The AACM and American Experimentalism
George E. Lewis

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is a Chicago-based collective of experimental musicians that developed in 1965. Stating “Providing leadership and vision for the development of creative music” as a primary goal, the AACM has long cultivated an atmosphere privileging a free, collectivist atmosphere where individuality is given space to expand within a group. Their motto: “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.” Distinguished, multigenerational members abound, including pianist Amina Claudine Myers, multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, and the revered group Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Despite the AACM’s ample contributions—musical as well as social and intellectual—to American experimental music over the past 40-plus years, history tends to be mum on the collective. When they are acknowledged, it’s normally through discography, which ignores the greater social context in which they emerged and persisted. AACM member and musician-composer-artist George E. Lewis’ Power Stronger Than Itself: A History of the AACM, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2007, redresses these omissions by presenting a complex, nuanced, and multicultural view of the diverse and unstable environment of contemporary American musical experimentalism. Here, Lewis discusses the AACM’s radical spirit and his motivations for writing his forthcoming book.

George E. Lewis (1984) Collection of Cheryl Lewis

Since its founding on the virtually all-black South Side of Chicago in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the subject of my forthcoming book, has played an unusually prominent, internationally recognized role in the development of American experimental music. The composite output of AACM members has explored a wide range of methodologies, processes, and media, developing new and influential ideas about timbre, sonic identity, collectivity, extended technique, instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures.

In a 1973 article, two early AACM members, trumpeter John Shenoy Jackson and co-founder and pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, asserted that, “The AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.”[i] Accordingly, the collective developed strategies for individual and collective self-production and promotion that both reframed the artist/business relationship and challenged racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure.

In 1981, Wadada Leo Smith and Joseph Jarman interviewed each other with a view toward constructing a general history of the AACM.[ii] The project was never completed, but recent scholarship tends to emphasize the continuity of efforts such as these with the slave narratives of 19th century America, which presaged the importance of autobiography as a crucially important African American literary form. In recent years, works ranging from James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to the Delany Sisters’ Having Our Say became weapons in the battle over the historicity of the African diaspora, in which people of letters and people in the street were all vitally invested.

It should therefore be unsurprising that the historiography of black music is similarly dominated by autobiography, most often in the form of transcribed and published interviews by journalists and music enthusiasts. Certainly, historians owe a debt to these writers, who pursued their enthusiasms in the face of considerable disapprobation concerning the utility of documenting black music. At the same time, many musicians felt that the results often concentrated on discographies and anecdotes, while avoiding, as Burton Peretti puts it, “issues of intellectual development, social context, racial conditions, or the subjects’ views of culture, history and philosophy.”[iii]

AACM members in Wadsworth Jarrell's backyard (ca. 1968) (Left to right: Leo Smith, Sarnie Garrett, Jarrell's son, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wallace McMillian, Douglas Ewart, Buford Kirkwood, John Shenoy Jackson, John Stubblefield, Lester Lashley, Martin "Sparx" Alexander, Steve Mccall, Henry Threadgill) Collection of the AACM

Moreover, many such studies are hampered by their seeming failure to recognize in African American artists the cosmopolitanism that marks contemporary musical practice. Thus, most studies that extensively reference the AACM, confined within “world of jazz” discourses that cordon musicians off from interpenetration with other musical art worlds, have been unable to account for the ways in which the collective’s influence has extended across borders of genre, race, geography, and musical practice, contributing to the breakdown of genre definitions and the mobility of practice and method that informs the present-day musical landscape.

On this view, the AACM provides a successful example of collective working-class self-help and self-determination, encouraging difference in viewpoint, aesthetics, ideology, spirituality, and methodologies, and of promulgating cooperative, rather than competitive, relationships between artists in which the dynamic of collectives and networks, as distinct from heroic individual behaviors, becomes crucial to cultural and aesthetic formation. As Yale anthropologist John Szwed has written:

Jazz requires that musicians be able to merge their unique voices in the totalizing, collective improvisations of polyphony and heterophony. The implications of this esthetic are profound and more than vaguely threatening, for no political system has yet been devised with social principles which reward maximal individualism within the framework of spontaneous egalitarian interaction.[iv]

In fact, as historian Samuel Floyd has noted, the pursuit of individualism within an egalitarian frame has been central not only to the jazz moment, but also to African American music before and since that moment. Indeed, it seems fitting that in the wake of the radical physical and even mental silencing of slavery (as distinct from, say, an aestheticized silence of four minutes or so), African Americans developed an array of musical practices that encouraged all to speak. If the AACM embodied Floyd’s “individuality within the aggregate” in both music-making and in the political organization of the collective, the organization’s example could serve as one potential symbol for the kind of sociopolitical system that Szwed envisions.

In other published writings,[v] I have been rather critical of the failure of many journals and histories devoted to experimental music to discuss the work of African American experimentalists. Even when improvisation is under discussion, the discourse consistently (and sometimes militantly) erases African American artists and cultural tropes.[vi] Thus, a major interest for me in writing this book was documenting, through both historical and ethnographic work, the fact that experimentalism in music can have many different histories. If the development of a notion of “experimental” and “American” that excludes the so-called bebop and free jazz movements, certainly among the most influential American experimentalist musics of the latter part of the 20th century, may be seen as highly problematic (to say the least), the continuing development of these discursive exclusions in the music-historical literature can be partly accounted for in terms of a generally poorly-developed engagement with issues of race and ethnicity in criticism on American experimentalism.

Samana (ca. 1995) (Left to right: Coco Elysses, Shanta Nurullah, Maia, Nicole Mitchell) Collection of Maia

As the globalizing impulses of the 21st century develop, historians of American experimentalism, perhaps without fully realizing it, have stood at Elegba’s crossroads, facing a stark choice: to grow up and recognize a multicultural, multi-ethnic base for experimentalism in music, with a variety of perspectives, histories, traditions, and methods, or to remain the chroniclers of an ethnically bound and ultimately limited tradition that appropriates freely, yet furtively, from other ethnic traditions, yet cannot recognize any histories as its own other than those based in whiteness.

Thus, I see my work on the AACM, as well as my work on experimental music more broadly, as an interventionist project, an activity aimed at encouraging the production of new histories of experimentalism in music. To the extent that AACM musicians challenged racialized hierarchies of aesthetics, method, place, infrastructure, and economics, the organization's work epitomizes the early questioning of borders by artists of color that is only beginning to be explored in serious scholarship on music. Following a far different path to experimental practice than most members of the white American avant-garde, the influence wielded by AACM musicians overflowed the banks of the jazz river, confronting whiteness-based new music histories with their self-imposed, race-based conundrums. At the same time, histories of the post-1960 African American experimental music that developed in the midst of one of the most turbulent and unstable periods in US history also tend to confound standard narratives of the musical Afrodiaspora, which may account for why so few of these stories have actually been told to date. [vii]

Finally, even as so much African American literature favors the autobiographical in some way, it seemed clear to me that what was needed for this book was not just a compendium of personal reminiscences or observations, but also a framing of the AACM in dialogue with the history of music and the history of ideas. In fact, AACM members who published critical articles in the 1970s and 1980s tended to take this approach. Leo Smith’s writings, notably his 1973 Notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music, and his 1974 (M1) American Music, [viii] were followed in the mid-1980s by Anthony Braxton's massive three-volume Tri-Axium Writings, a work that, while clearly in dialogue with John Cage’s 1961 manifesto Silence, Amiri Baraka’s 1963 Blues People, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1963 Texte zur Musik, extends considerably beyond each of these texts, both in length and in range of inquiry, recalling in style the similarly self-published writings of Yosef ben-Jochannan. For me, the works of these AACM members constituted sources of inspiration and instruction for my own research, as did Derek Bailey’s influential book, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. [ix]

The AACM Band (ca. 1968) Performance view, Chicago (Left to right: Ajaramu, Anthony Braxton, Kalaparusha, John Shenoy Jackson, Joseph Jarman, Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Amina Claudine Myers (partly obscured), Lester Lashley, Joel Brandon) Collection of Oliver Lake

Beginning in the early 1990s, these efforts were joined by a panoply of new work on new music by a host of scholars and musicians. [x] In looking for ways to theorize the music I had been trying for so many years to compose, improvise, and perform, I discovered in the work of this new generation of scholars a rapidly developing, questing new literature, supported by musicians and listeners eager for a new kind of writing about multicultural experimentalism that did not patronize the reader or assume his or her ignorance of the matters under review, and where complex ideas were worked out at sufficient length and in detail in a manner that seemed compatible with my experience as an artist.

The many interviews I conducted for my own book served as a form of cross-generational reconnection among musicians, a kind of collaborative mode of writing the autobiography of a collective. Truth be told, however, the “real” story, if there is one, will not be captured in a set of recordings or an archive of texts. Here, I take my cue from an unnamed AACM musician’s answer to a query from the late Whitney Balliett about “the” AACM sound: “If you take all the sounds of all the A.A.C.M. musicians and put them together, that's the A.A.C.M. sound, but I don't think anyone's heard that yet.” [x]

George E. Lewis, improvisor-trombonist, composer and computer/installation artist, is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, a Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis has explored electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis' work as composer, improvisor, performer, and interpreter is documented on more than 120 recordings, and his published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes.

For more information on the AACM, visit:
http://www.aacm-newyork.com/
www.aacmchicago.org/

Endnotes:
[i] Muhal Richard Abrams, and John Shenoy Jackson, “Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,” Black World, November 1973, 72.
[ii] Joseph Jarman, “AACM History: Interview with Leo Smith,” (Collection of Shaku Joseph Jarman. Tape recording, New York City, January 2, 1981).
[iii] Burton W. Peretti, “Oral Histories of Jazz Musicians: The NEA Transcripts as Texts in Context,” in Jazz Among The Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 122.
[iv] John Szwed, “Josef Skvorecky and the Tradition of Jazz Literature,” World Literature Today, vol. 54, no. 4 (1980): 588. [v] George E. Lewis, “Afterword to 'Improvised Music After 1950': The Changing Same,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).
[vi] See, for example, the issue featuring improvisation in the November 2000 issue of MusikTexte (Heft 86/87), which, rather than being exceptional, merely constitutes one of the more egregious recent examples.
[vii] Newer histories of the period often uncritically recapitulate the corporate-supported tale told by the heavily funded Ken Burns Jazz series, a story which goes something like this: John Coltrane went mad in 1965 and a mysterious virus that he and others were carrying killed unwary musicians until Wynton Marsalis arrived in 1983, carrying a powerful mojo from the birthplace of jazz that put the deadly germ and its carriers to flight.
[viii] Leo Smith, “(M1) American Music,” Black Perspective in Music, vol. 2, no. 2, Autumn (1974).
[ix] See Amiri Baraka, Blues People: The Negro Experience In White America and The Music That Developed From It (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963), Anthony Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings, Volumes 1-3 (Dartmouth: Synthesis/Frog Peak, 1985), John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik (Köln: M.D. Schauberg, 1963).
[x] A short list includes Jason Robinson, Julie Dawn Smith, Michael Dessen, Dana Reason Myers, Stephen Lehman, Salim Washington, David Borgo, Daniel Widener, Tamar Barzel, Kevin McNeilly, Robin Kelley, Ellen Waterman, Krin Gabbard, Vijay Iyer, Herman Gray, Sherrie Tucker, Deborah Wong, Jason Stanyek, Gregory Campbell, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Brent Hayes Edwards, Penny Von Eschen, Ajay Heble, Tracey Nicholls, Ronald Radano, Ingrid Monson, Robert O’Meally, Ekkehard Jost, Wolfram Knauer, Bert Noglik, Hans Kumpf, Christian Broecking, Ben Watson, George McKay, Jean Jamin, Patrick Williams, Francesco Martinelli, Alexandre Pierrepont, and the late Peter Niklas Wilson.
[xi] Whitney Balliett, “Jazz: New York Notes,” The New Yorker, June 20, 1977, 92.