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Jazz

Art Ensemble of Chicago: The Sixth Decade from Paris to Paris: Live at Sons d’hiver

The Sixth Decade from Paris to Paris: Live at Sons d’hiver
Art Ensemble of Chicago: The Sixth Decade from Paris to Paris: Live at Sons d’hiver
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In June 1969, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors Maghostut, and Joseph Jarman traveled to Paris and, assuming the name Art Ensemble of Chicago, garnered performing and recording opportunities and a degree of acclaim they had never experienced at home in the United States. By the time they returned to Chicago in 1971, they had added Famoudou Don Moye, and for the next 28 years, until the death of Bowie in 1999, they bolstered their status as the most important and influential longstanding group in avant-garde jazz, or what they called “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.” The Sixth Decade captures the latest iteration of the Art Ensemble in concert in early 2020 at Sons d’hiver, a festival held in the southeastern suburbs of Paris. As the surviving members of the legendary quintet, Mitchell, sopranino and alto saxophones, and Moye, drums and percussion, reorganized the Ensemble in 2019 for a 50th anniversary tour. Rather than just replace trumpeter Bowie, bassist Favors Maghostut (who died in 2004), and woodwinds master Jarman (2019) and form a new quintet, they added 16 musicians and created a sprawling chamber orchestra, performing at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville and recording the studio-and-concert set We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Mitchell, as accomplished a composer and educator as he is an improvisor, contributes several fully notated scores for the Sons d’hiver concert, and those pieces are conducted by Steed Cowart, his colleague for a dozen years at Mills College in Oakland, California. His writing for strings, reeds, brass, and voices is spacious and fluid, creating passages of atmospheric serenity. Listeners expecting radical sounds will find plenty but might well be surprised by the bounty of sheer beauty.

Cropping up throughout the 17 tracks across two discs, Moor Mother’s dramatically intoned poetry—“Come rejoice in a higher place!” “Bring back the magic!” “We are on the edge of victory!”—adds spiritual and political focal points. A cadre of percussionists bring additional jittery excitement to join Moye’s battery of congas, djembé, jundun, gongs, congo bells, bendir, triangles, and thaï bells, and Senegalese multi-instrumentalist Dudú Kouaté provides two pieces that accentuate the Ensemble’s African connections.

There are plenty of passages where the players, here numbering 19, improvise freely—individually and in various groupings—and explore the sonic potential of their instruments. Mitchell, 79 at the time of this performance, is an almost unparalleled genius with extended techniques. But violinist Jean Cook, violist Eddy Kwon, cellist Tomeka Reid, flute and piccolo virtuoso Nicole Mitchell, trumpeter/flugelhornist Hugh Ragin, trombonist/tubaist Simon Sieger, and pianist Brett Carson all cut loose from conventional jazz playing.

Most exhilarating in this variegated quilt of post-modern new music, percussion jams, art songs, spoken word, and funk (two double basses and electric bass propel “We Are on the Edge” and the Ensemble staple “Funky AECO”) is how you can feel that the musicians are always on the same, albeit ever-changing, wavelength. The “ancient” is well represented in The Sixth Decade, but the balance tips toward “the future,” for which Mitchell and Moye are suggesting a template that their brilliant mentees can expand upon ad infinitum.

Tags: JAZZ MUSIC

By Derk Richardson

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