Word: jazz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 may have flourished in obscurity...
While rock gained new levels of popularity and achievement throughout the 60s, the national jazz scene was rapidly drying up. The audience dwindled, the clubs closed. The effect on the New York musicians was devastating; many of the major figures who didn't die either went into seclusion or left for the greener pastures of Europe and Las Vegas. But the less competitive Chicago avant-garde community was on the threshold of an artistic breakthrough, and in the face of public indifference Chicago musicians turned to one another for support through the AACM...
...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 in 1970, the AEC was 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...
...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...
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...