9. Art Ensemble of ChicagoNice Guys
I was fortunate enough to call those members my friends and associates. You can hear the kinship of the Chi-tribe, Chi-town. Chicago was a hotbed of all kinds of music and hardships of living in this hard-working city, there was racial prejudice, and stratified White and Black neighbourhoods. Chicago was a union organised town. It instilled a DIY ethic in me. The Art Ensemble were the personification of DIY, you had these guys who were barely surviving in terms of income, and the terrible challenges living as a Black person in that time – Fred Hampton of the Panthers was assassinated by the police. It was also a beautiful existence growing up, but it was hard.
These guys created the AACM – Association For The Advancement Of Creative Musicians, it is over 50 years old, and was a springboard that took out-of-work musicians to Paris to create a whole other universe, it gave them survival for their whole lives, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell, Corey Wilkes and Malachi Favors, Lester Bowie ¬– they created lives and livelihoods, families, and substantiality from nothing, and that’s been the most remarkable thing about the Art Ensemble. I love that track ‘Dreaming Of The Master’, it’s the closest thing to a jazz hit or jazz avant-garde standard that there is, it has such a memorable melody, that walking bassline, horn riff, it’s so Chicago, I can feel the South Side and Hyde Park. It brings it all back for me.
