Word: greats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future" is the AEC motto. The members of the Art Ensemble are quick to deny any racial or elitist intent--the motto is meant to acknowledge and affirm the singular course of American black musical development. The group's radical conception of musical performance has as its obvious source the improvisation and spontaneous creation which are characteristic of jazz, blues, and Afro-American folk music. These are musical values that have no counterpart in the mainstream of Western culture. But classifications like "jazz" or even "music" seem to narrow to contain the Art Ensemble...
...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 may have flourished in obscurity, but it flourished all the same; today's growing AEC audience enjoys a mature artistic form born in the early 60s through the innovations of The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Chicago-based musician's collective...
...complete. The music had reached a high level of development, and the European cultural community, traditionally more receptive to jazz and black artists than the U.S., greeted the band as something of a popular sensation. Then, in 1972, the Art Ensemble returned to America and brought their Great Black Music home to the culture it seeks to express...
...most memorable moments from an AEC concert combine musical and extra-musical elements--Bowie wheeling around to release an arresting snarl, Mitchell picking up his clarinet to play a single note, Jarman filling out the harmony of an ornate fanfare by putting two saxophones to his lips at once. Great Black Music has room for all this and more...
...successfully promoted the likes of Keith Jarrett and Pat Methaney--the AEC is riding a new crest of public interest and acceptance. But as Lester Bowie comments, there has always been a receptive audience for the group's work, and the size of that audience is of no great consequence. The music which so excites critics today is essentially unchanged since the days when the Art Ensemble played for groups of ten or fifteen devotees back in Chicago. Through years of poverty and even a self-imposed exile, the Art Ensemble of Chicago has remained scrupulously true to their original...