Message to Our Folks
The Art Ensemble of Chicago
This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices – members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry's traditionalist aesthetics. In "Message to Our Folks", Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble's performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades".Message to Our Folks" is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world's premier musical groups.
About the Author
Paul Steinbeck is assistant professor of music theory at Washington University in St. Louis. He is co-author of "Exercises for the Creative Musician", as well as a bassist, composer, and recording artist.
Reviews
"Steinbeck's 'Message To Our Folks' is the first book-length study of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The author has produced an absorbing and highly original account of the group's origins on the Southside of Chicago, the social and political implications of their move to Paris in 1969, and their subsequent return to the United States in 1971, along with innovative musicological analyses of the group's most influential compositions and recordings. By taking us into the inner life of the Ensemble, Steinbeck eloquently demonstrates the ways in which the group's lifelong engagement with multiple African-American, avant-garde, non-Western, and popular musical traditions was manifested in their unique sound, as well as explaining how and why they gained such a large and diverse following among audiences throughout the world. This is an important addition to jazz scholarship" – Nicholas Gebhardt, author of "Going for Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology"
"'Message to Our Folks' is a strong, interesting, thoroughly-researched, and beautifully written study of a pivotal group in jazz history – The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Combining narrative history and extended analysis of exemplary work by the group, the book is sure to find a significant audience among jazz scholars and the band's broad, international fan base" – Gabriel Solis, author of Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
"I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Steinbeck for 'Message to Our Folks'. This book is more than we could have hoped for, telling the complete history of the Art Ensemble of Chicago in careful, engaging detail" – Roscoe Mitchell, founder, Art Ensemble of Chicago
"Steinbeck has produced a major contribution to both music theory and the burgeoning field of critical improvisation studies, showing academic and lay readers alike how these boundary-shattering African-American artists realized their ambitious dreams, not only in sound, but through alternative communities of affect and agency that transformed experimentalism itself" – George E. Lewis, author of "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music"
