Forget polka: Poland hosts the final week of AACM's 45th-anniversary celebration

The final installment of the AACM’s 45th-anniversary celebration – which marks the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, on Chicago’s south side – plays out on a stage far from home this weekend, in Poznan, Poland. The location offers a fitting reminder that the AACM, in the earliest years of existence, began to build an international reputation that quickly eclipsed its fame in the U.S.

As pointed out in the first of my three previous postings on the AACM’s milestone, even the organization’s newest members are part of the ongoing experiment that spurred the organization's creation -- seeking and exploring avant-garde sounds that nonetheless connect to the earliest days of the jazz tradition (a phenomenon perhaps best emblematized by the work of the renowned Art Ensemble of Chicago).

The AACM grew out of The Experimental Band, a rehearsal orchestra that pianist Muhal Richard Abrams organized in 1962 to work on new musical concepts.  In 1965, he and three others from this circle – Jodie Christian, Phil Cohran, and the long-departed Steve McCall – conceived the AACM, which they envisioned as a community service organization as well as a musicians' collective.

Indeed, these musicians saw music itself as a community service – shunning the alcohol and drugs that had devastated previous generations of African-American artists – and that philosophy holds forth today as well. (For an almost complete list of current AACM members, see here.)

These musicians nourished concepts of free jazz and researched its implications; the results ranged from bleak or tender interludes of intimacy to the cacophonous joy of polyphonic improvisation. And they also nourished each other: the collective produced and supported its members’ concerts when no club owners would promote their radical and sometimes confrontational creations.  

That’s hardly the current scenario. In, AACM musicians find regular showcases at the Chicago Cultural Center, at The Hideout and the Hungry Brain on the north side, and especially at the Velvet Lounge, just east of Chinatown, established and owned (until his death this spring) by Fred Anderson, a charter member of the AACM. And in Europe, where the music first achieved recognition in the mid-60s, the thirst for these sounds remains strong no matter how often it’s slaked.

This weekend’s concerts in Poznan illustrate that point, as the Great Black Music Ensemble – which opened the 45th-anniversary proceedings on November 12 at Mandel Hall – appears as part of the fifth annual Made In Chicago festival. Conducted by reedist Mwata Bowden, the 17-piece band will feature a host of the AACM’s leading lights, among them multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart, flutist Nicole Mitchell, bassist Harrison Bankhead, vocalist Dee Alexander, pianist Ann Ward, violinist Renée Baker, and guitarist Jeff Parker. 

The first concert (Friday) will present an evening of collective improvisation; the second concert (Sunday) will reprise the Tribute To Fred Anderson, performed at Millennium Park in 2009, at which several of Anderson’s compositions – typically written for groups ranging from three to six musicians – were arranged for the entire orchestra.

The following week, on December 3, Nicole Mitchell will present her piece Arc Of O – commissioned by the 2010 Chicago Jazz Festival, where she premiered the piece in September  – performed by the Arche New Music Ensemble of Poland (with Chicago soloists Bowden, Baker, and saxophonist David Boykin). Other Chicago artists appearing in Poznan include guitarists Bobby Broom and Mike Allemana, and a quintet led by Ernest Khabeer Dawkins.  

The Poznan concerts are co-produced by the Jazz Institute of Chicago, whose executive director – the gifted and respected jazz photographer Lauren Deutsch – will mount an exhibition of her work at the gallery Oko Ucho. (Literal translation: “Ear Eye.”) It is the third exhibition of Deutsch’s photos at this gallery. Since you’re probably not going to Poland for the event, check out the slideshow of her work at left.