AACM Festival @ The Kitchen

A Power Stronger Than Itself:
A Celebration of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians

Co-curated by George Lewis & Chris McIntyre

October 9 and 11, 2008
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, New York NY 10011
www.thekitchen.org

October 9, 8 pm

Muhal Richard Abrams: Trio for Violin, Clarinet, and Cello (2004)

Henry Threadgill: He Didn’t Give Up/He Was Taken (1990), for voice, piano, alto saxophone, and violin, with text by Thulani Davis

Leroy Jenkins: Wonderlust (2000), for chamber ensemble

Roscoe Mitchell: White Tiger Disguise (2006), for voice and string quintet, with text by Daniel Moore

Muhal Richard Abrams and Amina Claudine Myers, duo piano

October 11, 5 pm

Panel Discussion: The Meaning and Legacy of the AACM

With Brent Hayes Edwards, George E. Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Ted Panken, and Matana Roberts; Christopher McIntyre, moderator.

Following the discussion, Lewis will sign copies of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

October 11, 8 pm

Nicole Mitchell: Waterdance (2003), for flute, cello, and percussion

Wadada Leo Smith: Loving - Kindness (1997), for clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, piano, trombone/tuba

George Lewis: Hello Mary Lou (2007), for chamber ensemble and live electronics, with video by Kate Craig

Ritual and Rebellion (2008), a collaborative multi-movement program by Matana Roberts and Nicole Mitchell, with Craig Taborn and Chad Taylor

About the AACM

Since its founding on the virtually all-black South Side of Chicago in 1965, the African-American musicians' collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has played an unusually prominent role in the development of American experimental music. The composite output of AACM members explores a wide range of methodologies, processes and media. AACM musicians have developed new ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations and kinetic sculptures.

In a 1973 article, two early AACM members, trumpeter John Shenoy Jackson and co-founder and pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, asserted that, "The AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.” The AACM's goals of individual and collective self-production and promotion challenged racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure, serving as an example to other artists in rethinking the artist/business relationship.

The musical influence of the AACM has extended across borders of race, geography, genre, and musical practice and must be confronted in any nonracialized account of experimental music. To the extent that AACM musicians challenged racialized hierarchies of aesthetics, method, place, infrastructure and economics, the organization's work epitomizes the early questioning of borders by artists of color that is only beginning to be explored in serious scholarship on music.

The internationally prominent and ongoing example of the AACM expanded the range of thinkable and actualizable positions for a generation of experimental musicians, and challenged conventional understandings of American experimental music, obliging the recognition of a multicultural, multi-ethnic reality, with a variety of perspectives, histories, traditions and methods. These evenings of AACM music at the Kitchen, presented in conjunction with the emergence of George E. Lewis’s important new book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Contemporary Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) are intended to give listeners a notion of the diversity of musical thinking and cultural influence that has emerged from this groundbreaking artists’ collective.

For more on the AACM, see aacm-newyork.com and aacmchicago.org.