Art Ensemble of Chicago
Art Ensemble of Chicago, New Jazz Festival Moers (Moers Festival), 1978
Background information
Origin	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Genres	Avant-garde jazz, free jazz
Years active	1969–present
Labels	BYG, Nessa, Delmark, ECM, AECO, Pi
Members	Roscoe Mitchell Famadou Don Moye and "guests"
Past members	Lester Bowie Malachi Favors Joseph Jarman Phillip Wilson Corey Wilkes Baba Sissoko Ari Brown Elliot Ngubone
Website	www.artensembleofchicago.com

The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz group that grew out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the late 1960s.^[1] The ensemble integrates many jazz styles and plays many instruments, including "little instruments": bells, bicycle horns, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and various forms of percussion. The musicians would wear costumes and face paint while performing. These characteristics combined to make the ensemble's performances both aural and visual. While playing in Europe in 1969, five hundred instruments were used.^[2]

History

Members of what was to become the Art Ensemble performed together under various band names in the mid-sixties, as members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). They performed on the 1966 album Sound, as the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet. The Sextet included saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, trumpeter Lester Bowie, and bassist Malachi Favors. For the next year, they played as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. In 1967, they were joined by fellow AACM members Joseph Jarman (saxophone) and Phillip Wilson (drums) and recorded for Nessa Records.

All of the musicians were multi-instrumentalists. Jarman and Mitchell's primary instruments were alto and tenor saxophone, respectively, but they played other saxophones (from the small sopranino to the large bass saxophone), and the flute and clarinet. In addition to trumpet, Bowie played flugelhorn, cornet, shofar, and conch shells. Favors added touches of banjo and bass guitar. Most of them dabbled in piano, synthesizer, and other keyboards, and they all played percussion instruments.

They were known for wearing costumes and makeup on stage. Member Joseph Jarman described part of their style:

So what we were doing with that face painting was representing everyone throughout the universe, and that was expressed in the music as well. That's why the music was so interesting. It wasn't limited to Western instruments, African instruments, or Asian instruments, or South American instruments, or anybody's instruments.^[3]

In 1967, Wilson left the group to join Paul Butterfield's band, and for a period the group was a quartet without a full-time drummer. Jarman and Mitchell served as artistic directors at the cooperative summer camp Circle Pines Center in Delton, Michigan, in August of 1968, during the same week that the Democratic Convention was in Chicago. After a farewell concert at the Unitarian Church in Evanston, Illinois, in fall, 1968, the remaining group traveled to Paris.^[4] In Paris, the ensemble was based at the Théâtre des Vieux Colombier.^{[5] [6]} In France, they became known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The impetus for the name change came from a French promoter who added "of Chicago" to their name for descriptive purposes, but the new name stuck because band members felt that it better reflected the cooperative nature of the group. In Paris, the ensemble was based at the Théâtre des Vieux Colombier ^[7] and they recorded for the Freedom and BYG labels. They also recorded Comme à la radio with Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem but without a drummer until percussionist Don Moye became a member of the group in 1970. During that year, they recorded the albums Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass and Les Stances a Sophie with singer Fontella Bass, who was Lester Bowie's wife. The latter was the soundtrack from the French movie of the same title.

Fifty years on

Lester Bowie died of liver cancer in 1999.^[8] Malachi Favors died in 2004 of pancreatic cancer.^[9] Joseph Jarman died on January 9, 2019, of respiratory failure.^[10][11]

As of 2017-2019 Mitchell and Moye remained active, with new and previous collaborators as guest under the name Art Ensemble of Chicago - 50th Anniversary Large Ensemble. They released an album in 2019:^{[12][13][14][15]}

• Roscoe Mitchell – saxophones;
• Famoudou Don Moye – drums, congas and percussion.

Guests:

• Babu Atiba [de] - african drums and djembe
• Fred Berry [de] - trumpet, flugelhorn
• Silvia Bolognesi [it]– double bass
• Brett Carson [de] – piano
• Jean Cook – violin
• Steed Cowart [de] - conductor
• Rodolfo Cordova-Lebron [de] – voice
• Dudu Kouaté [de] – African percussion
• Edward "Eddy" Yoon Kwon [de] – viola
• William Lang [de] - trombone
• Nicole Mitchell – flutes
• Moor Mother – spoken word
• Erina Newkirk [de] - soprano vocals
• Junius Paul [de] – double bass and objects
• Hugh Ragin – trumpet, flugelhorn and piccolo trumpet
• Tomeka Reid – cello
• Stephen Rush [de] - conductor
• Jaribu Shahid – double bass
• Abel Selaocoe [de] - cello
• Simon Sieger [de] – trombone
• Baba Sissoko – African percussion
• Titos Sompa [de] - vocals, congas, mbira, bells
• Christina Wheeler [de] – voice, array mbira, autoharp, q-chord, theremin, sampler, electronics
• Enoch Williamson [de] - congas, djembe and percussion

and another in 2023 with a smaller ensemble of 20 musicians - The Sixth Decade: From Paris to Paris.^[16]

Discography