Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM
by Paul Steinbeck (Music 781.65 Ste)
While the history of modern jazz is
often associated with activities in and around New York City, there have been
jazz scenes around the country as well. One of the most notable was in 1960s
Chicago, where the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)
was born. One thing that’s immediately different about the Chicago scene
compared to the east coast is that they formally organized themselves, a great
way for musicians to become colleagues, learn from one another, and offer
mutual support. The AACM was founded in 1965, and a huge range of important
names in jazz have been part of its ranks over the decades, including Anthony
Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Wadada Leo Smith,
Henry Threadgill, Lester Bowie, Jack DeJohnette, Tomeka Reid, and many more. As
an organization, they have operated music programs directed at inner-city kids,
and they’ve run their own AACM School of Music, where students get to interact
with well-known AACM members as teachers.
The latest book about the AACM is Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM by Prof.
Paul Steinbeck, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library. This is his
second book related to the AACM, as he published “Message To Our Folks, a book about the Art Ensemble of
Chicago, in 2017, which we also have. Both the Art Ensemble and the AACM have
been very influential, and there are already several good histories written about
the AACM in particular. However, Steinbeck asserts that Sound Experiments is the first book to offer a
deep analysis of the diverse music itself coming out of the AACM, as opposed to
just an account of their history. The first chapter offers a quick historical
overview of the group’s foundation, and historical highlights appear throughout
the book to place the pieces, composers and performers discussed in context,
but indeed the overall focus of the book quickly hones in on discussion of a
handful of representative pieces from members of the Association.
It’s worth mentioning on that front
that this is a book that features some fairly formal music analysis, including
some transcribed passages and reproductions of handwritten charts. While you
don’t need to read music to enjoy a lot of the book, it’s also fair to say that
it’s primarily aimed at an audience who does, musicians and musicologists more
than music lovers. That said, if you’re already a music lover that’s into jazz,
you will still understand the majority of the narrative descriptions around the
pieces discussed in the book, so I’d still encourage anyone interested to check
it out.
The representative pieces by AACM
members and groups discussed here reveal the massive range of musical ideas
inspired by the AACM. Like most jazz, most of these pieces combine elements of
composition and improvisation, but most feature more unique formal structuring
than the usual “head-solos-head” format found in earlier forms of combo jazz.
Among the interesting features in AACM pieces are the use of what they call
“little instruments,” which many members perform with in addition to their
primary instruments. These are used to add new kinds of textures and colors to
the music, and included things like bike horns, ratchets, maracas, cymbals, and
various small African instruments. Conventional notation is used for some of
the pieces, while others become fairly unconventional. The work of Anthony
Braxton is a great example of this: in his Chicago days with the AACM, most of
his music still included aspects of traditional notation, but it was combined
with elements of graphic notation. On paper, this music looked like it landed
somewhere between jazz and the more aleatoric “new music” scores found in the
60s. And indeed, the chance-based operations of aleatory approaches to music
share a certain kinship with jazz improvisation sonically as well.
While Braxton’s music can sound
very modern, other influences on AACM artists were sometimes quite traditional.
The group Air, for example, developed out of saxophonist Henry Threadgill
arranging Scott Jopin piano rags for the trio. While their vocabulary stretched
considerably beyond this, they continued to incorporate the occasional rag into
their performances, and they developed strategies for improvising in a manner
that sounded faithful to the intention of such pieces. Some of Threadgill’s
music of this period with Air also incorporated Japanese musical concepts, and
he developed his own percussion instrument, the “hubkaphone,” made of bells,
gongs, cymbals, and hubcaps hanging in a metal frame.
Over time, the concepts behind
AACM-related music have continued to evolve with technology. Trombonist George
Lewis has been a fantastic example of this in practice with his “Voyager”
piece, which creates duets between computer-generated music and live
performers. The piece debuted in the late 1980s, and Lewis has continued to
refine it as new kinds of interactive software become available. But no matter
the technology, the goal of the piece remains the same, which is to create “a
software-driven improvising entity that could create orchestral textures based
on the musical concepts of the AACM.”
The AACM continues to grow and
evolve, too. The final chapter focuses on a piece by flutist and composer
Nicole Mitchell, one of the first members of the AACM to be born after its
foundation, and one of the notable leaders within the group in recent years.
Her “Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds” is a great example of a
contemporary piece that can go anywhere the composer’s imagination desires,
with elements of rock, pop, world idioms and more. The work also points to
extramusical considerations like evolving technology and spirituality, a kind
of fresh take on Afrofuturism. This is a great piece to end this book on, as
it’s an excellent example of how vibrant and forward thinking the AACM and its
members can be, even 50 years after its founding.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago also by
Paul Steinbeck, or Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City by William
Sites.)
( official Paul Steinbeck
web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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