In America there exist two distinct traditions of art music -- creative music and classical music. I use the term creative music to apply to improvised music brought alive by the creative improvisor, either through reference to a score provided for his or her exploitation or through absolute improvisation; the term classical music refers to composed music brought alive by the performer through interpretation of a score. (Smith 1974: 111)This important distinction serves to clarify the boundaries within which this essay falls, and I shall use the term "creative music" in this sense. The African-American creative musics such as jazz and blues form a large part of this multifaceted tradition. Since the artists that I consider here have made music of controversial status within the industry-enforced genres of "jazz," "blues," "rap," "avant-garde," and so forth, I find that Smith's term serves better than any others to delineate, to some extent, these artists' activities.
I wish to discuss a subset of the African-American creative music tradition, namely, music collectives. Exemplified diversely by the Chicago Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Sun Ra and his Arkestras, the Black Artists' Group in St. Louis, and more recently by Steve Coleman and the M-Base Collective, these often revolutionary, self-sufficient, artist-run organizations have sought to develop collective musical aesthetics, practices, and discourses.
Goals or rationales behind all of these groups are varied, since they belong to different historical and cultural locations and enjoy long and ever-changing lives; hence I will resist overgeneralization. However, one common feature of these collectives is an emphasis on economic self-sufficiency, independence, and empowerment. This is typified in an essay/manifesto by pianist, composer, and AACM co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams:
The Black creative artists must survive and persevere in spite of the oppressive forces which present Black people from reaching the goals attained by other Americans. We must continue to add copiously to an already vast reservoir of artistic richness handed down through the ages. Black artists must control and be paid for what they produce, as well as own and control the means of distribution. (Abrams 1973:73)This passage echoes what was a common sentiment among African-American artists in the '60s and '70s, namely, frustration with the white-dominated music business. (It may also be traced back to certain governing ideas of the Harlem Renaissance -- namely, the aims to raise the status of African-Americans through focus on the arts. Here, however, these ideas are significantly recontextualized, in part by forty more years of appropriation of black American culture by the mainstream.) This view is expressed, for example, by many of the interviews in Arthur Taylor's important book Notes and Tones . Here is a section from Taylor's interview with pianist Randy Weston (not an AACM member) from 1968:
Do you think musicians should produce their own concerts and records?During its most active period from the mid-'60s to the early '70s, the AACM, whose history is discussed extensively in Radano (1993), produced its own concerts, did its own promotion and its own publishing, and generally circumvented the music industry. (Radano 1992:85)
I believe the musician of today and of the future has to own everything. He should own his own nightclub, even if itŐs no bigger than a small room. He should either have his own record company or be able to record his own material and lease it to record companies.... Considering our experience and how artists are exploited, particularly black artists, we must forget about working for other people and start working for ourselves. (Taylor 1977/1993:20)
Connected to and underlying these efforts was a strong sense of community among the AACM's members, all of whom were African-American, mostly from the nearly-all-black, economically depressed South Side of Chicago. In an atmosphere of grass-roots civil-rights activism, the sense of economic necessity and of urgency for justice was balanced with a desire to create art that gave a positive representation of the black community. (Radano 1992:81-82) The music created by many of the artists in this collective, such as Abrams, Smith, reeds player Anthony Braxton, the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and trombonist George Lewis, frequently involves "open" improvisation in which the focus is on collaboration and interaction. The music in this way recapitulates the collectivist ideals of the AACM, as suggested in the following excerpt from an essay by Lewis, which expresses his views on improvisation:
The experience and practice of improvisation in improvised music privileges the role of musical sound as a carrier for history and cultural identity. Improvised music deemphasizes Western notions of form and structure in favor of the exchange of cultural and social narratives ...The focus of musical discourse suddenly shifts from the individual creator to the collective, the individual as a part of global humanity. (Lewis 1995a, emphasis added)Thus exchange of narrative is the point of entry for the musician's identity into the music. The activity of group improvisation, where musical identities interact in musical space, is seen as a metaphor for individuals coexisting and cooperating in society, while maintaining their individual identities. Lewis maintains that this metaphor indicates the coded presence of African sensibilities:
In improvised music, the development of the improvisor is regarded as encompassing not only the formation of individual musical personality, but the harmonization of one's musical personality with social environments, both actual and possible. This emphasis on personal narrative is a clear sign of the strong influence of the Afrological on improvised music. (Lewis 1995b)The Ghanaian master drummer, dancer, and teacher C. K. Ladzekpo has corroborated this claim by employing essentially the same metaphor. In describing the different rhythmic strata in the Anlo-Ewe music of West Africa, he represents different rhythms that lie across each other as different individuals, with strong identities of their own, interacting in the community embodied in the musical totality itself. "In [the Anlo-Ewe] community, artistic [musical] elements are not abstract phenomena. They assume real-life characters... This attitude is also the premise for idiomatic discourse or verbal exchange of ideas." (Ladzekpo, "Cultural Understanding") Also, he describes Anlo-Ewe culture in a way that parallels this musical depiction:
Membership in the community system is controlled by a patrilineal heredity that promotes a strong sense of family within a social, political and economic system of communalism. In this communal pursuit, private initiative or profit is encouraged within the realms of strong social-minded values in which family is the heart of the community and neighbors care about each other. [It is a] civilization that promotes the wish for the integration of the complex fundamental disposition of mankind. (Ladzekpo, "Anlo-Ewe Intro")This brings us to another important aspect of the AACM, namely the self-conscious emphasis on awareness of African cultures, concepts, and philosophies. As Lewis points out, it was and is a logical recourse for the AACM members, and in general for black musicians, to look back into their past:
When a tradition is missing or destroyed, ... (as in the case of the descendants of the African slaves in the Americas), part of the task of the descendants of that tradition is the redefinition of self entering the historical process through review, deconstruction and reconstruction. (Lewis 1995a)In theorizing about the music they were making, some of the AACM musicians reasoned that since the music of their ancestors had been essentially robbed from them, the only access they had to it was through the channels of consciousness. The "open" improvisational practices were a way of accessing the recesses of mind, the possible domain of ancestral memories. (Radano 1992:88) Hence the musical activities not only served as a grounds for communication between the musical identities of the participants, but also as a chance for the musicians' true -- that is, ancestral -- identities to manifest themselves. The musical exchange of personal narratives is enhanced if one's personal narrative is fleshed out by a personalized, if abstract, understanding of one's ancestry.
This idea is illuminated through Gates' concept of Signifyin(g) (Gates 1988). The stylized term is given dozens of meanings that play off of each other; Signifiyin(g) can refer to "a way of encoding messages or meanings which involves, in most cases, an element of indirection... [i.e.] an alternative message form [which] may occur in a variety of discourse ... Signifyin(g) is troping." (Gates 1988:80-81) The governing idea behind Signifyin(g) is verticality -- that is, the free play of rhetorical associations to conjure up multiplicities of meaning. In theorizing about African-American discourses, Gates identifies the importance of Signifyin(g) -- i.e. of verticality, of intertextuality, of history, of multiplicity, of reference to shared knowledge -- in the production and communication of meaning. The term "ancestral memory" may refer to (or may be exactly equal to) the shared cultural memory of black Americans, i.e. the realm of Signification.
The framework of Signifyin(g) also helps clarify some of the activities of members like Malachi Favors Maghostut, the bassist in the Art Ensemble. Highly respected within the AACM as a scholar of ancient and modern African civilizations and cultures, Favors often wears African clothing and face paint in performance. This may be read as a practice of Signifyin(g) on African tropes in a coded gesture of solidarity with his ancestry, that of black Americans.