“People have given us all sorts of names–avant-garde, free jazz, new jazz,” pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams says, pretty much right off the bat. “We don’t accept those names, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use them in connection with my work.” By “us” Abrams–who’s in town this weekend to perform a solo piano concert and receive a proclamation from the city announcing this Sunday as Muhal Richard Abrams Day–means himself and his cohorts in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the hugely influential south-side organization that produced forward-thinking jazz players like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, and George Lewis. And in case you’re wondering what you can call what they do, the preferred term is “music.”
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Abrams, 68, cofounded the AACM in 1965 and served as its president almost continuously until 1977, when like many of the organization’s finest players he moved to New York. He still lives there. “I’m a musician and I function in the world,” he says. “You can access the world from New York.” It seems to have paid off: he’s accumulated an impressive discography and list of commissions, including a piece he just conducted at Carnegie Hall and a newly completed symphony that will be performed there in January by the American Composers Orchestra. But his presence still looms large in Chicago jazz. The AACM was a model of artistic self-determination: its members all wrote original music, fronted their own groups, presented their own concerts in churches, coffeehouses, and small theaters, and developed bigger, broader ideas than most other jazz musicians of the era. They also established a community music school that today teaches 20 to 30 students per quarter.
Fleming’s recordings for the Chess subsidiary Argo in the early 60s, though decidedly more commercial than anything Abrams would do on his own, incorporated a wide range of nonjazz elements, from New Orleans R & B to African percussion breakdowns. As Abrams told writer Gene Santoro in the book Dancing in Your Head, “Look at all the different themes [Fleming] used on Stand By. In Chicago, most musicians were like that. That’s why you could have an AACM and a Sun Ra come out of there.”
Abrams’s performance, which will follow the formal presentation of his proclamation by Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lois Weisberg, is a rare event: his last appearance in Chicago was his Experimental Band reunion at Jazz Fest in 1995. His improvised performance starts Sunday at 3 PM in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Preston Bradley Hall, 78 E. Washington. Admission is free; call 312-744-6630 for more information.
