New York Times Covers Great Black Music

May 2, 2008
Four Decades of Music That Redefined Free
By NATE CHINEN, New York Tims
May 2, 2008

“First of all, No. 1, there’s original music, only.”

Those words would have consequences, yielding everything from runic silence to braying cacophony, from open improvisation to orchestral scores. Baubles and bells. Bicycle horns. The rumble of a hundred tubas. Ancient drums and electronic striations, and flashes of full-tilt swing.

The pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams uttered that statement of purpose one afternoon some 43 years ago, in a meeting on the South Side of Chicago. In the process he laid the groundwork for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years.

Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide. more