Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago
Message to Our Folks tells the story of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship group of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Formed in 1966 and flourishing until the 2010s, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself through its unique performance practices: the members of the band played hundreds of instruments onstage, recited poetry, and performed theatrical sketches while wearing evocative costumes, face paint, and masks. The group, which built a global audience and toured on six continents, presented its work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry’s traditionalist aesthetics. In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck examines several performances by the Art Ensemble, showing how the group members were able to improvise together in many different musical styles while drawing on an extensive repertoire of original compositions. The book also investigates the group’s social practices of cooperation and autonomy, which kept the members together for five decades, making the Art Ensemble one of the longest-lived bands in the history of jazz and experimental music.
Published by the University of Chicago Press, Edizioni Quodlibet and the Presses Universitaires du Midi (PUM).
To access the recordings analyzed in Message to Our Folks, go to paulsteinbeck.com/av.