After the Great Migration, the promise of proper employment and serving in a World War black folks figured that the government probably wasn’t going to provide too much in the way of social services, job training or any kind of authentic assistance in their neighborhoods.
In response to that perception, a great many organizations sprung up in urban centers across the country. Coupling leadership and scholarship based on everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X and the pharaohs of Egypt, groups like the Black Panthers began programs to feed children and secure neighborhood’s safety. While cells of the organization would crop up in major cities across the country, a number of towns counted a few other socially conscious groups that worked towards the betterment of people’s lives.
The impetus of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1965, though had absolutely nothing to do with helping the less fortunate even as it eventually counted free music lessons as a part of its program. The association just wanted to find local gigs for musicians (1). With the jazz scene in Chicago settling down after the thirties and Louis Armstrong’s departure, there wasn’t a breadth of opportunity for working musicians. To combat that, Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and Phil Corhan began meeting under the auspices of AACM to perform with like minded musicians and assist one another in finding work (2).
Being acquainted from working with and admiring Sun Ra, who left Chicago a few years prior to AACM being founded, the principals of the organization shared a general philosophical outlook on jazz (2). While earlier performers that called Chicago home – the aforementioned Armstrong and even Jellyroll Morton - remained influential, Sun Ra’s incorporation of what some termed “little instruments” soon became a trademark of the resultant AACM ensembles (3). The melodic component to each composition remained intact, but the concept of group improvisation, which was concurrently being figured out by Ornette Coleman on his 1960 album Free Jazz, began to serve as the most recognizable quality to the music.
Despite the shift towards a more guttural style of playing, the AACM affiliated groups still highly respected well written charts. “When we were playing with Sun Ra, we had objectives and sounds and we knew what we were doing,” says Cohran in an interview from The Wire, a magazine covering experimental music.
In stark contrast to “out music” and what was transpiring in New York’s Loft Scene where players like Albert Ayler and John Coltrane attempted to merge an innate and spiritual manner of performing that eschewed any sense of strict composition, the Chicago jazz scene worked to maintain a sense of scholarly achievement in its performances and recordings.
AACM, over time has counted over one hundred members in its ranks – and two MacArthur Fellows, George Lewis and Anthony Braxton (1). But it’s two of the organization’s founders that most succinctly engender the sound and approach that players involved with the AACM would work with. Phil Cohran and Roscoe Mitchell are certainly not the biggest names in jazz, but both have maintained a remarkable level of consistency during careers that span five decades.
1: http://www2.kenyon.edu/projects/ottenhoff/aacm/paper.htm
2: http://homepage.uab.edu/moudry/ra&aacm.htm
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_ensemble_of_chicago
4: http://philcohran.com/pc_wr_fr.htm
5: http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2008/08/14/phil-cohrans-living-legacy
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