The AACM’s 45th-anniversary celebration – which began last week and continued Friday night with Roscoe Mitchell’s performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (see yesterday’s column here) – offers several significant performances over the weekend as well.
Saturday afternoon, drummer Mike Reed will present a free concert with the quintet he calls Loose Assembly, reprising the lineup that recorded the newly released album Empathetic Parts (482 Music). The name of the band suggests the concept of the album: on stage, the musicians employ signals to arrive at what Reed calls “collective arrangements” of the music.
The band regularly features cellist Tomeka Reid; alto saxist Greg Ward and vibist Jason Adasiewicz (each of whom has released a new recording of his own); and bassist Josh Abrams. But at the Umbrella Festival in 2009, Reed – a savvy jazz-history buff with a wealth of smart ideas and discerning projects – invited Roscoe Mitchell to perform with the group. Empathetic Parts documents that meeting, which took place at The Hideout; Saturday’s concert revisits it, as Mitchell again joins the quintet for what should be a pretty memorable afternoon.
The concert takes place at 4 PM in Millennium Park, but you won’t need to bundle up: Loose Assembly will perform in the Pritzker Pavilion’s indoor configuration, with the band facing away from the park and the audience seated onstage looking out, all protected by an insulated glass curtain. It’s a design feature known to few of the park’s summertime festival-goers, and almost worth the trip on its own.
Sunday night, the action returns to the MCA, with two of the AACM’s true stalwarts each leading an impressive group. At 7:30, Kelan Phil Cohran – one of the four musicians who conceived the AACM in 1965 – conducts the AACM Vocal Ensemble, which convenes several of the organization’s traditon-shattering singers. The weekend concludes with Douglas R. Ewart’s Inventions, the continually evolving lineup of musicians under the direction of the veteran reedist, instrument-maker, and expert on Jamaican music.
With such AACM icons as vocalist Dee Alexander, reedists Mwata Bowden and Edward Wilkerson, and guitarist Jeff Parker in the group, this edition of Inventions would be strong enough. But Ewart has upped the ante by adding another of the AACM’s “First Four” founding fathers, the smart and soulful pianist Jodie Christian, and another charter member, the multi-textural drummer Thurman Barker – who as a teenager in mid-60s Chicago played with the Experimental Band, the precursor and breeding-ground of the AACM itself.
It all makes for a grand weekend and an anniversary celebration that should live up to its hype and its purpose: you don’t turn 45 every day, you know.
By the way, the Friday and Sunday concerts fall under the larger heading of the MCA’s Creative Music Summit. On Saturday, as part of this series, the Chicago Asian-American Jazz Festival presents the concluding event in their own 15th-anniversary season.
The program opens with a multi-media piece by New York composer Miya Masaoka, who will employ electronics, dance, video, narration, and her own koto playing to present her LED Kimono Project. (The piece gets its name from the 444 LEDs sewn into the sleeve of a kimono, which is manipulated on stage; the lights are programmed to respond to both sound and physical movement.)
Even with all that going on, the show-stopper promises to come after intermission, when the rangy and puissant Chinese-American saxophonist Francis Wong presents a newly commissioned work, Shanghai Stories. Wong – who is also the creative director of Asian Improv aRts (AIR) in the San Francisco Bay area – credits two inspirations for the piece: Korean dancer Dohee Lee’s production entitled FLUX (2008), and the memoirs of his own father.
Wong will perform with a group he calls Legends and Legacies, assembled specifically for this event. The group has a distinctly transcontinental flavor. In addition to Wong and Lee, both from the Bay area, it features New York violinist Jonathan Chen, and a number of Chicago-based Asian- and African-American soloists: bassist Tatsu Aoki (the first artistic director of the Chicago Asian-American Jazz Festival); taiko drummer Amy Homma; and AACM artists Bowden, Wilkerson, and Alexander (see above).
The appearance of these improvisers in Wong’s performance underscores the historic link between AIR and the AACM, which – as noted in various interviews over the years, by such AAJA mainstays as Wong, pianist Jon Jang, and drummer Anthony Brown – was an inspiration and model for Asian-American jazz musicians in forming their own collective.
Wong has made Chicago a regular stop on his annual itinerary, and has recorded with several Chicago musicians over the years. His return suppies another highlight for what has already been a stellar month for Chicago fans of improvised music.
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