review:a power stronger than itself: the aacm and american experimental music

Review: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental MusicA Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. LewisReview by: Mike HeffleyJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 464-470Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2011.64.2.464 .

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464 Journal of the American Musicological Society

together in the 1960s? These meetings would seem to cry out for at leastsome speculation: what would evenings among these three legendarily obtuseconversationalists sound like and what subsequent influence might they havehad on their work? Yet Kelley lets this opportunity go.

Even with these missteps, though, the book offers invaluable insight intoMonk’s practices and aesthetics, ranging from his preferred articulation (heliked his tunes played with a staccato attack) to his insistence that his sidemenbase their solos on the melody rather than the chord changes. Here again wefind a connection to Ornette Coleman. Perhaps this shared privileging ofmelody over harmony provides a key to explaining why these two musiciansare widely praised (or dismissed) as “natural,” and “childlike” (harmony oftenseen as the more “intellectual” aspect of music), and also why Monk is one ofthe very few composers whose tunes Coleman has covered. It is also clear thatKelley listened intently to the private tapes available to him. While discussingan eighty-four-minute home recording of Monk working through “I’mGetting Sentimental Over You,” Kelley perceives an uncharacteristic verbosityto Monk’s playing and perceptively recognizes, “What is most surprising to se-rious listeners is that this master of space and economy leaves very little silencebetween notes and plays nonstop for long stretches. He’s listening for differ-ent possibilities to construct a tight, ‘edited’ performance” (p. 218). In otherwords, far from his being “natural,” Kelley shows how Monk worked at devel-oping his trademark succinct style.

Thelonious Monk is a major achievement, a work of passionate scholarshipthat gives us a vivid portrayal of the social and cultural circumstances sur-rounding and shaping jazz in America during the twentieth century. It is amuch-needed corrective to romanticized narratives of this artist and it will un-doubtedly become the standard biographical reference on Monk for scholars,musicians, and fans. It has already received justified praise from many corners,including the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musi -cological Society. The book has its flaws, to be sure. But to paraphrase the au-thor’s assessment of Monk’s life and work, Kelley has achieved somethingstartling, memorable, beautiful, and, yes, original.

DAVID AKE

A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,by George E. Lewis. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,2008. xlviii, 676 pp.; plates.

Outside New York, the neoclassical jazz movement never succeeded in margin-alizing its experimental predecessors. . . . Indeed, not only were the Chicago-based AACM musicians spared the vitriolic denunciations to which their EastCoast colleagues were subjected, but in the Chicago mediascape, a new genera-tion of local critics, led by Chicago Tribune writer Howard Reich, saw the



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music of the AACM largely as most of the rest of the music world beyond Jazzat Lincoln Center saw it—as one of the most important contributions of thelatter half of the twentieth century to jazz, and even to world music history writlarge. (pp. 447–48)

In 1965, pianist-composer Muhal Richard Abrams incorporated, with fourfellow Chicagoans (two of them women), the Association for the Advance -ment of Creative Musicians (AACM) as a 501(c)3 corporation (p. 115); he isthe one of the five who has endured as the most public face of both its philos-ophy and its praxis. Trombonist-composer and fellow Chicagoan GeorgeLewis, a generation younger, joined it six years later, and was immediatelyelected to the role of its “recording secretary” (p. 285). This book is a culmi-nation of that official service that is a power manifestly stronger than the collective’s self back then (except, of course, in its wildest dreams).

Lewis’s first four chapters are a rich weave of pithy historical research andthe oral history from his own ninety-two interviews and personal memoriescovering the AACM’s grandparentage in the Great Migration of AfricanAmericans from the South to the North, specifically to Chicago, spanning theyears 1915–60; as such, they also glimpse that larger part of African Americanculture’s most socioeconomically vulnerable group, along with the Mid -western part of jazz history less chronicled and more radical, in both senses ofthe word, than its New Orleans and New York counterparts.1 Lewis’s narra-tive suggests that the often violent uprooting from sharecropper poverty to anurban-industrial working class made for an ethos of self-reliance, collective sol-idarity, autodidactic discipline, and a measure of nothing-to-lose-everything-to-reach-for spirit of freedom that more integrated, educated, and better-offbourgeois and bohemian parts of black America lacked.

Abrams’s path from that parent history led him in the late 1940s/early1950s through his teenage neighborhood and church connections to privateclassical piano lessons and theory and composition classes to the more on-the-job-training of Chicago’s “blues, jazz, stage shows, rhythm and blues, andchurch socials” (p. 17). His independent approach as a more mature playerwas complemented by mentors amenable to it—talented teachers and work-ing musicians—whom Lewis also thoroughly documents and credits. One ofthose was fellow pianist and composer-arranger Charles Stepney, who intro-duced Abrams to the writings of Joseph Schillinger (p. 58).2

1. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration(New York: Random House, 2010) extends the migration to 1970, calls it “perhaps the biggestunderreported story of the twentieth century” (9), and compares it to America’s version ofEuropean migrations to the New World in its central rejection of bad for better conditions(Wilkerson, interviewed by Jeffrey Brown, PBS NewsHour, PBS, 23 September 2010). Lewis, invoking literary theorist Farah Jasmine Griffin’s work, emphasizes the loss of land and indepen-dence, along with the escape from intolerably poor conditions, that it brought (p. xxxvi).

2. See Warren Brodsky, “Joseph Schillinger (1895–1943): Music Science Promethean,”American Music 21 (2003): 45–73, for a comprehensive portrait of Schillinger and his work.




Abrams’s vision for himself and the AACM was not, accordingly, one con-ceived to bear the torch of Schillinger’s distinctly modernist project, but it didevince his affinity with it through a likeminded approach to music and otherarts in, specifically, an American zeitgeist poised by 1965 on the tipping pointfrom the modern to the postmodern. It was consciously African American inboth identity and aesthetics, yet only so as its natural first step toward tran-scending all commercial and cultural genre divisions and their high-low racialand class distinctions, and joining its fellow Americans in the arts and lettersthere, to then join the rest of the world there.

The AACM’s mission statement was, explains Lewis, “an attempt tocounter . . . widespread stereotypes about black musicians that had infectednot only the academic world, but the dominant culture generally” (p. 116); itmapped out a cultural space, in the tradition of self-reliance, community ser-vice, and professional dignity set by voluntary associations such as James ReeseEurope’s turn-of-the-century Clef Club, and followed by more recent similarcollectives inspired and engendered by AACM’s lead, especially the mostclosely connected St. Louis–based Black Artists Group (BAG) and Chicagoneighbor Asian Improv Records (AIR). Lewis situates his part in that missionas joining a new-century international conversation (in both English and otherlanguages) about “post-1965 improvised music” (also international) (p. xv),serving as “autobiographer of the collective” (p. xxvii, his nod to the AfricanAmerican literary tradition of autobiography). He does so by presenting theAACM as a prominent player in the “development of American experimentalmusic” (p. ix), in “a long tradition of organizational efforts in which AfricanAmerican musicians took leadership roles” (p. x),3 in and out of the “jazzstudies” rubric and other humanities disciplines (pp. xi–xii).4

He does so, above all, to compensate for abovementioned inadequate,wrongheaded, or (mostly) absent press and scholarship on African Americanmusic culture, especially that part of his purview: “Part of my task in this book,as I see it, is to bring to the surface the strategies that have been developed todiscursively disconnect African American artists from any notion of experi-mentalism or the avant-garde” (p. xxxii). When his ethnographies are of thewell-known members, their gift is to show and connect us to the person be-hind the public persona and work; when of the lesser known, their equal

3. One textual reflection of that tradition is another model from the literature, drummer ArtTaylor’s groundbreaking book of interviews with fellow musicians: Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, expanded ed. (New York, Da Capo, 1993), xxviii.

4. The descriptor he prefers to “interdisciplinary” is “interpenetrative,” for AACM’s ownconscious blurring of disciplinary borders. See David P. Brown, “Function, Flexibility, andImprovisation: The AACM and Mies van der Rohe,” in Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, andArchi tecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) for an example of a burgeoningfield of such cross-pollinations. See the University of Guelph’s The International Improvisation,Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) website (http://www.improvcommunity.ca/) for oneof the field’s major loci.



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attentiveness is footnoted with references to their subjects’ own work and call-ing cards—websites, publications, recordings—that expand their exposure.5He sees his role in presenting them, largely in their own words, as that of “or-chestrator” and “arranger” (p. 498) in the twelve chapters that chronicle thegroup’s expansion to (and from, never abandoning, Chicago) a strong pres-ence in Europe and New York. He keeps a neutral, scholarly tone about theinternal conflicts and resolutions—most noteworthily, for my money, in hissubstantive attention to the roles and issues of women in the group—thathave marked the AACM’s survival and continued cohesion and growth. Hisstated desire to play that role untainted by his own unconscious spins or blindspots is supported by a lush Afterword of further pronouncements byAACMers, loosely bundled under evocative subheadings (Expansion andSacrifice, Boxing with Tradition, Contemplating the Postjazz Continuum,etc.), which he describes as “what an AACM meeting might be like witheveryone present, living and ancestral” (p. 498). Also lush, and gorgeous, isthe section of seventy-six photos, four in color.

Much of Lewis’s book is a celebration of the various AACM artists whobravely, brilliantly realized that well-conceived dream in their own individualcareers, against a default atmosphere (and often raging headwinds) of mediaand critical neglect, misunderstanding, and/or hostility, along with no smallmeasure of same from other camps of musicians. Much of it is also, accord-ingly, a close and unflinching look at the nature of those obstacles, and somesurgically patient and often discursively informed counterargument to renderthe most decisive rebuttals and/or exposés of them. When critical, his tone isnever shrill, hardly even polemical—more like simply setting the recordstraight, a patient teacher correcting students or colleagues. That approach,counterintuitively, effects a sharpening and deepening of his focus andinsight.6

5. Lewis nods (p. 527) to James Clifford’s “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations,no. 2 (Spring 1983): 118–46, for its influence on his “collaborative mode of writing history” withhis interviewees-cum-subjects. Fellow AACMers Lester Bowie and Jodie Christian (p. 499), andMuhal Richard Abrams (pp. xxiv–xxv) specifically voice their trust in Lewis as uniquely qualifiedand positioned, both personally and artistically, to write the book they themselves could comfort-ably authorize; and Lewis cites (p. 305) art historian Robert Farris Thompson’s review of WadadaLeo Smith’s self-published 1973 book Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New World Music: Creative Musicas advocating for the importance of the improviser’s voice itself in a hoped-for elevation to “a newart of writing about music.”

6. The targets are three: the jazz press, from the Chicago-headquartered magazine DownBeat’s first attentions or lacks thereof to the AACM, to the press’s contrasting hype of the “neo-classical Jazz movement” (pp. 46, 87, 526n15); the American “new” and “experimental music”community (chap. 2); and the European improvised music scenes (pp. 235–43, 251–53). See“American Mavericks: Composers,” American Public Media, http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/composers/, 2010, for a comprehensive list that includes Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, JohnCage, Milton Babbitt, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and other such “usual suspects”with John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton,




Another quality of his authorial voice is the etic/emic fusion suffusing allthe pages, but especially those drawing on and speaking to other academic lit-erature; it is as striking as the ethnographic and historical sections are thor-ough and warm, especially to those of us familiar with Lewis’s work and voiceas artist as well as (in my case, long prior to) those as scholar. His care not toinject himself unduly into the portrait of the whole doesn’t get in the way ofresponsibly and effectively describing his own role in the history as one of itsprincipal actors. Further, his complete command of and comfort with the is-sues and vocabularies of the academic discourses and disciplines relevant to hissubject and story are matched by an equal proficiency and achievement bothin that world of scholarship and in the historical, aesthetic, cultural, and socialissues it engages. While there are other examples of artists of similar staturewriting about their own field and/or work in it, none of the many I’ve readhas as central and authoritative a presence in realms of both the creative-activeand the professionally academic-reflective as Lewis’s.7

That fusion speaks to—indeed, puts to rest—many earnest screeds fromboth camps, including many in this Journal and its collegial counterparts,about the thorny challenges confronting those of us who both write aboutand make (or, as pointedly, don’t make) music. The jazz-critical press espe-cially has historic black-white racial conflicts with its subjects, especially acerbicin the AACM period of the 1960s and 1970s; musicologies respectively qualified as “historical,” “comparative,” and “ethno-” have a parallel West-framing-Rest rocky road rooted in colonialism and awkward-to-failed post-colonial attempts to move on from it.8

My point in mentioning Schillinger’s early influence on Abrams is to sug-gest the AACM as a kind of heir unapparent to the American MusicologicalSociety (of which Schillinger was a cofounder) whom the country’s racist his-torical fate consigned to the pauper’s role, but whose princely nature wouldnot be suppressed. Schillinger’s Russian-futurist-cum-radical-populist contri-bution to the most originally and distinctively American of America’s music,

George Lewis, and his wife Miya Masaoka—names more usually listed together in two separategroups—nicely contextualizing their common ground, and redemptively countering Lewis’scomplaint (p. 526n5) about Michael Broyles’s more Eurocentric (and more usual) application ofthe “maverick” rubric.

7. Lewis names his own such models as fellow AACMers “Leo Smith’s writings, notably his1973 Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New World Music: Creative Music, and his 1974 ‘(M1) AmericanMusic’ . . . Anthony Braxton’s massive three-volume Tri-Axium Writings . . . Derek Bailey’s in-fluential book, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music” (p. xxix).

8. See Heffley, “Jazz History: Not All Black and White,” http://mheffley.web.wesleyan.edu/almatexts/almamusicology.htm, for an overview of the history of jazz journalism and schol-arship; see Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–53, for their introduction’soverview of the historical and current issues of race in music scholarship’s several fields, and itscorroboration of the tenor and complaints Lewis airs here as they relate most directly and specifi-cally to musicology.



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through jazz and the Maverick school, has been central but was itself also di-luted and diverted by cultural-political dynamics. A mutual contempt betweenhim and much of professional academia; the commercialization and decidedlynonexperimental direction of the “jazz” that spread from the SchillingerHouse through the Berklee School and out to the network of high school andcollege music departments roughly concurrent with the AACM’s lifetime; andwhat Lewis has exposed here and in his previous work as the “Eurological”mindset of the Maverick school (and its own heirs more apparent, concordantwith the “one-drop rule” of exclusion Lewis sees as applying here) that hasblinkered it against acknowledging the very Amerilogical (if I may) centralityof the African American composers in the AACM9—these have conspired toobscure what has arguably been the AACM’s fulfillment of Schillinger’s origi-nal vision beyond, or at least as fully as, any other such American artists or collectives.

Likewise, what the AACM did for Schillinger with its music it has alsodone, preeminently through this book about itself by (part of ) itself, forSchillinger’s fellow cofounder Charles Seeger’s vision of an Americanmusi cology—not an American branch of European historical musicology, nota European-style musicology of American and other world music, not thecommercial-journalistic subsets of those called a “jazz press,” or a “newmusic” press, but one experientially and creatively informed by the music it studies, and by the class-busting, race-busting, genre-busting, world-embracing, world-embraced Amerilogic Seeger laid down in writings founda-tional to the AMS.

The first power greater than the bare-bones self of a South Side Chicagolocal group that had no external reason to expect that the rest of the countryor world would care about what it did lies in the national and international impact and prestige it has achieved, through the recordings of people such asLewis, Abrams, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago (RoscoeMitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, Fadoumou DonMoyé), and others.10 The second degree is the power it has bestowed on those

9. Lewis’s important and much-cited “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological andEurological Perspectives” and “Afterword to ‘Improvised Music after 1950’: The ChangingSame” are both in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue,ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 131–72, Music/Culture (Middletown, CT: WesleyanUniversity Press, 2004).

10. For valuable additions to the conversation about the AACM since Lewis’s book cameout, or not in his bibliography, see Howard Mandel, Future Jazz (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999); Iain Anderson, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture(Phila delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); William C. Banfield, Cultural Codes:Makings of a Black Music Philosophy; An Interpretive History from Spirituals to Hip Hop (Lanham,MD: Scarecrow, 2010); J. Kaw, “The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians andthe (Aural) Arts after Jazz,” sweet pea, http://www.sweetpeareview.com/aacm1.html (December2009); and Stuart Nicholson’s, Greg Tate’s, Peter Margasak’s, and John Szwed’s contributions inThe Future of Jazz, ed. Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Capella, 2002).




of us in journalism and academia who play our own role most properly by giving it its due recognition and attention. The third, most relevant to the present and future, is the power of the AACM, and of this book in showing it,as a model for all Americans, not just African Americans, of how to respond toand overcome the realities of poverty, underemployment, exclusion, and ne-glect; of being stuck on the south side of a polarized and oligarchical economytolerated—if not designed and fostered—by a body politic that proffers idealsand promises to correct it while perpetuating and pushing it to its breakingpoints.

Finally, therefore, one power further: the AACM story as told here canmodel the (creative, faith-full) way forward and up for America in the globalround, away from whatever degree it is increasingly dragged down by thedirty little wars waged by its handful of robber barons against its legions ofbetter angels, and thus left behind—educationally, economically, infrastruc-turally, geopolitically—by a world it once dominated.

Lewis, after a nod to “the old African-American saying ‘We’ve done somuch with so little, now we can do anything with nothing,’ ” wonders (p. xx)what the musicians of his purview might have done with the same level of in-stitutional support and funding (indirectly, through a MacArthur award,along with the usual such help available to a well-positioned tenured profes-sor) he got to write his book. His book has left me wondering the oppositeabout an America seeming to do, by comparison, so much less with so muchmore.

MIKE HEFFLEY

A Correction to Seth Monahan, “ ‘I have tried to capture you . . .’:Rethinking the ‘Alma’ Theme from Mahler’s Sixth Symphony,” vol. 64,no. 1 (Spring 2011): 119–78

Due to an error in the proofing process, some of the measure numbers men-tioned in the text are incorrect. These concern the references to the firstmovement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: all measure numbers above 122 areconsistently five measures too high; readers thus should substract five mea-sures. The numbers in the musical examples are correct.

The Editors and the Author



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