orchestrated just like the 4  dance, with the flutes and violin supported by a cello-guitar-percussion ostinato. However, the meter

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3

has changed to a slow 4 , and the written theme played by Baker, Mitchell, and Umezaki has an exquisitely mournful sound—a reflection, perhaps, of the challenges faced by the narrative’s protagonists, who are “astonished by the different life that Mandorla offers” and “resist letting go of their old ways.”73 After the theme, Reid takes over, closing “Dance of Many Hands” with a “lyrical” cello improvisation.74 Then the performers pivot to the next phase of the suite. “Listening Embrace” is the suite’s longest movement, and the only one built from a series of improvised solos. Each solo is framed by a short composed passage, a design reminiscent of the extended forms pioneered by first-wave AACM members such as Muhal Richard Abrams (see example 9.6). Mitchell’s composition, though, has a thoroughly contemporary sound, with a blend of timbres and musical styles that could only have come from the Black Earth Ensemble. The piece begins with Armstrong 4 and Reid playing a medium-tempo hip-hop groove in 4 . Over the groove, Baker, Mitchell, and Wing (on theremin) perform an angular melody that lasts just twelve measures, until 0:22. Then Umezaki takes their place, improvising on shakuhachi. Partway through the solo, Reid switches instruments, moving from cello to banjo to play a repeating background figure. Example 9.6 “Listening Embrace”: formal diagram.

first groove

0:00–0:22

Umezaki solo

0:22–1:53

 + Wing solo

1:53–2:45

interlude

2:45–4:18

Aoki/Umezaki duo

4:18–5:27

second groove

5:27–5:53

Mitchell solo

5:53–7:35

Wing solo

7:35–8:53

ensemble improvisation

8:53–9:20

Umezaki solo

9:20–10:09

 + Baker solo

10:09–10:40

Armstrong/Baker duo

10:40–12:06

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Before long, Baker and Mitchell rejoin the texture, blurring the figure that Reid is playing on banjo, while Wing adds a second improvised line on theremin. As Wing’s theremin line gains prominence, the other musicians abandon their parts, and the hip-hop groove breaks down. Then, at 2:45, Mitchell guides the ensemble through a rubato interlude, with epigrammatic unison melodies from the flute, theremin, and violin—and improvised responses by the banjo and shakuhachi. The interlude leads into another rubato episode, an unaccompanied duo improvisation by Aoki (on shamisen) and Umezaki. At 5:27, as the shamisen-shakuhachi duo is winding down, Armstrong, Baker, Mitchell, and Reid reemerge with a second hip-hop-inspired passage: a nine-measure chorus with a new cello-percussion groove and a flute-violin line derived from the melodies heard in the interlude (see example 9.7). Nine bars later, Mitchell launches into an improvisation, the first extended flute solo in Mandorla Awakening II. She plays four virtuosic choruses, then yields to Wing (on electric guitar), who takes three choruses of his own. The score calls for just two solos here—flute and guitar. But Armstrong and Reid’s groove is so infectious that Mitchell brings back her bandmates for another round of improvisations: an ensemble chorus from 8:53 to 9:20, three choruses by Umezaki (with Baker joining in for the last chorus), and finally, a duo by Armstrong and Baker that ends the piece, twelve minutes after it started. The sixth movement, “Forestwall Timewalk,” is the midpoint of the suite, but it sounds like a new beginning (see example 9.8). The piece’s timbres and textures are closely related to the opening movement, “Egoes Wars,” which portrays the dystopic society from which the protagonists fled. In addition, “Forestwall Timewalk” sets the stage for the final phase of the suite, when vocalist avery r. young joins the ensemble, singing and reciting texts that bring the Mandorla narrative to life. The movement begins with Aoki playing a cadence-like rhythm on taiko. Armstrong enters at 0:18, followed an instant later by Wing, who performs the introductory melody with grit (as indicated in the score) by using distortion on his electric guitar.75 After Wing states the opening melody, he starts improvising over the percussive backdrop provided by Aoki and Armstrong. At 1:09, just twenty seconds into the guitar solo, Baker, Mitchell, Reid, and Umezaki bring in the movement’s theme. Wing is still improvising, and the texture resembles the middle section of “Egoes Wars,” with a composed theme in the flutes, violin, and cello, counterpointed by percussion and distorted guitar. However, instead of flowing right into an ensemble improvisation—as in “Egoes Wars”—the “Forestwall Timewalk” theme concludes with a climactic march up the C whole-tone

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Example 9.7 “Listening Embrace”: score, flute and guitar solos.

scale (2:01–2:28). Once the theme ends, Aoki, Baker, Mitchell, Reid, and Umezaki exit, but Wing and Armstrong continue playing, keeping the momentum going until the other players come back. Mitchell returns first, and Baker is next, improvising a violin line that emulates Wing’s high-energy guitar playing. Reid and Umezaki come in at 3:47 with an E  ♭ -minor ostinato. Shortly thereafter, Aoki finally reappears, harmonizing Reid and Umezaki’s part with a deep-toned bass line. Moments later,

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Example 9.8 “Forestwall Timewalk”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–0:46

Wing solo

0:46–1:09

 + flutes/strings theme

1:09–2:28

Wing solo

2:28–3:05

Baker solo

3:05–3:47

 + transition

3:47–4:24

intensity structure

4:24–4:54

Example 9.9 “Staircase Struggle”: formal diagram.

young solo

0:00–0:22

 + funk groove

0:22–2:58

young recitation

2:58–3:19

 + ensemble texture

3:19–8:39

intensity structure

8:39–9:48

Mitchell starts to reshape the ensemble’s sound, directing the musicians to play their parts faster and faster—and transforming the texture into a raucous intensity structure. The performers sustain the intensity structure for thirty seconds, until 4:54, when Mitchell abruptly cuts them off. Just then, young walks onto the stage, and the next movement commences. With a pentatonic melody, young sings the words “we keep on doing the same thing over and over again.”76 This is the opening phrase of the seventh movement (“Staircase Struggle”), and young sings the line dozens of times—“over and over again”—using repetition to underscore the meaning of the text. After the first few statements of the vocal phrase, Aoki enters on bass, and the other instrumentalists soon follow, backing up young with a spontaneously assembled funk groove (see example 9.9). young’s vocal delivery, though, is more churchy than funky, and at times he sounds like a gospel singer riffing over the groove played by the Black Earth Ensemble. The musicians work the improvised groove until 2:58. Then Mitchell gives a signal, and the band falls silent. This is

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young’s cue to move to the next section of the piece, where he recites a poetic text drawn from the Mandorla narrative. The instrumentalists wait about twenty seconds before joining the texture, as in the opening vocal solo. This time, however, the band’s accompaniment is scripted rather than spontaneous. There are six different accompaniment passages in the score, one for each section of young’s text. Mitchell leads the ensemble from one passage to the next, creating a musical narrative that unfolds alongside the story young is telling.77 The text recited by young explores a number of topics, from the clash between nature and technology to music’s ability to show humanity a better “way of being.”78 As young proclaims at 6:53, and again at 7:09: “In a fluorescent flooded little shoebox that cannot hold any more batteries, gadgets, and medication, we ask for music.”79 At 8:39, young arrives at the last line of the text, just as the instrumentalists are playing the final notes of the written accompaniment. Without missing a beat, Mitchell deftly guides the band off the pages of the score and into an intensity structure. young answers by repeating the text’s closing line with great feeling, taking the texture to an even higher level of intensity. The movement concludes a minute later, when young finally finishes his recitation. It is Mitchell, though, who gets the last word—playing one more note on flute and then falling off, as if she is catching her breath after the movement’s intense, exciting ending. Mitchell opens the eighth movement, “Shiney Divider,” with a brief but dazzling solo that showcases her ability to sing and play flute simultaneously. She improvises for thirty seconds, then brings in her bandmates, who construct a rubato texture in A  ♭  minor (see example 9.10). The ensemble’s rubato texture becomes the backdrop for a vocal solo by young—the movement’s main event. young enters at 0:49, intoning a sorrowful, minor-key line: Blood . . . is . . . spilling . . . we . . . keep . . . on . . .80

young sings the line once more, at 1:13, before shifting gears in response to the ensemble. At 1:43, the instrumentalists introduce a new texture built from stop-time phrases that sound a bit like the fills played by church musicians on Chicago’s West Side—where young grew up— during the high points of a sermon. young follows suit, adopting an impassioned, preacherly tone as he delivers the next section of the “Shiney Divider” text. At times, the text reaches beyond the futuristic setting of the Mandorla story to address a litany of contemporary issues, from environmental disasters to the police killings that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement:

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Example 9.10 “Shiney Divider”/“Mandorla Island”: formal diagram.

Mitchell solo

0:00–0:33

rubato texture

0:33–0:49

young solo + rubato texture

0:49–1:43

young solo + stop-time texture

1:43–4:59

young solo + blues vamp

4:59–7:04

ensemble texture

7:04–7:34

transition

7:34–8:06

first theme: flutes

0:00–2:07

second theme: flutes/strings

2:07–4:28

first groove

4:28–5:01

 + Umezaki solo

5:01–6:40

  + Mitchell solo

6:40–6:56

second groove

6:56–7:14

 + Mitchell/Umezaki duo

7:14–9:03

conclusion

9:03–10:22

Our blood . . . is spilling . . . in Baltimore, Ferguson, Chicago . . .81

After each of these passages, though, young returns to the “chalice and blade” duality that the Mandorla narrative is built around. “I want to pick up my blade,” he declares again and again, “but then there’s gotta be a better way.”82 3 The musicians change the texture once more at 4:59, playing a 4 -meter blues vamp, with Wing on lead guitar. young turns one of the lines of the text into a refrain, singing “we keep on walking that way” after every phrase.83 His tone becomes more urgent each time he repeats the refrain, and by the seven-minute mark, the texture has reached a peak. Suddenly, at 7:02, young breaks away from the written text, shouting, “I wish I had a praying church! I need some witnesses!” like a West Side preacher dialoguing with his congregation. The musicians answer with an explosive, piercing chord, which they sustain for thirty seconds. Then they lay out,

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while young leads the transition to the ninth movement—dancing across the stage, singing fragments of the “Shiney Divider” text, and waiting for what comes next. Mitchell cues Umezaki, and the two flutists play a haunting melody made up of long tones, adorned with percussion “colors” from Armstrong.84 The flute-shakuhachi melody is the first theme of “Mandorla Island,” the suite’s penultimate movement (see example 9.10). Next, at 2:07, is the second theme—mysterious and slow-paced, like the first theme. Here, Baker and Reid enter (on violin and cello, respectively) to play the line with Mitchell and Umezaki. When the second theme ends, the flutes and strings exit, leaving only Armstrong to welcome Wing, who joins the texture on oud at 4:28. The written line played by Wing is simple—a descending six-note ostinato—but the texture soon grows more complex. Baker and Reid return at 4:49, playing the six-note ostinato together/not together with Wing, while Aoki and Armstrong add 7 another layer to the texture: a bass-percussion vamp in 4 .85 The musicians quickly settle into the multilayered groove, which supports a shakuhachi solo by Umezaki. Mitchell resurfaces near the end of Umezaki’s improvisation, trading a few phrases with the soloist. Then, at 6:56, she starts playing a new ostinato at twice the tempo of the prevailing groove. Mitchell’s line has a descending contour, like the previous oud-violincello ostinato, and both figures are based on the same diminished-seventh chord. But the new ostinato’s faster tempo and syncopated rhythms give the emerging texture an entirely different feel. By 7:08, all of the string players are performing the line with Mitchell, and the new groove takes off, elevated by Armstrong’s inventive, precise drumming. Mitchell and Umezaki embark on a duo improvisation over the up-tempo groove, and even young gets swept up in the excitement, urging on the musicians from his post on the side of the stage. At 9:03, two minutes into the new groove, Mitchell concludes her improvisation and prepares to end “Mandorla Island.” With Baker, Mitchell plays a long-tone melody that echoes the first and second theme, followed by a repeating figure that crisscrosses all of the groove’s syncopated rhythms. Baker and Mitchell play the figure exactly sixteen times, from 9:33 to 10:20, building up their dynamics before bringing them back down. Then, with a signal from Mitchell, the band stops on a dime, and the musicians turn the pages of their scores, readying themselves for the suite’s tenth and final movement. After a round of applause from the concert audience, Mitchell introduces the last movement, “TimeWrap,” with a leaping figure based on just two pitches, E and F (see example 9.11). Baker and Reid enter next, doubling Mitchell’s line and pushing the tempo. A moment later, Aoki

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and Armstrong come in with complementary bass and percussion patterns, while young adds a bluesy, ad-libbed vocal line (see example 9.12). The flute, string, and percussion parts soon coalesce into a surging rock groove, and at 0:32, young starts singing the first few lines of the movement’s text: Back when the days are too long, and the sweat pours endlessly on the fields of cotton, and the streets of the city86 Example 9.11 “TimeWrap”: score.

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Example 9.12 “TimeWrap”: formal diagram.

introduction

0:00–0:32

young solo

0:32–3:31

 + Reid solo

3:31–4:31

flutes/violin theme

4:31–5:57

Armstrong/young duo

5:57–6:29

conclusion

6:29–7:15

As young performs the opening lines, Wing joins in, playing a frenetic, chicken-scratch guitar part that fills up all the spaces and silences in the groove. For the next few minutes, the instrumentalists ride the groove, as young sings the “TimeWrap” text in its entirety. The text’s subject is “that moan”—the “small and seemingly simple sound” heard in the cotton fields, on city streets, and wherever humanity cries out for “liberation”: That moan is a small kernel of life. Where we dip our minds into the bright. We develop a new territory where we’ll reside. Where the velvet blanket of coal black night covered the sky with piercings of light . . . from the other side.87

The narrative’s protagonists found their “new territory” when they first arrived on the island called Mandorla. However, Mandorla cannot become their home until the protagonists change their way of life. Could this kind of “transformation” also help save the dystopic society that they left behind? Or will the protagonists decide that their “old world” is beyond redemption?88 Mitchell does not reveal the answers to these questions—but she does remind her listeners that it is not too late to make a change in their own lives. As Mitchell writes in the album liner notes, “‘What would an advanced society that is in harmony with nature be like?’. . . . How can more of us use our imaginations to quest this . . . into being? I hope Mandorla Awakening can be an invitation for people to collaborate and imagine new realities that embrace dualities.”89 After young sings the “TimeWrap” text, Aoki, Armstrong, and Wing continue playing the rock groove, while the other musicians perform the movement’s theme. young keeps singing and shouting during the theme, as he did in the previous two movements. Once the theme ends, young

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takes over again, improvising with Armstrong for thirty seconds. Then, at 6:29, Baker, Mitchell, and Umezaki return with the suite’s final strand of melody, a line that stretches upward from the low D near the bottom of their instruments’ ranges to a high C. Aoki and Reid come in at the end of the line, harmonizing the last few notes played by Baker, Mitchell, and Umezaki. And then, with a percussive flourish from Armstrong, the suite comes to a close.

Leveling Up In 2017, the Chicago independent label FPE issued a recording of the Mandorla Awakening II premiere.90 The album was hailed as one of the year’s best by several outlets, including the New York Times, which named it the top release in the jazz category.91 For Nicole Mitchell, this represented a new level of esteem for her work as a composer. She was already known as a world-class performer—by 2017, she had won the flute category in Down Beat magazine’s annual critics’ poll for eight consecutive years with no end in sight, a historic run rivaled by only one other flutist, her teacher James Newton.92 Now Mitchell was being recognized as one of the foremost composers in jazz and experimental music, like many AACM members before her. Indeed, as the Association entered its sixth decade, its influence on jazz and experimental music seemed stronger than ever. The same New York Times article that spotlighted Mandorla Awakening II as the best jazz release of 2017 had two other albums by AACM artists in the top five: Wadada Leo Smith’s Najwa and Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells for the South Side.93 The following year, Mandorla Awakening II earned Nicole Mitchell the Champion of New Music Award from the American Composers Forum.94 And in 2019, after nearly a decade at UC Irvine, Mitchell was offered a prestigious new position at the University of Pittsburgh—the directorship of its jazz studies program.95 Nicole Mitchell was not the first AACM member to go into academia. Roscoe Mitchell and Wadada Leo Smith started teaching at universities in the 1970s.96 By the 1990s, a number of AACM artists were working at top-ranked schools, including Fred Berry at Stanford University, Mwata Bowden at the University of Chicago, Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University, Douglas Ewart at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, George Lewis at the University of California, San Diego, and Wadada Leo Smith at the California Institute of the Arts.97 Two institutions even made the AACM a permanent presence on their faculties. When Smith was hired by CalArts, the school where he had been teaching, Bard College, selected AACM percussionist-composer Thurman Barker as his replacement.98 And Mills College, in Oakland, California, was home to no fewer than four

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AACM members: Braxton, Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, and Tomeka Reid.99 These institutions, however, were all known for experimental music—not jazz. In fact, before the University of Pittsburgh hired Nicole Mitchell, she thought that “no school would want an adventurous artist like her anywhere near their jazz department.”100 By 2019, though, the tide had turned, as evidenced by Mitchell’s move to Pitt, which “affirm[ed] the ascent of the improvising avant-garde in the jazz academy,” in the words of one observer.101 The members of the AACM’s founding generation were accomplished jazz performers. But their explorations of multi-instrumentalism, new notation systems, extended forms, and other experimental techniques were not immediately embraced by the jazz community, least of all by traditionalists who did not want to see jazz evolve. Over the years, however, the AACM’s musical innovations became so influential that even the field of jazz education—the jazz world’s most conservative precinct—had to open its doors to the Association. This was a marvel to first-wave members like Joseph Jarman, who saluted all of the AACM artists who were “engaged in world-class academia”: They are still pushing that AACM ideal of freedom of expression and imagination. . . . Find out what’s going on, don’t be afraid to experiment. They’re telling all their students this, and that’s what the AACM was all about. These students, even if you have only one out of a thousand, subconsciously that one out of a thousand is going to be carrying the purposes, or the essence of the cause of this organization, on and on and on. So it’s going to never die.102

conclusion

We decided to celebrate the history and our love of the AACM.1

Since 1965, every concert produced by the AACM has featured “original music only”: new compositions written and performed by the musicians on stage.2 However, the organization never placed any restrictions on what its members could play in other settings, and a few bands from the Association incorporated works by non-AACM composers into their performances. The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and the Ritual Trio, both led by Kahil El’Zabar, recorded a number of jazz standards as well as the traditional gospel song “This Little Light of Mine.”3 Even the Art Ensemble of Chicago—the AACM’s flagship group, with hundreds of original scores in its repertoire—occasionally played pieces written by composers such as Albert Ayler (“Bells,” “Ghosts”) and Claudio Monteverdi (“Lasciatemi morire,” from the seventeenth-century opera L’Arianna).4 In 2015, the Association’s fiftieth year, three members of the Chicago chapter came together to explore another body of work that was close to their hearts: the compositions of their AACM colleagues. The Artifacts trio was founded by cellist Tomeka Reid, a fourth-wave AACM member.5 She was slated to give a concert in Seattle, Washington, in 2015, and she decided to invite two musicians who had “been in [her] corner” since she joined the AACM a decade earlier: drummer Mike Reed and flutist Nicole Mitchell.6 Reid and Reed both came into the Association in 2005, and they served together on the Chicago chapter’s executive board during Mitchell’s time as chair (2009–2011).7 Instead of writing new music for the Seattle performance, Reid proposed a concert program of works by AACM composers. Reid’s idea appealed to everyone: her two new bandmates, the concert promoter in Seattle, and jazz-festival directors throughout the country, who rushed to book the Artifacts trio for appearances later in 2015. “I guess word got out,” Reid recalled, “and we started getting asked to play festivals before we even really played any

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gigs.” By year’s end, Artifacts had played a half-dozen concerts across the United States, plus a date in Poland, and recorded an album for the New York independent label 482 Music.9 On the trio’s self-titled debut album, Artifacts (2015), there are compositions from nearly every decade of the AACM’s history.10 One piece, “Light on the Path,” is by second-wave AACM composer Edward Wilkerson Jr., and another, “Days Fly By with Ruby,” is by Jeff Parker, a third-wave member who entered the Association in 1995, the same year as Nicole Mitchell.11 The other compositions come from representatives of the AACM’s first wave: Muhal Richard Abrams (“Munktmunk”), Fred Anderson (“Bernice”), Anthony Braxton (Composition 23B), Leroy Jenkins (“The Clowns”), Steve McCall (“B. K.” and “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .”), Roscoe Mitchell (“Jo Jar”), and Amina Claudine Myers (“Have Mercy Upon Us”).12 The two McCall compositions were written for Air, his trio with Henry Threadgill and Fred Hopkins, and the performances by the Artifacts trio stick close to the original renditions.13 In contrast, the rest of the pieces were first played by ensembles of different sizes and instrumentations, opening up a broader range of possibilities for the arrangements created by Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, and Tomeka Reid. On “Have Mercy Upon Us,” for instance, the electronic effects that Mitchell uses on her flute and singing voice seem to respond to the electric organ and double-tracked vocals heard on Amina Claudine Myers’s original recording.14 And the trio’s arrangement of “Light on the Path” has a new introduction and coda—as well as elements drawn from two earlier versions of the piece, one by Edward Wilkerson Jr.’s 8 Bold Souls octet and the other by his trumpet-saxophone-bass-drums quartet.15 Several of the compositions on Artifacts were inspired by other AACM members. Roscoe Mitchell wrote “Jo Jar” for Joseph Jarman in the mid-1960s, a few years before the two saxophonists joined forces in the Art Ensemble of Chicago.16 Wilkerson dedicated “Light on the Path” to “Light” Henry Huff, his bandmate in the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and the twenty-five-piece Shadow Vignettes orchestra.17 And Jeff Parker developed “Days Fly By with Ruby” from a line that he heard Fred Anderson play during his time in the elder musician’s group.18 In the Artifacts trio’s versions of these pieces, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, and Mike Reed pay tribute to the relationships that bound all of these AACM artists together, both on and off stage. Some of these musical relationships were formed between contemporaries who came of age in Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band (Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman) or honed their craft in later AACM groups (Edward Wilkerson Jr. and “Light” Henry Huff), while other relationships crossed generational lines (Jeff Parker and Fred Anderson). As Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, and Tomeka Reid 8

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well understood, the Association could not have survived for a half century (and counting) without the relationships that motivated the members to do all the things that kept the collective running, from raising funds and producing concerts to operating the AACM School of Music on the South Side of Chicago. These efforts, in turn, ensured that the AACM’s musical innovations—extended forms, multi-instrumentalism, little instruments, and alternative approaches to notation, conducting, and technology—would be taken up by the next generation, and the next. In 2019, the Art Ensemble of Chicago embarked on its “Sixth Decade” tour. It had been fifty years since Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors, and Roscoe Mitchell moved from Chicago to Paris—and “carried the banner of the AACM” to an international audience.19 During their sojourn in Europe (1969–1971), the four Chicagoans started performing with percussionist Famoudou Don Moye, who became the fifth member of the Art Ensemble. By 2019, Mitchell and Moye were the only surviving group members. Bowie passed away in 1999, Favors in 2004, and Jarman in January 2019, not long before the Art Ensemble’s tour was scheduled to begin.20 Instead of hiring a few guest musicians to stand in for the departed members, as the band had done in the past, Mitchell and Moye brought more than a dozen new faces into the fold, transforming the Art Ensemble into a chamber orchestra, complete with a conductor. Tomeka Reid, Nicole Mitchell, and fourth-wave AACM bassist Junius Paul were part of the new-look Art Ensemble, as was first-wave member Fred Berry, who played trumpet in the Experimental Band and the mid1960s Roscoe Mitchell quartet. The other musicians came to the Art Ensemble from all over the United States, and from as far away as Italy, the home of bassist Silvia Bolognesi and multi-instrumentalist Dudù Kouaté. With woodwinds, brass, percussion, singers, strings, and electronics, the expanded Art Ensemble could, and did, play absolutely everything: familiar works from the band’s songbook, epic group improvisations, fully notated scores by Roscoe Mitchell, percussion-driven orchestrations by Famoudou Don Moye, and even poetry pieces by guest performer Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother).21 Each concert, it seemed, was a microcosm of the sound-world that the Art Ensemble, the Experimental Band, and the rest of the AACM created in the 1960s. As Roscoe Mitchell observed, “this group comes from all the work that has been done previously in the past, [since] the beginning of the AACM.”22 And now Mitchell—by then the Association’s most senior figure—was preparing to pass the torch. “The AACM sparked [another] generation of younger musicians,” he affirmed, “and they’ve now become part of us.”23 In between tour dates with the Art Ensemble, Tomeka Reid and Nicole Mitchell kept their own projects going, including the Artifacts trio with

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Mike Reed. The trio continued to perform across the country, from California to Maine.24 The three musicians also found time to record a second album, . . . and then there’s this (2021), which featured their own original compositions along with pieces written by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell.25 With this album, Artifacts was following a trail blazed by another AACM trio—Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall’s Air, which “started out playing Scott Joplin [compositions]” for a 1972 Chicago stage play.26 Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall eventually developed a repertoire of original compositions that made Air one of the best ensembles of the 1970s and 1980s, and decades later, the members of the Artifacts trio were poised to do the same, using the tradition they inherited as inspiration to invent something new and unforeseen. For Air co-founder Henry Threadgill, this commitment to experimentation was what made the Association so special: “The whole idea of the AACM was to create your own approach to the music.”27 Nicole Mitchell agreed wholeheartedly. “The AACM,” she explained, “[is] about playing your own stuff. . . . [and] it’s about rebellion. We see our mentors as creating, creating, creating and never looking back.”28

not es

Introduction 1. Steve McCall, quoted in Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 196. 2. Robinson, “The Association,” H68. 3. Robinson, “The Association,” H71–H72, H75. 4. Abrams and Chaney, “Creative Musicians Sponsor Artists Concert Showcase,” 14. 5. Beckwith and Roelstraete, The Freedom Principle; Corbett, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 46, 48; Heble, Douglas R. Ewart’s Crepuscule; Walker and Corbett, gallery guide for Ankhrasmation. 6. Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 221–222. 7. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, ix. 8. There are two French-language books about the AACM, both written by Alexandre Pierrepont. See Pierrepont, chaos, cosmos, musique; and Pierrepont, La Nuée. 9. Translated editions of Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, were published in Italy (Macerata: Edizioni Quodlibet, 2018) and France (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2021). 10. Beckwith and Roelstraete, The Freedom Principle, 72–73, 254–255. 11. Meyer, “Founded as an AACM Repertory Ensemble, the Artifacts Trio Now Plays Original Compositions.” Chapter 1 1. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in DeMuth, “15 Years of the AACM,” 28. 2. “Ad Lib,” 45. 3. Litweiler, “Chicago’s Richard Abrams,” 23. 4. Muhal Richard Abrams, quoted in Townley, “Muhal Richard Abrams,” 34. 5. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 68; Martin, “The Chicago Avant-Garde,” 14. 6. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 97–114. 7. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 115–119. 8. Abrams and Chaney, “Creative Musicians Sponsor Artists Concert Showcase,” 14. 9. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 88–95; Pierrepont, La Nuée, 103–115. 10. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 69–70, 361. 11. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 97–103, 107–111, 116. 12. Beauchamp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, 40; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 148.

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n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 –12

13. Barker, telephone interview by author, March 24, 2018; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 69. 14. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 118–120. 15. Anthony Braxton, quoted in Litweiler, liner notes for Braxton, Three Compositions of New Jazz. 16. Abrams and Chaney, “Creative Musicians Sponsor Artists Concert Showcase,” 14; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 116. 17. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 1, 23, 277. For a list of the individuals who joined the AACM in the 1960s, see Pierrepont, chaos, cosmos, musique, 220. 18. Harris, radio interview by Ted Panken, June 29, 1994. 19. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 78. 20. Martin, “The Chicago Avant-Garde,” 14. 21. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 79. 22. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 5. 23. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 14. 24. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 17–18. 25. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 57–58. 26. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 58; Schillinger, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. 27. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 59–60. Muhal Richard Abrams’s studies of classical music are chronicled in Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009; Lewis, “Purposive Patterning,” 67; and Panken, “Muhal Richard Abrams,” 35. 28. Hannaford, “One Line, Many Views,” 147–239. 29. Campbell, Pruter, and Büttner, “The King Fleming Discography”; Fleming, King! The King Fleming Songbook; MJT+3, Daddy-O Presents MJT+3. 30. Muhal Richard Abrams, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 69. 31. Barker, telephone interview by author, March 24, 2018. 32. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 135. For more on Butch Morris and Walter Thompson’s conducting methods, see Morris, The Art of Conduction; and Thompson, Soundpainting. 33. Litweiler, “Chicago’s Richard Abrams,” 26. 34. See Robinson, “The Association,” H68–H72, H75, for a detailed account of a 1968 concert by the AACM Big Band, directed by Muhal Richard Abrams. 35. Muhal Richard Abrams, quoted in Litweiler, “Chicago’s Richard Abrams,” 26. 36. Muhal Richard Abrams, quoted in Litweiler, “Chicago’s Richard Abrams,” 26. 37. Lewis and Smith, radio interview by Ted Panken, September 12, 1995; Litweiler, “Chicago’s Richard Abrams,” 41; Newsome, “It’s After the End of the World! Don’t You Know That Yet?,” 231; Chad E. Taylor, “Henry Threadgill’s Zooid,” 15. 38. Amina Claudine Myers, quoted in Donnell, “Interview: Pianist Amina Claudine Myers.” 39. Jost, Free Jazz, 165. 40. Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 45–47, 49. 41. Malachi Favors, quoted in Blumenthal, “A Kaleidoscope of Sound,” N1; Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 45–47, 49–50. 42. Lester Bowie, quoted in Beauchamp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, 47. 43. Roscoe Mitchell, telephone interview by author, February 28, 2015. 44. Roscoe Mitchell, email message to author, July 21, 2020.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 – 19

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45. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 65; Roscoe Mitchell, email message to author, July 21, 2020. 46. Davis, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 28; Figi, “Art Ensemble of Chicago,” 44. 47. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 66–67. 48. Beauchamp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, 71; Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life, 118. 49. Fielder, telephone interview by author, March 11, 2006; Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Before There Was Sound. 50. Martin, “The Chicago Avant-Garde,” 16; Roscoe Mitchell, Before There Was Sound. 51. Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Before There Was Sound. 52. Litweiler, “There Won’t Be Any More Music,” 23; Martin, “Blowing Out in Chicago,” 21; Martin, “The Chicago Avant-Garde,” 16. 53. Martin, “Blowing Out in Chicago,” 21; Martin, “The Chicago Avant-Garde,” 17n2; Welding, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 44. 54. Blumenthal, “A Kaleidoscope of Sound,” N1. 55. Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings, 1:428. 56. Litweiler, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 38; Martin, “The Chicago Avant-Garde,” 17. 57. Litweiler, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 38; Martin, “The Chicago Avant-Garde,” 16; Welding, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 48. 58. Kennedy and McNutt, Little Labels—Big Sound, 168. 59. Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light; Bierma, “Nessa on the AACM”; Jarman, Song For; Roscoe Mitchell, Sound. 60. Fielder, telephone interview by author, March 11, 2006; Welding, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 48. 61. Bierma, “Nessa on the AACM.” 62. Chuck Nessa, quoted in Silverstein, “Recording History,” 57. 63. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 141–143; Silverstein, “Recording History,” 57–58. 64. Fielder, telephone interview by author, October 11, 2006. 65. Roscoe Mitchell, interview by David Bernstein, March 10, 2017. 66. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 240. Mitchell and his bandmates in the Art Ensemble of Chicago would rehearse in much the same way as the Sound sextet, with all-day sessions for several weeks prior to a recording or concert tour. See Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks. 67. Shoemaker, Jazz in the 1970s, 20. 68. Along with Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler was perhaps the strongest early influence on Roscoe Mitchell’s saxophone playing, due in part to an in-person encounter at a West Berlin jam session when Ayler and Mitchell were serving as army bandsmen. See Davis, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 28, 30; and Roscoe Mitchell and Amina Claudine Myers, radio interview by Ted Panken, June 13, 1995. 69. Shepp, “A View from the Inside,” 41. 70. Lewis, “Singing Omar’s Song,” 76; Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 145. 71. Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 175. 72. As Jamil Figi observed in his notes about the piece, “the lines of [the theme], along with the title, are self-evident marks of Mitchell’s deep respect for Ornette Coleman, though Roscoe is quick to point out his awareness that respect must never be exaggerated into worship.” Figi, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Sound.

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n o t e s t o p a g e s 19 – 3 3

73. Fielder, telephone interview by author, October 11, 2006; Litweiler, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 38; Welding, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 48. For more on the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s concert suites, see Lewis, “Singing Omar’s Song,” 75; and Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 183. 74. Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light; Abrams, Young at Heart/Wise in Time; Art Ensemble of Chicago, A Jackson in Your House; Art Ensemble of Chicago, Eda Wobu; Art Ensemble of Chicago, Message to Our Folks; Art Ensemble of Chicago, People in Sorrow; Art Ensemble of Chicago, Reese and the Smooth Ones; Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Spiritual; Art Ensemble of Chicago, Tutankhamun; Bowie, Numbers 1 & 2; Braxton, B-X o/N-O-I-47  A; Braxton, For Alto; Braxton, Three Compositions of New Jazz; Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith, Silence; Jarman, As If It Were the Seasons; Jarman, Song For; McIntyre, Humility in the Light of the Creator; Roscoe Mitchell, Congliptious; Roscoe Mitchell, Old/Quartet; Roscoe Mitchell, Sound. 75. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 143. 76. Fielder, telephone interview by author, October 11, 2006; Silverstein, “Recording History,” 58. 77. Bierma, “Nessa on the AACM.” 78. Barker, telephone interview by author, March 24, 2018. 79. Bierma, “Nessa on the AACM.” 80. Martin, “Blowing Out in Chicago,” 47. 81. Figi, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Sound. 82. Roscoe Mitchell, “Sound,” score. 83. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 240. 84. Figi, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Sound. 85. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 240. 86. Litweiler, “Fanfare for the Warrior.” 87. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 240. 88. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, “Blowing Out in Chicago,” 21. 89. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 240. 90. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, “Blowing Out in Chicago,” 47. 91. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 240. 92. Barker, telephone interview by author, March 24, 2018. 93. For more on Gordon Emanuel, a white musician who was a member of the AACM from 1967 to 1969, see Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 196–200. 94. Lewis, “Experimental Music in Black and White,” 56; Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, 69, 211. Amus Mor’s poems are collected in his chapbook The Coming of John and in a number of anthologies, including King, Black Spirits. On a 1972 album also entitled Black Spirits, Mor can be heard reciting one of his poems before an audience at New York’s Apollo Theater. 95. For more about Joseph Jarman and the Art Ensemble’s use of poetry in their 1960s performances, see Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 55–57, 81–124. 96. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 335; Shoemaker, Jazz in the 1970s, 20. 97. Litweiler, “Chicago’s Richard Abrams,” 23; Welding, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 44. 98. Barker, telephone interview by author, March 24, 2018. 99. Muhal Richard Abrams, quoted in Robinson, “The Association,” H76. 100. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 148. 101. Gluck, “Electroacoustic, Creative, and Jazz,” 142. 102. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 106.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 3 – 3 9

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103. Jarman, Song For. 104. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 150. 105. Pinson, The Jazz Image, 170. 106. Rev. 16:12–16. 107. For more on Amus Mor’s contributions to “The Bird Song,” see Edwards, introduction to Jarman, Black Case, 2019 ed., 17, 24n17. 108. Barker, telephone interview by author, March 24, 2018. 109. Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings, 1:428. 110. Lewis, “Singing Omar’s Song,” 76. 111. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 117. 112. Muhal Richard Abrams, quoted in Little, liner notes for Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light. 113. Beckwith and Roelstraete, The Freedom Principle, 202. For more about Muhal Richard Abrams’s work as a painter and his involvement with the African American artists’ collectives OBAC and AfriCOBRA, see Lewis, “Expressive Awesomeness,” 116–117; Lewis, “Purposive Patterning,” 63–64; and Roelstraete, “The Way Ahead,” 117–118. 114. Beckwith and Roelstraete, The Freedom Principle, 25, 254. 115. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 57; Newsome, “It’s After the End of the World! Don’t You Know That Yet?,” 250. 116. Staircases and brightly colored anthropomorphic figures appear in a number of Abrams’s paintings, including the cover artworks for his albums SoundDance and Think All, Focus One. 117. Ivory, email message to author, May 22, 2019. 118. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 108. 119. Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 235. 120. Joseph Jarman, quoted in Beauchamp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, 75. Chapter 2 1. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 2. Janssens and de Craen, Art Ensemble of Chicago Discography. 3. “Festivals,” 4–6. 4. Flicker et al., “Châteauvallon,” 10, 13; Hardy, “Willisau,” 19. 5. “Festivals,” 6; Troxler, concert program for Jazz Festival Willisau ’76. 6. Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 7. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 8. Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. Niklaus Troxler himself served as the festival’s emcee. Troxler, email message to author, October 28, 2015. 9. Martin, liner notes for Art Ensemble [of Chicago], 1967/68. 10. Kostakis and Lange, “Joseph Jarman Interview,” 3; Lock, Forces in Motion, 27. 11. Abrams, Young at Heart/Wise in Time; Roscoe Mitchell, Congliptious; Roscoe Mitchell, Old/Quartet. 12. Braxton, For Alto. 13. For more on AACM members’ solo performances, see Campbell, “‘A Beautiful, Shining Sound Object,’” 309–345; Smith, notes; and Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 172–179. 14. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Davis, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 32. 15. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Davis, “Roscoe Mitchell,” 32.

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16. Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah, autograph score for solo alto saxophone; Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 17. Roscoe Mitchell, The Roscoe Mitchell Solo Saxophone Concerts. 18. Art Ensemble of Chicago, Fanfare for the Warriors; Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah; Roscoe Mitchell, Live at “A Space” 1975; Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah, autograph sketch for alto saxophone quartet. 19. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 20. Troxler, “Jazz Poll ’76.” 21. Braxton, Creative Orchestra Music 1976; Troxler, “Jazz Poll ’76.” In the Willisau poll’s “album of the year” category, Braxton’s Duets 1976 album placed third, giving him two LPs in the top three. Braxton and Abrams, Duets 1976. 22. Troxler, “Jazz Poll ’76.” The members of Anthony Braxton’s 1976 quartet were drummer Barry Altschul, bassist Dave Holland, and AACM trombonist George Lewis, who had recently replaced trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. Troxler, concert program for Jazz Festival Willisau ’76. 23. Troxler, email message to author, October 28, 2015. 24. “Liebe Festivalbesucher, das erste Mal müssen wir improvisieren heute Abend. Anthony Braxton ist leider nicht angekommen bis jetzt. Wir haben vorläufig so improvisiert: es wird zwei Teile geben. Einen erste Teil—Roscoe.” (“Dear festivalgoers, for the first time tonight, we have to improvise. Anthony Braxton has not arrived yet, unfortunately. For now, this is what we have improvised: there will be two parts. The first part—Roscoe.”) Niklaus Troxler, quoted in Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. Following Mitchell’s solo performance, the August 28 concert concluded with another spontaneously arranged performance by an ensemble that included Albert Mangelsdorff, Evan Parker, and Alexander von Schlippenbach. Troxler, email message to author, October 27, 2015. 25. Roscoe Mitchell, telephone interview by author, November 2, 2015; Troxler, email message to author, October 28, 2015. 26. Troxler, “Jazz Poll ’76.” 27. Anders, “Jazz-Festival Willisau,” 18; Hardy, “Willisau,” 19. 28. Reason, “‘Navigable Structures and Transforming Mirrors,’” 80. 29. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 145. 30. “A Roscoe Mitchell (alto solo), on ne pardonnait pas de remplacer Braxton.” Hardy, “Willisau,” 20. 31. Troxler, email message to author, October 28, 2015. 32. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 33. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 34. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 35. “What the experienced improviser is after is extended thought, extended thought patterns. This is what makes good improvisation.” Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Colli, “An Interview with Roscoe Mitchell.” 36. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 37. Joseph Jarman composed “Erika” in 1966, and the piece entered the Art Ensemble’s repertoire around 1967, two years before Jarman formally joined the group. Art Ensemble [of Chicago], 1967/68; Jarman, scrapbook. For an analysis of the Art Ensemble’s 1969 recording of “Erika,” see Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 108–124. 38. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 39. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Martin, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 5 5 – 61

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40. Lewis, “Purposive Patterning,” 67. 41. Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. 42. Anders, “Jazz-Festival Willisau,” 18; Hardy, “Willisau,” 20; Reason, “‘Navigable Structures and Transforming Mirrors,’” 80–81; Reynolds, “Improvisation Analysis of Selected Works of Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Cecil Taylor,” 66–72. 43. Roscoe Mitchell, “Nonaah and the Composition/Improvisation Connection”; Roscoe Mitchell, “Nonaah: From Solo to Full Orchestra.” 44. Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah. On the original quartet recording from 1977, Mitchell performed with three fellow AACM alto saxophonists: Joseph Jarman, Wallace McMillan, and Henry Threadgill. Thirty-five years later, in 2012, the piece was recorded again by a saxophone quartet led by James Fei. Roscoe Mitchell, Not Yet. 45. Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah, score for alto saxophone quartet; Reynolds, “Improvisation Analysis of Selected Works of Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Cecil Taylor,” 96. 46. Reynolds, “Improvisation Analysis of Selected Works of Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Cecil Taylor,” 74. 47. Roscoe Mitchell, Four Compositions; Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah, score for chamber orchestra; Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah, score for full orchestra; Roscoe Mitchell, Not Yet; Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravska Banda, Distant Radio Transmission; Reynolds, “Improvisation Analysis of Selected Works of Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Cecil Taylor,” 83–104. 48. Roscoe Mitchell, liner notes for Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravska Banda, Distant Radio Transmission. 49. Reynolds, “Improvisation Analysis of Selected Works of Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Cecil Taylor,” 102–104; Walls, “Improvisation Lends a Hand to Orchestras,” C2. 50. Walls, “Improvisation Lends a Hand to Orchestras,” C2. 51. Muhal Richard Abrams, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 70. 52. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Corbett, “Roscoe Mitchell’s Big Word,” 30. Chapter 3 1. Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:145. 2. For listings of Anthony Braxton’s compositions and recordings, see Guthartz, “Braxton Discography.” 3. Braxton, Composition Notes; Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings. 4. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 273n11. 5. Chinen, Playing Changes, 227; Roth, “All Honor to Anthony Braxton!”; Shteamer, “Anthony Braxton’s Big Ideas.” Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey also studied composition at Columbia University with AACM member George Lewis. Chinen, Playing Changes, 99, 134–135. 6. Broomer, Time and Anthony Braxton; de Craen and Janssens, Anthony Braxton; Ford, Anthony Braxton; Heffley, The Music of Anthony Braxton; Hoyer, Anthony Braxton; Lock, Blutopia; Lock, Forces in Motion; Lock, Mixtery; Martinelli, Anthony Braxton Discography; Radano, New Musical Figurations; Wachtmeister, A Discography & Bibliography of Anthony Braxton; Wilson, Anthony Braxton. 7. Braxton, Composition 76. 8. Braxton, For Trio. 9. Driscoll, “Diverse Practices of Graphic Notation,” 11–13; Heffley, The Music of

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n o t e s t o pa g e s 61– 6 5

Anthony Braxton, 317–322; Hoyer, Anthony Braxton, 59, 139–140, 335, 354, 364, 612, 664; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 364; Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 276; Lock, Blutopia, 157; Lock, Forces in Motion, 6, 170, 222, 290, 330–331; Lock, “‘What I Call a Sound’”; Radano, New Musical Figurations, 214–216; Shoemaker, “Turning the Inside Out,” 38–39. See also Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:136–154. 10. Beckwith and Roelstraete, The Freedom Principle, 72–73, 254–255; Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. 11. For an in-depth account of Anthony Braxton’s early years, see Radano, New Musical Figurations, 28–75. 12. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 113. 13. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 147–148. 14. Braxton, Three Compositions of New Jazz. This album, released by Delmark Records in 1968, was the fourth entry in the label’s AACM series, after Roscoe Mitchell, Sound; Jarman, Song For; and Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light. 15. Braxton, Composition Notes, 1:9–26, 1:173–183; Radano, New Musical Figurations, 127–131. 16. Anthony Braxton, quoted in Lock, Forces in Motion, 55. 17. The AACM expedition was led by the four members of the Art Ensemble (Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell), who arrived in Paris at the beginning of June 1969. A few weeks later, they were joined by the BraxtonJenkins-Smith trio. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 217–225; Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 61–69, 78–80. 18. Lehman, “I Love You with an Asterisk”; Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 70–77. 19. Anthony Braxton, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 235. 20. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 155. 21. Gluck, The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, 70–75. 22. Creative Construction Company, Creative Construction Company; Creative Construction Company, Creative Construction Company Vol. II; Gluck, The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, 75–78; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 326. 23. Gluck, The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, 113–131; Radano, New Musical Figurations, 163–164, 177–178. 24. Lock, Forces in Motion, 94–96; Radano, New Musical Figurations, 180–181. 25. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 249–256; Shoemaker, “Turning the Inside Out,” 37–38. 26. Radano, New Musical Figurations, 256–267. 27. Lock, Forces in Motion, 131–132. 28. Braxton, Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979; Braxton, For Four Orchestras; Braxton, For Trio; Braxton, For Two Pianos. 29. Braxton, For Trio. 30. Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. 31. Braxton, Composition 76. The free ordering of 76’s score pages may have been inspired by Roscoe Mitchell’s Cards, a similarly structured composition that was first recorded in 1975, two years before Braxton’s piece. Roscoe Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell Quartet. 32. Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:149. 33. Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio.

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[ 211 ]

34. According to Braxton, the color-emotion correspondences in the Composition 76 score are blue, “somber or moody”; red, “explosive or intense”; green, “calm, restrained, or contained”; purple, “vibrant or pulsing or energetic or vigorous”; brown, “complementary or harmonious or balancing”; and orange, “strong, lyrical, or bright.” Lock, Forces in Motion, 222. 35. Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. 36. Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:147. 37. Braxton, Composition 76. 38. Lock, Forces in Motion, 330. See also Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 1; Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 2; Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 3; Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 4; Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 5; Stockhausen, Zyklus. 39. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 97, 116. 40. Stockhausen, Aus den sieben Tagen; Stockhausen, Sternklang. 41. Braxton, For Trio. 42. Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:143. See also Braxton, For Four Orchestras; Braxton, For Two Pianos. 43. Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. 44. The AACM’s “composer-centered” philosophy is explored in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 69–70, 280, 361, 458, 484. 45. Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:143. 46. Braxton, For Trio. 47. Ewart, telephone interview by author, November 20, 2017. 48. Lock, Forces in Motion, 331. 49. Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. See also Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:148. 50. Lock, Forces in Motion, 222. 51. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Palmer, “New Sounds from Roscoe Mitchell,” C15. 52. Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:145. 53. Anthony Braxton, quoted in Lock, Forces in Motion, 330. 54. Braxton, Composition 76. 55. Lock, “‘What I Call a Sound,’” 10. 56. Braxton, Composition 76. 57. Lock, Forces in Motion, 222. 58. Broomer, “Pitch into Time.” 59. Braxton, Composition Notes, 4:147. 60. Braxton, For Four Orchestras. 61. Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. 62. According to Braxton: “This composition has been designed as a result of the multi-instrumental breakthroughs that have occurred in the last time cycle (I am speaking of the AACM activity in particular).” Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. 63. Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings, 1:428. 64. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 155. 65. Braxton, liner notes for Braxton, For Trio. Chapter 4 1. Fred Hopkins, quoted in Natambu, “Air Is an Element That Is Essential to Life: Part II,” 25.

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2. Braxton, Composition 76; Braxton, For Trio. 3. Air, Air Time. 4. Bourget, “Nessa Story,” 30, 46; Jung, “A Fireside Chat with Chuck Nessa of Nessa Records”; Nessa, liner notes for Art Ensemble [of Chicago], 1967/68; Robert Palmer, “Air—Democracy in Jazz Action,” D38. 5. Backström, The Illustrated Henry Threadgill Discography. The trio’s previous albums were Air Song (1975) and Air Raid (1976). 6. Zabor, “Air,” 55. See also Robert Palmer, “Air, a Jazz Trio, at Axis in Soho,” 39. 7. Taylor Funeral Home, funeral program for Stephen McCall IV, Chicago, May 30, 1989; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 12, 72–73. 8. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 60. 9. Dublin, “Steve McCall,” 5; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 67, 83. 10. Fischlin, “‘A Door to Other Doors.’” 11. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 73, 146; Radano, New Musical Figurations, 51; Chad E. Taylor, “Henry Threadgill’s Zooid,” 13. 12. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 74. 13. Brady, “Sweet Home Chicago,” 44; Cromwell, “Jazz Mecca,” 175–176; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 67. 14. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 75; Martin, “The Chicago AvantGarde,” 14. 15. Brady, “Sweet Home Chicago,” 45. 16. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 75, 185; Threadgill, radio interview by Ted Panken, July 24, 1996. 17. Edwards, email message to author, March 15, 2020; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 185–187, 204; Santoro, “Henry Threadgill,” 27. For more on the AACM School of Music, see Despont and Nussbaum, “Ecstatic Ensemble”; and Lewis, “Collaborative Improvisation as Critical Pedagogy.” 18. Edwards, email message to author, March 15, 2020. 19. Brady, “Sweet Home Chicago,” 47–48; Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 193. 20. Dublin, “Steve McCall,” 5; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 217–218. 21. Bisceglia, interview by author, July 28, 2006. 22. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 218. 23. For more on the Art Ensemble and the Braxton-Jenkins-Smith trio’s move to Paris, see Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 215–257; and Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 61–142. 24. Braxton, B-Xo/N-O-I-47A; Braxton, This Time . . .; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 225–229. 25. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 241–243, 259–260, 284–285. 26. Hopkins, radio interview by Ted Panken, August 2, 1987; Reich, “Saluting a Chicago Teacher Who Turned Out Jazz Stars,” AE3. 27. Litweiler, “Air,” 22. 28. “Final Bar,” 10, 13. 29. “Final Bar,” 13; Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 194. 30. Hopkins, radio interview by Ted Panken, December 3, 1985; Iverson, “Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 1).” 31. Iverson, “Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 1).” 32. Iverson, “Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 1)”; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 286.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 9 1– 9 8

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33. Litweiler, “Air,” 22; Reflections, publicity brochure. The stage play produced at Columbia College in late 1972 was directed by Don Sanders. 34. Lawrence, The Collected Works of Scott Joplin; Litweiler, “Air,” 22. 35. Iverson, “Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 1).” 36. Air, Air Lore. 37. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, “Air,” 51. 38. Zabor, “Air,” 57. 39. Steve McCall, quoted in Litweiler, “Air,” 51. 40. Steve McCall, quoted in Litweiler, “Air,” 51. 41. Steve McCall, quoted in Litweiler, “Air,” 51. 42. Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 194. 43. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 194. 44. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 194. 45. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 194. 46. Robert Palmer, “Air, a Jazz Trio, at Axis in Soho,” 39. 47. Steve McCall, quoted in Litweiler, “Air,” 51. 48. Dublin, “Steve McCall,” 5; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 298; Litweiler, “Air,” 22; Rotman, “An Interview with Henry Threadgill,” 6. 49. Dublin, “Steve McCall,” 5; Litweiler, “Air,” 22. 50. Air, Air Song. 51. Litweiler, “Air,” 22. 52. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Brady, “Sweet Home Chicago,” 49. 53. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 333–334; Litweiler, “Air,” 22. 54. Iverson, “Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 1).” 55. Air, Live Air; Zabor, “Air,” 55–56. 56. Zabor, “Air,” 56. See Dublin, “Steve McCall,” 5, for a portrayal of the Tin Palace as the “headquarters” of the 1970s New York jazz scene. 57. Air, Live Air; Jenkins, Free Jazz and Free Improvisation, 1:6; Litweiler, “Air,” 22. 58. Air, Air Raid. 59. Air, Air Time. 60. “Chuck Nessa, the album’s producer, says that he asked the group for a very broad range of material, and what he got was an album about diversity.” Robert Palmer, “Air—Democracy in Jazz Action,” D38. 61. Fred Hopkins, quoted in Zabor, “Air,” 57–58. 62. McCall, radio interview by Studs Terkel, September 4, 1981. 63. Brady, “Sweet Home Chicago,” 43; Lewis Porter, “Air Time,” 116. Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill’s lifelong friend, remembered the first time he heard the young saxophonist play: “I met [Threadgill] when I was twelve years old. And when he was fourteen years old, he had Sonny Rollins down, Sonny Rollins’ devices down. He was outrageous!” Braxton, interview by Libby Van Cleve, February 20, 2009. 64. Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 65. Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 66. “As Threadgill points out, the distant tone intervals in the staccato, spacednote theme predict spacing and distances in the solos.” Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 67. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 194. 68. Litweiler, “Air,” 51. 69. Hopkins, radio interview by Ted Panken, August 2, 1987.

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70. Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 71. Fales, “Auditory Illusion and Cognitive Patterns in Whispered Inanga”; Robert Palmer, “Air—Democracy in Jazz Action,” D38. 72. Hopkins, radio interview by Ted Panken, August 2, 1987. 73. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 74. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, 193–194. 75. Threadgill also created a larger version of the instrument—the hubkawall— with eighteen hubcaps, ten more than the hubkaphone. Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 76. Grella and Foye, “Ride It, or Go Under”; Mandel, “Henry Threadgill,” 28. 77. Grella and Foye, “Ride It, or Go Under”; Iverson, “Interview with Henry Threadgill (Part 3)”; Threadgill, interview by Gregg Bendian, January 22, 2016. 78. “The kabuki actors have an element of improvisation, so the musicians know their themes and relate them to what they see.” Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 79. Lewis Porter, “Air Time,” 116. 80. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 81. Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 82. Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 83. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. See Edwards, Epistrophies, for an analysis of “the micropoetics of the song title” in “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water” and other Threadgill compositions. 84. Lewis, “Singing Omar’s Song,” 76. 85. “McCall determin[es] the length and course of interludes between theme restatements. . . .” Litweiler, liner notes for Air, Air Time. 86. “Peace & Rhythm’s Interview with Chuck Nessa of Nessa Records.” 87. “26th Annual Jazz Critics Poll,” 18; “27th Annual International Jazz Critics Poll,” 16. 88. Air, Montreux Suisse Air; Jenkins, Free Jazz and Free Improvisation, 1:6–7. 89. Jenkins, Free Jazz and Free Improvisation, 1:7; Shoemaker, Jazz in the 1970s, 93. 90. Jenkins, Free Jazz and Free Improvisation, 1:7; Shoemaker, Jazz in the 1970s, 150. 91. “28th Annual International Jazz Critics Poll,” 16–17. 92. Zabor, “Air,” 56. See also Shoemaker, Jazz in the 1970s, 150. 93. Air, 80° Below ’82; Air, Air Mail; Air, Live Air. 94. Jenkins, Free Jazz and Free Improvisation, 1:7. 95. Ratliff, “Fred Hopkins, Experimental Jazz Bassist, 51,” B6. 96. Backström, The Illustrated Henry Threadgill Discography; Pareles, “Big Ideas Take a Back Seat to a Good Time,” H27. 97. Birnbaum, “Outside Moves In,” 17–18; Shoemaker, Jazz in the 1970s, 150. 98. Mercer, “Some Guys Are Only About . . . ,” 223; Chad E. Taylor, “Henry Threadgill’s Zooid,” 20. 99. Chad E. Taylor, “Henry Threadgill’s Zooid,” 19–20; Threadgill and Make a Move, Everybodys Mouth’s a Book. 100. See Hill, “Idiosyncratic Concepts in the Music of Henry Threadgill’s Zooid”;

n o t e s t o p a g e s 10 8 – 1 1 2

[ 215 ]

and Chad E. Taylor, “Henry Threadgill’s Zooid,” for more on the “intervallic language” employed by the ensemble. 101. Santoro, “Henry Threadgill,” 25. 102. “In for a Penny, In for a Pound, by Henry Threadgill (Pi Recordings)”; Threadgill, In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Chapter 5 1. Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 33. 2. In May 1965, before the AACM had a name, Philip Cohran proposed calling the nascent organization the “Association of Dedicated Creative Artists.” Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 110–111. 3. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 116–118. 4. For an account of the AACM’s discovery of “little instruments,” see Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 45–46. 5. Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light; Roscoe Mitchell, Sound. 6. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 313, 318–320. 7. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself. 8. Lewis, Sullivan, and Griffin, program for Afterword, an Opera world premiere, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2015. 9. George Lewis, quoted in Parker, “George Lewis,” 84. 10. Roscoe Mitchell appeared on the first recording of Voyager. Lewis, Voyager. 11. Gregory Taylor, “An Interview with George Lewis and Damon Holzborn, Part 2.” 12. Lewis, “Living with Creative Machines,” 93. 13. Born, “On Musical Mediation,” 32. See Lewis, “From Network Bands to Ubiquitous Computing,” for a history of interactive computer music prior to Voyager. 14. A few studies (Born, “On Musical Mediation,” 27–28; Hannaford, “Stretching the Boundaries”; Monaghan, “A Conversation with George Lewis,” 146–147) briefly explore Voyager’s connections to the music of the AACM, but typically this context is downplayed. See Dean, Hyperimprovisation, 81–84, 123–126, 162–176, 178–179; Gbadebo, “Multiplex Consciousness,” 11–15; Jennie Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 209–210; Hagan, “The Intersection of ‘Live’ and ‘Real-Time,’” 143–144; Nelson, “Cohabitating in Time,” 112–113; Savery, “Algorithmic Improvisers,” 10–13; and Tanner, “Olly Wilson, Anthony Davis, and George Lewis,” 47. 15. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 281–282. 16. Steinbeck, “‘Patience, Sincerity, and Consistency.’” Fred Anderson’s late 1960s playing can be heard on Joseph Jarman’s Song For and As If It Were the Seasons. Jarman, Song For; Jarman, As If It Were the Seasons. 17. Lewis, interview by Eva Soltes, October 9, 1997. 18. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 282. 19. Karabel, “How Affirmative Action Took Hold at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,” 66. 20. George Lewis, quoted in Rockwell, “A New Music Director Comes to the Avant-Garde Kitchen,” D23. 21. Lewis, interview by Eva Soltes, October 9, 1997. 22. Gluck, “Electroacoustic, Creative, and Jazz,” 142; Lewis, interview by Eva Soltes, October 9, 1997.

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23. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 341. 24. Lewis, Homage to Charles Parker; Parker, “George Lewis,” 83. 25. Lewis, “Living with Creative Machines,” 86–87. 26. Lewis, “Living with Creative Machines,” 88. 27. Lewis, “Living with Creative Machines,” 83; McLellan, “Strange Music at the Kitchen,” H9. 28. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, xxiii. 29. Lewis, interview by Eva Soltes, October 9, 1997; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 284; Rockwell, “A New Music Director Comes to the Avant-Garde Kitchen,” D23, D29. 30. Lewis, “Living with Creative Machines,” 90–91. For a recording of the Rainbow Family premiere, see Lewis, Rainbow Family. 31. Lewis, interview by Eva Soltes, October 9, 1997. 32. Born, Rationalizing Culture, 192; Lewis, liner notes for Lewis, Rainbow Family. 33. Lewis, interview by Eva Soltes, October 9, 1997; Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 34. 34. Gregory Taylor, “An Interview with George Lewis and Damon Holzborn, Part 2.” The Disklavier version of Voyager made its debut as the piano soloist in Lewis’s Virtual Concerto (2004), an orchestral work premiered at Carnegie Hall by the American Composers Orchestra. A subsequent version of Voyager for Disklavier can be heard on Lewis and Mitchell, Voyage and Homecoming. 35. Lewis, “Living with Creative Machines,” 83. 36. Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 34–35. 37. Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 36. 38. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 282; Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 49–50. 39. Art Ensemble of Chicago, Live at Mandel Hall. For an analysis of Live at Mandel Hall, see Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 181–212. 40. George Lewis, quoted in Parker, “George Lewis,” 84. 41. Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 36. 42. Lewis, Endless Shout. 43. Abrams, Blu Blu Blu; Abrams, The Hearinga Suite; Abrams, Rejoicing with the Light. 44. George Lewis, quoted in Dean, Hyperimprovisation, 164. 45. Dean, Hyperimprovisation, 81. 46. George Lewis, quoted in Parker, “George Lewis,” 85. 47. Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 34. In the Max/MSP instantiations of Voyager, setphrasebehavior was referred to as setphrase or “The Phraser.” Gregory Taylor, “An Interview with George Lewis and Damon Holzborn, Part 1.” 48. Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 35. 49. Lewis, liner notes for Lewis, Voyager. 50. Lewis, “Interacting with Latter-Day Musical Automata,” 103–104. 51. George Lewis, quoted in Dean, Hyperimprovisation, 171. 52. Lewis, “Interacting with Latter-Day Musical Automata,” 105. 53. Lewis, “Interacting with Latter-Day Musical Automata,” 105. 54. Lewis, “Too Many Notes,” 36. 55. Lewis, “Singing the Alternative Interactivity Blues,” 5. 56. George Lewis, quoted in Casserley, “Person to . . . Person?” 57. Lewis, “Living with Creative Machines,” 83.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 19 – 1 2 3

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58. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 111. 59. George Lewis, quoted in Casserley, “Person to . . . Person?” 60. George Lewis, quoted in Casserley, “Person to . . . Person?” 61. Lewis, “Interacting with Latter-Day Musical Automata,” 100–101. Chapter 6 1. Tatsu Aoki, quoted in Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero.” 2. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 118, 140. 3. Jarman, As If It Were the Seasons; Jarman, Song For. 4. Litweiler, “Overdue Ovation,” 45. 5. Litweiler, “Overdue Ovation,” 45; Charl[ie] Parker’s Ree Boppers, “Billies Bounce”/“Now’s the Time.” 6. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 26. 7. Elaine Cohen, “Fred Anderson,” 18; Pierce, email message to author, April 14, 2020. 8. Anderson, interview by author, August 5, 2009; Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 20–21. 9. Anderson and Steinbeck, Exercises for the Creative Musician. 10. Anderson, interview by author, March 4, 2002. 11. Anderson, interview by author, August 5, 2009. 12. Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 21. 13. Solothurnmann, “Fred Anderson,” 41. 14. Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 21; Jung, “A Fireside Chat with Joseph Jarman.” 15. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 118. 16. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 293. 17. Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 21; Mandel, “Different Ways to See and Be.” 18. Elaine Cohen, “Fred Anderson,” 18; Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 21; Steiger, “Meeting & Parting,” 15–16. 19. Lewis, “Teaching Improvised Music,” 88. For contemporaneous accounts of Anderson’s 1970s ensemble, see Elaine Cohen, “Fred Anderson,” 18–19; Charles Mitchell, “Fred Anderson Sextet, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,” 35–36; and Tesser, “Whither the Avant-Garde?,” x2. 20. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 321. See also Elaine Cohen, “Fred Anderson,” 19. 21. Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero”; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 318. 22. Elaine Cohen, “Fred Anderson,” 18; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 320–321. 23. Solothurnmann, “Fred Anderson,” 39; Thiem, “Dieter Glawischnig,” 42. See also Jost, Free Jazz, especially chapter 9, which discusses the early recordings of Muhal Richard Abrams, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell. 24. Mandel, “Fred Anderson’s Great Hope,” 28; Neighbours, Accents. 25. Anderson, Another Place; Elaine Cohen, “Fred Anderson,” 18; Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 20; Glawischnig, letter to Fred Anderson, January 9, 2009.

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26. Fred Anderson, quoted in Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 46. 27. Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 46. 28. Anderson, interview by author, August 5, 2009. 29. Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 20. 30. Anderson, Dark Day; Anderson, The Missing Link. 31. Michael Jackson, “Inspirational Motivation,” 50. 32. Anderson, interview by author, August 5, 2009; Steiger, “Fred Anderson,” 28. 33. Fred Anderson, quoted in Jung, “A Fireside Chat with Fred Anderson.” 34. Whiteis, “New Velvet,” 36. 35. Litweiler, “Center Stage,” A3. 36. Litweiler, “Overdue Ovation,” 44–45. 37. Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 229–230. 38. Vega, “AACM’s Fred Anderson.” See ER, season 4, episode 21. 39. Fred Anderson, quoted in Whiteis, “New Velvet,” 36. 40. Douglas Ewart, quoted in Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero.” 41. Jung, “A Fireside Chat with Fred Anderson.” 42. Litweiler, “Overdue Ovation,” 45; Maghostut Trio, Live at Last. 43. Aaron Cohen, “AACM Works Great Black Music Ensemble,” 26; Michael Jackson, “Inspirational Motivation,” 51. 44. Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero.” 45. Pierce, email message to author, April 14, 2020; Whiteis, “New Velvet,” 36. 46. Douglas Ewart, quoted in Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero.” 47. Anderson, Volume Two. 48. Anderson and Steinbeck, Exercises for the Creative Musician, 2nd ed., 71–72. 49. Wong, “Asian American Improvisation in Chicago.” Volume Two was the second in a series of six Fred Anderson albums issued by Asian Improv Records: Anderson, Volume One; Anderson, Volume Two; Anderson, Live at the Velvet Lounge—Volume III; Anderson, Live Volume IV; Anderson, Birthday Live 2000; Anderson, Quintessential Birthday Trio Vol. II. 50. Aoki, email message to author, January 15, 2021. 51. Wong, “Asian American Improvisation in Chicago.” 52. Aoki, email message to author, September 11, 2011. 53. Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 119, 129. 54. van Trikt, “Nicole Mitchell,” 39. 55. Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 112, 134; Pierrepont, La Nuée, 186–187, 191. 56. Parker, email message to author, December 22, 2019. 57. Tisue, “Chicago Now.” 58. Mehr, “Raising Hamid.” 59. Hamid Drake, quoted in Mehr, “Raising Hamid.” 60. Friedman and Birnbaum, “Fred Anderson,” 46. 61. Anderson, interview by author, August 5, 2009. 62. Fred Anderson, quoted in Frantz and Corbin, “Fred Anderson Interview,” 10. 63. Aoki, email message to author, September 11, 2011. 64. For more on Clarence Bright’s work as an album producer and audio engineer, see Michael Jackson, liner notes for Anderson, Back at the Velvet Lounge. 65. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 277, 283, 318, 443. 66. Jeff Parker’s unique approach to blues playing “made an impression” on Fred Anderson during their first performance together: “Fred later told me that . . .

n o t e s t o pa g e s 13 0 –13 8

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I played the blues, but ‘in this weird way.’” Parker, email message to author, December 22, 2019. 67. “The Fred Anderson Quartet asserts the primacy of open-ended narrative, in live dialogue with an audience whose quiet intensity of listening can be felt as you hear this recording—a phenomenon of emotional transduction that transcends the known limits of digital reproduction.” Lewis, liner notes for Anderson, Volume Two. 68. Anderson, interview by author, November 7, 2000. 69. Anderson, interview by author, November 7, 2000. 70. Anderson, interview by author, November 7, 2000. 71. Lewis, liner notes for Anderson, Volume Two. 72. Anderson, interview by author, November 7, 2000. 73. “You’re trying to catch the audience’s ear. You play little things over and over so they can remember it. But during your solo you can always play something different if you think about it. . . . you have to take chances, just like you take chances in life.” Anderson, interview by author, November 2, 2000. 74. Anderson, interview by author, November 7, 2000. 75. “Here, the audience is charged with a measure of responsibility fully equal to that of the musicians, as all of us engage with audible histories, memories, identities, and personalities, while none of us know just where that engagement might lead us.” Lewis, liner notes for Anderson, Volume Two. 76. Shipton, “South Side Free Spree,” 12. 77. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 513. 78. Pierce, liner notes for Anderson and Bankhead, The Great Vision Concert; Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 234. 79. Glasspiegel, “Anderson Plans to Move Velvet Lounge,” 22. 80. Michael Jackson, “Inspirational Motivation,” 51; Nicole Mitchell, “Fred Anderson,” 33; Whiteis, “New Velvet,” 36. 81. Pierce, email message to author, March 6, 2020. 82. Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 235. For a poetic treatment of the Velvet Lounge’s décor, see Plumpp, Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth. 83. Whiteis, “New Velvet,” 36; Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 235. 84. Nicole Mitchell, “Fred Anderson,” 33. 85. Fred Anderson, quoted in Whiteis, “New Velvet.” 86. Watters, “Fred Anderson’s 80th B-Day.” 87. Anderson, 21st Century Chase; Michael Jackson, “Inspirational Motivation,” 48. 88. Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero”; Steinbeck, “‘Patience, Sincerity, and Consistency.’” 89. Lewis, “Something Like Fred.” 90. Anderson and Steinbeck, Exercises for the Creative Musician, 2nd ed., 39–58. 91. George Lewis, quoted in Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero.” 92. Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 93. George Lewis, quoted in Anderson et al., “Celebrating a Jazz Hero.” 94. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 448. 95. Weber, “Fred Anderson, 81, Tenor Saxophonist,” D7; Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 235. 96. Blumenfeld, “A Greater Power,” 35; Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 240. 97. Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 241.

[ 220 ]

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 3 8 – 14 1

98. Fred Anderson, quoted in Newsome, “It’s After the End of the World! Don’t You Know That Yet?,” 172–173. Chapter 7 1. Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 2. Abrams, Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell, Streaming; Mercer, “Some Guys Are Only About . . . ,” 223; Smith, Golden Quartet; Steinbeck, liner notes for Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell, Voyage and Homecoming. 3. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 319. See Pierrepont, chaos, cosmos, musique, 220–221, for a list of the AACM members who came into the organization during the 1970s. 4. For a review of one of the AACM Big Band’s final performances, see Balliett, “Jazz: New York Notes,” 96–97. 5. Ameen Muhammad, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 416. 6. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 260, 276–277, 325, 333–335. 7. Hentoff, “‘Great Black Music’ from Chicago’s Art Ensemble,” 25. The AACM’s late 1970s major-label albums include: Abrams, Lifea Blinec; Abrams, Spiral; Air, Air Lore; Air, Montreux Suisse Air; Air, Open Air Suit; Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nice Guys; Smith, Divine Love; Threadgill, X-75 Volume 1; and Braxton’s Arista discs. 8. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 428, 440. 9. Douglas Ewart, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 423. 10. Chinen, “Four Decades of Music That Redefined Free,” E8; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 397, 416. 11. Shadow Vignettes, Birth of a Notion. 12. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 13. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 389. 14. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020; Marovich, A City Called Heaven, 90–92. 15. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 16. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 390. 17. Dawn Renee Jones, “Mwata Bowden,” 8; Reich, “Saluting a Chicago Teacher Who Turned Out Jazz Stars,” AE1. 18. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 19. Dawn Renee Jones, “Mwata Bowden,” 8; Reich, “Saluting a Chicago Teacher Who Turned Out Jazz Stars,” AE1. 20. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 391, 407. 21. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 22. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020; Dawn Renee Jones, “Mwata Bowden,” 8. 23. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. For more on the AACM Big Band, see Pierrepont, “Mwata Bowden,” 30. 24. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 25. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. See Balliett, “Jazz: New York Notes,” 94, for a description of one of Bowden’s performances with Abrams. 26. Dawn Renee Jones, “Mwata Bowden,” 8; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 391.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 14 1 – 14 5

[ 221 ]

27. Gluck, “Electroacoustic, Creative, and Jazz,” 142; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 309–310; Lewis, interview by Eva Soltes, October 9, 1997. 28. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 29. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 30. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 31. Dawn Renee Jones, “Mwata Bowden,” 8. 32. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 177. 33. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 34. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 464. See also Despont and Nussbaum, “Ecstatic Ensemble,” 54. 35. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 36. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 313. 37. Mwata Bowden, quoted in Reich, “New Music’s Mentors,” I6. 38. Reich, “New Music’s Mentors,” I6. 39. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 40. Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 147. 41. Mwata Bowden, quoted in Broecking, “30 Jahre AACM,” 38. 42. Lester Bowie, quoted in Don Palmer, “About Time,” 51. 43. Don Palmer, “About Time,” 51. For more on the Art Ensemble’s slogan “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future,” see Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 222–228. 44. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 319, 393–394, 449. Sound Spectrum was the name of Mwata Bowden’s longstanding quartet. Litweiler, “AACM at 30,” 11. 45. Aaron Cohen, “AACM Works Great Black Music Ensemble,” 26. 46. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 47. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 48. Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 49. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 333–334, 460–461, 478–479; Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 50. Aaron Cohen, “AACM Works Great Black Music Ensemble,” 26. 51. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 485. See also Michael Jackson, “AACM Displays New, Old at 40th Anniversary Concert.” 52. Reich, “At Jazz Festival, a Requiem for New Orleans.” 53. Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 240. 54. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 55. Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 56. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 57. Reich, “AACM Dives into New Compositions,” On the Town 13. 58. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 59. AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, Sparx of Love—Sparx of Fire! A Tribute to Martin Sparx Alexander. 60. Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 61. West, “Umbria Jazz: Days 4–6, July 13–15, 2009”; West, “Umbria Jazz: Days 7–10, July 16–19, 2009.” 62. AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, At Umbria Jazz 2009; Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 63. Weir, “Vienne & Umbria,” 3. 64. Alexander, email message to author, May 22, 2020. 65. Bowden, telephone interview by author, June 20, 2020.

[ 222 ]

n o t e s t o p a g e s 14 6 – 1 5 8

66. Ziyad, “Esoteric Intrusiveness.” 67. Dawkins, “Nebulisium-Cipher.” 68. James Brown, The Payback. 69. Ewart, email message to author, May 24, 2020; Mosley, email message to author, May 25, 2020. 70. Ewart, email message to author, May 24, 2020. 71. Lewis, “Fractals.” 72. Lewis, interview by Ted Panken, July 14, 2009. 73. Lewis, email message to author, March 31, 2018. 74. “I thought the tonality transition in the second improvisation was miraculous.” Lewis, email message to author, March 31, 2018. 75. Lewis, email message to author, April 3, 2018. 76. Here Renée Baker, Tomeka Reid, and Ann Ward employ the D  ♭  Lydian dominant scale, made up of the pitches D  ♭ , E  ♭ , F, G, A  ♭ , B  ♭ , and C  ♭ . At times, Saalik Ziyad, Taalib-Din Ziyad, and the instrumentalists add F  ♭  and G  ♭ , pitches borrowed from the D  ♭  Dorian mode. 77. Alexander, email message to author, May 22, 2020. 78. Alexander, email message to author, May 22, 2020. 79. Ewart, “Concentric.” 80. See Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 194–199, for a discussion of other modular compositions by AACM artists, including Roscoe Mitchell’s “Checkmate.” 81. Ewart, “Sonic Tops.” For more on Ewart’s Sonic Tops, see Heble, Douglas R. Ewart’s Crepuscule. 82. “People are drawn to the rhythm, the swing,” Fred Anderson would tell Nicole Mitchell. “Don’t forget where the music comes from—[there’s] nothing new under the sun.” Nicole Mitchell, “Fred Anderson,” 33; Nicole Mitchell, “Under the Sun.” 83. “An Insolent Noise Chicago.” 84. Stewart, “Musician George Lewis Riffs on Improv and Ethics.” 85. “Made in Chicago 2010.” 86. Nicole Mitchell, “Fred Anderson”; Reich, “Chicago’s Velvet Lounge Closed in Family Dispute.” 87. Reich, “Exuberant Sounds at Englewood Jazz Festival”; Zanolini, “Sacred Freedom,” 241, 257. 88. Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, program for AACM 50th anniversary reunion concert, Mandel Hall, University of Chicago, April 26, 2015. 89. Reich, “A Golden Night at the AACM’s 50th Anniversary Concert.” 90. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020; Kurt Gottschalk, “Mwata Bowden,” 10. 91. Bowden, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2020. 92. Chicago Park District, flyer for Fred Anderson Park grand opening celebration, Chicago, May 31, 2015. 93. Prior to 2015, Ernest Dawkins served as one of the Great Black Music Ensemble’s substitute directors. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 489. 94. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 405–406, 409–410. 95. Dawkins and New Horizons Ensemble, South Side Street Songs; Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, The Continuum; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 459. 96. Dawkins, “Live the Spirit Residency.”

n o t e s t o pa g e s 15 8 –161

[ 223 ]

97. Dawkins, telephone interview by author, September 8, 2020; Pierrepont, chaos, cosmos, musique, 221; Pierrepont, La Nuée, 190. 98. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 489. 99. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 489. 100. AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, Live at the Currency Exchange Cafe Volume 1. 101. Kurt Gottschalk, “Artifacts Investigates AACM at Spoleto”; Kot, “Greg Kot’s Guide to the 2019 Pitchfork Music Festival”; Mandel, “City’s Cultural Capital on Full Display at Chicago Jazz Festival”; Russonello, “An Innovative Flutist Takes the Lead,” C5. Chapter 8 1. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 115. 2. Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, July 14, 2011. 3. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 260. 4. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Jeff Jackson, “Wadada Leo Smith’s American Music,” 21. 5. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 115. 6. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 169. 7. Jung, “A Fireside Chat with Wadada Leo Smith.” 8. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 169–170. 9. Ness, “Leo Smith,” 36. 10. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 171. 11. Smith, email message to author, January 31, 2021; Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, July 14, 2011. 12. Braxton, Three Compositions of New Jazz. 13. Bradford Bailey, “The Scores of Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers, and the Specter of Race”; Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, July 14, 2011. For an insightful analysis of Braxton’s Composition 6E, see Sessa, Improvviso singolare, 366–367. 14. Smith, The Bell. 15. Corbett, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 56. For more on rhythm units, see Smith’s method book Rhythm (1976). 16. Smith, Rhythm. 17. Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith, Silence. 18. Braxton, B-Xo/N-O-I-47A; Braxton, This Time . . .; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 224–231, 241–244, 254–255. 19. Creative Construction Company, Creative Construction Company; Creative Construction Company, Creative Construction Company Vol. II; Gluck, The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, 75–78; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 326. 20. For accounts of Leroy Jenkins’s 1970s activities, including his work with the Revolutionary Ensemble, see Gluck, The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, 133–148; and Sessa, “Leroy Jenkins.” 21. Smith, “About.” 22. Erdmann, “Thinking Forward and Staying True,” 44. 23. Ness, “Leo Smith,” 37.

[ 224 ]

n o t e s t o pa g e s 161–16 5

24. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Birnbaum, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 24. 25. Barbiero, “Leo Smith and New Dalta Ahkri”; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 303. 26. Barbiero, “Leo Smith and New Dalta Ahkri”; Michael Jackson, “Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith,” 41. 27. Smith, liner notes for Smith, Divine Love. 28. Smith, liner notes for Smith, Divine Love. See also Birnbaum, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 22. 29. Smith, Solo Music (Ahkreanvention). 30. Smith, Creative Music-1 (Six Solo Improvisations). 31. New Dalta Ahkri, Reflectativity; New Dalta Ahkri, Song of Humanity (Kanto Pri Homaro); Smith, Solo Music (Ahkreanvention). 32. Smith, notes. 33. Derek Bailey, Improvisation; Braxton, Composition Notes; Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings; Sudnow, Ways of the Hand. Translated editions of Wadada Leo Smith’s notes were later published in Japan (Tokyo: Zen-On Music Company Ltd., 1976), Italy (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1981), and Iceland (Reykjavík: Mengi, 2018). 34. For a close reading of Smith’s notes, see Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?, 254–268. 35. Smith, notes. 36. Marion Brown, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. 37. Smith, notes. 38. Smith, “(M1) American Music.” 39. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 111. 40. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 111–114. 41. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 114–115. 42. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 116. 43. Smith, email message to author, January 31, 2021. 44. Erdmann, “Thinking Forward and Staying True,” 44; Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, December 20, 2011. 45. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Oteri, “Wadada Leo Smith”; Smith, Divine Love; Smith, Rastafari; Smith [and] Golden Quartet, Tabligh. Divine Love was the first of several albums Smith made for ECM Records. Smith also gave the record company its name (“Editions of Contemporary Music”) in a conversation with the label’s founder, Manfred Eicher. Weiss, “Wadada Leo Smith: Part Two,” 41. For more on Smith’s lifelong spiritual journey, see Bivins, Spirits Rejoice!, 241–250; Birnbaum, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 24–25; and Pérémarti, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 29. 46. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Oteri, “Wadada Leo Smith.” 47. Kowald, Smith, and Sommer, If You Want the Kernels You Have to Break the Shells; Smith, Human Rights; Smith, Kowald, and Sommer, Touch the Earth. 48. Birnbaum, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 22; Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, December 20, 2011. 49. Birnbaum, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 22; Gutkin, “American Opera, Jazz, and Historical Consciousness, 1924–1994,” 7; Smith, email message to author, January 31, 2021. 50. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 115. 51. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Birnbaum, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 22. 52. Mandel, “Elephant’s Memory,” 23.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 6 5 – 1 74

[ 225 ]

53. Erdmann, “Thinking Forward and Staying True,” 44. 54. Smith, Light Upon Light; Smith, Tao-Nija. 55. Blumenfeld, “Ten Years in Three Nights”; Smith and Southwest Chamber Music, Grand Oak Trees at Dawn/String Quartet No. 1/String Quartet No. 3 “Black Church”/ Bardsdale. 56. Wadada Leo Smith founded the Golden Quartet in 2000. The original members were Anthony Davis (piano), Smith’s AACM colleague Malachi Favors (bass), and former Experimental Band member Jack DeJohnette (drums). See Smith, Golden Quartet. 57. Smith, Ten Freedom Summers, score. 58. Fischlin, “Improvocracy.” 59. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). 60. Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, December 20, 2011. 61. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Brady, “Freedom Writer,” 11–12. 62. Fischlin, “Improvocracy.” For subsequent performances, Smith added one or more new compositions to Ten Freedom Summers, because he “wanted each audience to have [an] experience that was unique.” The New York premiere—held at Roulette in May 2013—featured his piece “The March on Washington D.C.,” commissioned by Harvard University’s Fromm Foundation. By 2018, Ten Freedom Summers had grown to a four-night, seven-hour event. Smith, email message to author, February 1, 2021. 63. The Ten Freedom Summers premiere also incorporated video projections by Ismail Ali and Robert Fenz, and the final concert closed with an audio excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech, given in Memphis on April 3, 1968. Woodard, “Wadada Leo Smith’s ‘Ten Freedom Summers,’ REDCAT.” 64. Blumenfeld, “Ten Years in Three Nights”; Fischlin, “Improvocracy.” 65. Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, December 20, 2011; Sumera, liner notes for Smith, Ten Freedom Summers. 66. Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, December 20, 2011. 67. Smith, “Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers.” 68. Shoemaker, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 63. 69. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Brady, “Freedom Writer,” 12. 70. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 71. Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 72. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 73. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 151–152. 74. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 75. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 151–152. 76. Pages 7–9 of the “Emmett Till” score (track 3, 11:38–12:34 on the Ten Freedom Summers recording) are a re-orchestration of rehearsal nos. 11–13 of “Black Church” (track 7, 8:11–9:22 on the recording). 77. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 78. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 79. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 80. Smith, email message to author, January 31, 2021. 81. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 82. Smith, email message to author, January 31, 2021. 83. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152. 84. Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 147. 85. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 152.

[ 226 ]

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 74 – 1 7 8

86. Woodard, “Onward & Upward,” 66. 87. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 147. 88. Brady, “Freedom Writer,” 12; Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices, 151; Shoemaker, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 63. 89. Reich, “Pulitzer Finalist Wadada Leo Smith Symbolizes Chicago Jazz Power.” 90. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Dansby, “Wadada Leo Smith Continues to Tinker with His Masterpiece”; Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Weiss, “Wadada Leo Smith: How Wet Is Wet for You?,” 41. 91. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Dansby, “Wadada Leo Smith Continues to Tinker with His Masterpiece.” 92. Smith, “(M1) American Music,” 115. 93. Hicks, “Jahzz,” 17; Panken, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 24; Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life, 124. 94. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Panken, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 24. 95. Beckwith and Roelstraete, The Freedom Principle, 232–233, 257; Corbett, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 46, 48; Walker and Corbett, gallery guide for Ankhrasmation. 96. Panken, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 24. 97. Panken, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 22; Smith, America’s National Parks. 98. Wadada Leo Smith, quoted in Panken, “Wadada Leo Smith,” 28. Chapter 9 1. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 2. Nicole Mitchell, email message to author, April 15, 2021. 3. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 464. 4. Nicole Mitchell, email message to author, April 14, 2021. 5. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 464. 6. Russonello, “An Innovative Flutist Takes the Lead,” C5. 7. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Spicer, “When Worlds Collide,” 40–41. 8. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 9. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 465; Margasak, “An Improvised Life.” 10. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 11. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 465. 12. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 13. Margasak, “An Improvised Life”; Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 14. Nicole Mitchell, email message to author, April 14, 2021. 15. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 465; Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Margasak, “An Improvised Life.” 16. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Margasak, “An Improvised Life.” 17. Margasak, “An Improvised Life”; Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae; Nicole Mitchell, email message to author, April 14, 2021. 18. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 19. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 20. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 21. Margasak, “An Improvised Life.” 22. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. See also Nicole Mitchell and Madhubuti, Liberation Narratives, a recording of poetry performances by Third World Press founder Haki Madhubuti and Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 17 8 –18 1

[ 227 ]

23. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 24. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 25. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 471, 477–478. 26. Margasak, “An Improvised Life.” 27. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 464, 478. 28. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 478–480; Nicole Mitchell, “What Was Feared Lost,” 226. 29. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 30. Shanta Nurullah, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 478. 31. Pierrepont and Pierrepont. “David Boykin & Nicky Mitchell,” 34. 32. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 33. Nicole Mitchell, “Fred Anderson,” 33. 34. Margasak, “An Improvised Life”; Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae. In 1996, just before Samana disbanded, the members of the ensemble released their only recording. See Samana, Samana. 35. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 36. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Margasak, “An Improvised Life.” 37. Tisue, “Chicago Now.” 38. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in DeJong, “Women of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,” 145. 39. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. 40. Nicole Mitchell, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, June 3, 2012. Mitchell used the name Black Earth Strings for her flute-violin-cello-bass quartet—and Black Earth Orchestra for her eleven- to twenty-piece ensemble. Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae. 41. Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Afrika Rising; Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Hope, Future, and Destiny; Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Vision Quest. 42. Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae; Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Black Unstoppable; Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Xenogenesis Suite; Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell, and Black Earth Ensemble, Three Compositions. 43. Waterman, “‘I Dreamed of Other Worlds.’” 44. Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae. 45. Russonello, “An Innovative Flutist Takes the Lead,” C5; Waterman, “‘I Dreamed of Other Worlds.’” 46. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Tesser, “Black Earth Rising,” 66. 47. Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae; Nicole Mitchell, email message to author, April 14, 2021. 48. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Waterman, “‘I Dreamed of Other Worlds.’” 49. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Tesser, “Leaving the City’s Music Scene, But Staying, Too,” A21. 50. Tesser, “Leaving the City’s Music Scene, But Staying, Too,” A21. 51. Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae. 52. Tesser, “Leaving the City’s Music Scene, But Staying, Too,” A21. 53. Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae. 54. Molly Jones, “Nicole Mitchell on Her Projects and Process”; Miriello, “Nicole Mitchell Heads West,” 16–17; Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae. 55. Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Intergalactic Beings; Nicole Mitchell

[ 228 ]

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 1 – 19 2

[and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II; Nicole Mitchell, Black Earth Ensemble, and Ensemble Laborintus, Moments of Fatherhood. 56. Roscoe Mitchell, Bells for the South Side; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “MCA Stage”; Reich, “World Premieres Spotlight Women of the AACM.” 57. Ricci, “Nicole Mitchell Premieres Collaborative Multi-Arts Mandorla Awakening November 22–23, 2013.” 58. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “Nicole Mitchell: Creative Music Summit.” 59. “The novella has not been published,” Nicole Mitchell told a Chicago critic in 2018: “It’s existed as a . . . myth, because I haven’t released it yet.” Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Corbett, “Flutist Nicole Mitchell Uses Music to Map a Possible Paradise.” 60. Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II, score. 61. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 62. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade; Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. The Mandorla Awakening narrative is also reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series of novels, which served as the inspiration for Nicole Mitchell’s Xenogenesis Suite (2008), Intergalactic Beings (2014), and EarthSeed (2020). See Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Intergalactic Beings; Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, Xenogenesis Suite; and Nicole Mitchell and Harris, EarthSeed. 63. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 64. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 65. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Spicer, “When Worlds Collide,” 42. 66. Molly Jones, “Nicole Mitchell on Her Projects and Process”; Nicole Mitchell, email message to author, April 14, 2021. 67. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Molly Jones, “Nicole Mitchell on Her Projects and Process”; Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 68. Nicole Mitchell, “What Was Feared Lost,” 230, 235. 69. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Spicer, “When Worlds Collide,” 40. 70. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Molly Jones, “Nicole Mitchell on Her Projects and Process.” 71. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Molly Jones, “Nicole Mitchell on Her Projects and Process.” 72. Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II, score. 73. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 74. Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II, score. 75. Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II, score. 76. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 77. “I’ve realized [that] what I’m doing with music is storytelling. Narrative has always informed my compositions, even if I don’t share that narrative with the audience.” Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Corbett, “Flutist Nicole Mitchell Uses Music to Map a Possible Paradise.”

n o t e s t o p a g e s 19 2 – 19 9

[ 229 ]

78. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 79. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 80. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 81. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 82. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 83. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 84. Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II, score. 85. Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II, score. 86. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 87. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 88. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 89. Nicole Mitchell, liner notes for Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 90. Nicole Mitchell [and Black Earth Ensemble], Mandorla Awakening II. 91. Russonello, “The Best Albums of 2017.” 92. “Complete Critics Poll Results,” 56; Nicole Mitchell, curriculum vitae. 93. Roscoe Mitchell, Bells for the South Side; Smith, Najwa. 94. American Composers Forum, “Sarah Cahill, Nicole Mitchell, Jim Staley to Receive Champion of New Music Award.” 95. Russonello, “Nicole Mitchell to Head Pittsburgh Jazz Studies,” C3. 96. Roscoe Mitchell, telephone interview by author, October 18, 2006; Smith, interview by Taylor Ho Bynum, December 20, 2011. 97. Erdmann, “Thinking Forward and Staying True,” 44; Ewart, curriculum vitae; Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 147; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, xxiii; Martin, liner notes to Roscoe Mitchell, Before There Was Sound; Pierrepont, La Nuée, 295; Radano, New Musical Figurations, 273n11. 98. Mandel, “Elephant’s Memory,” 23. 99. Chan, “An Interview with Fred Frith”; Gilbert, “Jazz Cellist Tomeka Reid to Make Debut as Mills Professor with Virtual Show”; Gilbert, “Prolific Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith Brings His Create Festival to SF.” 100. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Shanley, “Flutist, Composer and Educator Nicole Mitchell Discusses Her Appointment as the William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies.” 101. Russonello, “Nicole Mitchell to Head Pittsburgh Jazz Studies,” C3. 102. Joseph Jarman, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 499–500. Conclusion 1. Artifacts, liner notes for Artifacts, Artifacts. 2. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 98, 121–124.

[ 230 ]

n o t e s t o p a g e s 19 9 – 2 0 2

3. El’Zabar and Ritual Trio, Jitterbug Junction; Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Freedom Jazz Dance. 4. Art Ensemble of Chicago, Live from the Jazz Showcase; Art Ensemble of Chicago, Les Stances à Sophie. The Art Ensemble also recorded an album with arrangements of popular songs by Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Otis Redding. See Art Ensemble of Chicago, Ancient to the Future. 5. Kurt Gottschalk, “Artifacts Investigates AACM at Spoleto.” 6. Tomeka Reid, quoted in Collins, “Tomeka Reid.” 7. Artifacts, liner notes for Artifacts, Artifacts; Beckwith et al., “A Collective Conversation,” 188; Reed, “The AACM on the Move”; Reich, “At 40, Legendary Jazz Group at Turning Point.” 8. Tomeka Reid, quoted in Collins, “Tomeka Reid.” 9. Collins, “Tomeka Reid.” 10. Artifacts, Artifacts. 11. Pierrepont, chaos, cosmos, musique, 220–221; van Trikt, “Nicole Mitchell,” 39. See Reed, The City Was Yellow, 27, 77, for lead sheets of Edward Wilkerson Jr.’s “Light on the Path” and Jeff Parker’s “Days Fly By with Ruby.” 12. Pierrepont, chaos, cosmos, musique, 220. For a lead sheet of “Bernice” based on Fred Anderson’s original handwritten score, see Anderson and Steinbeck, Exercises for the Creative Musician, 2nd ed., 59–60. 13. Air, Air Mail; Air, Air Time; Collins, “Tomeka Reid.” 14. Myers, Song for Mother E. 15. 8 Bold Souls, Sideshow; Wilkerson, Light on the Path. 16. Martin, liner notes to Roscoe Mitchell, Before There Was Sound; Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 59–60, 65–66. 17. Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Impressions; Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Three Gentlemen from Chicago; Wilkerson, liner notes for Shadow Vignettes, Birth of a Notion. 18. Artifacts, liner notes for Artifacts, Artifacts. 19. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Cromwell, “Jazz Mecca,” 196. 20. Chinen, “Joseph Jarman, 81, Dies,” D7; Ratliff, “Lester Bowie Is Dead at 58,” B15; Ratliff, “Malachi Favors, 76, Jazz Bassist with Art Ensemble of Chicago,” B8. 21. Art Ensemble of Chicago, We Are on the Edge; Russonello, “Evolving at 50, and Still Unafraid of the Abyss,” C2. 22. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Shteamer, “The Art Ensemble of Chicago on the Past and Future of Their ‘Great Black Music.’” 23. Roscoe Mitchell, quoted in Russonello, “Evolving at 50, and Still Unafraid of the Abyss,” C2. 24. Nicole Mitchell, “Shows.” 25. Artifacts, . . . and then there’s this; Meyer, “Founded as an AACM Repertory Ensemble, the Artifacts Trio Now Plays Original Compositions.” 26. Mike Reed, quoted in Kurt Gottschalk, “Artifacts Investigates AACM at Spoleto.” 27. Henry Threadgill, quoted in Rotman, “An Interview with Henry Threadgill,” 3. 28. Nicole Mitchell, quoted in Kurt Gottschalk, “Artifacts Investigates AACM at Spoleto.”

r ecor dings

8 Bold Souls. Sideshow. Arabesque Jazz AJ0103, 1992, compact disc. AACM Great Black Music Ensemble. At Umbria Jazz 2009. Musica Jazz MJCD 1226, 2010, compact disc. AACM Great Black Music Ensemble. Live at the Currency Exchange Cafe Volume 1. AACM Chicago Productions, 2018, compact disc. AACM Great Black Music Ensemble. Sparx of Love—Sparx of Fire! A Tribute to Martin Sparx Alexander. AACM Chicago Productions, 2008, compact disc. Abrams, [Muhal] Richard. Levels and Degrees of Light. Delmark Records DS-413, 1968, 33⅓ rpm. Abrams, Muhal Richard. Lifea Blinec. Arista Novus AN 3000, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Abrams, Muhal Richard. SoundDance. Pi Recordings PI37, 2011, two compact discs. Abrams, Muhal Richard. Spiral. Arista Novus AN 3007, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Abrams, Muhal Richard. Think All, Focus One. Black Saint Records 120141–2, 1995, compact disc. Abrams, Muhal Richard. Young at Heart/Wise in Time. Delmark Records DS-423, 1970, 33⅓ rpm. Abrams, Muhal Richard [Orchestra]. Blu Blu Blu. Black Saint Records 120117–2, 1991, compact disc. Abrams, Muhal Richard [Orchestra]. The Hearinga Suite. Black Saint Records 120103– 1, 1989, 33⅓ rpm. Abrams, Muhal Richard [Orchestra]. Rejoicing with the Light. Black Saint Records BSR 0071, 1983, 33⅓ rpm. Abrams, Muhal Richard, George [E.] Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell. Streaming. Pi Recordings PI22, 2006, compact disc. Air. 80° Below ’82. Antilles AN-1007, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Air Lore. Arista Novus AN 3014, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Air Mail. Black Saint Records BSR 0049, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Air Raid. Whynot PA-7156, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Air Song. Whynot PA-7120, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Air Time. Nessa Records N-12, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Live Air. Black Saint Records BSR 0034, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Montreux Suisse Air. Arista Novus AN 3008, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Air. Open Air Suit. Arista Novus AN 3002, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Anderson, Fred. 21st Century Chase. Delmark Records DE-589, 2009, compact disc. Anderson, Fred. Back at the Velvet Lounge. Delmark Records DG-549, 2003, compact disc.

[ 232 ]

recordings

Anderson, Fred. The Missing Link. Nessa Records N-23, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Anderson, Fred. Quintessential Birthday Trio Vol. II. Asian Improv Records AIR 0087, 2015, compact disc. Anderson, Fred [Trio]. Birthday Live 2000. Asian Improv Records, 2009, compact disc. Anderson, Fred [Quartet]. Dark Day. Message Records 0004, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Anderson, Fred [Quartet]. Live at the Velvet Lounge—Volume III. Asian Improv Records AIR 0074, 2008, compact disc. Anderson, Fred [Quartet]. Live Volume IV. Asian Improv Records AIR 0087, 2016, compact disc. Anderson, Fred [Quartet]. Volume One. Asian Improv Records AIR 0049, 1999, compact disc. Anderson, Fred [Quartet]. Volume Two. Asian Improv Records AIR 0054, 2000, two compact discs. Anderson, Fred [Quintet]. Another Place. Moers Music MOMU 01058, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Anderson, Fred, and Harrison Bankhead. The Great Vision Concert. Ayler Records aylCD-052, 2007, compact disc. Art Ensemble [of Chicago]. 1967/68. Nessa Records NCD-2500, 1993, five compact discs. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Ancient to the Future. DIW 8014, 1987, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Eda Wobu. JMY 1008–2, 1991, compact disc. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Fanfare for the Warriors. Atlantic Records SD 1651, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. A Jackson in Your House. BYG/Actuel 529302, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Live at Mandel Hall. Delmark Records DS-432/433, 1974, two 33⅓ rpm discs. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Live from the Jazz Showcase. University of Illinois at Chicago Media Production Center, 1982, VHS videocassette. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Message to Our Folks. BYG/Actuel 529328, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Nice Guys. ECM Records 1126, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. People in Sorrow. Pathé 2C 062–10523, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Reese and the Smooth Ones. BYG/Actuel 529329, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. The Spiritual. Freedom FLP 40108, 1972, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Les Stances à Sophie. Pathé 2C 062–11365, 1970, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. Tutankhamun. Freedom FLP 40122, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Art Ensemble of Chicago. We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration. Pi Recordings PI80, 2019, two compact discs. Artifacts. . . . and then there’s this. Astral Spirits AS139, 2021, compact disc. Artifacts. Artifacts. 482 Music 482–1093, 2015, compact disc. Black Spirits: Festival of New Black Poets in America. Black Forum B 456L, 1972, 33⅓ rpm. Bowie, Lester. Numbers 1 & 2. Nessa Records N-1, 1967, 33⅓ rpm. Braxton, Anthony. Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979. Arista Records A2L 8602, 1979, two 33⅓ rpm discs. Braxton, Anthony. B-Xo/N-O-I-47A. BYG/Actuel 529315, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Braxton, Anthony. Creative Orchestra Music 1976. Arista Records AL 4080, 1976, 33⅓ rpm.

recordings

[ 233 ]

Braxton, Anthony. For Alto. Delmark Records DS-420/421, 1971, two 33⅓ rpm discs. Braxton, Anthony. For Four Orchestras. Arista Records A3L 8900, 1978, three 33⅓ rpm discs. Braxton, Anthony. For Trio. Arista Records AB 4181, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Braxton, Anthony. For Two Pianos. Arista Records AL 9559, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Braxton, Anthony. This Time. . . . BYG/Actuel 529347, 1970, 33⅓ rpm. Braxton, Anthony. Three Compositions of New Jazz. Delmark Records DS-415, 1968, 33⅓ rpm. Braxton, Anthony, and Muhal Richard Abrams. Duets 1976. Arista Records AL 4101, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. Braxton, Anthony, Leroy Jenkins, and [Wadada] Leo Smith. Silence. Freedom FLP 40123, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Brown, James. The Payback. Polydor PD 2–3007, 1973, two 33⅓ rpm discs. Brown, Marion. Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. ECM Records 1004, 1970, 33⅓ rpm. Creative Construction Company. Creative Construction Company. Muse Records MR 5071, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Creative Construction Company. Creative Construction Company Vol. II. Muse Records MR 5097, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. Dawkins, Ernest, and New Horizons Ensemble. South Side Street Songs. Silkheart Records SHCD 132, 1993, compact disc. El’Zabar, Kahil, and Ritual Trio. Jitterbug Junction. CIMP 150, 1997, compact disc. Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. The Continuum. Delmark Records DE-496, 1997, compact disc. Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. Freedom Jazz Dance. Delmark Records DE-517, 1999, compact disc. Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. Impressions. Red Record VPA 156, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. Three Gentlemen from Chicago. Moers Music MOMU 01076, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Fleming, King. King! The King Fleming Songbook. Southport Records S-SSD 0041, 1996, compact disc. Jarman, Joseph. As If It Were the Seasons. Delmark Records DS-417, 1968, 33⅓ rpm. Jarman, Joseph. Song For. Delmark Records DS-410, 1967, 33⅓ rpm. Kowald, Peter, [Wadada] Leo Smith, and Günter Sommer. If You Want the Kernels You Have to Break the Shells. FMP Records 0920, 1983, 33⅓ rpm. Lewis, George [E]. Endless Shout. Tzadik Records TZ 7054, 2000, compact disc. Lewis, George [E]. Homage to Charles Parker. Black Saint Records BSR 0029, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Lewis, George [E]. Rainbow Family. Carrier Records carrier 051, 2020, compact disc. Lewis, George E. Voyager. Avant Records AVAN 014, 1993, compact disc. Lewis, George [E.], and Roscoe Mitchell. Voyage and Homecoming. Rogue Art ROG0086, 2019, compact disc. Maghostut Trio. Live at Last. Rogue Art ROG-0005, 2006, compact disc. McIntyre, Maurice. Humility in the Light of the Creator. Delmark Records DS-419, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Mitchell, Nicole, and Black Earth Ensemble. Afrika Rising. Dreamtime Records 004, 2002, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole, and Black Earth Ensemble. Black Unstoppable. Delmark Records DE575, 2007, compact disc.

[ 234 ]

recordings

Mitchell, Nicole, and Black Earth Ensemble. Hope, Future, and Destiny. Dreamtime Records 007, 2004, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole, and Black Earth Ensemble. Intergalactic Beings. FPE Records 002, 2014, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole[, and Black Earth Ensemble]. Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds. FPE Records 012, 2017, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole, and Black Earth Ensemble. Vision Quest. Dreamtime Records, 2001, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole, and Black Earth Ensemble. Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler. Firehouse 12 Records FH12–04–01–006, 2008, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole, Black Earth Ensemble, and Ensemble Laborintus. Moments of Fatherhood. Rogue Art ROG-0068, 2016, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole, and Lisa E. Harris. EarthSeed. FPE Records 027, 2020, compact disc. Mitchell, Nicole, and Haki Madhubuti. Liberation Narratives. Black Earth Music, 2017, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe. Before There Was Sound. Nessa Records NCD-34, 2011, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe. Bells for the South Side. ECM Records 2494/2495, 2017, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe. Four Compositions. Lovely Music LCD 2021, 1987, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe. Nonaah. Nessa Records N-9/10, 1977, two 33⅓ rpm discs. Mitchell, Roscoe. Not Yet: Six Compositions. Mutable Music 17550–2, 2013, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe. Old/Quartet. Nessa Records N-5, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Mitchell, Roscoe. Roscoe Mitchell Quartet. Sackville Recordings 2009, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Mitchell, Roscoe. The Roscoe Mitchell Solo Saxophone Concerts. Sackville Recordings 2006, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Mitchell, Roscoe [Art Ensemble]. Congliptious. Nessa Records N-2, 1968, 33⅓ rpm. Mitchell, Roscoe [Quartet]. Live at “A Space” 1975. Delmark Records SK-2080, 2013, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe [Sextet]. Sound. Delmark Records DS-408, 1966, 33⅓ rpm. Mitchell, Roscoe [Sextet]. Sound. Delmark Records DE-408, 1996, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe, Nicole Mitchell, and Black Earth Ensemble. Three Compositions: Live at Sant’Anna Arresi. Rogue Art ROG-0043, 2012, compact disc. Mitchell, Roscoe, with Ostravska Banda. Distant Radio Transmission. Wide Hive Records WH-0347, 2019, compact disc. MJT+3. Daddy-O Presents MJT+3. Argo LP-621, 1957, 33⅓ rpm. Myers, Amina Claudine. Song for Mother E. Leo Records LR 100, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Neighbours. Accents. Musicians Record Co. 1C 066–32 854, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. New Dalta Ahkri. Reflectativity. Kabell Records K-2, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. New Dalta Ahkri. Song of Humanity (Kanto Pri Homaro). Kabell Records K-3, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Parker, Charl[ie][, and] Ree Boppers. “Billies Bounce”/“Now’s the Time.” Savoy Records 573, 1945, 78 rpm. Samana. Samana. Storywiz Records M100D, 1996, compact disc. Shadow Vignettes. Birth of a Notion. Sessoms Records 0001, 1986, 33⅓ rpm. Smith, Wadada Leo. America’s National Parks. Cuneiform Records RUNE 430/431, 2016, two compact discs.

recordings

[ 235 ]

Smith, [Wadada] Leo. Creative Music-1 (Six Solo Improvisations). Kabell Records K-1, 1972, 33⅓ rpm. Smith, [Wadada] Leo. Divine Love. ECM Records 1143, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Smith, Wadada Leo. Golden Quartet. Tzadik TZ 7604, 2000, compact disc. Smith, [Wadada] Leo. Human Rights. Gramm Records 24, 1986, 33⅓ rpm. Smith, Wadada Leo. Light Upon Light. Tzadik TZ 7046, 1999, compact disc. Smith, Wadada Leo. Najwa. TUM Records 049, 2017, compact disc. Smith, [Wadada] Leo. Rastafari. Sackville Recordings 3030, 1983, 33⅓ rpm. Smith, [Wadada] Leo. Solo Music (Ahkreanvention). Kabell Records K-4, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Smith, Wadada Leo. Tao-Nija. Tzadik TZ 7017, 1996, compact disc. Smith, Wadada Leo. Ten Freedom Summers. Cuneiform Records RUNE 350/351/352/353, 2012, four compact discs. Smith, Wadada Leo[, and] Golden Quartet. Tabligh. Cuneiform Records RUNE 270, 2008, compact disc. Smith, [Wadada] Leo, Peter Kowald, and Günter Sommer. Touch the Earth. FMP Records 0730, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Smith, Wadada Leo, and Southwest Chamber Music. Grand Oak Trees at Dawn/String Quartet No. 1/String Quartet No. 3 “Black Church”/Bardsdale. Cambria CD 8809, 2000, compact disc. Threadgill, Henry. X-75 Volume 1. Arista Novus AN 3013, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Threadgill, Henry, and Make a Move. Everybodys Mouth’s a Book. Pi Recordings PI01, 2001, compact disc. Threadgill, Henry [Zooid]. In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Pi Recordings PI58, 2015, compact disc. Wilkerson, Edward Jr. Light on the Path. Sound Aspects Records SAS CD 050, 1994, compact disc.

r efer ences

“26th Annual Jazz Critics Poll.” Down Beat 45, no. 14 (August 10, 1978): 15–18, 60–62. “27th Annual International Jazz Critics Poll.” Down Beat 46, no. 14 (August 9, 1979): 16–20, 52, 54, 56–57. “28th Annual International Jazz Critics Poll.” Down Beat 47, no. 8 (August 1980): 16–20, 63–64, 66. Abrams, [Muhal] Richard L., and Ken Chaney. “Creative Musicians Sponsor Artists Concert Showcase.” Chicago Defender, August 7, 1965: 14. “Ad Lib: Chicago.” Down Beat 30, no. 10 (May 9, 1963): 45. Alexander, Dee. Email message to author. May 22, 2020. American Composers Forum. “Sarah Cahill, Nicole Mitchell, Jim Staley to Receive Champion of New Music Award.” April 23, 2018. https://composersforum.org/ sarah-cahill-nicole-mitchell-jim-staley-to-receive-champion-of-new-music-award. Anders, Johannes. “Jazz-Festival Willisau.” Jazz Podium 25, no. 10 (October 1976): 18–19. Anderson, Fred. Interview by author. Chicago, November 2, 2000. Anderson, Fred. Interview by author. Chicago, November 7, 2000. Anderson, Fred. Interview by author. Chicago, March 4, 2002. Anderson, Fred. Interview by author. Chicago, August 5, 2009. Anderson, Fred, Tatsu Aoki, Douglas [R.] Ewart, Tsehaye Geralyn Hébert, George [E.] Lewis, Paul Steinbeck, and Francis Wong. “Celebrating a Jazz Hero: A Symposium on the Role of Fred Anderson in Chicago’s Jazz Legacy.” Critical Studies in Improvisation 6, no. 2 (December 2010). https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/ csieci/article/view/1019. Anderson, Fred, and Paul Steinbeck. Exercises for the Creative Musician. Chicago: Many Weathers Music, 2002. 2nd ed., 2010. “An Insolent Noise Chicago.” A Proposito di Jazz, September 28, 2009. http://www .online-jazz.net/2009/09/28/an-insolent-noise-chicago. Aoki, Tatsu. Email message to author. September 11, 2011. Aoki, Tatsu. Email message to author. January 15, 2021. Artifacts. Liner notes for Artifacts, Artifacts. 482 Music 482–1093, 2015, compact disc. Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Program for AACM 50th Anniversary Reunion Concert. Mandel Hall, University of Chicago, April 26, 2015. Backström, Lars. The Illustrated Henry Threadgill Discography, August 24, 2020. http:// discography.backstrom.se/threadgill.

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Bailey, Bradford. “The Scores of Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers, and the Specter of Race.” The Hum, November 23, 2016. https://blogthehum.com/ 2016/11/23/the-scores-of-ishmael-wadada-leo-smith-ten-freedom-summers-and -the-specter-of-race. Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. Ashbourne, Derbyshire: Moorland Publishing, 1980. Balliett, Whitney. “Jazz: New York Notes.” New Yorker, June 20, 1977: 92–97. Barbiero, Daniel. “Leo Smith and New Dalta Ahkri.” All About Jazz, April 7, 2020. https://www.allaboutjazz.com/leo-smith-and-new-dalta-ahkri-new-dalta-ahkri. Barker, Thurman. Telephone interview by author. Jeffersonville, NY, March 24, 2018. Beauchamp, Lincoln T. Jr. Art Ensemble of Chicago: Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future. Chicago: Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing, 1998. Beckwith, Naomi, Romi Crawford, Tomeka Reid, Dieter Roelstraete, and Hamza Walker, with commentary by Fred Moten. “A Collective Conversation.” In The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, edited by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, 186–199. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Beckwith, Naomi, and Dieter Roelstraete, eds. The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Bierma, Ron. “Nessa on the AACM.” Rhythm & News, 2000. https://web.archive.org/ web/20180607190235/http://delmark.com/rhythm.nessa.htm. Birnbaum, Larry. “Outside Moves In: Henry Threadgill Inks a Major-Label Deal.” Down Beat 62, no. 3 (March 1995): 16–19. Birnbaum, Larry. “Wadada Leo Smith.” Ear 13, no. 5 (July–August 1988): 22–25. Bisceglia, Jacques. Interview by author. Paris, France, July 28, 2006. Bivins, Jason. Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Blumenfeld, Larry. “A Greater Power.” Chamber Music Magazine 36, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 28–35. Blumenfeld, Larry. “Ten Years in Three Nights: A Decade’s Triumph.” Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2011. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB10001424052970203716204577013713658125178. Blumenthal, Bob. “A Kaleidoscope of Sound: Listening to the Big Picture with the Art Ensemble of Chicago.” Boston Globe, June 13, 1999: N1. Born, Georgina. “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology, and Creativity.” Twentieth-Century Music 2, no. 1 (March 2005): 7–36. Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Born, Georgina, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, eds. Improvisation and Social Aesthetics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Bourget, Jean-Loup. “Nessa Story.” Jazz Magazine, no. 264 (May 1978): 30–31, 46. Bowden, Mwata. Telephone interview by author. Chicago, March 8, 2020. Bowden, Mwata. Telephone interview by author. Chicago, June 20, 2020. Brady, Shaun. “Freedom Writer: Wadada Leo Smith on His Epic Masterwork, Ten Freedom Summers.” JazzTimes 42, no. 8 (October 2012): 11–12. Brady, Shaun. “Sweet Home Chicago.” JazzTimes 45, no. 4 (May 2015): 42–49. Braxton, Anthony. Composition 76. Score. Tri-Centric Foundation, 2014.

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inde x

8 Bold Souls, 200 80° Below ’82 (Air album), 91, 107 482 Music, 200 AACM. See Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) AACM Big Band, 1–2, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 204n34, 220n4, 220n23 AACM Experimental Chamber Ensemble, 144 AACM Great Black Music Ensemble: AACM anniversary festivals, 143–44, 157; Alexander von Schlippenbach, 157; directed by Douglas Ewart, 157; directed by Ernest Dawkins, 158, 222n93; directed by Mwata Bowden, 5, 139, 140, 143–44; founding, 139, 140, 143–44; Fred Anderson, 137, 157; George E. Lewis, 145, 157; Great Black Music concept, 143, 152; instrumentation, 144, 145–46; members, 144, 145–46; musical practices, 143–44, 145–56; original music, 143; tours, 144–45, 157, 180; Velvet Lounge, 5, 125, 144, 157; women, 144, 145–46 AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, works: At Umbria Jazz 2009 (album), 5, 145–56; “Concentric” (Douglas Ewart composition), 152–55; “Esoteric Intrusiveness” (Saalik Ziyad composition), 146–48, 157; “Fractals” (George E. Lewis composition), 150– 51; Live at the Currency Exchange Cafe Volume 1 (album), 158; “Nebulisium-

Cipher” (Ernest Dawkins composition), 148–50; Sparx of Love—Sparx of Fire! (album), 144; “Under the Sun” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 155–56; “Untitled” (Renée Baker composition), 157; “Vocaleidoscope” (Dee Alexander composition), 151–52; “Well Woven Web” (Mwata Bowden composition), 157 AACM School of Music, 89, 140, 142, 157, 178, 180, 201, 212n17 AACM Vocal Ensemble, 144, 151–52 Abrams, Muhal Richard: AACM chair, 7, 90, 143; AACM co-founder, 7, 89; biography, 9–10; Braxton-JenkinsSmith ensemble, 61, 160; Charles Stepney, 9; combining composition and improvisation, 4, 11, 30, 59; composing, 9–11, 27–28, 31, 142, 202; conducting, 1–2, 10–11, 29, 30, 31–32, 34, 35, 142; director of the AACM Big Band, 1–2, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 204n34; director of the Experimental Band, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 27, 37, 61, 89, 114, 122, 139, 140, 143, 158, 200; Eddie Harris, 29; extended forms, 4, 27, 32, 188; intensity structures, 32, 34–35; intermedia performance, 28; little instruments, 1–2, 28, 34–35; MJT+3, 10, 29; move to New York, 139; multiinstrumentalism, 27–28, 29, 32–33, 34, 61–62; musical notation, 10–11, 142; Richard McCreary, 141; solo performance, 38–39; technology, 4,

[ 256 ]

index

Abrams, Muhal Richard (continued) 28, 30, 32, 33–34; trio with George E. Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell, 139; visual art, 36, 207n113, 207n116; William Jackson, 9 Abrams, Muhal Richard, works: “The Bird Song” (composition), 27–28, 32–35, 36, 207n107; Levels and Degrees of Light (album), 4, 14, 27–36, 109; “Levels and Degrees of Light” (composition), 27–30, 32, 33; Levels and Degrees of Light (painting), 36; “Munktmunk” (composition), 200; “My Thoughts Are My Future—Now and Forever” (composition), 27, 30– 32, 33, 34; Three Compositions of New Jazz (Anthony Braxton album), 61 Accents (Neighbours album), 123 Adebayo, Soji, 123 Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (Marion Brown album), 162 Afterword (George E. Lewis opera), 110, 181 Air: audience in New York, 88, 92–93; audience worldwide, 93, 107; Columbia College stage play, 90–91, 92, 202, 213n33; combining composition and improvisation, 5, 91–92, 93, 96– 98, 102–3, 104–6; extended forms, 101–3; founding, 88, 90–91, 202; intensity structures, 106; jazz and experimental music, 107; move to New York, 92–93; New Air, 107; open improvisation, 91; Pheeroan akLaff, 107; ragtime, 91–92, 107, 202; reception, 88, 106–7; tours, 93, 107 Air, works: 80° Below ’82 (album), 91, 107; Air Lore (album), 91, 107; Air Mail (album), 107; Air Raid (album), 93; Air Song (album), 92–93; Air Time (album), 5, 88, 93–107; “G. v. E.” (Fred Hopkins composition), 93, 98– 101; “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .” (Steve McCall composition), 93–96; “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water” (Henry Threadgill composition), 93, 104– 6, 214n85; Live Air (album), 107;

Montreux Suisse Air (album), 107; “No. 2” (Henry Threadgill composition), 93, 96–98, 213n66; Open Air Suit (album), 107; “Subtraction” (Henry Threadgill composition), 93, 101–3 Air Lore (Air album), 91, 107 Air Mail (Air album), 107 Air Raid (Air album), 93 Air Song (Air album), 92–93 Air Time (Air album), 5, 88, 93–107 akLaff, Pheeroan: Golden Quartet, 169; Henry Threadgill Sextett, 107; New Air, 107; New Dalta Ahkri, 161 Alexander, Dee: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 144, 146–48, 150– 56; AACM Vocal Ensemble, 144, 151–52; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–56; “Vocaleidoscope” (composition), 151–52 Ali, Ismail, 225n63 Allen, Leon Q.: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146– 48, 150–51, 152–56 Altschul, Barry, 208n22 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 113 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 113 American Composers Forum, 197 American Composers Orchestra, 181 American Conservatory of Music, 140 America’s National Parks (Wadada Leo Smith album), 175 Anderson, Fred: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 137, 157; Al Poskonka, 122; biography, 121–23; Birdhouse, 123–24, 125; birthday celebrations, 136–37; composing, 122, 126–27, 130–32; ensembles with Billy Brimfield, 121, 122, 123, 137; first AACM concert, 7–8, 121; Fred Anderson Quartet, 125–36; Jazz Masters Award, 124; joining the AACM, 121; Martin Bough, 122; open improvisa-

index

tion, 122, 126–30, 133–35; quintet with Joseph Jarman, 7–8, 121, 122; timbre, 123, 133; tours, 123, 157; Velvet Lounge, 5, 124–25, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135–38 Anderson, Fred, works: Accents (Neighbours album), 123; Another Place (album), 123; As If It Were the Seasons (Joseph Jarman album), 121; “Bernice” (composition), 200, 230n12; Dark Day (album), 124; “December 4th” (composition), 127, 130–33, 137; “Exotic Dreams” (composition), 133–34; “Jeff’s Turnaround” (composition), 134–35; “Look Out!” (composition), 127–28; The Missing Link (album), 124; “Road Trip” (composition), 128–29; Song For (Joseph Jarman album), 121; “Tomato Song” (composition), 129–30; Volume Two (album), 5, 125–35, 136, 137, 138 Anderson, T. J., 163 Andrews, Dwight, 161 . . . and then there’s this (Artifacts album), 202 Another Place (Fred Anderson album), 123 Antilles Records, 107 Aoki, Tatsu: biography, 125–26; Black Earth Ensemble, 183–97; Fred Anderson Quartet, 125–36; Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 183–97; multi-instrumentalism, 183, 185–87, 189–90; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 126; timbre, 133; Tricolor, 126; Volume Two (Fred Anderson album), 125–35 Arista Records, 4, 60–61, 64–65, 68, 87, 88, 107 Armstrong, JoVia: Black Earth Ensemble, 183–97; Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 183–97 Armstrong, Louis, 163 Art Ensemble of Chicago: AACM flagship group, 2, 88, 199; audience worldwide, 12, 40, 43, 90, 109, 201, 210n17, 212n23; “Bells” (Albert Ayler composition), 199; combin-

[ 257 ]

ing composition and improvisation, 4, 206n73; “Erika” (Joseph Jarman composition), 208n37; facing east, 36; founding, 4, 12; “Ghosts” (Albert Ayler composition), 199; Great Black Music concept, 143, 221n43; intermedia performance, 2; “Lasciatemi morire” (Claudio Monteverdi composition), 199; Live at Mandel Hall (album), 114, 216n39; musical practices, 4, 12, 19, 37, 111, 114–15, 120, 201, 205n66, 206n73; poetry recitations, 201, 206n95; reception, 107; tours, 12, 38, 43, 90, 111, 201 Artifacts: . . . and then there’s this (album), 202; Artifacts (album), 200; “Bernice” (Fred Anderson composition), 200, 230n12; “B. K.” (Steve McCall composition), 200; “The Clowns” (Leroy Jenkins composition), 200; Composition 23B (Anthony Braxton composition), 200; “Days Fly By with Ruby” (Jeff Parker composition), 200, 230n11; founding, 6, 199–200; “Have Mercy Upon Us” (Amina Claudine Myers composition), 200; “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .” (Steve McCall composition), 200; “Jo Jar” (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 200; “Light on the Path” (Edward Wilkerson Jr. composition), 200, 230n11; “Munktmunk” (Muhal Richard Abrams composition), 200; technology, 200; tours, 199–200, 202 Artifacts (Artifacts album), 200 Art Institute of Chicago, 126, 178, 197 Artistic Heritage Ensemble, 8 Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW), 125 Asian Improv Records, 125, 218n49 As If It Were the Seasons (Joseph Jarman album), 121 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM): academia, 2, 197–98; anniversary festivals, 3, 110, 142–44, 157, 181; atmosphere, 8, 109, 202; audience in Chicago, 2, 109, 140; audience in New York, 64,

[ 258 ]

index

Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) (continued) 140, 160; audience worldwide, 2, 4, 12, 14, 90, 109, 201, 210n17; chapter in Chicago, 5, 139–40, 142, 143–44, 157–58, 176, 179, 180, 199; chapter in New York, 5, 139–40; concert production, 2, 7–8, 14, 64, 114, 121, 140, 160, 199; executive board, 180, 199; facing east, 36; founding, 2, 7, 120, 121; Great Black Music concept, 143, 158; jazz and experimental music, 2, 3, 8, 63–64, 68, 107, 108, 120, 198; original music, 7–8, 199; Velvet Lounge, 125, 137–38; visual art, 2, 4, 61, 143; women, 144, 176, 179 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), musical practices: combining composition and improvisation, 3, 68, 86–87; conducting, 3, 11, 109, 201; extended forms, 3, 4, 11, 22–23, 91, 109, 153, 163, 198, 201; intensity structures, 17, 106; intermedia performance, 2; little instruments, 13, 67–68, 87, 109, 201, 215n4; multi-instrumentalism, 3, 13, 29, 68, 87, 109, 114, 120, 163, 198, 201, 211n62; musical notation, 2, 3, 11, 87, 109, 198, 201; open improvisation, 116, 119–20; poetry recitations, 28, 33; solo performance, 38–39, 207n13; technology, 3, 201 At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 5, 145–56 Aus den sieben Tagen (Karlheinz Stockhausen composition), 67 Ayewa, Camae, 201 Ayler, Albert, 16–17, 199, 205n68 Babbitt, Milton, 163 Bailey, Derek, 113 Baker, Glenda Zahra, 179 Baker, Renée: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 145–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145– 48, 150–51, 152–56; Black Earth Ensemble, 183–97; composing, 145,

157; joining the AACM, 180; Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 183–97; Sunyata (composition), 181; “Untitled” (composition), 157 Banlieues Bleues (festival), 180 Bard College, 165, 197 Barker, Thurman: Bard College, 197; Experimental Band, 23; Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 27–32, 34–35; little instruments, 23–24; Sound (Roscoe Mitchell album), 23–24; Wadada Leo Smith, 165, 197 Basie, Count, 112 Bechet, Sidney, 163 Behrman, David, 112 Bell, The (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 160, 162 “Bells” (Albert Ayler composition), 199 Bells for the South Side (Roscoe Mitchell album), 197 Bells for the South Side (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 181 Berklee College of Music, 126 “Bernice” (Fred Anderson composition), 200, 230n12 Berry, Fred: Art Ensemble of Chicago, 201; Experimental Band, 9; Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, 12; Stanford University, 197 Bianchi, Filippo, 145 Birdhouse, 123–24, 125 “Bird Song, The” (Muhal Richard Abrams composition), 27–28, 32–35, 36, 207n107 Bjorkedal, Alison: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 170–74; Southwest Chamber Music, 166, 170–74 “B. K.” (Steve McCall composition), 200 Black, Stu, 14 “Black Church” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 171, 225n76 Black Earth Ensemble, 6, 125, 179–80, 181, 182–97, 226n22, 227n40 Blackmon, Felix, 123 Black Perspective in Music, The, 163

index

Black Saint Records, 107 Bland, Bobby “Blue,” 141 Bolognesi, Silvia, 201 Bough, Martin, 122 Bowden, Khari: AACM chair, 157; AACM School of Music, 157; Douglas Ewart, 157; Ernest Dawkins, 157 Bowden, Mwata: AACM Big Band, 140, 141, 142, 143, 220n25; AACM chair, 142–43, 157; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 5, 139, 140, 143– 44, 145–51, 152–56, 157–58; AACM School of Music, 142; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 5, 145–51, 152–56; biography, 140–43; composing, 140, 141–42, 143, 145, 157; conducting, 140, 142, 143; director of the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 5, 139, 140, 143–44, 157–58; Douglas Ewart, 141; George E. Lewis, 141; Governors State University, 141; joining the AACM, 141; Muhal Richard Abrams, 140, 141, 142, 143, 220n25; multiinstrumentalism, 140, 141, 145; musical notation, 141–42; Quadrisect, 141; Rasul Siddik, 141; Richard McCreary, 141; Sound Spectrum, 221n44; University of Chicago, 143, 197; Walter Dyett, 140; “Well Woven Web” (composition), 157 Bowie, Lester: AACM chair, 143; Art Ensemble of Chicago, 111, 115, 201; Experimental Band, 11; Great Black Music concept, 143; multiinstrumentalism, 13, 19, 21, 22, 115; Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, 13, 14–27; solo performance, 39; Sound (Roscoe Mitchell album), 14–27; timbre, 13, 25 Boykin, David, 179, 180 Brant, Henry, 163 Braxton, Anthony: AACM School of Music, 142; Anthony Braxton Quartet, 40, 208n22; audience in Chicago, 62–63; audience worldwide, 40, 43, 63–64; biography, 61–64, 210n11; Braxton-Jenkins-Smith ensemble, 61–

[ 259 ]

64, 90, 109, 160, 210n17, 212n23; Circle, 64; combining composition and improvisation, 4, 61, 65–66, 68– 87; composing, 64–66, 68–69, 72–73, 75, 87, 165; Experimental Band, 8, 11, 61; Jack Gell, 89; jazz and experimental music, 63–64, 68; joining the AACM, 8, 61; little instruments, 34, 61, 66, 87; Mills College, 60, 197– 98; move to New York, 64, 90, 139, 159, 160; multi-instrumentalism, 4, 61–62, 65–66, 68–69, 72, 73, 75, 80, 83–85, 87, 120; Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), 64; musical notation, 4, 60–61, 62, 65–87; reception, 63–64; students, 60; tours, 38; Tri-Centric Orchestra, 181; visual art, 4, 60–61; Wesleyan University, 60, 197; Wilson Junior College, 61 Braxton, Anthony, works: Composition 1 (composition), 60; Composition 2 (composition), 62; Composition 3 (composition), 62; Composition 6D (composition), 160; Composition 6E (composition), 160, 223n13; Composition 10 (composition), 62; Composition 23B (composition), 200; Composition 76 (composition), 4, 60– 61, 65–87, 88, 153; Composition 82 (composition), 68, 87; Composition 95 (composition), 68; Creative Orchestra Music 1976 (album), 40; For Trio (album), 60–61, 65, 68–87; Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 27, 31–32, 34–35; Silence (Braxton-Jenkins-Smith album), 160; Three Compositions of New Jazz (album), 61–62, 160; Trillium (operas), 60 Braxton-Jenkins-Smith ensemble: audience in Chicago, 62–63; audience worldwide, 63, 90, 109, 210n17, 212n23; New York concert, 64, 160; reception, 63–64; Silence (BraxtonJenkins-Smith album), 160; Three Compositions of New Jazz (Anthony Braxton album), 61–62, 160; tours, 63, 90, 160

[ 260 ]

index

Brenner, Vytas, 92 Bright, Clarence, 127, 218n64 Brimfield, Billy: ensembles with Fred Anderson, 121, 122, 123, 137; first AACM concert, 121 British Academy, 113 Brown, Ari, 61 Brown, James, 149 Brown, Marion, 162 Brown, Wes, 161 “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” (Jelly Roll Morton composition), 107 Burton, Art “Turk”: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56 Byas, Don, 90 Bynum, Taylor Ho, 60 Cage, John, 67, 163 California EAR Unit, 165 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), 165, 174, 177, 197 Cards (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 210n31 Carnegie Hall, 113 Carter, Elliott, 10 Center for Black Music Research (Columbia College), 3, 143, 177 Chalice and the Blade, The (Riane Eisler book), 182 Chamber Music America, 166 Champion of New Music Award, 197 Châteauvallon (festival), 38 Chávez, Carlos, 163 Cheatham, Jimmy, 177 “Checkmate” (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 222n80 Chicago History Museum, 3 Chicago Jazz Archive, 3 Chicago Jazz Festival, 124, 144, 158 Chicago Public Library, 3 Chicago State University, 180 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 90 Chicago Tribune, 1–2 Chicago Vocational High School, 61 Chi-Lites, 141

Christian, Jodie: AACM co-founder, 7; Velvet Lounge, 125 Circle, 64 Civic Orchestra of Chicago, 90 Clark, Charles: Civic Orchestra of Chicago, 90; Experimental Band, 9; first AACM concert, 121; Joseph Guastafeste, 90; Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 27, 30–32, 34–35 Clayton, Frank, 161 “Clowns, The” (Leroy Jenkins composition), 200 Cohran, Philip: AACM co-founder, 7, 157, 178; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 157; Artistic Heritage Ensemble, 8; Experimental Band, 11 Coleman, Ornette, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 111, 122, 205n68, 205n72 Collier, Isaiah, 158 Collier, Jeremiah, 158 Collier, Micah, 158 Colson, Iqua: Fred Anderson, 123; move to New York, 144 Coltrane, John, 111 Columbia College, 91, 92, 143, 213n33 Columbia Records, 108 Columbia University, 113, 209n5 Composition 1 (Anthony Braxton composition), 60 Composition 2 (Anthony Braxton composition), 62 Composition 3 (Anthony Braxton composition), 62 Composition 6D (Anthony Braxton composition), 160 Composition 6E (Anthony Braxton composition), 160, 223n13 Composition 10 (Anthony Braxton composition), 62 Composition 23B (Anthony Braxton composition), 200 Composition 76 (Anthony Braxton composition), 4, 60–61, 65–87, 88, 153 Composition 82 (Anthony Braxton composition), 68, 87 Composition 95 (Anthony Braxton composition), 68

index

Composition Notes (Anthony Braxton book), 60, 162 “Concentric” (Douglas Ewart composition), 152–55 Constellation, 138 Cooper, Jerome, 161 Corea, Chick, 64 Cosey, Pete, 129 Cowell, Henry, 163 Cowell, Stanley, 92 Cranshaw, Emanuel: joining the AACM, 206n93; Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 27–30, 32 CREATE Festival, 175 Creative Music-1 (Wadada Leo Smith album), 162, 163 Creative Orchestra Music 1976 (Anthony Braxton album), 40 Croswell, Jerome: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; joining the AACM, 158 Curran, Alvin, 64 Daley, Richard M., 137 Dark Day (Fred Anderson album), 124 Daugherty, Edwin, 140; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 145–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145–51, 152–56; composing, 145 Davis, Anthony: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 168–74; Golden Quartet, 166, 168–74, 225n56; New Dalta Ahkri, 161; Yale University, 161 Davis, Richard, 160 Dawkins, Ernest: AACM chair, 158; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 145–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145–51, 152–56; composing, 145, 148; conducting, 149; director of the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 158, 222n93; Ethnic Heritage

[ 261 ]

Ensemble, 158; Governors State University, 158; “Nebulisium-Cipher” (composition), 148–50; New Horizons Ensemble, 126, 158 “Days Fly By with Ruby” (Jeff Parker composition), 200, 230n11 “D.C. Wall, The” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 166 Debussy, Claude, 160 “December 4th” (Fred Anderson composition), 127, 130–33, 137 DeJohnette, Jack, 9, 12, 225n56 Delcloo, Claude, 90 Delmark Records, 13–14, 23, 33, 36, 61, 88, 109, 114, 121, 123, 137, 160, 210n14 Department of Cultural Affairs (Chicago), 137 Dessen, Michael, 181 Dett Club, 141 Dillard, Justin, 158 Dinwiddie, Gene, 9 Divine Love (Wadada Leo Smith album), 164 Dobrian, Christopher, 181 Dolphy, Eric, 33 Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, 166 Dorsey, Thomas A., 140 Down Beat, 107, 159, 175, 197 Drake, Hamid: Fred Anderson, 123, 179; Fred Anderson Quartet, 126–36; Mandingo Griot Society, 126; Nicole Mitchell, 179; Volume Two (Fred Anderson album), 126–35 Dreamtime Records, 180 DuSable High School, 9, 90, 140 Dyett, Walter, 9, 90, 140 Ebenezer Baptist Church, 140 ECM Records, 164, 224n45 “Egoes Wars” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 184, 189 Ellington, Duke, 163 El’Zabar, Kahil: Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, 158, 199; Ritual Trio, 199 El’Zabar, Kai, 123 Emanuel, Gordon: joining the AACM, 206n93; Levels and Degrees of Light

[ 262 ]

index

Emanuel, Gordon (continued) (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 27–30, 32 “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 5, 166, 168–74 Emotions, 141 Endless Shout (George E. Lewis album), 114 Englewood High School, 12, 88–89 ER (television series), 124, 218n38 “Erika” (Joseph Jarman composition), 50, 208n37 “Esoteric Intrusiveness” (Saalik Ziyad composition), 146–48, 157 Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, 158, 199, 200 Evers, Medgar, 166 Ewart, Douglas: AACM chair, 180; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 145– 51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145–51, 152–56; combining composition and improvisation, 152–55; composing, 145, 165; “Concentric” (composition), 152–55; conducting, 154; extended forms, 152–55; For Trio (Anthony Braxton album), 68–87; Fred Anderson, 123; Homage to Malachi Maghostut Favors (composition), 181; little instruments, 155; multi-instrumentalism, 68, 73, 75–77, 80, 120, 145, 146, 149, 154, 155; musical notation, 154; Mwata Bowden, 141; Quadrisect, 141; Rainbow Family (George E. Lewis composition), 113; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 197; solo performance, 39; Sonic Tops, 155 Exercises for the Creative Musician (Fred Anderson and Paul Steinbeck book), 122, 137 “Exotic Dreams” (Fred Anderson composition), 133–34 Experimental Band: atmosphere, 8, 139; compositions, 10–11; conducting, 10–11; extended forms, 11, 12, 145; founding, 7, 9; intensity structures, 156; members, 8, 9, 11, 12, 23,

61, 89, 160, 200; musical notation, 10–11; open improvisation, 11, 122; original music, 7–8 Favors, Malachi: Art Ensemble of Chicago, 111, 115, 201; Golden Quartet, 225n56; Great Black Music concept, 143; Homage to Malachi Maghostut Favors (Douglas Ewart composition), 181; little instruments, 13, 22; Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, 12; Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, 13, 14–27; solo performance, 39; Sound (Roscoe Mitchell album), 14–27; Velvet Lounge, 125; Wilson Junior College, 61 Fenz, Robert, 225n63 Fielder, Alvin: Fred Anderson, 122; Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, 12; Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, 14–27; Sound (Roscoe Mitchell album), 14–27, 28 Fleming, Walter “King,” 10 Ford Foundation, 177 “Forestwall Timewalk” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 189–91 For Trio (Anthony Braxton album), 60– 61, 65, 68–87 Foschia, Jim, 166 FPE Records, 197 “Fractals” (George E. Lewis composition), 150–51 Freedom Principle, The (Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete book), 3 Free Jazz (Ekkehard Jost book), 123 Freeman, Chico, 141 Fromm Foundation, 225n62 Gamma, Lorenz: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 170–74; Southwest Chamber Music, 166, 170–74 Garrett, Donald Rafael, 9 Gay, Ben LaMar: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; joining the AACM, 158 Gell, Jack, 89

index

Getsug, Aaron, 158 “Ghosts” (Albert Ayler composition), 199 Glawischnig, Dieter, 123 Golden Quartet, 5, 139, 165–74, 225n56 Gordon, Dexter, 90 Governors State University, 112, 141, 158 Great Black Music Ensemble. See AACM Great Black Music Ensemble Guastafeste, Joseph, 90 Guggenheim Foundation, 113, 166 “G. v. E.” (Fred Hopkins composition), 93, 98–101 Halvorson, Mary, 60 Harris, Eddie, 29 Harvard University, 113, 225n62 “Have Mercy Upon Us” (Amina Claudine Myers composition), 200 Hébert, Tsehaye Geralyn, 123 Heidelberg Philharmonic, 12 Henderson, Fletcher, 163 Herrera, Tony, 158 Hicks, John, 92 Hill, Marquis, 158 Hines, Earl, 163 Holland, Dave, 208n22 Holzborn, Damon, 113 Homage to Charles Parker (George E. Lewis composition), 112 Homage to Malachi Maghostut Favors (Douglas Ewart composition), 181 hooks, bell, 177 Hopkins, Fred, 140; Air, 5, 88, 90–107, 200, 202; Air Time (Air album), 5, 88, 93–106; biography, 90; Civic Orchestra of Chicago, 90; composing, 93, 98–99; “G. v. E.” (composition), 93, 98–101; Henry Threadgill Sextett, 107; Joseph Guastafeste, 90; New Air, 107; timbre, 103; Walter Dyett, 90 House, Edward: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–51, 152–56 Huff, “Light” Henry, 200 Hyde Park Art Center, 1

[ 263 ]

Ibarra, Susie: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 168–74; Golden Quartet, 166, 168–74 ICP Orchestra, 115 “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .” (Steve McCall composition), 93–96, 200 Imaginary Landscape (John Cage compositions), 67 Improvisation (Derek Bailey book), 162 In for a Penny, In for a Pound (Henry Threadgill album), 108 Insolent Noise, An (festival), 157 Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), 113 Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin), 113 International Contemporary Ensemble, 181 Island Records, 107 Isotope 217, 126 Ives, Charles, 163 Iyer, Vijay, 110 Jackson, Isaiah: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56 Jackson, William, 9 Jacobson, Peter: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 170–74; Southwest Chamber Music, 166, 170–74 Jarman, Joseph: AACM Big Band, 1, 141; Art Ensemble of Chicago, 12, 37, 111, 114–15, 200, 201; As If It Were the Seasons (album), 121; “Erika” (composition), 50, 208n37; Experimental Band, 9, 11, 12, 89, 200; first AACM concert, 7–8, 121; For Trio (Anthony Braxton album), 68–87; “Jo Jar” (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 200; Muhal Richard Abrams, 9, 89, 200; multi-instrumentalism, 68–69, 72, 81–85, 114–15; “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City” (composition), 33; “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City” (poem), 33; poetry recitations,

[ 264 ]

index

Jarman, Joseph (continued) 33, 206n95; quintet with Fred Anderson, 7–8, 121, 122; solo performance, 39; Song For (album), 14, 22, 33, 121; Wilson Junior College, 9, 12, 61, 89 Jazz Institute of Chicago, 137 Jazz Masters Award, 124 Jazz Record Mart, 13–14 “Jeff’s Turnaround” (Fred Anderson composition), 134–35 Jenkins, Leroy: Braxton-Jenkins-Smith ensemble, 61–63, 90, 109, 160, 210n17, 212n23; “The Clowns” (composition), 200; Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 28, 32–35; little instruments, 34–35; “Medgar Evers” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 166; move to New York, 90, 139, 159, 160; Revolutionary Ensemble, 160, 223n20; Silence (Braxton-Jenkins-Smith album), 160; solo performance, 39; Three Compositions of New Jazz (Anthony Braxton album), 61, 160 Jenkins, Ulysses, 181 Johnson, James, 141 Johnson, James P., 91 “Jo Jar” (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 200 Jones, Leonard: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 28, 34–35 Jones, Norris, 160–61 Jones, Rrata Christine, 123 Joplin, Scott: composing, 91–92, 107, 163, 202; “The Ragtime Dance” (composition), 91, 107; “Weeping Willow” (composition), 91, 107 Jost, Ekkehard, 123 J’s Place, 123, 125 Juan-les-Pins (festival), 38 Kabell Records, 162 Kaplan, Larry, 166

Karlin, Jan: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 170–74; Southwest Chamber Music, 166, 170–74 Kart-Wolf, 123 “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water” (Henry Threadgill composition), 93, 104–6, 214n83, 214n85 Kennedy, John F., 166 Khari B.: AACM chair, 157; AACM School of Music, 157; Douglas Ewart, 157; Ernest Dawkins, 157 KIM and I, The (George E. Lewis composition), 112 King, Albert, 141 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 165, 225n63 “King Porter Stomp” (Jelly Roll Morton composition), 107 Kitchen, The, 112–13 Kitchener, Lord, 92 Knapp, Roy C., School of Percussion, 122 Koester, Bob, 13–14 Kouaté, Dudù, 201 Kowald, Peter, 164 Laboratory School, 111 Lacy, Steve, 113, 125 LaMar, Ben: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152– 56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; joining the AACM, 158 L’Arianna (Claudio Monteverdi opera), 199 “Lasciatemi morire” (Claudio Monteverdi composition), 199 Lashley, Lester: Experimental Band, 9; multi-instrumentalism, 13, 24, 26; Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, 13, 14–27; Sound (Roscoe Mitchell album), 14– 27; timbre, 26 Lashley, Marilyn, 123 Léandre, Joëlle, 113 Lehman, Steve, 60, 209n5 Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 4, 14, 27–36, 109

index

“Levels and Degrees of Light” (Muhal Richard Abrams composition), 27–30, 32, 33 Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams painting), 36 Lewis, George E.: AACM chair, 110; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 145–48, 150–51, 152–56, 157; Anthony Braxton, 112, 208n22; Art Ensemble of Chicago, 112; biography, 111–13; Columbia University, 113, 209n5; combining composition and improvisation, 110, 113–19; composing, 110, 112–19, 137, 145, 150, 165; computer music, 110, 112–20; conducting, 150–51; Count Basie, 112; Douglas Ewart, 112; Fred Anderson, 111, 123; Governors State University, 112; jazz and experimental music, 112; joining the AACM, 5, 110, 112, 119; Mills College, 197–98; move to New York, 112; Muhal Richard Abrams, 112; Mwata Bowden, 141; open improvisation, 116; Quadrisect, 141; Richard McCreary, 112, 141; solo performance, 39; Steve McCall, 112; students, 181, 209n5; tours, 112; trio with Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, 139; University of California, San Diego, 197; Yale University, 111–12 Lewis, George E., works: Afterword (opera), 110, 181; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145–48, 150–51, 152–56; Endless Shout (album), 114; “Fractals” (composition), 150–51; Homage to Charles Parker (composition), 112; The KIM and I (composition), 112; Rainbow Family (composition), 113; “Something Like Fred” (composition), 137; Voyager (composition), 5, 110, 113–20, 215n10, 216n34, 216n47 “Light on the Path” (Edward Wilkerson Jr. composition), 200, 230n11 Lindberg, John: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 168–74; Golden Quartet, 166, 168–74

[ 265 ]

“Listening Embrace” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 188–89 “Little Suite, The” (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 15, 19–22 Liu, Jabari, 158 Live Air (Air album), 107 Live at Mandel Hall (Art Ensemble of Chicago album), 114, 216n39 Live at the Currency Exchange Cafe Volume 1 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 158 Logan, Wendell, 177 “Look Out!” (Fred Anderson composition), 127–28 “(M1) American Music” (Wadada Leo Smith article), 163–64 MacArthur Foundation, 113, 142 Made in Chicago (festival), 157 Magnússon, Thorsteinn, 164 Maia: joining the AACM, 176, 178–79; multi-instrumentalism, 178; Philip Cohran, 178; Samana, 178–79 Make a Move, 108 Malcolm X College, 141 Mandingo Griot Society, 126 Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell album), 197 Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 5–6, 181–97 Mangelsdorff, Albert, 208n24 Manyweathers, Ford “Tip,” 124 MAP Fund, 166 “March on Washington D.C., The” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 225n62 Masaoka, Miya, 110 Massachusetts College of Art, 110 McCall, Steve: AACM co-founder, 7, 89, 160; Air, 5, 88, 90–107, 200, 202; Air Time (Air album), 5, 88, 93–106; biography, 88–90; “B. K.” (composition), 200; Braxton-Jenkins-Smith ensemble, 90, 160; Charles “Specs” Wright, 89; composing, 93, 94; drum tuning, 98; Experimental Band, 9, 89; Fred Anderson, 122; “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting . . .” (composition), 93– 96, 200; tours, 92

[ 266 ]

index

McCreary, Richard, 112, 141 McIntyre, Maurice: AACM Big Band, 141; Experimental Band, 9, 11; Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 27, 31–32, 34–35; little instruments, 22, 34–35; Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, 14–27; Sound (Roscoe Mitchell album), 14–27; timbre, 15– 16, 18, 26 McMillan, Wallace, 141 “Medgar Evers” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 166 Mellon Foundation, 177 Mengelberg, Misha, 115 Message to Our Folks (Paul Steinbeck book), 3, 4 Messiaen, Olivier, 33 Metropolitan School of Music, 9 Mills College, 60, 197–98 Missing Link, The (Fred Anderson album), 124 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 166 Mitchell, Nicole: AACM chair, 5, 180, 199; AACM executive board, 180, 199; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 145–48, 150–51, 152–56, 180; AACM School of Music, 178, 180; American Composers Orchestra, 181; Art Ensemble of Chicago, 201; Artifacts, 6, 199–200, 201–2; bell hooks, 177; biography, 176–81, 197–98; Black Earth Ensemble, 6, 125, 179–80, 181, 182–97, 226n22, 227n40; Champion of New Music Award, 197; Chicago State University, 180; combining composition and improvisation, 181, 183, 184, 186, 189; composing, 6, 145, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 194, 202; conducting, 156, 184, 189, 191–92, 194; David Boykin, 179, 180; extended forms, 188; Fred Anderson, 136, 155, 179; George E. Lewis, 181; Glenda Zahra Baker, 179; Hamid Drake, 179; intensity structures, 156, 191, 192; International Contemporary Ensemble, 181;

James Newton, 177, 197; jazz and experimental music, 197–98; Jimmy Cheatham, 177; joining the AACM, 5, 176, 179; Leroy Jenkins, 178; Maia, 176, 178–79; multi-instrumentalism, 178–79, 183, 186, 200; musical notation, 183, 184; Northern Illinois University, 180; Oberlin College, 177, 178; poetry recitations, 192; Samana, 178–79; Shanta Nurullah, 176, 178–79; technology, 6, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 200; Third World Press, 178, 226n22; tours, 180; Tri-Centric Orchestra, 181; Ulysses Jenkins, 181; University of California, Irvine, 180–81, 197; University of California, San Diego, 177; University of Pittsburgh, 197–98; Velvet Lounge, 125, 136, 179; voice, 145, 183, 192, 200; Wendell Logan, 177 Mitchell, Nicole, works: At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145–48, 150– 51, 152–56; “Egoes Wars” (composition), 184, 189; “Forestwall Timewalk” (composition), 189–91; “Listening Embrace” (composition), 188–89; Mandorla Awakening II (album), 197; Mandorla Awakening II (composition), 5–6, 181–97; “Shiney Divider”/“Mandorla Island” (composition), 192–94; “Staircase Struggle” (composition), 191–92; “Sub-Mission”/“The Chalice”/“Dance of Many Hands” (composition), 185–88; “TimeWrap” (composition), 194–97; “Under the Sun” (composition), 155–56 Mitchell, Roscoe: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 144; AACM School of Music, 142; Art Ensemble of Chicago, 4, 12, 19, 37, 38, 40, 111, 114–15, 200, 201; audience worldwide, 43; biography, 12; combining composition and improvisation, 13, 15, 25–26, 50–51, 59; composing, 13, 14–15, 19, 24, 39–40, 50, 55–59, 201, 202; Experimental Band, 9, 11,

index

12, 89, 200; extended forms, 12, 13, 15, 19–27; intensity structures, 21, 22; intonation, 45–46; little instruments, 12, 13, 15, 18, 21–22, 25, 71, 81–82, 87; Mills College, 197–98; Muhal Richard Abrams, 9, 89, 200; multi-instrumentalism, 4, 12, 13, 15, 21, 22, 68–69, 82, 114–15; open improvisation, 39, 55; reception, 13; Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, 8, 12; Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, 4, 13, 14–27; silence, 25, 27, 72; solo performance, 38–39, 43–59; timbre, 13, 15, 16–17, 25–26, 46–49, 52, 55, 59; trio with George E. Lewis and Muhal Richard Abrams, 139; Wilson Junior College, 9, 12, 61, 89 Mitchell, Roscoe, works: Bells for the South Side (album), 197; Bells for the South Side (composition), 181; Cards (composition), 210n31; “Checkmate” (composition), 222n80; For Trio (Anthony Braxton album), 68–87; “Jo Jar” (composition), 200; “The Little Suite” (composition), 15, 19–22; Nonaah (album), 55, 59, 106; Nonaah (composition), 4, 39–59; “Ornette” (composition), 15–19; Sound (album), 4, 14–27, 109; “Sound” (composition), 15, 22–27, 28, 32; Voyager (George E. Lewis composition), 110, 215n10 MJT+3, 10, 29 Moers (festival), 38, 123 Monteverdi, Claudio, 199 Montreux (festival), 38, 107 Montreux Suisse Air (Air album), 107 Moore, David. See Mor, Amus Moor Mother, 201 Mor, Amus: Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 28, 33–35, 207n107 Moran, Jason, 110 Morris, Butch, 10 Morton, Jelly Roll, 107, 163; “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” (composition), 107; “King Porter Stomp” (composition), 107

[ 267 ]

Mosley, Dushun: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56 Moye, Famoudou Don: Art Ensemble of Chicago, 115, 201; composing, 201; solo performance, 39 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 91 Muhammad, Ameen, 178, 179 “Munktmunk” (Muhal Richard Abrams composition), 200 Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), 5, 61, 144, 181 Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), 64 Musica Jazz, 145 Myers, Amina Claudine: Experimental Band, 11; “Have Mercy Upon Us” (composition), 200; move to New York, 144; solo performance, 39; voice, 200 “My Thoughts Are My Future—Now and Forever” (Muhal Richard Abrams composition), 27, 30–32, 33, 34 Nabors, Kevin, 158 Najwa (Wadada Leo Smith album), 197 National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), 141 National Endowment for the Arts, 124, 166 Naughton, Bobby, 161 “Nebulisium-Cipher” (Ernest Dawkins composition), 148–50 Neighbours, 123 Nessa, Chuck, 13–14, 23, 88, 213n60 Nessa Records, 55, 88, 106–7, 109 New Air, 107 New Century Players, 165 New College of Florida, 113 New Dalta Ahkri, 161–62 New Horizons Ensemble, 126, 158 New Musical Figurations (Ronald M. Radano book), 3 Newton, James, 177, 197 New York Times, 197 “No. 2” (Henry Threadgill composition), 93, 96–98, 213n66

[ 268 ]

index

Nonaah (Roscoe Mitchell album), 55, 59, 106 Nonaah (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 4, 39–59 “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City” (Joseph Jarman composition), 33 “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City” (Joseph Jarman poem), 33 Northern Illinois University, 180 notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music (Wadada Leo Smith book), 162–63, 224n33, 224n34 Novus Records, 107. See also Arista Records “Now’s the Time” (Charlie Parker composition), 121 Nurullah, Shanta: joining the AACM, 176, 178–79; multi-instrumentalism, 178; Philip Cohran, 178; Samana, 178–79 Oberlin College, 177, 178 Oliver, King, 163 Open Air Suit (Air album), 107 “Ornette” (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 15–19 “Paille Street” (Henry Threadgill composition), 107 Palm, Norman, 158 Parker, Charlie, 112, 121, 123 Parker, Evan, 110, 208n24 Parker, Jeff: Berklee College of Music, 126; composing, 200; “Days Fly By with Ruby” (composition), 200, 230n11; Fred Anderson Quartet, 126– 36, 200; Isotope 217, 126; joining the AACM, 176, 200; New Horizons Ensemble, 126; Tortoise, 126; Tricolor, 126; Volume Two (Fred Anderson album), 126–35 Partch, Harry, 163 Paul, Junius: Art Ensemble of Chicago, 201; Fred Anderson, 137; joining the AACM, 158 “Payback, The” (James Brown composition), 149 Pescara (festival), 38

Peters, Tom: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 170–74; Southwest Chamber Music, 166, 170–74 Pierce, Andy, 136 Pitchfork Music Festival, 158 Poskonka, Al, 122 Powell, John, 61 Power Stronger Than Itself, A (George E. Lewis book), 3, 110 Pritzker Pavilion, 137 Pulitzer Prize for Music, 108, 174 Quadrisect, 141 Ra, Avreeayl, 179 “Ragtime Dance, The” (Scott Joplin composition), 91, 107 Rainbow Family (George E. Lewis composition), 113 Rastafari (Wadada Leo Smith album), 164 RCA Records, 108 REDCAT Theater, 166 Reed, Arthur, 121 Reed, Mike: AACM executive board, 199; Artifacts, 66, 199–200, 201–2; composing, 6, 202; Constellation, 138; Fred Anderson, 138; joining the AACM, 180, 199; Pitchfork Music Festival, 158 Reflectativity (New Dalta Ahkri album), 162 Regal Theater, 9 Reid, Tomeka: AACM executive board, 199; AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 145–48, 150–51, 152–56; Art Ensemble of Chicago, 201; Artifacts, 6, 199–200, 201–2; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145–48, 150–51, 152–56; Black Earth Ensemble, 183– 97; composing, 6, 145, 202; joining the AACM, 180, 199; Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 183–97; Mills College, 197–98; multi-instrumentalism, 183, 188–89 Revolutionary Ensemble, 160, 223n20 Ritual Trio, 199 Rivers, Sam, 92

index

R. Nathaniel Dett Club, 141 “Road Trip” (Fred Anderson composition), 128–29 Robinson, Troy, 11 Rollins, Sonny, 94, 213n63 Roulette, 225n62 Roy C. Knapp School of Percussion, 122 Ruiz, Hilton, 93 Rzewski, Frederic, 64 Samana, 178–79, 227n34 San Sebastián (festival), 38 Savage, Darius, 179 Savoy Records, 121 Sawai, Tadao, 164–65 Schillinger System of Musical Composition, The (Joseph Schillinger book), 9–10 Schlippenbach, Alexander von, 10–11, 157, 208n24 Schmidt, Jeff von der: director of Southwest Chamber Music, 170, 171; “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 170–74 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 126, 178, 197 Schubert, Franz, 159 Scott, Sherry, 1–2 Scriabin, Alexander, 10 “September 11th, 2001” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 166 Shadow Vignettes, 200 Sheppard, Horace, 89 “Shiney Divider”/“Mandorla Island” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 192–94 Shorter, Wayne, 107 Siddik, Rasul, 141 Silence (Braxton-Jenkins-Smith album), 160 Sirone, 160–61 Smith, Wadada Leo: Ahkreanvention, 162, 164; Alex “Little Bill” Wallace, 159; Ankhrasmation, 5, 164, 168, 172, 174; Anthony Braxton, 160; Bard College, 165, 197; biography, 159–61, 164–65, 224n45; Braxton-Jenkins-Smith ensemble, 61–63, 90, 109, 160, 210n17, 212n23; California EAR Unit, 165; California Institute of the Arts (Cal-

[ 269 ]

Arts), 165, 174, 197; combining composition and improvisation, 162–64, 172, 174; composing, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174; conducting, 172; CREATE Festival, 175; Experimental Band, 11, 160; Golden Quartet, 5, 139, 165–74, 225n56; Günter “Baby” Sommer, 164; jazz and experimental music, 174; joining the AACM, 5, 159, 160; Joseph Jarman, 160; little instruments, 162; move to the East Coast, 90, 139, 159, 161; multi-instrumentalism, 162, 163; musical notation, 5, 160, 161, 162, 164, 168, 172, 174; New Century Players, 165; New Dalta Ahkri, 161–62; Peter Kowald, 164; rhythm units, 160, 161, 162, 163, 223n15; Roscoe Mitchell, 160; silence, 160, 161, 162; solo performance, 39, 162, 163; Southwest Chamber Music, 165–74; Tadao Sawai, 164–65; Thorsteinn Magnússon, 164; Thurman Barker, 165; visual art, 174; Wesleyan University, 161, 164 Smith, Wadada Leo, works: America’s National Parks (album), 175; The Bell (composition), 160, 162; “Black Church” (composition), 171, 225n76; Creative Music-1 (album), 162, 163; “The D.C. Wall” (composition), 166; Divine Love (album), 164; “Emmett Till” (composition), 5, 166, 168–74; “The March on Washington D.C.” (composition), 225n62; “Medgar Evers” (composition), 166; Najwa (album), 197; Rastafari (album), 164; Reflectativity (New Dalta Ahkri album), 162; “September 11th, 2001” (composition), 166; Silence (BraxtonJenkins-Smith album), 160; Solo Music (album), 162; Song of Humanity (New Dalta Ahkri album), 162; Tabligh (album), 164; Ten Freedom Summers (album), 169, 174, 225n76; Ten Freedom Summers (composition), 5, 165–68, 172, 174, 225n62, 225n63; Three Compositions of New Jazz (Anthony Braxton album), 61, 160

[ 270 ]

index

Society Situation Dance Band, 107–8 Solo Music (Wadada Leo Smith album), 162 “Something Like Fred” (George E. Lewis composition), 137 Sommer, Günter “Baby,” 164 Song For (Joseph Jarman album), 14, 22, 33, 121 Song of Humanity (New Dalta Ahkri album), 162 Sons d’hiver (festival), 145, 180 Sorey, Tyshawn, 60, 209n5 Sound (Roscoe Mitchell album), 4, 14– 27, 109 “Sound” (Roscoe Mitchell composition), 15, 22–27, 28, 32 Southern, Eileen, 163 Southwest Chamber Music, 165–74 Sparx of Love—Sparx of Fire! (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 144 Spencer, Isaiah, 137 “Staircase Struggle” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 191–92 Stanford University, 197 Steinbeck, Paul, 137 Stepney, Charles, 9 Sternklang (Karlheinz Stockhausen composition), 67 Still, William Grant, 163 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 66–67, 160 Stravinsky, Igor, 10 Streeterville Studios, 88 Stubblefield, John, 139 Studio Rivbea, 92 Studio voor Electro-Instrumentale Muziek (STEIM), 113 “Sub-Mission”/“The Chalice”/“Dance of Many Hands” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 185–88 “Subtraction” (Henry Threadgill composition), 93, 101–3 Sunyata (Renée Baker composition), 181 Tabligh (Wadada Leo Smith album), 164 Taylor, Penelope: Levels and Degrees of Light (Muhal Richard Abrams album), 27–29, 31–32, 33 Teamer, Althea, 123

Teatro Morlacchi, 145, 155 Teitelbaum, Richard, 64 Ten Freedom Summers (Wadada Leo Smith album), 169, 174 Ten Freedom Summers (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 5, 165–68, 172, 174, 225n62, 225n63 Third World Press, 178, 226n22 Thompson, Walter, 10 Threadgill, Henry: AACM Big Band, 141; AACM School of Music, 112; Air, 5, 88, 90–107, 200, 202; biography, 88–89; composing, 92, 96–97, 102–3, 104, 107–8; Experimental Band, 9, 11, 89; Henry Threadgill Sextett, 107; hubkaphone, 99–101, 102–3, 214n75; Jack Gell, 89; jazz and experimental music, 108; little instruments, 75, 80; Lord Kitchener, 92; Make a Move, 108; Muhal Richard Abrams, 9, 89; multi-instrumentalism, 68, 73, 75–77, 89, 96, 99–100, 102–3; New Air, 107; Pulitzer Prize for Music, 108; Society Situation Dance Band, 107–8; timbre, 98, 106; Very Very Circus, 108; Vytas Brenner, 92; Wilson Junior College, 9, 61, 89; WindString Ensemble, 107; Zooid, 108, 139 Threadgill, Henry, works: Air Time (Air album), 5, 88, 93–106; For Trio (Anthony Braxton album), 68–87; In for a Penny, In for a Pound (album), 108; “Keep Right on Playing through the Mirror over the Water” (composition), 93, 104–6, 214n83, 214n85; “No. 2” (composition), 93, 96–98, 213n66; “Paille Street” (composition), 107; “Subtraction” (composition), 93, 101–3 Three Compositions of New Jazz (Anthony Braxton album), 61–62, 160, 210n14 Till, Emmett, 5, 166, 170, 172, 174 “TimeWrap” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 194–97 Tin Palace, 92, 213n56 Tip’s Lounge, 124 “Tomato Song” (Fred Anderson composition), 129–30

index

Tortoise, 126 Tri-Axium Writings (Anthony Braxton book), 60, 162 Tri-Centric Orchestra, 181 Tricolor, 126 Trillium (Anthony Braxton operas), 60 Troxler, Niklaus, 38, 207n8 Umbria (festival), 145–57 Umezaki, Kojiro: Black Earth Ensemble, 183–97; Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 183–97 “Under the Sun” (Nicole Mitchell composition), 155–56 University of California, Irvine, 180–81, 183, 197 University of California, San Diego, 177, 197 University of Chicago, 111, 114, 143, 157, 197 University of Edinburgh, 113 University of Pittsburgh, 197–98 “Untitled” (Renée Baker composition), 157 US Armed Forces, 12, 61, 88–89, 159– 60, 165, 166 Vandermark, Ken, 179 Varèse, Edgard, 163 Vartan, Lynn, 166 Velvet Lounge: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 5, 125, 144, 157; atmosphere, 124–25, 127, 130, 134, 135–38, 219n67, 219n75; Black Earth Ensemble, 125, 179; Clarence Bright, 127, 218n64; Fred Anderson, 5, 124–25, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135–38, 179 Very Very Circus, 108 Vijayan, Shalini: “Emmett Till” (Wadada Leo Smith composition), 170–74; Southwest Chamber Music, 166, 170–74 “Vocaleidoscope” (Dee Alexander composition), 151–52 Volume Two (Fred Anderson album), 5, 125–35, 136, 137, 138

[ 271 ]

Voyager (George E. Lewis composition), 5, 110, 113–20, 215n10, 216n34, 216n47 Wallace, Alex “Little Bill,” 159 Walton, Charles, 141 Ward, Ann: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 144, 145–48, 150–56; AACM School of Music, 142; AACM Vocal Ensemble, 144, 151–52; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 145–48, 150–56; composing, 145; joining the AACM, 179; multi-instrumentalism, 145–46, 149 Ways of the Hand (David Sudnow book), 162 Weather Report, 107 Webern, Anton, 160 “Weeping Willow” (Scott Joplin composition), 91, 107 “Well Woven Web” (Mwata Bowden composition), 157 Wesleyan University, 60, 161, 164, 197 Wheeler, Kenny, 208n22 Whynot Records, 92–93 Wilkerson, Edward, Jr.: 8 Bold Souls, 200; Edward Wilkerson Quartet, 200; Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, 200; “Light on the Path” (composition), 200, 230n11; Shadow Vignettes, 200 Wilkes, Corey, 158 Williams, Dawi: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–51, 152–56; multiinstrumentalism, 146 Williams, Samuel “Savoir Faire,” 179 Willisau (festival), 38–59 Wilson, Olly, 163 Wilson Junior College, 9, 12, 61, 89 WindString Ensemble, 107 Wing, Alex: Black Earth Ensemble, 183– 97; Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 183–97; multi-instrumentalism, 183, 188–89, 194

[ 272 ]

index

Woodrow Wilson Junior College. See Wilson Junior College Wright, Charles “Specs,” 89 Yale University, 111–12, 161 young, avery r.: Black Earth Ensemble, 183, 189, 191–97; Mandorla Awakening II (Nicole Mitchell composition), 183, 189, 191–97 Zanolini, Adam, 158 Zawinul, Joe, 107 Ziyad, Saalik: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 144, 145–48, 150–56; AACM Vocal Ensemble, 144, 151–52; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great

Black Music Ensemble album), 145– 48, 150–56; composing, 145, 146–47, 157; conducting, 146, 147, 148; “Esoteric Intrusiveness” (composition), 146–48, 157; extended forms, 146–48 Ziyad, Taalib-Din: AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, 144, 146–48, 150– 56; AACM Vocal Ensemble, 144, 151–52; At Umbria Jazz 2009 (AACM Great Black Music Ensemble album), 146–48, 150–56 Zooid, 108, 139 Zyklus (Karlheinz Stockhausen composition), 66