The Art Ensemble of Chicago's "The Spiritual"
Part of an ongoing series of avant-garde jazz releases from the Black Lion/Freedom catalog, ORG Music's Record Store Day reissue of the Art Ensemble of Chicago's 1969 LP The Spiritual takes its place on the shelf alongside the label's reishes of the Art Ensemble's Tutanhamun (recorded at the same session), Albert Ayler and Don Cherry's Vibrations, and Cecil Taylor's Silent Tongues and The Great London Concert.
The Art Ensemble, along with their brethren and sistren from Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), were committed to community and composition at a time when the jazz press was fixated on the quest to find the next heroic soloist. The Art Ensemble and AACM were more multidimensional than that. Reedman Joseph Jarman (who passed in January of this year) was also a poet and spoken word artist (and later a Buddhist priest). Trumpeter Lester Bowie (1941-1999), who appeared onstage in a white lab coat, was the group's business mind and went on to lead the accessible octet Brass Fantasy. Bassist Malachi Favors (1927-2004) introduced the group to "little instruments" after seeing them used in an African ballet performance he witnessed. Reedman/Art Ensemble founder Roscoe Mitchell went on to achieve acclaim as a composer and educator (since 2007, he's been the chair of composition at California's Mills College).
The Spiritual documents a representative performance from the flowering of creativity that began with Mitchell's Sound (cut for Delmark in 1966) and culminated with the Art Ensemble's epic Fanfare for the Warriors (for Atlantic in 1973). Recorded during the group's extremely fruitful two-year sojourn in Paris -- which resulted in a mind-boggling 15 albums (released by BYG-Actuel, Nessa, America, and a handful of smaller labels, as well as Freedom) -- this incredibly rich set captures their internationalism (years before the term "world music" was coined), multi-instrumentalism (including banjo, harmonica, and noisemakers, as well as an impressive array of percussion), and theatricality (manifested visually by the group's onstage use of costumes and face-painting, and audibly via skits and dialogue). More ruminative in character than the "energy music" of the post-Coltrane '60s avant-garde, the Art Ensemble's music retains a timelessness in keeping with their slogan, "Ancient to the future."
The Art Ensemble, along with their brethren and sistren from Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), were committed to community and composition at a time when the jazz press was fixated on the quest to find the next heroic soloist. The Art Ensemble and AACM were more multidimensional than that. Reedman Joseph Jarman (who passed in January of this year) was also a poet and spoken word artist (and later a Buddhist priest). Trumpeter Lester Bowie (1941-1999), who appeared onstage in a white lab coat, was the group's business mind and went on to lead the accessible octet Brass Fantasy. Bassist Malachi Favors (1927-2004) introduced the group to "little instruments" after seeing them used in an African ballet performance he witnessed. Reedman/Art Ensemble founder Roscoe Mitchell went on to achieve acclaim as a composer and educator (since 2007, he's been the chair of composition at California's Mills College).
The Spiritual documents a representative performance from the flowering of creativity that began with Mitchell's Sound (cut for Delmark in 1966) and culminated with the Art Ensemble's epic Fanfare for the Warriors (for Atlantic in 1973). Recorded during the group's extremely fruitful two-year sojourn in Paris -- which resulted in a mind-boggling 15 albums (released by BYG-Actuel, Nessa, America, and a handful of smaller labels, as well as Freedom) -- this incredibly rich set captures their internationalism (years before the term "world music" was coined), multi-instrumentalism (including banjo, harmonica, and noisemakers, as well as an impressive array of percussion), and theatricality (manifested visually by the group's onstage use of costumes and face-painting, and audibly via skits and dialogue). More ruminative in character than the "energy music" of the post-Coltrane '60s avant-garde, the Art Ensemble's music retains a timelessness in keeping with their slogan, "Ancient to the future."
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