By
Lee Rice Epstein
Three years ago, Art Ensemble of Chicago released
We Are On the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration
, a double-album that didn’t quite live up to many reviewers’ expectations
(personally, I loved it, but perhaps it doesn’t fit as neatly into the AEOC
legacy as was anticipated). We Are On the Edge was “dedicated to
Lester Bowie, Shaku Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Favors Maghostut” and
celebrated 50 years of the AEOC, one of the most accomplished and transformative creative, collaborative endeavors in perhaps the past 100 years (I don’t think I’m overstating my case here, the influence of the Art
Ensemble continues unabated).
Part of what made/makes the Art Ensemble so important is the individual
artists’ resistance to stasis. To say, “the Art Ensemble sound” might mean
different things to different listeners. For some, it’s going to be rolling
percussion and small instruments. For others, it recalls the occasionally
clashing aesthetics of its founders, miraculously harmonious. And if the
story of the Art Ensemble of Chicago can be told in a series of double live
albums, the growth and extension of those aesthetics can be traced over the
titular six decades. Starting with Live In Paris, and leading to
Urban Bushmen (all-time high point?),
Zero Sun No Point (Dedicated To Mynona & Sun Ra)
, Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City — Live At Iridium, and now
The Sixth Decade: From Paris To Paris. If these albums tell the
story of the Art Ensemble, then the story they tell is personal, complex,
aspirational, demanding, and thrilling.
Beginning with their earliest albums, the Art Ensemble often felt as if
they were skating together on a single blade, piled up and carrying each
other, possibly while juggling flaming torches. You had the feeling that
the music was held together through momentum and force of will. Gradually,
however, stunning relationships between the musicians brought into focus a
lovely architecture of communal elements. As David Menestres wrote, in his
review of Paul Steinbeck’s
Message
To Our Folks , “It is this organization, the democratizing
of decision making, the pooling of resources, and the dedication to the
collective that enabled the Art Ensemble to work and grow for decades.
Despite this collective mindset, the musicians never gave up their
individual autonomy. The supremacy of the individual to be able to express
themselves through music, costume, make up, theatrics, or any other means,
while still working within the group, is a large part of why the Art
Ensemble has stayed consistently creative for so long.”
Just going by the albums listed above,
Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City
was a major pivot for the group, the first double-live album following the
ascensions of Bowie and Maghostut. This ended up being Jarman’s final
recording with the group, and it’s a really nice, if somewhat restrained,
album. Bowie’s departure took more from the Art Ensemble than we may have
even thought, at the time. In hindsight, revisiting Urban Bushmen
for example, a track like “New York Is Full of Lonely People” cuts through
the middle of the set. In a way, now, that role has been offloaded to the
next generation, artists like Dudù Kouaté, who contributes two compositions
to The Sixth Decade. This is crucial because it’s the multiplicity
of voices that helped define the Art Ensemble from its inception.
Recorded two years after We Are On the Edge, the group performing
on The Sixth Decade feels much more comfortable and looser. The
lineup is incredible: Mitchell on sopranino and alto saxes; Moye on drums
and percussion; Moor Mother on spoken word; Roco Córdova and Erina Newkirk
on vocals; Nicole Mitchell on flutes and piccolo; Hugh Ragin on trumpet,
flugelhorn and Thai bells; Simon Sieger on trombone and tuba; Jean Cook on
violin; Eddy Kwon on viola; Tomeka Reid on cello; Brett Carson on piano;
Silvia Bolognesi, Junius Paul, and Jaribu Shahid on bass; Kouaté, Enoch
Williamson, Babu Atiba, and Doussou Touré on percussion; all under the
direction of Steed Cowart. If the music was only fine, it would be a
monumental achievement. The music is, in my opinion, really excellent.
With Cowart onboard and with Mitchell and Moye now the dominant
compositional voices, there is a marked shift in the Art Ensemble’s tonal
identity. Cowart directed Mitchell’s albums
Littlefield Concert Hall Mills College March 19-20, 2018
and Discussions. And the set opening, “Leola,” comes from
Mitchell’s Note Factory book, with the follow-up “Cards,” which dates back
to the 1970s. And so the first half, misleadingly, would seem to indicate
this is something of a Mitchell set. Arguably, even these few compositions
are far from an album like Bells for the South Side—Mitchell
really stretches himself and the ensemble, and the accumulation of voices,
winds, and strings works exceedingly well in the mix. Ragin blasts a long
note at the beginning of “Introduction to Cards,” before leaning into one
of Art Ensemble’s most powerful instruments: silence. It’s one Jarman and
Moye, in particular, used to great effect throughout their careers. Silence
opens the space around the musician, and in the context of the Art
Ensemble, seems to expand the circle of participation to include the
audience. We become one in those moments. Mitchell follows with a searing
solo, the entire stretch a beguiling and compelling performance. It’s the
kind of high-wire improvisation that may have been missing from the
previous set.
With four additional percussionists, you can feel Moye as a second music
director. On Kouaté’s “Ritual ‘Great Black Music,’” the stage opens up for all
five percussionists to perform as a chamber unit, leading to “Kumpa/Stormy
Weather,” which blends a dozen concepts and voices, Moor Mother’s spoken
word interlaced with Kouaté’s singing. Again, the Art Ensemble moves in a
few occasionally contrasting directions, which renews the unpredictability
that came to define the group in the ’70s and ’80s. If there is less,
overall, of the outsider element in the music—nothing like the way Jarman
and Maghostut kept things on the edge, so to speak—that’s been somewhat the
case since around the mid-’90s, when the Art Ensemble became more of an
institution. And, maybe that’s a good thing. Nobody’s shooting starter
pistols at the audience anymore, sure, but as Córdova sings on “Funky
AECO,” “Please don’t stop the music.”
