Chicago has been a key centre of jazz innovation in the United States for decades, rivalling and at times surpassing New York as the music’s creative engine room. In the first of a series of articles on the state of jazz in America, noted writer and critic John Litweiler looks at the city’s avant-garde tradition and profiles some of the musicians currently making a mark on the progressive scene.
The underground improvisation scenes in Chicago have been especially newsworthy during the last year or so, what with the ongoing adventures of the new generations of white musical explorers and events like the AACM’s 40th anniversary celebrations and the saga of Fred Anderson and his nightclub, the Velvet Lounge. Since this is a racially divided city, it has two distinct jazz scenes: south side (black) and north side (white). It’s heartening to report that adventurous artists play weekly in concerts (often in lofts, galleries, bookstores) and nightclubs (mostly small neighborhood taverns) on both sides of Chicago—how many other cities have so many active musical radicals?—and that their shows attract audiences, occasionally even crowds, of all ages.
There were precious few jazz venues here when south side musicians formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in 1965. Originally the AACM’s purpose was to simply present jazz concerts. Since so many early AACM members came from the young Experimental Band, led by Muhal Richard Abrams, they became a self-aware avant garde, with innovations in sound, rhythm (including silence), form, and emotion. After the more famous, or notorious, first AACM generation moved away, usually to New York, in the 1970s, mostly more conservative artists grew out of the AACM School and stayed in Chicago.
Quite the most liberated AACM Chicagoan is woodwind improviser Douglas Ewart, who for over three decades has been playing saxes, flutes, and clarinets and making bamboo instruments decorated with his own carved designs—flutes, even saxophones and didgeridoos. He’s lived in Australia, with Aboriginal musicians, and in Japan, with shakuhachi players, and his music in recent years has often been calm, reflective, with a free sense of momentum, space, and dynamics; he’s also worked increasingly with poets. By contrast, the huge AACM big band played his composition “Red Hills,” with its joyously swooping horns, at two festivals last year.
The most prominent figures to emerge from the AACM in the 1990s were Nicole Mitchell and Corey Wilkes. Mitchell is a flutist with a flair who, joined by bass and drums, offered a rousing set in New York at last year’s Vision Festival; back in Chicago at an AACM celebration, she and pianist Abrams created a long duet notable for its sensitive lyric probing. Events like these were vivid showcases for her technique and sustained creativity. She also composes for her Black Earth Ensemble, which includes younger players like trombonist Tony Herrera and bassist Darius Savage. While young trumpeter Wilkes has always demonstrated idiomatic mastery, lately his soloing with Roscoe Mitchell and others has presented true lyrical feeling. Recently he’s taken the trumpet chair in the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
One of the most intriguing underground figures is David Boykin, who sometimes plays tenor sax in a Sonny Rollinsish manner. At other times he ventures into pure, post-Ayler abstraction, and while he prefers to fill spaces with sound, he can also phrase with a sense of time and space as free and fluid as Ewart’s. While multi-woodwind man Boykin seems almost too versatile, I think he finds his most personal voice in his most exploratory settings. Pianist Justin Dillard and bassist Junius Paul are two more impressive young AACM players.
Tenorist Fred Anderson is that rare artist who has kept steadily getting better since the 1960s. He plays tenor sax with a big, true, personal sound and angular, snaking melodies. He explores deeply into his themes, with low-register byways and great blues cries and drops, before suddenly introducing contrasting ideas. In recent years most of his music has been wholly improvised. For years he led excellent bands of young musicians in obscure Chicago venues. Finally, he’s become recognized as a major artist, with frequent European tours and at least 16 or 17 CDs by now; he was guest of honor at that 2005 Vision Festival, where old partners and players he nurtured (among them Hamid Drake, Nicole Mitchell, Thurman Barker, Joseph Jarman, Kidd Jordan, Alvin Fielder) paid tribute. His club, the Velvet Lounge, is Chicago’s principal center of adventurous jazz, with shows by different bands five nights a week. Anderson became important news last year on Chicago TV and newspapers when a developer announced plans to tear down the Velvet Lounge. After many benefit concerts, Anderson will open the new Velvet Lounge, just a block from the old, in April, 2006.
Precious few white Chicagoans played “outside” jazz before the 1980s, when bands led by young percussionist Damon Short and veteran percussionist-saxophonist-trumpeter Hal Russell began attracting notice. The dynamic Russell, who died in 1992, taught his young NRG combos to play virtuoso energy music and he composed prolifically, including extended, wild, abstract impressions of Fred Astaire, Artie Shaw, The Freedom Principle, and best of all, the film actors (but emphatically not the Rodger-Hammerstein score) of The Sound of Music. Short’s small-group compositions, which usually feature saxman Chuck Burdelik, are still a jazz highlight, as are the freely improvising quartet of expansive ex-NRGmen Jim Baker (keyboards), Brian Sandstrom (bass, trumpet, guitar), Steve Hunt (drums, vibes), and Mars Williams (saxes).
Multi-saxist Ken Vandermark moved here from Boston and very quickly became central to the white improvising scene. Throughout the 1990s he was omnipresent, working with Russell’s ex-sidemen, forming a succession of high-energy bands, and (with critic-entrepeneur John Corbett) curating popular and highly imaginative weekly improvisation shows at the Empty Bottle nightclub. At his best a few years ago Vandermark played big, furious tenor in the DKV Trio, shaping screams and honks into complex solos full of clever contrasts. Lately, under the dubious influence of Mats Gustaffson, his playing is too often melodramatic and disorderly. Unusually for these times, he reinterprets free-jazz pieces by Lester Bowie, Ornette Coleman, and other seniors; he’s also recently played some impressive baritone sax. He also plays in and is a major stimulus behind Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Tentet.
Drummer Tim Mulvenna, alto saxist Dave Rempis, trombonist Jeb Bishop, and cellist Fred Lonborg-Holm are especially valuable musicians who’ve emerged from various Vandermark combos. Bishop is a fine post-Rudd man who slashes his way through high-energy storms and at other times plays post-bop solos that, for all their rough-toned vigor, are thoughtful. Lonborg-Holm, a closely listening ensemble player with post-Bartok expressive virtuosity, likes to explore the free tension of sounds in space and to experiment in conduction with his Lightbox Orchestra. He sometimes plays with Guillermo Gregorio, who moved to Chicago from Argentina in the ‘90s. The veteran Gregorio composes detailed pieces that join isolated sounds and broken phrases into lines—again, the tension of sounds in space. At best he offers colorful abstractions and plays a free version of cool-jazz clarinet and alto sax. Drummer Ted Sirota’s fiery Rebel Souls quintet is another especially rewarding band.
Some impressive younger improvisers emerged in the 21st century. More than the younger AACM musicians, the white players hark back to the discoveries of the first AACM generation, with their freedom of movement, their lyricism, and their sensitivity to sounds and silence. Josh Berman, who curates weekly sets at the Hungry Brain nightclub, is a quite personal cornet player who remains a straightforward melodist in the midst of all kinds of rhythmic, harmonic, and formal complexities. Keefe Jackson is his tenor-sax counterpart. Vivid vibist Jason Adasiewicz is an advance on the promise of early Bobby Hutcherson and Al Francis, the long-ago vanished Boston avant-gardist. The best of these is altoist Aram Shelton, with his immensely fluid senses of momentum and melody and his penetrating way of developing motives into singing lines. Sad to say, this masterful player recently moved away from Chicago, as did two other newer artists, bassist Josh Abrams and altoist Matana Roberts, one of the few women in this new music.
This is by no means a complete list of musicians who make the new music-free jazz-free improvisation scene such a pleasure here. Nevertheless, I should also make special note of guitarist Jeff Parker, of the hot big bands of young musicians formed by long-time AACM saxman Ernest Dawkins, and of some wonderful music by other AACM veterans like saxists Mwata Bowden, Ari Brown, and Edward Wilkerson and drummer Avreeayl Ra. As time goes by black and white musicians increasingly get together, especially at Anderson’s Velvet Lounge—Shelton and Boykin, for instance, are two who discovered rewarding common ground. In fact, in 2005 cornetist Rob Mazurek debuted his Exploding Star Orchestra, an all-star big band of Chicago’s underground musicians. I leave you with percussionists Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake, who offer dawn concerts every December at the winter solstice. These are warm-hearted improvisers with a wonderful feeling for the flow of sounds, colors, momentum, and dynamics, for when to lead, to follow, and to duet. Far from the customary drum thunder, this is sensitive, thoughtful, emotional music that really does embody the joy of the new jazz.
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John Litweiler is the Chicago-based author of two key works on jazz – Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life and The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958.