Lester Bowie
And the Art Ensemble of Chicago....
These bluesy shadows come to light
as we stroll downtown doing slick up country
stomps hi-stepping and prancing
ladies, gents blase in the awakening.
Salvation through music, where ever the people
gather anywhere blue togetherness gitten
through to the inside of the only dance
there is. The Dance of Being Here.
-Joseph Jarman
Our journey on The Big River called Jazz meanders into the mystical world of Lester Bowie and The Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Lester Bowie died on November 8, 1999. He was 58 years old, the same age I am now. I dedicate this week’s leg of our journey to him. If the song For Louie was on YouTube, I would have inserted it here, but I could not locate it. So please, after you finish reading this, go to my Spotify playlist From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra and listen to For Louie in memory of two great trumpet players.
On January 20, 2000, at Hyde Park Union Church on the South Side of Chicago, there was a concert celebrating the life and music of visionary and trumpet virtuoso, Lester Bowie. It seems only natural the concert was performed during a full lunar eclipse. Kahil El’Zabar, who became the chairman of the AACM in 1975, organized the concert. James Carter, Hamiet Bluiett, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and the Roscoe Mitchell Quintet performed. Along with these stalwarts, a friend of mine at that time, Ken Vandermark, played at the concert
I met Ken at the 10th Annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party at the Bop Shop in Wicker Park just before it closed down - I think it was the Bop Shop anyway. There were only a couple dozen of us there. Next to me, Ken was the youngest. So we naturally gravitated to each other. One doesn’t often find North Side innovators deep in South Side territory, but by inviting young reedist-bandleader Ken Vandermark to the proceedings, El’Zabar underscored the link between avant-garde generations past and present. It was a fitting tribute and something Lester would have greatly appreciated. With characteristic grace, Ken led his Vandermark 5 band not in their own music, but in all Lester’s music.
Breakfast with Lester
As I pointed out last week, Anthony Braxton told me to call the AACM office in Chicago. I think he actually gave me the number, which in those days would have been very difficult to find. Anyway, I cold-called them and a voice answered, “Hello, this is Sparx.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the legendary early AACM member Martin “Sparx” Alexander, who played trombone in the AACM Big Band directed by Muhal Richard Abrams.
I told him I was living in California and trying to get some information about the AACM for an article I was writing for the Peninsula Times Tribune. He told me he had a few things he could send my way. He also shared with me that Lester Bowie and Don Moye would be coming out to Oakland next week. I asked if there was a way I could interview Lester. He told me to call Don Moye and gave me a phone number where I could reach him. I called Don, and he said to look him up after the show at Kimball’s East - I think it was there. I’m a little foggy on which club and details, but it was a Brass Fantasy show with Steve Turre on trombone. I also remember a tuba player, which was cool.
After the show, I connected with Don. We talked for a few minutes; and he introduced me to Lester, who literally just said, “Hi. Meet me at the Washington Inn in the morning for breakfast at like 9:30, OK?” I responded, “Why sure. See you then.” And off they went.
So I go home to Cupertino and then in the morning hoof it back up to Oakland to the Washington Inn for breakfast.
I was in the lobby for a few minutes, when down the steps comes Lester Bowie with his wife and two kids - kids or grandkids, can’t recall. He graciously introduced me to his family, and we all sat down for breakfast together - totally casual. We ordered breakfast and talked shop. We mostly talked about military stuff. He was in the Air Force; a MP - Military Policeman, which he thought was funny. He told me, in fact, that all the guys in the Art Ensemble were in the military. And that Joseph Jarman was a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division. I shared a few of my Army stories. After breakfast was over, he asked his wife to take the kids and we settled into our interview. I took out my little tape recorder, hit record, and we talked for about an hour. Then, he quickly wrapped it up and we parted ways.
I ended up losing that tape. I was in the process of transferring from Cupertino to Chicago and the Peninsula Times Tribune was closing down. I had given it to someone in the office to transcribe. In my moving and their closing down, it got lost in the shuffle….
Unfortunately, I recall little of our conversation together. We talked about his roots with BAG down in St. Louis and about Sun Ra in Chicago. I don’t remember how he answered my questions about Sun Ra’s influence on their music. He did say there was some, but it would be nice now to read again what exactly that would have been.
However, one thing I do remember about our conversation was how I tried to make connections between the AEC and the Black Power movement, thinking that there was a connection. Lester only seemed annoyed by this. He expressed how I was missing the boat. He stressed the fact that they were artists, just as their name implies: “The Art Ensemble.”
Artists, stupid!
During the 1950s, the language of Jazz had been greatly enriched by the advent of Be Bop and West Coast Jazz. No longer functioning exclusively as popular music, the language of jazz saw the extension of the technical resources of the soloists and an increase in the complexity of compositions. In essence, Jazz was establishing itself as an Art form. I think it was this movement away from dance music restrictions that allowed experimentation and innovation dependent only on the artist’s vision. These changes were perhaps best heard in Miles Davis’ 1959 Kind of Blue and then again in the music of Ornette Coleman. We need only look at the cover of Ornette Coleman’s 1961 Free Jazz, featuring Jackson Pollack’s 1954 Abstract Expressionist painting The White Light, to see the willingness to portray the sound as more than just music. It was Art.
It was in this “light” that on December 3, 1966, Roscoe Mitchell brought together his group for a midnight concert at Hyde Park’s Harper Theater billed as The Art Ensemble.
Art Ensemble of Chicago
A direct outgrowth of Chicago’s AACM, Mitchell’s Art Ensemble was formed as a quartet with Roscoe Mitchell on horns, Lester Bowie on Trumpet, Malachi Favors on Bass, and Phillip Wilson on drums.
The legendary record producer Chuck Nessa offers this information about how the Art Ensemble of Chicago came to be:
Roscoe started calling his group the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in late 1966. The first evidence is a concert flyer I have from a 12/3/66 concert at the Harper Theater. This group was the quartet with Phillip Wilson. Phillip left the group, we recorded without a drummer in '67 (under Lester's name - for contractual reasons) and in early '68 with Bob Crowder playing drums. This second record was billed as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble.
By October of '68 my job took me out of Chicago and I lost day-to-day contact with the guys. Sometime in very late '68 or early '69 Roscoe asked Jarman to join the group. Two members of Joseph's quartet had died (Christopher Gaddy and Charles Clark), and he was "adrift".
Roscoe had already made the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble a cooperative group, and when Joseph came aboard he dropped his name. This group had a fine following in Chicago, but they wanted to move on to bigger and better things - they had already tried NY but didn't think the fit was right. They left for Europe in the late spring of 1969, at the suggestion of Steve McCall. Steve was in Paris playing with Steve Lacy and Marion Brown.
I think when Wilson left to join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, it proved difficult for Mitchell, Favors, and Bowie to between themselves replace the absent drummer or invent three-man music with their odd instrumentation. However, I actually think the loss of one musician, a drummer, actually helped the ensemble find a new and perhaps more influential musician, silence. This change signaled a new attitude in their music: it stopped screaming and began to breathe.
And then, the addition of multi-instrumentalist Joseph Jarman, together with Mitchell, formed the perfect partnership. These four musicians were the founding fathers of the Art Ensemble that in Paris became known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The impetus for the name change came from a French promoter who added "of Chicago".
Here is Roscoe telling a little about the formation of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
The British writer and musician Ian Carr perhaps put it best, “The Art Ensemble of Chicago showed a way out of the cul-de-sac of abstraction.”
I’m not sure when I first heard about People in Sorrow, but I’m pretty sure it was at breakfast with Lester, when he told me that I should get a copy (no easy task back then) of People in Sorrow and listen to that. So I did. I had been listening to some of Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, but outside of Anthony Braxton, I had not heard any of the AACM albums. When I finally did find a copy of People in Sorrow, it changed my perspective on Jazz completely. From that starting point, I spent a lot of time learning about, searching for, and listening to AACM albums. Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the roots of The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s 1969 Magnum Opus, People in Sorrow, can be found in two early pre-Art Ensemble recordings:
Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound (we covered that last week) from his 1966 album of the same name. The beginning and ending sections provide the recurring theme for People of Sorrow
Joseph Jarman’s Song to Make the Sun Comes Up from his 1968 album As If It Were the Seasons. Charles Clark’s 5-minute sustained-note arco bass at the end of the song is very similar to the sustained clarinet with circular breathing (I checked with Chuck Nessa who identified it as “An electric buzzer of some sort.”) that starts at about the 32-minute mark of People in Sorrow
These two early AACM recordings on the Delmark label provided the cornerstones on which this incredible work of art was created:
I think much of the pre-Moye quartet music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago helped define their sound and contains much of my favorite music in their discography. I think few jazz groups achieve the collective voice and telepathic interactions of the Art Ensemble in 1969, while in France. The French media were dazzled by the sheer spectacle of the Art Ensemble performances, which the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observatuer called “living sculpture.”
Dreaming of the Master
In late 1969, while living in Paris, they were joined by drummer/percussionist Don Moye. Admittedly, hiring a drummer risked the chemistry of the quartet, and his presence was felt immediately on their next two albums in 1970: Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass and brilliant Les Stances a Sophie.
Here’s the Art Ensemble with the addition of percussionist Don Moye in a live rendition of their classic Dreaming of the Master:
Mike Hennessey wrote: “The AEC has always proclaimed its repertoire as being “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future.” The fact that they emerged from the mid-sixties, at a time when the United States was in the throes of a civil rights upheaval, when Malcolm X’s Black Nationalists movement was mounting a militant challenge to institutionalized racial discrimination, meant that the band was frequently identified with Black Panthers and its members portrayed as angry and politically motivated renegades.
But, as Don Moye has observed, “All the political agitation of the sixties is contained in part of who we are. They tried to involve us politically with slogans and rhetoric, but none of us had any background in the bullshit of politics - we wanted to make strong musical statements about our identity and heritage. We wanted to make a strong declaration of who we were, regardless of social climate - but we never get involved in the politics.”
Perhaps British writer and photographer Val Wilmer most succinctly identified the AEC’s position in the hierarchy of Black American music when she wrote: “The Art Ensemble are a long way from being revolutionary in a political sense, and yet their music represents another interpretation of Black Power. Although the dedicated bunch of Chicagoans are artists first and foremost, they come closer to realizing that slogan than some of their brothers do, simply through playing the people’s music.”
Let’s conclude this dedication with the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s closing theme, Odwalla:
Next week, we’ll resume our journey with a trip across the pond, back to the Netherlands for the 1991 North Sea Jazz Festival in Den Haag.
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey, please share my newsletter with others - just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page.
Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….