Magic in the method: The Art Ensemble of Chicago live in New York

Tonight's Art Ensemble of Chicago show at Columbia University's new Lenfest Center for the Arts uptown concluded with 10 to 15 minutes of what on the surface could be termed an old-school free-jazz blowout. (The above video captures an analogous sample from one of the group's shows at London's Café Oto this past February.) It had that familiar kind of multilayered density, with Roscoe Mitchell on alto sax, Hugh Ragin on trumpet and Tomeka Reid on cello all sending forth formidable streams of sound that swirled together with drummer Famoudou Don Moye's busy textural wash and dual bassists Jaribu Shahid and Junius Paul's thick low end. But though the sextet worked up to a pretty intense boil, there was something about this episode that stood distinctly apart from codified "free jazz" practice. There was some matter-of-fact-ness here, some total lack of histrionics or extramusical drama — a refutation of the idea that this turbulent climax needed to convey any particular message outside of the literal impact of its sound — that seemed to sum up the utterly unassuming way that the group had worked its magic, and potently demonstrated so many of its core principles, over the preceding 40 minutes or so.

To put it more straightforwardly, this edition of the Art Ensemble, the only one I've had the pleasure of seeing live, covered an enormous amount of aesthetic ground with a remarkably little amount of fuss. The juxtaposition of styles — a consciousness-warping unaccompanied Mitchell solo on sopranino sax, say, followed by a conventionally "jazzy" group theme statement over an amiable swing rhythm — is such an elemental part of the AEOC's mission that they're able to pull this off, i.e., to construct an episodic set that flows surprisingly yet perfectly logically though a series of disparate soundworlds, without coming off as glib or contrived in the slightest. In the world of so-called avant-jazz, you'll sometimes see this kind of friction played more or less for laughs, e.g., a tight ensemble statement will give way to an exaggeratedly ragged, lurching bit of "out" improv, often eliciting a few knowing chuckles. But here there was no gimmick being trotted out, no musical punchline being delivered. I just felt from the whole set a sort of great serenity (even in its more abrasive moments) and focus, a sense that the group's comfort in its own skin was absolute — impressive since this particular configuration had never performed together before tonight. (Aside from the group mainstays Mitchell and Moye, Shahid, Ragin and Paul had all appeared at prior AEOC gigs; this was Reid's first live outing with the group, and her contributions were invaluable throughout.)

It was hard to tell how rigorously structured the set was, but the various sections flowed into each other with a masterful kind of ease, each new one following from the prior like a course in a meticulously plotted feast. A tender yet expressive Hugh Ragin feature, accompanied by one of the basses, if memory serves, to open the set; a Mitchell sopranino solo that started out sparse and tentative and built into a torrent of circular-breathing-abetted multiphonics; an alluringly fluid and fleetingly funky Moye drum solo; and so on. And then a poignant moment when Mitchell seemed to serenade a man in the front row of the audience, who was then led up onstage to sit in front of a microphone. It was none other than longtime AEOC mainstay Joseph Jarman, the night's guest of honor, apparently no longer performing on reeds, but game here for spoken-word recitation that verged at times on song. The band (with Moye switching to congas) built up a lively undercurrent while letting Jarman take the lead, speaking poetic phrases clearly informed by his Buddhist beliefs. He would fixate on lines ("We're in a maze together..."), repeat them, transform his speech into fragile melody as the band cushioned him, rising and falling with his cadences.

What struck me here, and during the various other times when one or more members took either an overt or subtle "lead" or solo-istic role, is how patiently each such episode seemed to unfold. I kept thinking of the sort of ethos and approach of Mitchell's classic Sound session, probably the Art Ensemble–related documented I've connected with most deeply over the years (I'm a passionate fan of a handful of AEOC recordings, particularly the Nessa box of 1967/68 sessions and Fanfare for the Warriors but I'm by no means an expert on their full discography), i.e., this idea of leaving aside the surging rush of classic "energy music" in favor of a more contemplative, exploratory spirit, yielding a situation in which each solo, so to speak, is really more like a mini research mission, with the player in question staking out a sonic terrain and then sort of drilling down in, burrowing ever deeper. Mitchell is of course a master of this kind of thing, and seems to be able to reach that place of almost monastic focus more or less instantaneously, but Moye's solos tonight carried the same sort of authority, the same thoughtful progression and play of virtuosic dazzlement and shrewd restraint. Just as the players demonstrated extreme sensitivity to one another, they seemed to put the same principle to work within their own improvisations — the notion of playing without simultaneously listening, considering, weighing, taking into account the overall micro- and macro- sonic narrative at hand doesn't seem to be in the AEOC's vocabulary.

And when at one point, after Jarman had spoken, a string trio of Reid, Shahid and Paul emerged out of the larger group and came to the fore, supported by Moye's bells, you heard how completely even the newest member of the group seemed to have internalized this core principle of how they operate. I can't recall the precise texture of this episode, but I remember feeling awed by its simultaneous daring abstraction and tasteful cohesion. Like so many of the musical chapters that made up the set, it felt at once obsessively focused and refreshingly compact. And as it was happening, the other players sat silent, absorbed, as if to transmit to their groupmates a message of pure "you do you" support. The full "Sound" privilege isn't just reserved for the senior members, in other words; everyone onstage got all the time and space they needed, not to "solo" per se, but to, to paraphrase Coltrane's spoken introduction to "Dearly Beloved," carve out a particular sonic space and "keep a thing happening."

The strings and bells would give way to the free ensemble climax, another brief, groovy theme statement (it might have been the band's signature tune "Odwalla") and personnel introductions by Mitchell. He has an easy way at the mic and a hint of the veteran showman to his delivery. For all the marvelous intensity and idiosyncrasy of his playing, his demeanor onstage is dry and no-nonsense. He clearly values the performative exchange (at the post-concert chat expertly moderated by my friend and former colleague Steve Smith, who was at least partly responsible for this gig happening at all, Mitchell spoke with great enthusiasm of the many outside projects he has afoot, including the marvelous trio-improvisations-turned-orchestral-compositions document Discussions — see Seth Colter Walls' typically sharp and detailed review here — and a challenging new ECM double-disc set. Bells for the South Side) but he doesn't get onstage to peddle any kind of mysticism or cater to any kind of mythology about the business of so-called experimental music-making. Paradoxically that only makes the group's insular, intuitive praxis feel that much more ritualistic, even alchemical. There's this methodology that these musicians, in various configurations, have been honing for half a century now, an approach built on the simple yet elusive principles of real diversity, depth and good old-fashioned concentration, and during tonight's unfussy tour de force, they showed how much vitality there still is in what it is that the AEOC (and in a more broad sense, the AACM) does.

It ain't magic, but it sure does feel like it.

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*A special word of thanks not just to Steve but also to Seth Rosner and Yulun Wang of Pi Recordings, who were also instrumental in making this gig happen, and who issued three key documents of the AEOC from 2003 through 2006.

*Do not miss Nate Chinen's excellent WBGO feature on the group's past, present and future.

*If you're in Philly tonight (Saturday, 10/7/17), the AEOC performs again as part of the October Revolution fest.

American treasure: Jack DeJohnette's Made in Chicago and the AACM in the present tense

Photograph: Paul Natkin / ECM Records

Made in Chicago, a Jack DeJohnette album that came out on ECM earlier this year, is an important statement, easily one of the most striking jazz releases of 2015, almost by default. The mere facts of the album—a master drummer of the progressive mainstream reengages with his roots in the unparalleled experiments-in-sound collective the AACM, which turns 50 this year—make it special. And it's a damn good record, one I'm still digesting and savoring months after I first heard it.

But seeing the Made in Chicago group live, as I did Sunday at Cornell University, was a whole other experience. It's clear to me that since their 2013 debut gig, the Chicago Jazz Festival performance documented on the ECM album, this group has evolved from a project, an unusually well-plotted experiment, into an actual band, a collective of composers and improvisers committed to developing a shared language over time.

When an artist or group of artists gains a reputation for experimentalism, there's always a risk, from the perspective of audience or creator, that what once seemed radical can devolve into shtick. Somehow, that hasn't happened with the AACM representatives in Made in Chicago: saxophonists and multi-instrumentalists Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. (Incidentally, Mitchell turned 75 in August, Abrams 85 in September; Threadgill is 71.) Seeing these three together onstage was a profoundly intense experience, and not just because their respective sonic palettes can, at times, tend toward the extreme or confrontational. More what I mean is that all three seemed absolutely sharp, fully attuned to each passing moment.

Watching the show, I got the sense of being in some sort of temple or dojo—an extension of the project founded by Abrams and others back in 1965 as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and documented and broadcast to the world on Mitchell's debut album, titled, simply and tellingly, Sound—where the practices of listening and responding in real time are sacred. I noticed the listening, the reception of sound—Threadgill, seated when not playing, zeroing in on Mitchell's solos, nodding in approval; Abrams, head bowed as if in prayer while bassist Larry Gray played an unaccompanied intro on arco cello—as much as its creation.

You felt, hearing this band play, the certainty and conviction of the original AACM mission, the self-belief that allowed these musicians to band together 50 years ago in the spirit of pursuing their individual and collective aesthetics, and then live their lives according to that belief. But the miracle is how good it all sounds today—how uncompromising, yes, but also how engaging, how human.

I felt, throughout the set, this strong feeling of pushing, of extremity, like the band was taking an idea into its collective vise and slowly, steadily squeezing and refining. This quality came through especially on a piece during which DeJohnette performed exclusively on an electronic drum pad that I'm pretty sure was a Wavedrum. During a solo intro, he struck the pad, producing echoing, marimba-like tones, and scraped his stick across the side as one would play a güiro. I remember the rest of the band slowly wading in with small, piquant textures—I believe Mitchell was on sopranino and Threadgill flute, with Abrams strumming the piano's strings by hand—so that the sound gradually fattened and amplified, eventually achieving an alarming density, with DeJohnette pounding mercilessly on the Wavedrum. The piece didn't develop so much as expand. It was one sound, one idea, that became a mini universe.

There was something especially driven and focused about that piece, but the whole set had this sort of staring-contest intensity, not hostile or off-putting, but simply extreme. The opening piece, which built off Gray's cello intro into a series of beautifully calm, refined statements, some solo and some overlapping, was extreme in its sparseness. The one that followed brought more of a familiar sort of free-jazz heat, with DeJohnette bashing out rubato time—his drum-hero bravado serving as a fascinating counterpoint to his bandmates' deep-seated strangeness—as Mitchell unleashed for the first time his trademark alien-speech circular breathing on alto. Here and elsewhere in the set, it was fascinating to compare Threadgill's approach—focused more on brief, choppy, gut-wrenchingly soulful phrases than a steady stream of sound—to Mitchell's. The two are just so fully themselves, as is Abrams, who executes the oddest, most ear-bending ideas, either skipping and stabbing his way across the piano or softly caressing the keys, with a palpable sense of loving care. The set ended with Mitchell's "Chant," the seesawing minimalist epic that leads off Made in Chicago—this was the only piece in the set that I'm sure appears on the album, but there may have been others—and came off as a lovably demented roof-raiser live.

The band played a quick encore, a loose, swinging freebop improv that was by far the closest thing to conventional jazz in the set. It was a powerful reminder of the deliberate nature of the whole Made in Chicago endeavor. These are master musicians who can play whatever they want. And time after time during this set, they chose to take it there, pushing, ratcheting up the intensity and the focus and the abstraction to borderline uncomfortable levels, avoiding the easy out. Working up at times to recognizable points of climax or cohesion, but sometimes just letting the sounds exist and hang in the air. There was no hand-holding of the audience, no explanation or disclaimer—DeJohnette didn't say a word to the crowd until he introduced the musicians at the end of the set—just sound and commitment.

Made in Chicago is a band very much still in progress, still finding out what it has to say. If they keep giving concerts as special, as fully realized, as the one I saw, they could become one of the key endeavors of the AACM as a whole, a living emblem of what this collective (not just Abrams, Mitchell and Threadgill, but also Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis and so many others), this American treasure, has meant and still means.

*****

Postscript (10/9/15): I realized after I wrote this post that it doesn't address the Made in Chicago endeavor in the larger context of Jack DeJohnette bandleading endeavors, which is an oversight. I don't know all of DeJohnette's work as a leader, but I love what I've heard of the bands known as Special Edition—particularly the late-’70s and early-’80s albums reissued in the 2013 ECM box and this excellent 1983 concert—and New Directions. Both of those groups are totally different from Made in Chicago, and from each other. Special Edition is, to me, the most compositionally driven of the three, featuring precise little-big-band-style arrangements that foreground Jack DeJohnette, the writer. New Directions, at least judging by the self-titled album linked above, is more of a "vibe" band—an atmospheric post-fusion trance-out project à la DeJohnette and John Abercrombie's earlier collaboration in Gateway. (Incidentally, that first New Directions album is magical and, like pretty much all of DeJohnette's work as a leader, bafflingly underrated.)

What Made in Chicago does share with New Directions is that focus on texture and interaction over composition. Both are players' bands. When you hear New Directions, you come away thinking more about Abercrombie and trumpeter Lester Bowie—interestingly, another AACM member—than DeJohnette, and the same is true as regards Abrams, Threadgill and Mitchell's roles in Made in Chicago. (MIC almost seems designed to spotlight these men's talents in the way that the Iverson/Heath/Street trio is built to showcase the drumming of Al "Tootie" Heath.") MIC is about Jack DeJohnette immersing (or perhaps re-immersing) in the AACM concept rather than employing AACM musicians in service of his own concept, and as I hope the above post indicates, both aesthetics are strengthened in the process. MIC is an exemplary, all-in collaboration among masters.

Roscoe Mitchell and the tension thing

Photo: Joseph Blough

"I went out there and got this tension thing. It was a battle. I had to make the noise and whatever was going on with the audience part of the piece. The music couldn't move until they respected me, until they realized that I wasn't going anywhere, and if someone was going it would have had to be them."—Roscoe Mitchell, from the liner notes to Nonaah (1977)

Roscoe Mitchell faced an unruly crowd in Willisau, Switzerland on August 23, 1976. Thus, as he describes above, he spent the first eight minutes of his performance waging sonic warfare. (Hear for yourself via the two-disc Nessa reissue of this stupefyingly great album.)

Mitchell didn't have to worry about audience flak last night at his belated 70th-birthday concert at Roulette (TONY preview here). If anything, he was fighting the opposite battle: What's a lifelong experimentalist to do once their work has been embraced? How does a maverick become a master?

Mitchell's answer is to never let go of "the tension thing." If it's not coming at you from without, impose it. About an hour into last night's all-improv headlining set—a quartet with Dave Burrell, Henry Grimes and Tani Tabbal, each in excellent, highly engaged form—the music was ready for some punctuation, an exit hatch. Mitchell put down his soprano, adjusted his alto strap, brought the horn to his mouth and the vortex opened: a death-ray of circular-breathed WIND, noise, lava, light, pick your elemental metaphor, his face and neck bubbling as though in a horror-movie mutation scene.

The other players flurried around this writhing column, this straight-out-into infinity blast, and the whole room was fixed, right there. Who knows how long he kept it up? Was it two, three, five minutes? Far less? More? I have no idea. But I was gripped, and judging by the ovation that came when Mitchell signaled the final downbeat shortly afterward, so was everyone else. The coup was that he'd summoned the beast, invited the tension thing in. As Jack Black once said, "Sometimes you have to manufacture Inspirado."

The Right Prescription: An Alvin Fielder Mixtape

Since I don't have a regular radio outlet anymore—:(—thank God for Destination:Out. The site's principals have been unusually generous re: letting me muscle in on their territory when I have a blogging idea that suits their multimedia format. Last year, I surveyed Bobby Few's oeuvre, and now I've got another mixtape up on the site, bearing my somewhat corny—but IMHO justified— title of The Right Prescription (you'll have to read the intro to find out where that title comes from). This one's dedicated to Alvin Fielder (tearing it up behind the kit and looking like a ’70s ?uestlove in the pic above), a man who's always been one of my favorite drummers, yet whose recordings have always seemed really elusive outside of his famous debut on Roscoe Mitchell's Sound. I decided to use the sad recent news of his illness as an excuse to comb through his discography and pick out some choice tracks. Please take some time to sample this music; it's inspiring stuff.

All best wishes to Mr. Fielder! Here's hoping he makes it back to New York for a gig someday.

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Also, now playing over at The Volume, strong new tracks from John Hollenbeck, Kevin Hufnagel and Stinking Lizaveta.

And, in this week's Time Out New York, my review of the new Dylan disc.