The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the (Aural) Arts After Jazz
The A A C M's Place in Modern Music (Jazz and Otherwise)
This first race-centric issue also comes to light when we consider John Zorn (greatly influenced by Braxton and the Art Ensemble) whose name has become synonymous with eclecticism and "Post-Modernism" in music, and who, as such, has been misunderstood or criticized on the same grounds that the A A C M artists have. But Zorn, of course, is white - Jewish, yes, but in the U S A imperium at least (if not those of the European past) Jewish is white. And, as Lewis (correctly) argues, "many artists in the world of white American experimentalism [... are] able to describe themselves without opposition as 'former' jazz musicians" - that is, whites "have historically been free to migrate conceptually and artistically without suffering charges of rejecting their culture and history." Indeed, in the book's Afterword, when he turns his attention toward what he calls "Downtown II" (that is, the 1980's "Downtown" scene of whom Zorn is the most-recognized, in contrast to the earlier "Downtown I" of various composers largely associated with John Cage, Fluxus, and Minimalism) Lewis notes that "Downtown II's press coding as white [...] was not only at variance with [its] image of transcendence, but seemed to have little basis in either New York City's geography or musical affinities." Another relevant point in this regard: the phrase, "creative music," adopted by the Association as an alternative to "jazz," nonetheless was treated by journalists and listeners as interchangeable with Free Jazz. Readers of the Wire magazine, which in varied respects bears the brunt of Lewis's sharp rebukes, will surely recall their adoption of the phrase, "Fire Music," originally the name of an Archie Shepp album. In that case, critics who already ignored the A A C M's notion of a Jazz avant-garde that had traversed beyond the boundaries of Jazz itself have shot back with an alternate, non-"jazz" term that, a priori, has no meaning outside its circumscribed conceptualization of a particular scene within Free/ modern Jazz.
Many of Lewis's arguments pivot around these claims that musicians like those of the A A C M have abandoned their musical pedigree, their duty to embody African American experiences and cultural traits, a critique which masks its insidious racism with fraudulent accolades for "black" music. On one hand, Lewis argues that Jazz was a "modernist high art based in black culture." We see here Lewis's conservatism quite clearly; maintaining the very notion of "high" art, he justly wants to elevate Jazz to a position parallel to that of European Classical music, but only insofar as a high-low, or art-folk, binary unfortunately remains at work. He quotes Charlie Parker asserting that Bebop emerged directly out of the work of Jazz predecessors, not by imitating or incorporating that of European Classical masters. As often as Parker quoted Classical composition, as much as he wanted to work with Varèse, he still did not pay the "entrance fee" whereby a popular form, like Jazz, would be seen as having definitively left its origins behind and announced itself ready to be judged against Classical standards. In other words, Lewis is suggesting that A A C M artist have not abandoned their racial heritage, but instead are following the paths laid by their heroes. No surprise then that Lewis finds fault with the later writings of Leroi Jones (after he had changed his name to Amiri Baraka) when the famous poet-playwright began to echo the concerns of Marsalis and the "Classicists," arguing that Jazz had lost its mass audience since the 1950's and therefore no longer stood as the essential musical contribution of the "blues people." Baraka had already tagged A A C M artists as part of the "Tail Europe" school, asserting that they merely sought to impress the denizens of European Modernism by slavishly imitating the likes of Cage and Stockhausen. This "ongoing effort to chain the ideas of black musicians to the demands of vox populi," as Lewis puts it, again is countered by the origin of many post-Bebop Jazz artists in lower-class communities. Lest anyone think that white critics bear the brunt of Lewis's criticisms, he has Baraka in mind when he unleashes one of the best lines of the entire book: "Far from articulating resistance or class struggle, those who import the bourgeois-versus-vernacular binary dialectic unblinkingly into the complex world of black musical expression run the risk of inadvertently serving as the ventriloquist's dummy for corporate megamedia." Moreover, the reader is also indirectly reminded of how easy it is to exaggerate the popular appeal of Jazz music in the 1950's. Baraka, Marsalis, et al., have been pedaling a delusion, ignoring basic history: during the Big Band/ Swing era, Jazz definitely was the popular music of choice in the U S A, but it lost this status by the end of the 1940's, a development that surely relates to the rise of Bebop, but reflects many other changes in what was, after all, a decade of massive upheaval throughout most of the world.
The race issue takes us to Chapters 4 and 5 of the book, the portion that will prove to be of highest value to later historians, for it incorporates extensive excerpts from the tape recordings Abrams (the first President and continued unofficial leader of the Association) made of the early meetings of what became the A A C M. These excerpts let us know, first of all, that interracial relations reared their awkward head from the beginning. Bob Dogan, a pianist on the list of musicians who were invited to the Association's first general meeting on 8 May 1965 also happened to be white. Though Lewis asserts that founding members Richard Abrams, Phil Cohran, Jodie Christian, and Steve McCall "sent postcards to the cream of Chicago's African American musicians" announcing the meeting, the author apparently was not concerned to find out who had included a white man among the initial potential members. Was it a mistake, or an intentional move based upon Dogan's established position among Chicago's South Side and black musicians? Or, even more intriguing, a sly dissent by one of the four founders against the increasingly-obvious fact that the Association would not take an interracial approach? One thing we know, if such was the case: Abrams was not the voice of dissent, as he took the lead at the Association's third meeting, on 29 May 1965 [at the second meeting, on 15 May, the organization's name was adopted], in advocating that the group limit itself to black members. Dogan objected, suggesting that other white musicians had expressed interest in the new organization; other than Cohran proposing that the issue be put aside until the next meeting, Lewis only quotes Abrams, who apparently pushed Cohran's hesitation and Dogan's opposition aside. The reader is left to wonder what others at the meeting contributed to the discussion.
That said, the prospect Dogan raised of other white members in fact probably doomed any chance of the A A C M not being a race-exclusive grouping. A tiny number of white members might not have led to any dictums on the subject; the possibility of several, though, caused justified fears. The Association's exclusion of white musicians was grounded, as Lewis explains, not just in the shifting politics of the time, with civil-rights groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality expelling white members, but specifically in the disappointing experience of the Jazz Composers Guild [J C G], founded in 1964 in New York. The J C G's white members, notably Paul Bley, Carla Bley, and Mike Mantler, received grants or performance opportunities on an individual basis, and the organization as a whole, because of the de facto leadership of Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor, was ostracized as "black" and thus less likely to receive patronage. However, Archie Shepp's decision to sign with Impulse! Records, based on the popularity he'd attained as a sideman and protege of John Coltrane has been recognized as more of a blow to the J C G's continuation, especially its goal of the collective approving any work an individual member performed beyond its auspices. Shepp's opportunity, however, certainly did not disprove the existence at the time (and now) of what Lewis calls "a social system that routinely invests heavily in white privilege"; the rewards awaiting a white Jazz artist would contribute to tensions within interracial groups, and indeed such disparities had been a problem throughout Jazz history. The exclusion of whites apparently did not become official however, since in 1967 Emanuel Cranshaw was admitted as a member. Abrams accepted his membership in the face of increased opposition, arguing that Cranshaw, despite his genealogical heritage, had grown up "black"; born Gordon Emanuel, he had even taken the surname of his adopted brother, the popular (and African American) bassist Bob Cranshaw. To no avail, as pressures from within and without the organization eventually led to his expulsion. Here, Lewis gives a little more context for the decision, pointing out that many black-nationalist groups on Chicago's South Side looked askance at the white listeners in attendance at A A C M concerts.
In the book's second chapter, "New Music, New York," the author establishes his view of the cultural milieu New York-based Jazz artists found themselves in at the onset of the 1960's, as intriguing and perplexing as it certainly seemed to the young future A A C M members in Chicago. Most pertinent to this discussion, the chapter dwells at length upon the racial tensions among New York artists that helped break the connection between post-Bebop Jazz and the literary-visual arts vanguard that had been so strong in the 1950's. Even when Abstract Expressionist painters and Beat poets sang the praises of Bebop, they did so - Lewis claims - with the assumption that Jazz music took place somewhere else; the white "Jazz poets" may have collaborated with black musicians, but did not invite them to be "participants in any aesthetic or political discussions." LeRoi Jones and Ted Joans were exceptions, but still felt like outsiders. Their white counterparts in Greenwich Village lacked an understanding of the discrimination blacks faced, North and South, or awareness even of budding post-colonial movements in the art and politics of the Third World. Jones and other black artists were wary of the Euro-centric perspectives of their white compatriots, who were "overly invested in a kind of bourgeois individualism that black artists could not really afford to pursue." The growing Free Jazz revolution furthered the racial divide, as younger visual artists, such those of the "Pop Art" scene, evinced more interest in Rock music and had little affinity for either radical politics or expressionist/ Romanticist tendencies in art.
Preparing the reader for the eclecticism of the A A C M, Lewis is quick to place Free Jazz within a larger widening of artistic pursuits among (ostensible) Jazz musicians taking place in the 1960's; he also couples it with the rise of a black "salon scene" in Harlem and the East Village, led by Jones's decision to move uptown. Despite his later reactionary turn, Jones more than anyone made the connection between the "New Thing" in Jazz and nascent Afro-centric perspective on art and society, especially with his essay "Jazz and the White Critic," published in 1963 by Down Beat magazine, a response to both the angry retorts Free Jazz often prompted from critics and, more broadly, the failure of white critics to grant Jazz the same level of respect as Classical music. Lewis opines that a "Fordism that had seemingly defined the directions for black musicians along rigidly commodified lines" led in response to "various freedoms [...] being asserted across a wide spectrum of musical possibilities"; in such an interpretation, artists not regularly associated with Free Jazz are included: Yusef Lateef, Andrew Hill, or Wayne Shorter, for example. The revolution in Lewis's account was marked by: an expanded array of instruments, and "extended" techniques; a "nonhierarchical approach to time" grounded in the work of Bebop pioneer Kenny Clarke; increased "rhythmic complexity of melodic lines"; "harmonic practices rang[ing] through quartal, serial, polytonal, pantonal, microtonal, and atonal techniques, eschewing the late Romantic notions of teleological tonality that bebop practice had revised"; "structural integrity on a larger scale," with John Coltrane and Charles Mingus especially noteworthy in this regard; and a preference not to cover Jazz standards.
Thusly we come to a second major revelation of the excerpts from Abrams's recordings. The Association's focus on the "original" compositions of its members pointedly put it at odds with Jazz, and popular-music, norms and created a healthy amount of discord among the earliest members. Objections raised by bassist Melvin Jackson at the May 8 meeting led Abrams to clarify that those who do not want to write their own compositions still had a place in the organization because of the necessity of musicians other than the composer to enact said composer's work. Lewis points out that Abrams demurred from the "division of labor between 'composer' and 'performer' that characterized Western classical music," instead aiming to eliminate the composition-improvisation duality. He quotes Abrams: "'You write music when you stand up and practice your instrument.'" It was agreed that concerts promoted by the Association would only feature original works by members. Furthermore, following the example of Ornette Coleman's legendary Town Hall concert of 1962, they would avoid nightclubs, promoting their own shows, renting performance spaces as need be.
By the end of 1965, a major step toward the maturation of the Association's aesthetic identity occurred as an outgrowth of the debate over "original music" when the experimental/ avant-garde preferences of certain members impelled a clear rejection of traditionalism. The issue came to a head at a meeting on 2 October 1965, several months after playing standards had been rejected. Those of a traditionalist bent objected to a complete emphasis upon new compositions. Of especial notice at this point is that Abrams asserts that A A C M members are "not really Jazz musicians," an early indication of the Association's contradictory relationship to those worrisome "world of Jazz" ideologies. Abrams also put forth another crucial idea behind all sorts of experimentalist approaches to music: that the artists wanted to "awaken the psyche" of themselves first and foremost - to music play music they want to hear, not according to the demands of the buying public. Cohran, whose concern for a Jazz tradition he thought was being stolen and/ or abandoned had indirectly lent support to Association's racial exclusivity, now found that his desire to teach younger artists the particulars of African American musical history put him at odds with the majority. By the new year, 1966, he had left to pursue contrasting goals; a few others followed.
This rejection of playing standards did not entail a turn away from the learning how to play traditional Jazz. Under Abrams's guidance, the A A C M School opened in the fall of 1967, with Abrams and a few other older Association members teaching their younger peers, who in turn taught young musicians, sometimes children, the basics of harmony and rhythm, differing methods of composition, etc. As Lewis recounts, many Association members wanted to know how "play the changes" - quite a contrast with the crude stereotypes of young artists of Jazz's avant garde, accused as they were of not knowing how to play "in" before they chose to play "out." A related topic comes earlier in the book, in chapter 3, "The Development of the Experiment Band" (that is, the loose collection led by Abrams which prefigured the A A C M) when Lewis analyzes the influence of Joseph Schillinger on the young Abrams. An immigrant from Russia who worked with Leon Theremin and Henry Cowell, Schillinger worked out an elaborate, open-ended system of making music, published posthumously in 1946 as the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. Unlike other systems of "music theory," such as Serialism, the Schillinger system did not prescribe a set approach to harmony, and while it was highly mathematical it was not rigidly so, as it allowed for the spiritual effects of music, as such very appealing to Abrams, Braxton, and others in the A A C M, for whom philosophical study occurred alongside musical explorations. Though Schillinger's notoriety was fading quickly by the 1960's, his system foreshadowed the work of Milton Babbitt and Iannis Xenakis, and yet also - as Lewis relates - inspired Charles Stepney, an arranger for Chess Records who introduced it to Abrams. In turn, the system encouraged Abrams to seek out ways of expanding the "ad hoc, informal education system of Jazz," helped by other Chicago musicians like Eddie Harris, Donald Rafael Garrett, and Walter Perkins. That is, Abrams, already an established player in the Chicago Bebop scene, not only knew the tradition, but wanted to expand it. Again, we see the A A C M's simultaneous conservatism and radicalism. Mitchell, Threadgill, and Jarman began playing with Abrams in this period, as did a few other eventual Association members who made their mark early in the organization's history but sadly have not been heralded in the years since: Leonard Jones, Troy Robinson, and Gene Dinwiddie. Similarly, the Experimental Band's music is lost to time: they made few public appearances, and re-used the same tape when recording rehearsals.
While the A A C M School and other logistical matters were dealt with, as far as the listening public was concerned the A A C M story for several years became one and the same with that of The Art Ensemble of Chicago. The first A A C M album, Roscoe Mitchell's Sound, recorded in August 1966 and released later the same year, featured future members of the Ensemble (Mitchell, Lester Bowie, and Malachi Favors) plus Lester Lashley on trombone and cello, Maurice McIntyre on tenor saxophone, and Alvin Fielder on drums. Drummer Philip Wilson would join Mitchell, Bowie, and Favors for recordings in 1967 that would not be released until 1975, as Old/ Quartet. The next Mitchell album, Congliptious, recorded and released in 1968, featured landmark early solo performances by Mitchell, Bowie, and Favors, plus a quartet track with Robert Crowder on drums. Meanwhile, Numbers 1 & 2, recorded in 1967 and released the same year under Bowie's name, featured the Mitchell-Bowie-Favors trio on one track, and a quartet with Joseph Jarman added on another, thus setting the stage for the Art Ensemble. Jarman had also recorded his debut album in 1966: Song For, released the next year, didn't just feature Jarman's regular quartet of the time (with Christopher Gaddy on piano, Charles Clark on bass, and Thurman Barker on drums) but also Fred Anderson and Bill Brimfield (who had their own group, and constituted a sort of Evanston contingent of the Association) and Steve McCall. Another Jarman album, As If It Were the Seasons [1968] as well as Abrams's debut, Levels and Degrees of Light [1967] and Maurice McIntyre's debut Humility in the Light of the Creator [1969], showcased similarly-diverse line-ups - and, moreover, several of the musicians delving far into multi-instrumentalism, soon to become a defining characteristic of the A A C M.
The notes for the five-disc set, The Art Ensemble 1967/68, released by Nessa Records, give us a taste of those pivotal years between the Association's founding and the Art Ensemble's decision to go to Paris in the summer of 1969. Chuck Nessa, as a producer at Chicago's Delmark Records, had helped get many of these early albums recorded and published; upon leaving Delmark, he started his own label specifically focusing on Association artists. Besides the tracks that made up Old/ Quartet, Congliptious, and Numbers 1 & 2, the box set features some previously-unavailable recordings, the first a double trio: the Mitchell-Bowie-Favors grouping plus the Jarman quintet minus Gaddy. Indeed, within the next year both Gaddy and Charles Clark passed away from ill health despite their young ages. These tragedies, as Association members have often recalled, impelled the Chicagoans to leave their home city bitter and disappointed at the lack of opportunities there, but determined as ever to move forward. The financial difficulties that came with performing avant-garde Jazz in general had become too much; in the same period, Alvin Fielder returned to his native Mississippi, Philip Wilson turned to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and Abrams began emphasizing the Association's education mission, recording a second album, Young at Heart, Wise in Time in 1969 that wasn't released until 1974 and then not returning to the public eye until 1972 (having not only taken the lead with regard to the A A C M School, Abrams had to return to a leadership position with so many members leaving Chicago; he was aided by new members like Lewis, Douglas Ewart, Wallace McMillan, Pete Cosey, and Frank Gordon). His quartet decimated, Jarman joined Mitchell, Bowie, and Favors in their trek abroad. During their stay in Paris, 1969-1971, the group (adding Famoudou Don Moye in 1970) recorded 15 albums (including Comme à
la Radio, a collabroation with chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine and her regular co-composer Areski Belkacem) unleashing a consistently-excellent bulk of music in an unprecedented short period of time, and attracted a great deal of attention with theatrical live performances. (With their exploration of an expanded array of percussion instruments; costumes, masks, and dramatic skits; and compositions that obliquely denied the notation-improvisation binary, the Art Ensemble's work overlapped with that of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, a point Lewis addresses with considerable awkwardness in the final section of chapter 5. In chapter 3, he describes the important place Sun Ra held in the cultural life of 1950's Chicago.) Meanwhile, a trio of Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and Leroy Jenkins had recorded a debut album (published under Braxton's name) in 1968: 3 Compositions of New Jazz. After recording a follow-up album, Silence, in 1969, they too went to Paris (where they turned into a foursome with the addition of McCall, who'd left before the Art Ensemble, establishing many of the Association's Paris connections). The story goes that they received less acclaim than the Art Ensemble. While they too incorporated theatrical elements, they did so with less humor, less showmanship, and - most important - less Jazz. In chapter 7, "Americans in Paris," Lewis discounts this common narrative, pointing out that the trio enjoyed the same effusive reception from critics and chances at large audiences that the Art Ensemble had attained before them. Instead, the three had greater difficulty remaining united. The young Braxton, apparently quite competitive with his peers, took advantage of the opportunities made available by his perceived leadership of the group and his enthusiasm for his own ideas about composition and culture in general. Braxton has also acknowledged in interviews with Graham Lock in the latter's Forces in Motion: The Music and Thought of Anthony Braxton that his and Smith's compositional ideas frequently clashed. Though the trio left Paris for New York after less than a year, Braxton would return to Europe at least once a year throughout the decade, ultimately doing just as much to establish the A A C M in Europe as the Art Ensemble had.
While chapters 4 and 5 serve the historians, chapter 9, "The A A C M in New York," gives Lewis the chance to discuss at length the broader problems he wants to address, and to problematize. It takes the reader to the late 1970's, as the "loft" Free Jazz scene blossomed and New York found itself newly home to an impressive array of music artists associated with not only the A A C M, but also the Black Artists' Group [B A G] that had at the tail-end of the 1960's and the early '70's made Saint Louis a major center of interdisciplinary experimental art [included in this group were Julis Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, J D Parran, Charles Bobo Shaw, and Baikida Carroll] and the Los Angeles-based Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension [U G M A A], led by Horace Tapscott, who nevertheless did not join some of his pupils (David Murray, Arthur Blythe, Lawrence Butch Morris) in their eastward migration. At this point in their histories, with Braxton, Mitchell, Air, Abrams, Lewis and Smith regularly releasing albums, the A A C M reached their highest level of acclaim, challenging basic conceptions of music held by critics and artists alike in the epicenter of the Jazz business: despite its demographic and economic decline, New York at that time was the center of global cultural movements in a way no city could ever dream of becoming in the current geopolitical situation.
A few noteworthy aspects of the narrative suffice to frame the A A C M's brief flirtation with both commercial success and polite-society recognition. New York journalists Gary Giddins of the Village Voice and Robert Palmer of the New York Times began to take note of the infusion of Jazz artists into the experimental downtown scene, most of all at the performance venue the Kitchen, which during this time had Garrett List, Rhys Chatham, and Lewis, among others, serving two-year stints as curators. European festivals, especially the Moers New Jazz Festival, offered A A C M artists new opportunities both financially and creatively. Because of their growing commercial and critical success relative to native New Yorkers, A A C M artists sometimes drew the ire of those who expected young arrivals to "pay their dues": rise to prominence gradually with all due respect to one's elders, like past Jazz artists had supposedly done. Furthermore, as A A C M artists began finally to realize long-form notational works, far removed from the Jazz idiom, some of which they had been planning or imagining for years, they also began to hear complaints from the New York critics (and the Chicago ones, at Down Beat magazine) who had been their strongest defenders. To quote Lewis, "critical reception [...] became quite often frankly dismissive of the extensive engagement with extended notated form, electronics and computers, graphic scores[,] and traditionally notated works (with or without improvisation) realized by A A C M musicians and others." Association members and other Jazz artists did begin receiving support from the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as private foundations, though always in smaller sums than those awarded to white artists with a Classical/ academic background. Finally, the Jazz press and mainstream media caught wind of the "loft Jazz" scene, and as with previous potential for cross-over acclaim, the artists instead found they had in effect been ghettoized (even as those who lived and performed in the lofts were unwitting participants in the gentrification that would uproot them). Lewis explains: "by framing their music as requiring minimal infrastructural investment, ["loft Jazz"] was used to disconnect [the artists] from more lucrative economic possibilities." That is, though they were often closer in how they were run and in the music they presented to the gallery spaces that populated the Cageian-Fluxus-Minimalist "Downtown I" scene, lofts came to be seen as just the newest, hip version of the Jazz nightclub. [On a related note, chapter 7 of Benjamin Looker's history of the B A G ("Point From Which Creation Begins": The Black Artists' Group of St. Louis) - entitled "Going Out Live: B A G and the New York Loft Scene" - offers an excellent account of this twilight time of the Free Jazz era, still poorly documented.]
Nonetheless, the opportunities present in New York made Chicago seem like a backwater. In the early 1970's, only a small number of Association members came to New York (notably, Braxton and Leroy Jenkins, the latter forming The Revolutionary Ensemble with bassist Sirone and drummer Jerome Cooper). In the latter half of the decade, "members of the A A C M's second wave, along with the Chicago-based remnants of the first wave - including, most importantly, founder Muhal Richard Abrams - moved to New York, seemingly en masse." Lewis himself was one of the migrants, as were Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Fred Hopkins, Henry Threadgill, and Lester Bowie. Major labels took interest. The Art Ensemble, as with the A A C M's European ventures, first charted the course here, releasing two albums on Atlantic Records after their return to the United States in 1972; but again, Braxton ultimately shone brightest, signing with Arista Records, helping pave the way for both Abrams and Air to link up with Novus Records, an Arista subsidiary. Their stints were short-lived compared to Braxton's, which itself ended in confusion and disappointment. Still, Braxton's Arista recordings, stretching from 1974 to 1981 and recently collected in a box set by Mosaic Records, besides the 1969-1971 Art Ensemble recordings and the string of studio albums Air were able to release on several labels [Air Song [1975], Air Raid [1976], Air Time [1977], Open Air Suit [1978], Air Lore [1979], Air Mail [1980] and 80° Below '82 [1982]), show the A A C M at its artistic, and commercial, peak.
The quartet recordings Arista published (namely, New York, Fall 1974 [which also featured a duo with electronics musician Richard Teitelbaum as well a saxophone-quartet piece with B A G artists Hemphill, Lake, and Bluiett, leading eventually to their World Saxophone Quartet with David Murray], Five Pieces 1975, and The Montreux/ Berlin Concerts [which featured both versions of the quartet, plus one track with Braxton and Lewis alongside the Berlin New Music Group]) might still draw the most attention, but they were only the beginning, literally and conceptually, of Braxton's output on the label, barely hinting at the larger implications of his, and the A A C M's, revolutionary music (nevermind that, in its original formation - with trumpeter Kenny Wheeler instead of Lewis - Braxton was the only Association member in the quartet). Even with Lewis in Wheeler's place, the quartet can find itself assimilated into the Free Jazz genre. Two of the most-popular of his Arista albums, Creative Orchestra Music 1976 and Duets 1976 With Muhal Richard Abrams, as well as a double-L P of solo performances [Alto Saxophone Improvisations] offered their proverbial listeners enough challenges already. But Braxton also let loose a trio of albums that bemused some, annoyed many: For Trio, For Four Orchestras, and For Two Pianos. While the four-orchestra triple L P turned out to be somewhat of a disaster (Lewis disagrees), as it didn't even feature a complete performance of the composition in question and Braxton admits the musicians did not get a chance to rehearse appropriately, the other two were clear triumphs. For Trio featured two different trios [Braxton-Mitchell-Jarman and Braxton-Threadgill-Ewart] performing the same composition, and arguably provides the exemplary A A C M multi-instrumentalist performances. For Two Pianos features Ursula Oppens and Frederic Rzewski performing a single composition over the entire course of the L P, as such a brilliant coming-together of the "Downtown I" and the A A C M. As Lewis recounts, Braxton hoped the quartet releases would appease Arista enough for the label not to object to these experimental albums being slipped "under the rug." If so, an understandable defeatist strategy, suggesting that Braxton at least possessed no delusions about his ability to change the society's conception of the black musician.
Indeed, despite Arista's sponsorship, and despite the Art Ensemble re-emerging in 1978 after a few years on hiatus, support for A A C M artists from the mainstream faded faster than it had arrived. Without smaller European labels like Hat Hut and Black Saint, their music would have disappeared from record shops. These changing fortunes presumably struck at Lewis quite pointedly; as he relates by way of several charming anecdotes, this leading second-wave member had come of age in an ideal environment: learning from Abrams when they were both still in Chicago; while also traveling to New Haven to partake in Jazz's brief academic sojourn at Yale University under the banner of Willie Ruff's Duke Ellington Fellowship Program, launched in 1972 when legends like Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach met and played with young artists like Lewis, Anthony Davis, Dwight Andrews, and Alvin Singleton (also, Smith and a host of other Jazz-oriented musicians were living in New Haven at the time, including Gerry Hemingway, Pheeroan AkLaff, and Mark Dresser); then hooking up with Braxton just as it seemed the latter was going to achieve a status attained only a few experimentalists - say, Cage, Stockhausen, Philip Glass - wherein, no matter how rarely their music is actually listened to closely, they definitely have a "household name"-recognition in elite urban culture. Alas, something went wrong: neither a racist culture that would instead grant John Zorn the position Braxton perhaps could have gotten, since Zorn's popularity was based not just in "Downtown II" being "coded white" but also in his extensive, non-condescending interaction with Rock music; nor a mere result of the Marsalis crowd disparaging experimentalists. Rather, several obstacles come to the forefront; and given his deep personal interest, we're not surprised to see Lewis delve into these issues with such acumen and rigor.
Taking us back to the race issue, much of the negative criticisms of A A C M artists at the time revolved around the question of whether their music was Jazz or not, as if a verdict in such matter would settle the critic's confusion. Lewis provides plenty of evidence of the crass ridicule spewed by critics eager to reject any perversions of Jazz by academic and "high art" ideas, reminding us of the implied threats many musicians faced of having their careers ruined if they continued performing "anti-Jazz." Besides descriptions of some of the long-form works A A C M composers were first performing/ recording in the latter half of the 1970's (such as Mitchell's The Maze, included on an album with the aforementioned L-R-G, or Abrams's Lifea Blinec - pronounced "Lifeline A B C") Lewis's best response to many of these rebukes that now seem quite embarrassing to those who wrote them can only come via some ridicule of his own: "In the final analysis, those who thought that Anthony Braxton sounded like Karlheinz Stockhausen or Anton Webern could not be said to have truly heard much of either." That said, Lewis also returns to his qualms about a great deal of contemporary academic work on African American music, most of all its failure to redefine the idea of the vernacular, even as urbanization has, at least since the 1940's, rendered our commonplace notions of Folk music null and void - and not just in the West, but across a surprisingly-wide expanse of global culture. "What is needed," Lewis writes, "is a local and contingent articulation of the vernacular, one that responds to particular persons, histories, and social conditions, rather than a universalizing and essentializing conception that is permanently identified with whatever the black popular music of the moment might be." Presumably the extraordinary worldwide impact of African American popular music accounts for these limited expectations of African American music more generally; thus, a positive reason. That said, Lewis makes one of those rare revealing points that perhaps is too obvious, and yet because of its veracity is troubling in its implications for our intellectual climate: "A conception of black cultural history that is forced to deny engagement with or influence from pan-European traditions would look absurd if it were applied to black writers or visual artists."
"Bimusicality" emerges as a crucial concept here because of the inevitable binary between the Jazz and European Classical traditions. The term, in Lewis's rendering, refers to black musicians who mastered both the Jazz and Classical idioms, indeed whose experience as Jazz musicians made them uniquely adept at composing and interpreting contemporary notational music. A A C M and other musicians of the same generation, especially Anthony Davis, stand out as exemplary "bimusical" artists. A few other terms highlighted here: creolization, hybridity, polyphony, heterogeneity - succinctly capture Lewis's portrait of leading Association members like himself, Abrams, Braxton, Jenkins, Mitchell, Smith, and Threadgill. Having established "the dominant focus of the A A C M as strongly composer-centered," Lewis posits that "the unitary focus [...] on the role of improvisor, a trope that has become standard in the historiography and criticism of black American music, cannot account for the diversity of black musical subjectivity exemplified by the A A C M." It also doesn't account for the long history of African American Classical composers, who Lewis refers to often throughout the book - especially William Grant Still and James Reese Europe. He adds, "The ongoing binary opposition between composition and improvisation [...] lacked any real force among A A C M composers, who were often drawn to collage and interpenetration strategies that blended, opposed, or ironically juxtaposed the two disciplines." Duke Ellington, alongside Ornette Coleman, served as a lodestar of sorts for Association members. Lewis explains: "Ellington's image of himself as a composer working with and through African American forms was constantly challenged, stigmatized, and stereotyped." Lewis only hints at the larger implications of eliminating the composition-improvisation binary when he goes on to say, "as with Ellington, as well as later white American experimentalism, the definition of 'composition' could be a fluid one [...] employing compositional methods that did not necessarily privilege either conventionally[-]notated scores, or the single, heroic creator figure so beloved by Jazz historiography." Such methods have been used throughout the history of Jazz, and arguably have become the predominant form of music, perhaps even bringing the aural arts back on course after a period of, at most, two centuries wherein European Classical become strictly notational, and increasingly limited the leeway musicans had in interpreting notations.
Taking into account these many degrees of difference between the A A C M and any supposed norm certainly makes clear how much Association artists stood out. After all, Free Jazz - at least after the attention afforded "loft Jazz" - was losing favor, as was Fusion. In the 1970's, those looking for the next great Jazz hero were more likely to settle on Keith Jarrett than Braxton. Jarrett, after all, not only had the advantage of working with two of the most-popular Jazz artists of the late 1960's, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis, but brought in just-enough elements of the Free Jazz revolution, in both his solo-piano work and his quartet with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian, to please a broad range of listeners, if not critics. Alas, even Jarrett - or, for those less "purist," Pat Metheny - could not keep Jazz commercially viable. With little support coming from academia or government institutions, the A A C M - no, the entire Jazz avant garde - found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Compounded by the disgraceful Marsalis-led commercialization/ codification of Jazz in the early 1980's, no other shift in U S A culture of the time - save perhaps the rise of religious fundamentalism - did more to assure North America's position as a backwater of Western civilization. When, in the latter half of the 1980's and the early '90's, Braxton surpassed his previous achievements with a new quartet (featuring Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser, and Gerry Hemingway) that brilliantly - and collectively - traversed between notation and improvisation, the mainstream did not pay attention, the music relegated to European labels such as Leo Records and European (or Canadian) festivals.
The last section of Chapter 9, "Diversity and Its Discontents: New American Music After the Jazz Age," brings the scale of Lewis's search for the reasons behind the A A C M's problems with critics, Jazz or not, and for the origins of the limited conception among Americans of what constitutes "art music," to its widest expanse. He takes the reader back to the 1920's and the earliest attempts to delineate the "American" contribution to music. During that "roaring" age of illusory internationalism and peace, many Europeans and some North Americans suggested that "Jazz could form the basis for a uniquely American music" not excessively derivative of European models. As Lewis notes, the likes of composer Maurice Ravel, influential conductor Leopold Stokowski, and Alain Locke, philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance, were certain Jazz would serve as fertile ground for the still-young nation's classical/ art music. Others demurred from this positive optimistic perspective. In particular, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives fretted that Jazz would receive the serious interest that their own music, and other indigenous attempts at a North American Classical music, deserved.
Although Cowell clearly had scant respect for Jazz, Lewis's characterization of Ives seems off the mark. Lewis never quotes Ives directly, but instead indicts him by association with Cowell, "a leader of the self-consciously 'ultramodern' school of American composition [who] advocated the construction of 'a usable past' for American music that would elicit respect from the mavens of European high culture. Fashioning Charles Ives as 'the father of indigenous American art-music served this need." Lewis goes on to assert that Cowell "shared the elder composer's fear that their efforts to define an 'American' music would be overwhelmed by the strong worldwide interest in Jazz as constitutive of the best of American musical creativity," but he does not provide any indication as to where Ives expressed this notion. Even so, Ives and Cowell held justifiable concerns that their music would not receive its due. They too strived to create music that would not slavishly imitate European Classical music, and yet push the aural arts in new directions much like some European experimentalists were doing. Besides, Ives hardly deserves rebuke for any opinions he had about Jazz, as he had already composed his major works by the time Dixieland Jazz would have been heard in his part of the country; and yet showed genuine, respectful interest in popular-music forms like Ragtime and marching bands. Indeed, the notion of clashing orchestras so crucial to some of Braxton's most-ambitious works, including the four-orchestras album and impossible-to-realize compositions like that calling for orchestras on different planets, was first explored by Ives, who shared with Braxton a love for the now-forgotten practice of marching bands competing with each other during parades. As for Cowell, we wonder if he held the unspoken concern that European admiration for Jazz rested more upon general condescending attitudes toward Americans, black or white, than genuine appreciation for the music.
Moreover, Cowell's mild disregard for Jazz hardly compares to John Cage's utter aversion. Certain comments Cage made about Jazz music find the usually-profound intellectual-composer veering into sheer idiocy. Lewis includes one of several quotes most of his readers are probably already familiar with: "Jazz per se derives from serious music. And when serious music derives from it, the situation becomes rather silly." Like I said, sheer idiocy. While Lewis does not suggest that either Cowell or Cage directly expressed racist ideas, needless to say certain presumptions about vernacular arts, or even about "ethnic" (read: non-West European) groups, played a role in their (lack of) appreciation for any music that developed beyond the purview of "high" European and Euro-American society. Granted, all sorts of otherwise-enlightened individuals of Cowell's or Cage's generations probably had the prejudiced views that were too common then (and remain common today, despite all the progress made in the West toward removing sadism - pace Richard Rorty - from our social interactions). But those writing about experimental music rarely dwell on Cage's closed-mindedness. The absurdity of the situation becomes clear when one notices how Theodor Adorno's racially-tinged critique of Jazz is referred to ad nauseum, or when listeners suggest that Karlheinz Stockhausen's crude remarks about the rhythms of modern popular music somehow discredits his views, or prove that he went bonkers in his later years. Why then do John Cage's downright-dumb views on most music not made by him and his friends not similarly effect our understanding of his philosophy? After all, these ideas unfortunately seem to have greater influence than the vast amount of brilliant music he had a hand in creating. Moreover, if Adorno's and Stockhausen's comments hint at past German racism, why doesn't Cage's brusque rejection of Jazz bring to mind his nation's own history of racist imperialist oppression, inflicted not just upon African Americans but the Mexican, the Filipino, the Vietnamese, and the Arab as well?
This elephant proved too big for the room in the review of A Power Stronger Than Itself that appeared in the Wire. There, and in one of the several letters to the editor it prompted, we find the hazy notion that Lewis somehow misrepresents the intentions of the "New York School" of composers that included Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. He in fact does not, but largely because he is not presenting a thorough analysis of these composers. Granted, he could have been more diplomatic in his treatment. For example, when Frank O'Hara [in 1959!] describes a Morton Feldman composition as "spontaneous music-making," Lewis responds that Feldman "was well known for his dislike of improvisation." Apparently Lewis does not consider that, in a discussion centered on aleatoric methods (indeterminacy) which Feldman, compared to his "New York School" peers, ultimately shied away from, the point is secondary. Besides, the composition in question is an earlier piece by Feldman, when he did experiment with chance and improvisation. Lewis also makes the important point that David Tudor generally preferred to write secondary performance scores when realizing aleatoric compositions. Tudor, apparently, remained wary of improvised performances. That said, not only does Lewis note that both Wolff and Brown were critical of these secondary scores, he fails to show any awareness of the improvisational music that did emerge from "Indeterminacy" experiments, whether by the New York School or in the late 1960's by Karlheinz Stockhausen, but most of all in the diverse musical experiments of several Fluxus artists, even though earlier in the book he quotes Charlotte Moorman, a major figure in the Fluxus movement, extensively.
Still, the broad cultural shift from the pluralist 1930's, through the massive upheavals of the next decade, to the reactionary early-Cold War era, undoubtedly closed Jazz music off from consideration as a crucial part, or the foundation, of "an indigenous American high-culture music." Lewis's argument that "in this context, 'indeterminacy' became a compositional method that could embrace the new spontaneity [of Bebop], while preserving both the primacy of core Eurological aesthetic and formal values, and the associated high/ low divide," is valid. Drawing upon William Appleman Williams and David Noble, Lewis also makes a crucial, and necessary, connection between the notion of a definite lack of indigenous sources of North American art music and the ideology of the open frontier that assumed that First Americans, as well the subaltern groups that lacked the "high" culture of their social superiors, had no significant cultural contribution to make. Still, some later manifestations of the tradition initiated by Ives and Cowell certainly did question the divide between "high" and popular arts; and furthermore questioned whether one could speak of "aesthetic and formal values" as being European or African or Asian or what-have-you (and, again, Lewis sometimes has no problem with the high-low binary). Minimalist composers, some of whom were associated with Fluxus, pointedly looked to the Jazz and Rock band as a superior forum for their work compared to the orchestras and string quartets of European Classical music. After all, as Iain Anderson shows in This Is Our Music, the dark days of the early Cold War soon gave way to a new liberalist stage of United States imperialism, when its leaders strained to embrace pluralism once again (dim days, I suppose, but at least not dark).
When setting the scene of 1950's-early '60's Chicago early in his book, Lewis describes how the increase in white listeners of Jazz music had the adverse side-effect of contributing to the decline of live music in African American neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities (a process one cannot help but associate with the public-housing projects and "urban renewal" programs of the time that decimated or completely destroyed urban areas, especially those home to African American or other "ethnic" groups). Ironically then, especially given the black-nationalist orientation of the A A C M, Lewis doesn't ponder why Jazz artists of the 1940's and '50's would have wanted respect from the likes of John Cage, or any sort of recognition from the arbiters of mainstream culture. Having argued that Cowell and Ives feared the attention Jazz received, lest their own music not get its proper due, Lewis then suggests that the "New York School" devoted little mental energy toward "popular" musics like Jazz. And yet oddly he seems surprised that Cage and company fared much better in procuring funding from government agencies and private foundations. While the Association in its early years rejected the possibility of government funding (unlike their peers in the B A G, who briefly managed to procure funds before the Society became less Great) it changed course only to find, as Lewis explains, that the "Indeterminacy" and Minimalist camps, not to mention all sorts of traditionalists, had already laid claim to special status as the progenitors of distinct "American" art music.
The tragedy of the lack of recognition A A C M composers have suffered especially comes to light when we consider the sonic traits the long-form notated works of Braxton or Mitchell share with those of Morton Feldman. In his epic later works, such as For Philip Guston and String Quartet II, often lasting several hours, the "New York School" composer, living in Buffalo to be exact, necessarily worked closely with the performers; a side-by-side comparison of his working methods with those of Braxton and Mitchell would probably say a lot about music in an era of an eroding gulf between composer and performer. Mitchell's quieter, somber works especially invite comparisons. As with Feldman's music, they bring to mind the stillness of winter, its vast expanses of snow-covered fields; the certainty of death and failure, and the calm that awaits when America's inhabitants cease their impulsive social ways - plundering destruction followed by utopian dreaming - and simply live. We might say that the blank spaces and slow, non-"swing" pace of a lot of A A C M music evokes the North, and thus may serve as a fateful outcome for post-Jazz "Black" music, evoking as well a significant part of African American history: the Great Migration from the South (which comes up in Chapter 1 and elsewhere in the book when Lewis relates the family histories of Association members) and the disparate destinies of northern blacks compared to their southern counterparts, whose supposed liberation buttresses the nation's imperialist dogma and simplistic historical boosterism, while northerners clash with subtle forms of caste and the grim reality of industrial decay. The result: a necessary meditation upon the darker side of the dual identity W E B DuBois spoke of, resulting in a music, which from its first legendary manifestation (Sound, credited to the The Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, now seeming like a gentle mocking of the listener's "jazz" expectations) to the present, often presents us with a deafening silence: the (non-)response befitting a society whose ideological rationale attempts to deny any sort of social identity, replacing it with dreams of the violent erasure of others' homes in time and place.
Page 3
Anthony Braxton
First, Lewis's book, and the entirety of the A A C M experience, repeatedly forces us to dwell upon the image that comes to mind when we think of an experimental, or avant-garde, musician. The problem being: that image is of a white man. Sometimes a white woman (or a Japanese man or woman). But less likely, a black man or black woman. We do not think of Jazz artists as experimentalists, nor do we give appropriate due to those black artists - American, European, or African - who work beyond the purview of any conception, however open-ended, of what constitutes Jazz or any "black" popular music like Soul, Funk, Jùjú, Reggae, or Hip Hop. A challenge to this orthodoxy coming from privileged members of the African American minority would have been noteworthy enough. But Lewis also stresses, in the Preface, the origins of the A A C M among working-class African Americans in a city, Chicago, where they found themselves subject to severe discrimination. He then compares the collectivism (or, rather, the "individualism within an egalitarian frame") of the A A C M to Jazz music broadly as well as attempts at social order and institution building within slave communities; and later, in his introduction, links his book to the important place held by autobiographies and oral histories in African American literature. The point is clear: the A A C M did not in and of itself make a massive contribution to, and redefine the very nature, of experimental/ modern music. Rather, it did so as a culmination of Jazz music's own fundamental and dynamic effect on Twentieth-Century music, as a vital contribution to global culture made (more often than not) by the African American community.
Henry Threadgill
