From the archives
Geoffrey Smith on a set of ECM recordings celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Art Ensemble of Chicago
At first glance, 2019 may seem short on eyecatching musical anniversaries, but it represents a 50-year milestone for two significant jazz institutions, intertwined in the complex evolution of jazz history.
In the midst of the schism that erupted in jazz in 1969, with warring camps divided between jazz-rock fusion, free jazz or mainstream modern, a singular group appeared creating its own passionately innovative style. The Art Ensemble of Chicago offered a unique alternative to orthodoxies of all sorts, not just in its approach to music, but to performance, indeed to the whole idea of the jazz experience. And in that same year, a new record label propounded a similarly distinctive conception. Impressionistic, daring, devastatingly cool, ECM transcended the old jazz categories in the same manner as the Art Ensemble of Chicago but from a European perspective.
And now their shared anniversary has brought them together, in a magnificent, opulent boxed set of 21 CDS that presents just what its title proclaims: The Art Ensemble of Chicago and associated ensembles (ECM 2630) in all the recordings they made for ECM. It’s a fitting monument to a great band whose achievement still reverberates across the years. True to its motto of ‘Great Black Music – Ancient to Modern’ the AEC enthralled audiences with concerts that were both musical and theatrical experiences – free-form performances in which the group’s five players donned face paint and costumes and wandered across a stage spread with a panoply of instruments, big and small. In fact their ‘little instruments’ were their trademark, a host of gongs, bells and whistles fostering an ambience of magic and mystery, at once captivating and outrageous.
But the AEC’S music created a spell of its own, which comes across in all its protean energy in this box, encompassing all kinds of jazz styles, pop music, African dance beats, meditation, lyricism, satire and beauty. Here be treasure – rare, historic and as vitally alive as the day it was made.
The greatest jazz players and their music are explored in Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz, a weekly programme broadcast on Saturdays from 12am-1am