The Art Ensemble of Chicago will visit the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’s Terrace Theater this evening for two performance (7:00 & 9:00 p.m.) as part of their 50th Anniversary Tour.
Founder and newly named NEA Jazzmaster, Roscoe Mitchell, and long-time member, Famoudou Don Moye, will be joined by conductor Steed Cowart and an expanded ensemble to present music from their 26 April 2019 release We Are on the Edge – A 50th Anniversary Celebration, https://pirecordings.com/albums/weareontheedge/.
A Brief History
Given their pivotal role in Avant-Garde Jazz since the 1960’s, much has been written about the The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I will simply quote from the Pi Recordings website:
“We are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration is a commemoration of a half-century of magical music making from The Art Ensemble of Chicago, a band that has been at the forefront of creative improvised music since forming in 1969. It has also long served as the flagship ensemble of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the august Chicago-based organization that also fostered the careers of members such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, and Wadada Leo Smith, among many others. Now led by the surviving members Roscoe Mitchell and drummer Famoudou Don Moye, the album is also a loving tribute to the band’s three original members who have passed: Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and most recently, Joseph Jarman.
The greatness of the Art Ensemble has always been the shared commitment of its original members to the total realm of African diasporic music: what they have long-termed “Great Black Music—Ancient to the Future.” Also important are the group’s disparate musical and artistic personalities, comprised of jazz, advanced compositional techniques, theatrical performance, poetry, Pan-African percussion, all tied together with improvisational flair, a taste for the absurd, and the exploration of pure sound and space. It is this open-mindedness – absorbed from the basic tenets of the AACM – that has made the band one of the most important in the history of music.
At 50 years, The Art Ensemble is probably the longest-running aggregation in jazz. Other combinations that come readily to mind, such as the Modern Jazz Quartet or Harry Carney’s involvement with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, fall short of this milestone. The band agreed long ago that as long as one member of the group is left standing, it will still be The Art Ensemble. This is in no way to say that the group will always have to sound like the original Art Ensemble – which is, of course, impossible to pigeonhole anyway since the band was always developing and growing – but that it is a philosophy of music-making, one that has been honed over its entire history, that will be passed on. Not content to rest on their laurels – it would have been far easier and more commercially-minded to assemble another quintet to attempt to create some caricature of the original band – Mitchell and Moye have recruited a diverse group of fifteen highly-individual talents who bring their own approaches to the Art Ensemble aesthetic. They range from trumpeters Fred Berry and Hugh Ragin, who have performed with Mitchell for over five and four decades, respectively, to bassist Jaribu Shahid, for about as long, to singer Rodolfo Cordova-Lebron, who is a current student of Mitchell’s at Mills College. For Moye, his relationships with percussionist Enoch Williamson and Titos Sompa date back to the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. Now residing in Marseilles, France, Moye regularly performs with the Senegalese Dudù Kouaté, a master of the Wolof griot tradition. With clear intent towards representation, Mitchell and Moye’s engagement of musicians such as Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa), Christina Wheeler, Silvia Bolognesi and Jean Cook – women who are without peer as improvisers and performers – help bring a whole new perspective to the music.”
The New York Times, Critic’s Notebook on 1 May of this year, wrote nice coverage on the Ensemble’s 50th Anniversary, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/arts/music/art-ensemble-of-chicago.html.
A Longer History
While I was previewing this concert on last Thursday’s Morning Brew – Classic Jazz Edition, 12 December 2019, a listener from Woodbridge, VA called to tell me about a book that was previously unknown to me. Paul Steinbeck wrote Meassage to Our Folks, released in 2017 by the University of Chicago Press, https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo25125876.html, and named it after an album by the same name released on the French BYG Actuel label in 1969, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_to_Our_Folks.
A Digital Musical Compilation
For true fans, or anyone else desiring a compendium of much of their last four decades of recorded work, late last year, ECM released THE ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO AND ASSOCIATED ENSEMBLES , a 21-CD boxed set of just that, works by the ensemble from 1979 on, plus various other ensembles led by various members. Perhaps a perfect holiday gift to your loved ones or yourself, https://www.ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1536576225.
A Personal Note
Last spring at the Kennedy Center, I had free passes to a working rehearsal of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (former known as the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company) in the late afternoon. Later that evening, I had tickets for Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl project at the Kennedy Center’s KC Jazz Club. I was planning on going back to my day job between the two events. However, as I was leaving the Eisenhower Theater, I saw an older gentlemen with a soprano sax on the Millennium Stage. I said to myself, “That can’t be.” But it was, indeed, Roscoe Mitchell. He was warming up for a free concert in duet with poet and performance artist, Moor Mother (a.k.a. Camae Ayewa), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moor_Mother and https://pitchfork.com/features/rising/9968-moor-mother-hardcore-poet/. Needless to say, I waited the hour for the show to begin. So much for going back to work.
I will attending both shows this evening. As of this afternoon, a handful of tickets for purchase online were remaining on the Kennedy Center’s website, https://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/event/MUJPG.
I hope to see you there. Stay tuned and enjoy!
