George Lewis & the AACM's Staying Power

Finally out, and worth the wait: George Lewis’s sprawling book on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians — the Chicago musicians’ cooperative that spawned Lewis, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill and many more valued improvisers and composers. Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music is very dense but very readable, filled with fascinating stories, capsule bios and rewarding side trips. Lewis has a gift for explaining abstruse ideas without dumbing down. As a reader, I’m torn between wanting to savor it slowly and devour it fast. Two hundred pages in, I’ve got weeks worth of stuff to think about.

The book’s a labor of love too: a valentine to the self-help/self-starter organization, of ambitiously open-minded African American musicians, that set Lewis loose on his picaresque career. He first grabbed ears in the 1970s, as a powerful and supple trombonist, who could slide from Count Basie’s slinky swing charts to Braxton’s serrated cardiograms. His debut The Solo Trombone Record — including a long overdubbed piece where his three selves repeatedly diverge and converge — was a hell of a calling card, conceptually and chops-wise.

He was just warming up. Lewis began writing interactive software to get computers and people improvising together. (His now-rare CD Voyager was the payoff.) In Europe for much of the ’80s, he worked at high-toned and scrappy electronic music studios (Paris’s IRCAM, Amsterdam’s STEIM), joined the international Globe Unity and ICP improvising orchestras, and played on Derek Bailey’s all-improvised Company weeks.

That’s barely scratching the surface. These days, he heads the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. His 2002 MacArthur fellowship was well deserved. George has an attitude common to most AACMers I’ve known: a spirit of generosity, of taking time to educate others. But then Lewis himself, a few years younger than the founders, was nurtured by that first wave.

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A recurring theme: obstacles arise when you compose/improvise music that resists categories.

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Lewis was enrolled at Yale, and was just starting a year off from school, when in the summer of 1971 he was drawn into the association; he’d spend part of that year playing in Muhal Richard Abrams’ weekly big band. (That made for two good educations.) Pianist and composer Muhal was a driving force behind the AACM’s founding in 1965, and its patron saint: one of the most self-effacing of major musicians (habitually deflecting attention from himself and on to the organization), and the tale’s true hero.

We’ve discussed facets of AACM music in previous columns on Braxton, violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. A recurring theme: obstacles that arise (disapproving reviews, funding woes) when you compose/improvise music that resists categories. Lewis reminds us the AACM’s founders never used the word jazz to describe their music, felt free to draw on music from everywhere, Euro-classical included. But improvisation was almost always a conspicuous component; when diverse musics come together, it’s the handiest glue.

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