Muhal Richard Abrams

Great Black Music. Ancient to the Future...

Muhal was more than a teacher of music. He was a teacher of life. He was too big to be pushed into one corner.

-Roscoe Mitchell

In the summer of 1993, a few months before I left California for Chicago, I met Anthony Braxton outside of a Steve Lacy concert in Oakland. I told him I was moving to Chicago. He told me to look up the AACM and gave me their Chicago number.

A few days later, I called them up and Martin Alexander answered with, “This is Sparx speaking”. We talked about the AACM, and he offered to send me some material. When I gave him my Cupertino, California address, he mentioned that Don Moye was headed out to California with Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy. He gave me Don’s number, and I called him to see if we could meet up. We agreed to meet after the Brass Fantasy show at Kimball’s East. After the show, we talked for a while, and he introduced me to Lester, who invited me to breakfast the next morning. In many ways, this was the start of my jazz journey – post-hard bop.

At breakfast, we talked mostly about the Army. However, when I asked Lester about Sun Ra’s influence on him and the AACM, he went straight to Muhal Richard Abrams. He simply told me, “Find out about Muhal.” What I learned is that when the two most prominent free music thinkers left Chicago, Sun Ra in 1961 for New York and Raphael Garrett for San Francisco in 1964, the baton was passed to Richard Abrams and his Experimental band, a forerunner to the AACM.

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Around 1961, Richard Abrams (he didn’t take the name Muhal until 1967) was looking for an opportunity to express his new musical ideas. He recalls, “…there was a group of mainstream guys that formed a band for cats to write charts and things. We were rehearsing at the C&C lounge…. Eddie Harris was part of it.” These venues were extremely important for informal education that extended beyond the high school ensemble and informal jam sessions during the 1960s on the South Side. Many experienced Chicago musicians were looking for ways to address these limitations. In his book A Power Stronger Than Itself, George Lewis quotes vibraphonist Emanuel Cranshaw describing one way musicians pursued alternative education:

Cats like Chris Anderson used to have classes in his basement on 39th and Lake Park, the way Barry Harris used to do. He was playing with a guitar player, a cat named Leo Blevins. Leo wouldn’t do much teaching, it was mostly Chris. Cats would come by with notebooks and he’d get up and talk. All the cats that you know - Herbie [Hancock] would go down there, and [pianist] Harold Mabern. Muhal was probably down there too.

These venues created a safe and open environment for musicians to rehearse, teach, and exchange knowledge and ideas across generations. In a 1994 interview, Eddie Harris recalls an important development, “Trying to play around Chicago, you figured there are guys that never played first chair, there are guys that never played on a big band, and there are other guys that never had an opportunity to write for a large number of people, and there are people that wanted to sing, and sing in front of a band - so let’s form a workshop.”

Harris credits trumpeter Johnny Hines as the co-founder of the workshop, which attracted over a hundred musicians. According to Harris, a small group developed that was not interested in “playing an Ellis Larkin run or a Duke Ellington run… we wanted to try some different things.” Key members of this group, along with Harris, were Richard Abrams and Donald Rafael Garrett, who started meeting at the C&C Lounge for opportunities to play.

It was at the C&C Lounge that Abrams started regular rehearsals with mostly younger guys, and from these rehearsals came an ensemble that gradually, by 1961, became known as the Experimental Band. Two of these younger guys were Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman. One day in 1963, Mitchell turned up at the C&C Lounge for an Experimental band rehearsal. He was introduced to Abrams by Jack DeJohnette. After the rehearsal, Malachi Favors told Abrams he was impressed by Mitchell, and Abrams took him under his wing.

Abrams had a tremendous influence on these young musicians. In a 1995 interview, Mitchells recalls:

Muhal kind of took me in. I’d go to school, and I’d go straight from school to Muhal’s, when he was living in that little place off Cottage Grove, down in the basement. I remember he had painted everything that velvet purple color. Sometimes I’d be down over to Muhal’s at ten, eleven, twelve at night, playing or working on music.

Abrams’ leadership of the Experimental Band provided a valuable bridge missing in the musical education of the younger Chicago musicians. It also gave young musicians a challenging and high-level incubator for new music, without the competitive atmosphere of a typical jam session or the commercial compromises and practical pressures of gigs. The Experimental Band also became a platform for Abrams’ compositions.

In the summer of 1962, Abrams moved rehearsals to Tuesday nights at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Abraham Lincoln Center on Oakwood and Langley:

Abrams’ Experimental Band performed few concerts, and there are no known recordings of the ensemble from the pre-AACM period. However, here’s a poster from a January 1965 concert:

Again, Mitchell recalls Abrams’ leadership:

And of course, Muhal was always the person who brought everybody together.  He had his big band rehearsals down at a place called the C&C every Monday night, and we all started to want to go down there and be a part of that. This is what brought everybody together to where people started talking about, “Oh, yeah, let’s put together an organization where we can kind of control our destinies a little bit more” and so on and so forth, and this is where the thoughts for the AACM originated.

A few months later, the revolution was set in formal motion when Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and trumpeter Phil Cohran sat around the kitchen table of the McCall family home in a South Side housing project to discuss organizing. They sent out postcards inviting the cream of Chicago’s Black musicians to meet on May 8, 1965, to set the AACM’s course and philosophy. “First of all, number one, there’s original music, only,” Abrams said at that initial meeting.

The emphasis was on the importance of creative music and the link to its African heritage, not bound by the self-limiting categories of avant-garde, bebop, or other jazz categories. Their focus was to present “Great Black Music. Ancient to the Future.”

You can read more about the AACM here:

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Here’s a picture of the Experimental Band a couple of years later rehearsing at the Abraham Lincoln Center in 1967 with Abrams conducting:

Here’s a picture of the Experimental band at an outdoor performance from about the same time:

Interestingly, the meetings at Muhal’s apartment were about much more than just music. They also studied art and poetry. It was more like an art school. According to Mitchell, “Muhal was painting then, and we talked about painting a lot. Even now, when we get together, we may go to a museum. We always had a sketchpad with us.” In fact, Mitchell’s debut on Lester Bowie’s Numbers 1 & 2, released in 1967 on the Nessa label, featured a Mitchell painting:

Abrams' debut album released the following year on the Delmark label featured Abrams’ artwork; however, it also was the embodiment of his artistic vision of combining multiple disciplines: he wrote all the compositions, painted the cover art, and featured one of his poems on the back cover, 3 Degrees and 7 suns - before eternity….

From the album, which featured the debuts of saxophonist Anthony Braxton and violinist Leroy Jenkins, here is the title track:

In 1975, shortly after his third album Things To Come From Those Now Gone was released on the Delmark label, Abrams left Chicago for New York. I’m sure this was a difficult move, but he needed more exposure. True to form, though, along with Amina Claudine Myers, he founded the New York chapter of the AACM. He also signed on with the Italian Black Saint label, with whom he would record many excellent albums, starting with the 1976 Sightsong, a wonderful duo recording with Malachi Favors. From that album, here are two songs, the title track and Two Over One:

If it took moving to New York City to secure his long and prosperous relationship with the Black Saint label, then we are all the better for it.

Of all the fine Black Saint releases, the Muhal Richard Abrams Orchestra’s 1989 The Hearinga Suite is my favorite. It is a masterpiece. The Wire magazine’s Andy Hamilton described it as one that “stands as the summit of his achievement as a jazz composer.” From that album, here is the tour de force Oldfotalk:

The Hearinga Suite also features an Abrams painting. Also, it’s important to point out his dedication on the back cover:

The music on this album is dedicated to the memory of percussionist Steve McCall and contra-bassist Raphael Donald Garrett, who, in spite of the many challenges that compromise the universe of physical existence, were able to express love, friendship, and spiritual enlightenment through the mediums of rhythm, melody and harmony. The entities known as Steve and Raphael left a lasting impression on all who had the good fortune of walking part of the way with them.

Here’s one more for the road. In 2006, Pi Recordings released the first of three Abrams albums. Like Black Saint, Pi Recordings took care to feature Abrams’ artwork on the album covers. I encourage you to listen to all Abrams recordings on the Pi Recordings label, starting with Streaming released in 2006 and featuring a nice trio format with Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis. Also, check out Vision Towards Essence, a stunning live solo performance from the 1998 Guelph Jazz Festival released by Pi Recordings in 2007. These are historical recordings, and I thank the folks over at Pi Recordings for making them a reality.

What I admire most about Muhal Richard Abrams is his leadership. He provides an example for all of us of how we can lead change. Even in Jazz, leadership matters! Although he died in 2017, he still lives on in my heart. His legacy and his music will endure forever.

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Nessa’s early record releases.

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