So a finely tuned organism sounds

What a radical man! Trumpeter Lester Bowie, at the latest, in the eighties, became known with his happy-the experimental Free-trumpet as a great player of Wynton Marsalis, hesitate at a young age not long. 1969 sold to the Chicago resident and jazz musician, his house and his Bentley car. He wanted to show his colleagues in the Art Ensemble, it was seriously the step he was planning for you: Relocating to Paris.

in fact, Lester Bowie, saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman and bassist Malachi Favors in June 1969 sailed to Europe. "We just didn't want to play for the Rest of our lives in the same American Clubs," said Lester later about this time. On Board they had several Hundred different musical instruments. Including a lot of small percussion devices, for which the Ensemble was soon to be famous throughout Europe: wooden drums, Gongs, bells, whistles, sirens, Congas, Claves, rattles. The weight of the instruments, a total of over two tons.

it May be that some of these drums, bells, whistles, which were already on the Crossing to Paris, also on the Album "Nice Guys" (recorded in 1978). This Album opens the series of 21 CDs issued by the Label ECM records under the title "the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles" for the 50th anniversary of the group, including the nearly 300-page accompanying booklet.

The spirit of the collective,

Just the albums of the ensemble for ECM, "Nice Guys, Full Force, Urban Bushmen and The Third Decade" are particularly speaking for the Art Ensemble – the ECM-years around 1980 were the most successful period of the Art ensemble of Chicago. The Band toured at the time, all over the world, from France to Mexico, from Russia to Japan.

"Every single member of the Art Ensemble could be a Bandleader," wrote American jazz critic Nat Hentoff in 1979, "but together they achieve a degree of innovation and intensity level to extend the expressive power of the individual again." On "Nice Guys" of this pre-eminent collective spirit of the Art Ensemble listen. For one, almost all of the members have written pieces for the Album. And where a Lester Bowie, the streets, and brass music loved, musically and otherwise, was socialized as an example, the E-avant-garde zugetane Roscoe Mitchell, sounded the pieces are very different. They formed a polystilist of the cosmos; very often also within a piece of heterogeneous musical worlds met funny to each other. Improvised Spoken-Word contributions, Trumpet inserts, horsepower, collective improvisations, Vaude Ville-like passages, quote scraps from Dixieland, reminiscent of the European art music had everything in place.

The Art Ensemble played (and still play) a group of music. Solos are often only of episode tale brief, serving more as a contrast to the collective-generated sounds because, as a vehicle for self-realization. Together crochet pieces of music were only of the long-standing members of the band realized there was no one, it was difficult: reported in the ECM Booklet, trombonist George Lewis, 1977, he had to replace at a New York concert series Lester Bowie – the could not succeed, "the Art Ensemble was a finely tuned and well-balanced organism," recalled Lewis in 2018.

Free music lessons

The collective approach now went back directly on the formative time in Paris. In 1969, arrived in France, found the Chicago in the longer term, accommodation in a country house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, a small city outside of Paris. Surrounded by cherry - trees and Apple-trees, spent the Ensemble of countless days in order to develop as a tight-knit community music and rehearse. You understood financially as well as collectively, All of the income of the individual musicians were in a total cash – out of this you paid, then everything Resulting from the food to the technical Equipment.

This collective self-understanding of Chicago in Paris in the years 1969 to 1971, with members in Chicago went back again to the experience of most of the band. They had moved in the environment of the legendary pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. This was a cooperative in 1965, a driving force for the establishment of the so-called AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a major Chicago Music. The AACM encouraged African-American player to find free expression. AACM members gave young people from Chicago also, for free music lessons. There was also a collective self-financing thoughts. Conductive was at all, Muhal Richard Abrams' idea, "that the Era of the individual a thing of the past", the journalist Valerie Wilmer.

four Drummer

Perhaps such a collective spirit carries far, especially in Jazz. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, it seems to show. Still plays it to this day, albeit in a somewhat altered line-up. And from the long-lasting Spirit of the Chicago ensemble, the CD-Box of the ECM, when you have gathered including albums that do not come directly from the Art Ensemble, but of whose exponents in the game with the other groups reported.

a Particularly beautiful Bells for the South Side "(2017)" sounds like. It is recordings from concerts Roscoe Mitchell, with several different Trios in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2015. On a screen in the exhibition space, transfer, played in the trio of Mitchell, four different drummers, and used the original drums, bells, whistles of the type of Ensemble.

William Winant about the great played the drum, which had not beaten the 1999 late Lester Bowie, if he blew in the doctors coat, his cheeky trumpet. Maybe the drum was not the one that had taken Bowie 1969 to Europe.

ECM: The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles. 21 CDs, with Booklet.Paul Steinbeck: Message to Our Folks The Art Ensemble of Chicago. University of Chicago Press 2018, 336 p., approx. 40 Fr. (editor-in-Tamedia)

Created: 23.12.2018, 18:21 PM