The AACM & the Europeans

Trombonist, composer, writer of interactive software and top jazz academic George Lewis’s long-awaited book about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is out—A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (U of Chicago Press)—and it’s really, really good: a must-read study of one slice of the African American avant-garde.

Many of its themes will ring bells with anyone who’s followed the last 40 years in Dutch music. Composers cleared a space for themselves to operate between or outside of jazz and classical and ‘world’ musics. Musicians banded together for mutual support, taught practical theory to young acolytes, educated funding bodies about double standards applied to composers from different backgrounds, and brought humor and theatricality to serious music.

The AACM emerged in Chicago from the same wave of ’60s idealism that gave Holland the “subsidy system” and the BIM, Loevendie and Janssen, Nedly Elstak’s teaching workshops, improvisation reframed as “instant composing” and rowdy Breuker/ICP pageants AACM composers—like Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill or Lewis himself—represented “an indigenous working-class attempt to open up the space of popular culture to new forms of expression, blurring the boundaries between high and low culture.... [E]ngagement with contemporary pan-European music became a form of boundary-blurring resistance to efforts to restrict the mobility of black musicians, rather than a capitulation to bourgeois values.”

Their new, boldly inclusive music called not just for a new breed of improvising interpreter, but new critical attitudes. (“That’s not jazz” just doesn’t cut it anymore.) As Lewis shows, a New York Times writer who congratulated genre-spanning, white John Zorn for transcending his roots would criticize genre-spanning, black Braxton for moving beyond his. The author points up a few such contradictions in supposedly race-neutral discourse. Why, he asks, are free-jazzers described as providing the soundtrack for New York’s ’50s/’60s avant-garde art scene, and not as full participants in that scene?

Lewis’s capsule portraits of AACM colleagues are models of economy, but he sensibly refrains from trying to evaluate the music of folks he works with, in charting this “autobiography of a collective.” (Plus, the main text is 500 pages as it is.) Talk about blurring boundaries: he manages to speak for and to the organization’s musicians—telling their collective story, based on dozens of interviews—and to address academics and the culture establishment, framing his criticisms of them with a dry, forbearing wit.

Lewis spent a lot of time in (Paris and) Amsterdam in the ’80s, developing his electronic music at (IRCAM and) STEIM and playing in ICP—the Mengelberg family all but adopted him. Eric Boeren reports he picked up conversational Dutch absurdly fast. Lewis did Globe Unity and Company tours and works with Evan Parker too, but because he doesn’t make his book about himself, there’s little of that here.

I’ve always thought of Europe as AACM-friendly from the first. Drummer Steve McCall hooked up with Pim Jacobs and Wim Overgaauw; McCall and Braxton played alongside Breuker and Arjen Gorter on Gunter Hampel’s 8th of July 1969. BYG/Actuel (early) and Moers Music (later) documented many AACM ensembles, and Lester Bowie had contacts in every town with a road Braxton and Lewis were invited to the Bimhuis’s epic 1987 and ’91 October Meetings

But it turns out the first-wave Chicagoans didn’t readily click with the new European improvisers you’d expect to be natural allies. Yes, the Baden-Baden Free Jazz Orchestra directed by Bowie in 1969 brought the Art Ensemble, Willem Breuker and Leo Cuypers, Albert Mangelsdorff, Terje Rypdal and Tony Oxley together. But it opened up cultural gaps within the band: the Chicagoans with their face paint and taste for quiet open improvising seemed stand-offish to the Europeans, who struck the AACMers as fixated on the squalling energy music they’d moved beyond.

We internationalists believe in music’s ability to span borders, and improvisation is the best bridge between musical dialects (something Lewis under-stresses, focused on the AACM as a composers’ movement). But we all carry cultural baggage that colors our perceptions of folks from other backgrounds, in our own land or across an ocean. All the good will in the world notwithstanding, we dance wearing the blinders we had on when we came in.

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At Paris’s ritzy IRCAM, George Lewis had found rigid class divisions: lowly programmers below, lofty composers above. At STEIM, things were more egalitarian, mixed up. Then-director Michel Waisvisz personified that: composer, improviser, idea man and exhorter of engineers, he put electronics in the hands of performers, from the crackle box of the 1970s to the live sampling programs and handheld controllers of the 1990s. An idealist and a bridge-builder, he’ll be missed: we can always use more of either.