BAG - St. Louis
Across the railroad tracks....
Improvised music is older than composed music because it already existed in the Stone Age. This is how music was in the beginning. Nobody composed.
-Damo Suzuki
From 1965 to 1966, Luc Ferrari made a series of television films directed by Pierre Schaffer. You can read more about him here:
The series was called Les Grandes Répétitions. One of the segments filmed in 1966 was about Cecil Taylor. During filming, he was interviewed, and this is an excerpt from that interview:
Taylor: Well, the studies have to be divided into two categories, those of the academy and those of the areas usually located across the railroad tracks. In this case, the railroad tracks were located in a town outside Boston called West Medford, and there I heard other music.
Interviewer: Were there any conservatories across the railroad track?
Oh no. No, there are never conservatories across the railroad tracks.
What was across the railroad tracks?
Grass and trees.
Your people?
Well, people are everywhere. But that is not generally accepted. Because the statement seems to imply that the same conditions would exist with their people and our people.
In that case, then, what do you think of musicians such as Stockhausen?
He doesn’t come from my community.… My community, as I said before, is usually on the other side of the tracks…. The interesting thing that happens is that although we may live in the same time or in the same place, we are not accorded the means that people who are existing in the same time are accorded. This is true certainly on an economic level. It is true in terms of education. And it is most assuredly true socially…. The reality is that a separation exists. That’s all I’m talking about.
It is within this context that we can begin to understand the movement in 1960s American Black communities toward collectives, which were in some cases the artistic arm of political movements. One such collective, formed in 1968 on the “other side of the railroad tracks” in St. Louis, was the Black Artists’ Group (BAG).
BAG was fundamentally a total theater concept, committed to a collaboration of many artistic mediums ranging from theater, music, and dance to visual arts, poetry, and film. A few examples help illuminate BAG’s impact on the community.
Curious from walking past the St. Louis People’s Art Center in Grandel Square on his way to school as a child, one day Manuel Hughes enrolled himself. He recalled,
When I was in the second or the third grade. I had a very, very good elementary teacher who liked art also…. The People’s Art Center and that particular instructor at Simmons [Elementary] was enough to push me. That was the beginning of showing a really strong interest in making art.
Later, musician friends introduced him to the BAG. He joined and began to exhibit there. He later earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in Fine Arts from the University of Missouri.
The People’s Art Center closed in 1967, and BAG temporarily helped fill the gap by offering artists-in-residence in music, theater, dance, film, and visual arts. One of the artists-in-residence was Emilio Cruz, a New York Afro-Cuban artist, who in 1969 was invited by Julius Hemphill to join.
In a 2020 interview with John Corbett of the famed Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago, Patricia Cruz spoke about how she met her husband:
Emilio and I met in Tompkins Square Park. I was sitting on a bench with a friend… I was about 19. He came along and said, “Is that your baby?” And I said no, I was babysitting. Emilio said, “Oh, then I can say hello to you.” Because otherwise he was gonna be gone… We went to a movie once on 42nd Street, and there were people there calling out his name, so I thought he was really famous. (laughs) In Tompkins Square, he said he was a painter but everybody said they were an artist, so I was very skeptical. You know, these people on the Lower East Side would walk around with brushes in their back pockets – that made them artists.
She also explains how Emilio ended up at BAG:
So then he would go down to his studio on 3rd Street, and I was on 11th Street, and he had a visit from the folks in the Black Artists’ Group, but it was really Julius Hemphill.
Julius came and then other people told us you need to take this Rockefeller/Danforth Grant, I think it was recommended, actually, by Dick Bellamy, because Emilio’s career had kind of gone up, but was on its way down, and Martha Jackson, and, before that Virginia Zabriskie, were not really selling anymore. I mean they had been selling a lot – Emilio’s work was very popular – and then it wasn’t so much, and we didn’t have any money, and they were trying to get us to come because we could do this residency. Emilio thought, I don’t need to go to St. Louis, are you kidding, that sounds dreadful, and I was like, please don’t go to St. Louis, it is dreadful. Because I had gone to school in that area, and I thought it was next to Hell. But then Julius came down and he and Emilio just fell in love. Julius was as much like Bob Thompson, I think, as anybody Emilio had met since. Brilliant, charismatic, and attractive, and he made some incredibly beautiful music.
Here’s Emilio Cruz with students at the BAG training center:
I first heard about Emilio Cruz from Art Ensemble of Chicago album covers, like the 1982 Urban Bushmen:
Then I was re-introduced to him in 2020 when Corbett vs. Dempsey presented Emilio Cruz • I Am Food I Eat the Eater of Food:
Cruz would go on to perform in a series of plays, some incorporating members of BAG and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM). In the early 1980s, he returned to New York and toured with his play Homeostasis: Once More the Scorpion, with music composed by Henry Threadgill. He lived and worked in New York until he died in 2004.
As these examples show, BAG was much more than just a music collective. It was a community organization built on a creative outlook for urban self-determination and self-actualization.
The beginning of BAG goes back to 1967, when Oliver Lake’s group, The Lake Art Quartet, debuted at the Circle Coffee House in LaClede Town, a federally funded, mixed-income housing complex in St. Louis. Texas saxophonist Julius Hemphill had settled in the area while attending Lincoln University, and along with playwright and poet Malinké Elliott, they got together. Using the AACM as their model, they formed a cooperative to help facilitate wider exposure and more playing opportunities. Lake recalls a meeting they had after returning from a Chicago visit, “In our meeting, I suggested that we become a branch of the AACM. Julius then suggested that we form our own group, which included all the artists we had been associated with: poets, visual artists, dancers, and actors.”
And with that, in 1968, The Black Artists’ Group, Inc. was formed as a non-profit organization. They soon received major grant funding from the Danforth and Rockefeller Foundations. In July 1969, BAG agreed to pay $1 annual rent for a building at 2665 Washington Blvd., which became the BAG Artists-in-Residence Training Center:
It was here, inspired by the AACM, that BAG brought together and nurtured local Black experimentalists in the arts.
I have not yet seen The Black Artists' Group: Creation Equals Movement, the 2020 documentary film written and directed by Bryan Dematteis.
Here’s the trailer:
During their time in St. Louis between 1967 and 1972, BAG not only contributed to cultural richness but also created a strong model for inter-artistic cooperation and arts-driven activism. BAG member and multi-woodwind player, educator, and composer J. D. Parran wrote, BAG “…formed and flourished, then disappeared from its urban community setting. But for a few years, productive years, it nurtured and gave voice to burning creative impetus at large in that city and the nation.”
To get a feel for the music happening at the beginning of the 1970s in St. Louis, you only need to listen to one album. Recorded at Archway Studios in St. Louis in February 1972 and released on Julius Hemphill’s Mbari Records, Dogon A. D. is a masterpiece. With Hemphill on alto and flute, Baikida Carroll on trumpet, Abdul Wadud on cello, and Phillip Wilson on drums, there is plenty of room to move for each musician. Listening to this album now, over 50 years later, it is still fresh and interesting. Quoting Scott Yanow, “This important music is better to be heard than described.” Here’s the title track from the album:
In 1977, British jazz critic Val Wilmer wrote,
Sadly, BAG exists now only on a spiritual level. Its members continue to work together and exchange ideas, but the demise of the group was hastened by the collapse of their funding programme which coincided with the departure for Europe of their five leading members. Unlike the AACM, the younger members proved insufficiently mature to carry on the aims of BAG.
Oliver Lake remembers, “BAG had begun performing throughout the St. Louis bi-state area and we were looking to expand our musical and performance horizons, so we said, ‘Let’s go to Paris.’” As a result, BAG disbanded in 1973 when Lake, Joseph Bowie (Lester’s brother), Baikida Carroll, Charles “Bobo” Shaw, Floyd LeFlore, and several others raised enough money to get to France, where they purchased two vans for driving to gigs.
While in Paris, they recorded the classic In Paris, Aries 1973:
Here’s one more for the road. Inspired by BAG, The Human Art Ensemble was formed in St. Louis in 1971 by James Marshall and Charles “Bobo” Shaw. According to the Human Arts Association, they formed for “…the purpose of survival and growth of free and meaningful expression of human values and their uplifting influence in an unrighteous, violent, oppressive environment where the dollar is god and mediocrity is exalted.” This gives us a taste of the feelings at the time in St. Louis on the “other side of the railroad tracks.”
In July 1973, the Human Art Ensemble recorded a classic album: Under the Sun, the second release of their Universal Justice Records label - the first release was Ofamfa, a rather obscure record by Children of the Sun, a unit operating under the BAG umbrella. Interestingly, Ofamfa is the Akan symbol of critical examination.
Under the Sun features some star guests like AACM’s Lester Bowie and BAG’s Oliver Lake. It’s also Marty Ehrlich’s first record. But most of all, it features, of all things, free-jazz harmonica (that reminds me of you, C. L.). From that album, here is Hazrat, The Sufi:
About halfway through this song, a few minutes after the harmonica, they hit a wonderful and tremendously hypnotic groove, which always brings me back to an earlier time….
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of French composer Luc Ferrari.
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Until then, keep on walking….
The BAG/Human Arts Ensemble became quite big on the European Festival Scene of the 70ties, 80ties and 90ties since the also belonged to the Legendary Loft Scene of New York.
Their two most famous „Offsprings“ were the World Saxophon Quartett, a Band that soon started a Saxophon Quartett Craze, the other one is Defunkt. The „strangest“ Offspring was the Woodstock-Era Paul Butterfield Blues Band with Phillip Wilson and David Sanborn.
The Later should record with Tim Berne a CD dedicated to the Music of Julius Hemphill. Tim Berne, with Marty Ehrlich was also Member of the Julius Hemphill Saxophon Quartett.
The BAG was the „other“ Bunch of “Free Funkateers” beside Ornette Coleman, James Blood Ulmer and Ronald Shannon Jackson.
That Way the BAG had a massiv Influence on my listening and promoting „Live“ in the 80ties and 90ties.
It is somewhat sad that the BAG never achieved the Recognition in the USA it had in Europe.
But I am glad they played so often „over here“.