Kelan Philip Cohran

Musician, co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians

Kelan Philip Cohran, a musician and educator whose many contributions to the culture of Chicago’s South Side included helping to found the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, died on 28 June in Chicago. He was 90.

By the mid-1960s Cohran had spent three years playing trumpet and cornet in the pioneering pianist and composer Sun Ra’s Arkestra, and was established as both a bandleader in his own right and a galvanising force on the Chicago scene. On 8 May, 1965, his birthday, Cohran and three other local musicians called a meeting at his home in response to a series of night-

0 One of Cohran’s ensembles club closings, part of a broader economic downturn in the city’s black community.

In a series of meetings, the group established the AACM, whose goal was creating original music and raising public consciousness through performances and events on the city’s South Side. He later left the organisation because he was uninspired by its focus on free improvisation. But the AACM thrived, becoming an internationallyknownsymbol of the avant-garde and artistic self-reliance. It still exists.

In 1967, Cohran formed the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, a large group whose trancelike, communitarian music seemed to unite modern funk with Southern ring shouts, and both big-band and experimental jazz. The outdoor concerts he organised at the 63rd Street Beach, where dance troupes performed and vegetarian food was sold, became a citywide phenomenon, with crowds often numbering in the thousands.

Philip Thomas Cohran Jr was born on 8 May, 1927, in Oxford, Mississippi, the only child of Philip Thomas Cohran and the former Frankie Mae Green. He moved with his parents to St Louis when he was in elementary school. He moved to Chicago in 1953. While touring China in the 1990s, he met with a group of Muslims who gave him the name Kelan, meaning ‘holy scripture’.

Cohran is survived by 23 children from multiple relationships, 37 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

On 9 July, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first On the Beach concert is set to take place at the 63rd St Beach. ©Newyorktimes2017.distributedbynytsyndicationservice