A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music

George Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 2007.

By Jim Johnson

Here is the question: “Why do original works of art often strike us, at first, as being coarse, awkward and difficult to place?” While John Berger poses this query in a considerably different context, it applies both to the immensely influential work produced by members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and, arguably, to the organization in its entirety. The AACM is quite self-consciously difficult to place precisely because it seeks to sustain space -unavailable within existing practices and institutions- for the exercise of oppositional imagination.

The AACM is a four decade old collective of experimental African-American musicians who celebrate what its members have come to call “Great Black Music.” In A Power Greater than Itself musician, composer, and AACM stalwart George Lewis presents “an interim evaluation of the collective’s legacy.” One might think, given the book’s considerable bulk and its extended genesis (including both participant observation and hundreds of hours of interview-conversations with AACM members), that this is an overly modest description. In a sense it is. But Lewis insists that his is a provisional account because the history he chronicles is ongoing and because the participants themselves have diverse, often conflicting, views of their joint organizational and artistic project.

The AACM was founded in 1965, emerging literally from a series of kitchen table conversations among four Chicago musicians. Many first generation members of the collective grew up in working class families that had arrived in the racially segregated South Side of Chicago as part of the “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the rural south to the urban north. Acknowledging the social, economic and political forces that shaped these prosaic beginnings, Lewis offers his account as an antidote to “the historiography of jazz” that “has rarely been able to find a place for tropes of deliberation, planning and organization on the part of musicians. Rather, the image of the creative process has favored cliched images of spontaneity, along with portrayals of musicians as irresponsible, cryptically cliquish, and desirous of instant gratification.” His aim is to show how this group of working class African-Americans organized themselves under inauspicious conditions to assert control over the production, dissemination, and perpetuation of their work. In the process Lewis provides a sympathetic, but nonetheless frank, indeed at times frankly critical perspective on the AACM. He acknowledges the aesthetic, political, financial, generational, and social differences that the membership navigated as they envisioned, launched and sought to sustain the organization. In fact, he subtly uses material from his interviews to bring the resulting conflicts to the fore, in effect encouraging the participants to disagree among themselves.

From the outset the collective has been dedicated to original music, focusing as much on composition as improvisation. More strongly, they have consistently resisted the standard dichotomy between the two. As a result the AACM membership has sustained an ambivalent relation to what is commonly called the “jazz” tradition. This is not because they have failed to master and extend that tradition. Far from it. Rather, it is because, as Lewis points out, common conceptions of “the tradition” embody notions of racial authenticity that are overly confining both aesthetically and socially. The AACM commitment to creativity revolves around experimentation —in composition, in instrumentation, and in performance— even as multiple differences among members prompt them to disagree among themselves over what counts as experimentation. Even on so seemingly central an imperative, in other words, there has been no AACM orthodoxy. Indeed, over time, the democratic character of the collective has nourished somewhat contentious reflection on fundamental commitments. Lewis notes early on: “in my experience, the people who were trying to figure out what the AACM was about included, most crucially, AACM people themselves.”

This focus on experimentation and creative exploration makes artistic projects undertaken under the AACM’s auspices difficult to place. This I true for audiences -none of the individuals or ensembles (many very well known, but too numerous to mention) who make up the association are “popular.” But Lewis makes clear that it is true in other respects too. For example, sound engineers with expectations set by recording standard jazz instrumentation and formats were puzzled by the task of capturing on tape AACM performances (that range from spatial and hushed to nearly cacophonous within any given composition). Likewise, critics have repeatedly been flummoxed because AACM groups often are collaborations among ensembles of multi-instrumentalists that defy the conventional expectation that some “leader” will serve as spokesman. As Lewis makes amply clear in these and many other ways, originality, indeed, makes the AACM difficult to place. The AACM itself affords a wonderful vehicle for thinking about originality, experimentation and imagination in the arts.

Jim Johnson lives in the countryside south of Rochester New York. He is a political theorist by trade and keeps a blog called (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography.