I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
Written by AACM composer George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself is a collective autobiography of the organization. The book tells the story of the AACM from an insider’s perspective. The AACM began life as a fledgling non-profit on the South Side of Chicago, but its members had ambitions that were global in scope, and before long, the organization and its music were recognized around the world. The AACM’s history is truly remarkable, andA Power Stronger Than Itself is an indispensable resource for musicians and everyone else who appreciates the organization’s many contributions to contemporary culture.
Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images. Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall's kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, "A Power Stronger Than Itself" uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings…
New Musical Figurations is a profile of AACM composer Anthony Braxton. One of the best-known AACM musicians, Braxton is also one of the most influential: while writing hundreds of compositions and touring the world with his many ensembles, he has also found time to teach some of the best composers and improvisers of the twenty-first century, including Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson, Steve Lehman, and Tyshawn Sorey. Braxton continues to compose and perform today, and New Musical Figurations explores the ideas and philosophies that motivate his creative practices and draw new generations of listeners to his music.
By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture - a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton. Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz", "black music," "popular…
Of the 918 Americans who died in the shocking murder-suicides of November 18, 1978, in the tiny South American country of Guyana, a third were under eighteen. More than half were in their twenties or younger.
The authors taught in a small high school in San Francisco where Reverend Jim…
In The Freedom Principle, Chicago music critic John Litweiler examines the AACM’s connections to the experimental styles of jazz that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Figures such as Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were important early influences on the AACM, and Litweiler shows how their work became the foundation for the even more radical advances of AACM composers and improvisers. The Freedom Principle is also replete with wonderful stories from the AACM’s first two decades, including Henry Threadgill’s account of how he created the hubkaphone, a percussion instrument made from salvaged hubcaps.
}Ornette Coleman's discovery some thirty years ago that his band's music was indeed a "free thing" marked the beginning of a revolution in jazz. From the early free-form experiments, Coleman's dancing blues, and John Coltrane's saxophone cries and sheets of sound, to the brittle, melancholy modes of Miles Davis, vibrant, sophisticated new jazz idioms proliferated. In this critical and historical survey of today's jazz, noted critic John Litweiler traces the evolution of the new music through such artists as Coleman, Coltrane, Davis, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, and others. He also addresses questions such as:…
Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete’s book shares its title with the book described above, but its subject is completely different. Instead of focusing on the AACM’s music, this book centers on visual art related to the AACM, including paintings, sculptures, and installations created by AACM members such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Douglas Ewart, and Roscoe Mitchell. Published in conjunction with a major exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Beckwith and Roelstraete’s book is a visual feast and a tribute to the AACM’s boundless creativity.
On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Principle, which accompanies an exhibition on the topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, traces their history and shows how it continues to inform contemporary artists around the world. The book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-flourishing organization of Chicago musicians who challenge jazz's boundaries. Combining archival materials such as brochures, photographs,…
Spark a lifelong love of classical music using the Muzart-Connection. Start with fun, age-appropriate pieces, incorporate movement and art and diverse styles. The Teacher's Edition gives you what you need to create a positive and engaging musical environment.
The book creatively includes 125 QR codes which hold classical music…
AACM member Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s The Mandorla Letters is a companion to her series of Mandorla Awakening compositions, which use music and text to imagine new societies that “embrace dualities” and empower people to live in harmony with one another—and with the natural world. “Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella,” The Mandorla Letters is an extraordinary work by the figure who best embodies the AACM’s philosophy of creativity as a way of life.
Afrofuturist memoir on jazz, collaboration, and the search for collective well-being
Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt…
Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. Sound Experiments offers a sonic history of the collective, analyzing AACM artists’ compositions and formal innovations. The compositions examined in Sound Experiments span the entire history of the AACM, from 1960s and 1970s works by Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton to recent pieces by Wadada Leo Smith, Nicole Mitchell, and the Artifacts trio. Sound Experiments shows how the creators of these extraordinary works pioneered new approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, and technology while continually renewing the AACM’s commitment to musical experimentation.
In This Together explores how we can harness our social networks to make a real impact fighting the climate crisis. Against notions of the lone environmental crusader, Marianne E. Krasny shows us the power of "network climate action"—the idea that our own ordinary acts can influence and inspire those close…
An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milošević for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed during nearly a decade of wars in the former Yugoslavia.
