Freddie Hubbard, the AACM and me in Down Beat

Here's the complete text of my review of A Power Strong Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music as I submitted it -- about 150 words too long -- of my thoughts on Lewis's magisterial and highly readible study of the AACM, the self-supporting artists' collective I was fortunate enough to discover during formative listening years. The June issue of Down Beat includes the article pretty much if not exactly as I composed it, and nuance matters!: 

George Lewis's epic history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians sets a new standard for scholarly writing about the people who make Great Black Music, or any other kind. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press), interweaves interviews with 67 of Lewis's AACM colleagues, select journalistic reports and theoretical writings with the perspective of a trusted insider across a societal portrait worthy of Tolstoy. Lewis dramatizes the story of independent, underfinanced, determined, sophisticated artists from a working-class minority subculture struggling to launch an esthetic movement that emphasizes individuality, continuous exploration and personal development in a world that could hardly care less.

A self-funded artists' collective founded in Chicago in 1965, the AACM has gone on to establish three generations of adherents' composing, improvising, performing, recording and teaching throughout North America and Europe (some have reached South America and Japan, too). The AACM's mission and structure have proved durable, flexible and, best of all, achievable, while proposing that its members' seek out and employ any material or approach they choose, as long as the results are expressly their own.

As Lewis tells it, the organization's guiding dictums issue in large part from the wise council of founding chairman Muhal Richard Abrams, but are also tributes to the group's ad hoc participatory democracy. The AACM has faced some long-running disputes; many political, practical and personal issues are confronted in this narrative. De facto policies including the Association's stance on racial identity and exclusivity, gender equality and musical re-creation vs. all-original works have been debated, yet just having the discussions has served most AACM members well. While Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Fred Anderson, Lewis and many others pursue their distinct, sometimes inter-related careers, they remain tethered to AACM principles.

That the AACM has largely succeeded in raising a platform for itself the equal today to any experimentalists' gives the book an upbeat lift. Some of the text's greater power also accrues from the tales of each member arriving at organizational affiliation. The details of these black Midwesterners meeting on Chicago's South Side, leaving that district's confines and/or reinforcing their roots recall many an immigrant saga. 

As a devout AACM member nearly since his professional baptism, an internationally acclaimed trombonist and computer music innovator, a former music curator of New York's Kitchen Center for avant garde performance and the current director of Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, Lewis has unparalleled experience with the world he surveys. His evident inclusiveness lends an air of authority and substance to streetwise descriptions and lofty analysis, although his focus on theoretical questions occasionally flirts with impenetrability and distracts from more concrete thought.

For instance, despite the breadth of his considerations, Lewis is spare in depicting the music itself, and doesn't relate the pilgrims' progress to their recorded manifestations. He seldom notes an AACM influence in nominally non-"experimental" contexts, though the Paul Butterfield Band, also from Chicago's South Side, expanded its blues and jazz palette considerably when drummer Philip Wilson, late of the Art Ensemble, joined, and guitarist Pete Cosey had a crucial role in Miles Davis's mid-'70s ensemble. Earth Wind and Fire also owes something to the AACM, the same way the AACM owes some acknowledgement to Sun Ra's precedent, though the organization prefers to downplay it. Neither does Lewis discuss senior AACM members' ongoing enlistment as faculty members by educational institutions such as Bard College, Mills College, California Institute of the Arts and Wesleyan University.

If Lewis bears any animosities, it's a subtle grudge that the American jazz press was slow to acknowledge or understand the AACM's new music (despite the fact that much of it took place outside commonly reviewed commercial venues). He also suggests that the National Endowment for the Arts imposed inappropriate administrative directives and officers (who go unnamed) in its effort to upgrade and standardize fundees' business practices. 

More significant, perhaps, is Lewis's disinterest in addressing discussing the AACM's receptivem non-musician listeners. Who have they been, and what did they want or get from what AACM members created? Lewis is right that the "Eurocentric" wing of the arts elite and U.S. philanthropies have initially disdained, condescended to, and worse, ignored the AACM -- many of them continue to do so. Still, a self-selected audience of devotees attached itself to AACM projects and initiatives, leading to global appreciation and performance opportunities for many members. To the credit of Lewis' book, reading about the AACM leaves one wishing to have been a part of it. --  Howard Mandel

howardmandel.com
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