Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SPECTRE of the 60s raised by that hackneyed term is not inappropriate, for the AEC's unique concept of American music has its origins in the artistic and cultural ferment of that era. Our popular culture has conditioned us for the epehmeral, but the emergence of the Art Ensemble as a tangible force in jazz is in fact as much a culmination as beginning. The AEC has worked together for over fifteen years, and during that time they have released over 20 albums, as well as an equal number of records under individual Art Ensemble members' names. Great Black Music...
Saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, and bassist Malachi Favors were founding members of the AACM; trumpeter Lester Bowie joined when he came to Chicago shortly afterward. These four players became the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The original name was the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, but the group's musical philosophy was deeply influenced by the collective ideal of the AACM, and when they went to Europe in 1969 they adopted a name that more accurately suggests the active role each member takes in the AEC's music. With the addition of percussionist Don Moye...
...MUSIC ITSELF shows an unusually broad range of expression. The Art Ensemble has chosen a musical language which accepts and draws on both the multitude of musical experiences that have shaped the styles of its individual players and the roots of jazz itself. One thinks of avantgarde jazz in terms of raw rhythmic energy and screeching atonalism, but the Art Ensemble's musical vocabulary evokes swing, calypso, bebop circus music, rhythm'n blues and a host of other influences side-by-side with the visionary innovations of a Coltrane or an Ayler. It's not simply a case...
Group improvisation is not a new idea in music, but the AEC has advanced the idea to a new technical and artistic plane. The Art Ensemble sound is a fusion of five highly individual and even idiosyncratic stylists; their special achievement is in learning, through years of experimentation, to combine these styles into a coherent music that retains the originality and vitality of each. Lester Bowie is especially startling in his instrumental technique. He finds within his trumpet an astonishing variety of blasts, blares, bleats, and buzzes it was never meant to produce. He exploits the lower ranges...
Probably the most immediately striking element of the Art Ensemble's music is their use of multi-instrumentalist. It is not unusual to see a jazz saxophonist double on flute or clarinet, but Joseph Jarman works beside a rack of no fewer than eleven woodwind instruments, ranging from a wooden flute and tiny sopranino saxophone to a bass clarinet. One hallmark of AACM artists is a fascination with interesting and unusual juxtapositions of instruments, and in the AEC this interest is taken to an extreme. What is even more striking than the sheer multiplicity of instruments is the sensitivity...