Music Book Review: South Experiments: The Music of the AACM by Paul Steinbeck

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

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