A Power Stronger Than Itself

The AACM and American Experimental Music

A Power Stronger Than Itself (High Resolution)

Paper $41.00 ISBN: 9780226476964 Published October 2009

E-book $10.00 to $41.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226477039 Published September 2008

Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.

Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

Table of Contents

Contents
Review Quotes
Awards

Contents

Preface: The AACM and American Experimentalism
Introduction: An AACM Book: Origins, Antecedents, Objectives, Methods
Chapter Summaries
Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Foundations and Prehistory
Coming North: From Great Migration to Great Depression
Early Musical Experiences
Improvisation and Autodidacticism in 1950s Chicago
The End of an Era

Chapter 2: New Music, New York
Cultures of Spontaneity: Integrationism and the Two Avant-Gardes
Beyond a Bebop Boundary: The Challenge of New Music
Critical Responses: Anger, Noise, Failure
A Far Cry from New York: Segregation and Chicago Music

Chapter 3: The Development of the Experimental Band
Alternative Pedagogies of Experimental Music
Eyes on the Sparrow: The First New Chicagoans

Chapter 4: Founding the Collective
Urban Decline and the Turn to Communitarianism
Born on the Kitchen Table: Conceiving the Association
Naming Ceremony: Black Power and Black Institutions

Chapter 5: First Fruits
The First Year: Concerts, Critics, and Issues
New Arrivals and the University of Chicago
Travel, Recording, and Intermedia
Memories of the Sun: The AACM and Sun Ra

Chapter 6: The AACM Takes Off
The Black Arts Movement in Chicago
New Arrivals and New Ideas
The AACM School
Performing and Self-Determination
Cultural Nationalism in Postmodern Transition

Chapter 7: Americans in Paris
Conceiving the World Audience
Le Nouveau Paris Noir: Collectivity, Competition, and Excitement
The Politics of Culture: Black Power and May 1968
Die Emanzipation: The Rise of European Free Improvisation
Homecoming

Chapter 8: The AACM’s Next Wave
More from the Midwest: The Black Artists Group
New Elbows on the Table: The AACM’s Second Wave
Ten Years After: The Association Comes of Age

Chapter 9: The AACM in New York
Migration and Invasion
Europe and the Lofts
Beyond a Binary: The AACM and the Crisis in Criticism
Diversity and Its Discontents: New American Music after the Jazz Age

Chapter 10: The New Regime in Chicago
Generational Shifts in the Collective
The Two Cultures and a New Chapter
Form and Funding: Philanthropy and Black Music in the 1970s
Strains, Swirls, and Splits

Chapter 11: Into the Third Decade
The 1980s: Canons and Heterophony
Great Black Music: The Local and the Global
Leading the Third Wave: The New Women of the AACM

Chapter 12: Transition and Reflections
New York in Transition
Chicago in Reflection
J’ai deux amours . . .

Afterword
The Way of the Arranger
The Individual
The Book
Expansion and Sacrifice
Boxing with Tradition
Regrets
Survival
Contemplating the Post-jazz Continuum
Atmospheres
Futures

Appendix A: List of Interviews Conducted by the Author
Appendix B: Selected AACM Recordings

Bibliography
Notes
Index

Review Quotes

John Szwed, author of Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

“Written with the eye of an ethnographer, the ear of a performer, and the heart of a hometown dweller, George Lewis’s account of the development of the AACM is an engaging story, a romance in which several generations of musicians triumph to create a music that travels around the world, yet is completely unique to their experiences. Reinscribing Chicago as a city of enormous artistic vitality and tough aesthetics, A Power Stronger Than Itself brilliantly redraws the map of jazz and widens the horizon for new and experimental music.”

Paul Gilroy, author of Postcolonial Melancholia and The Black Atlantic

“George Lewis has outdone himself with this extraordinary volume. His unrelenting intelligence and ear for detail have produced a challenging compendium of late twentieth-century African Americana. This is not only a study of the AACM, it is a hope-drenched encomium to modernist creativity and the oppositional imagination.”

Margo Jefferson, author of On Michael Jackson

“The AACM is one of our great cultural inventions. This extraordinary book embodies its principles, for George Lewis draws on multiple traditions: scholarship, reportage, testament, analysis, theory and criticism come together with virtuosity and scrupulous discipline. A Power Stronger Than Itself remaps the landscape of American experimental music. Academics, critics and musicians will have to reconfigure such terms as ‘jazz,’ ‘classical,’ ‘soulful,’ ‘avant-garde,’ ‘black’ and ‘white.’ Now the past yields unexpected wonders; the future unexpected possibilities.”

Time Out Chicago

"A remarkable book, not just for corralling an enormous amount of information—interviews, critical reviews, music charts, news reports (the bibliography runs 35 pages)—but for making the result a digestible and thoroughly entertaining 500-page read.”

Howard Reich | Chicago Tribune

"With A Power Stronger Than Itself, Lewis exceeds expectations. For rather than merely recount the ascent of the AACM, he elegantly sets it against the backdrop of cultural, racial and social changes that shook the twentieth century. . . . Lewis unreels this tale with dramatic flourish and scholarly authority, in effect telling the story of not only the AACM but also the city where it’s centered, Chicago."

Peter Margasak | Chicago Reader

"Lewis’s landmark book. . . goes deeper into the formation and development of the AACM than any previous history, and as a formal acknowledgement of the group’s enormous importance and influence it’s long overdue."

Alain Drouot | Jazz Notes

"This could very well be the most anticipiated book of the year. . . . The long wait is now over and patrience will be rewarded. George Lewis’s encyclopedic knowledge, thorough research and in-depth interviews have produced an eye-opening work. . . . Overall, it is a pleasant read, scholarly but not overly academic in tone, covering a wide stylistic range--from essay to storytelling to autobiography."

Downbeat

"[Lewis] sets a new standard for scholarly writing about the people who make Great Black Music, or any other kind.. . . . Reading Lewis’s book about the AACM makes one want to have been a part of it."

Ed Hazell | Signal to Noise

"Simply put, George E. Lewis’ new and long-awaited history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) must be considered among the most important books ever written about creative music. A tour de force of narrative history and analysis driven by a clearly articulated point of view, it draws on a massive body of scholarship and original research that places Great Black Music in its historical, aesthetic, and social contexts. It will certainly shape the scholarly, critical, and public discussion of jazz and creative music for years to come."

Kevin Whitehead | Fresh Air

"Rich and dense and gratifyingly readable. . . . [Lewis] makes a scholarly portrait of a complex community into a ripping good and inspiring yarn."

Franklin J. Bruno | Nation

“In bringing intellectual breadth and what Lester Bowie calls ‘good old country ass-kicking’ to bear on past and present indignities, Lewis has produced a fitting companion to the music he celebrates.”

Nate Chinen | New York Times

“An important book. . . . Mr. Lewis narrates its development with exacting context and incisive analysis, occasionally delving into academic cultural theory. But because the book includes biographical portraits of so many participating musicians, it’s a swift, engrossing read.”

Kevin Whitehead | e-Music

"Very dense but very readable, filled with fascinating stories, capsule bios and rewarding side trips. Lewis has a gift for explaining abstruse ideas without dumbing down. As a reader, I’m torn between wanting to savor it slowly and devour it fast. Two hundred pages in, I’ve got weeks worth of stuff to think about."

Clifford Allen | All about Jazz

"An unequaled volume on both its subject and on Black creative collectivity."

Alan Chase | The Wire

"Lewis’ writing is lively, avoiding the trap of sounding too academic and instead creating a story that is compelling in its portrait of musicians dedicated to their art. This is a fine work on an area of jazz that deserves wider recognition and greater understanding."

A.B. Spellman | Chamber Music

"This essential book is music history from the inside. . . . Lewis is telling an interesting and important story here and telling it well. Anyone who is interested in modern serious music will learn from and enjoy this outstanding book."

Choice

"An illuminating, articulate panorama of a little-examined yet highly influential organization, one whose ’graduates’ have permeated every element of modern music."

Eugenia Bell | Frieze

"The crystalline study is thoroughly engaging. . . . Even the most dedicated improvised music aficionado will find anecdotes, relationships and hitherto unknown performances and biographies laid out in stunning detail. . . . The book is a graceful intertwining of oral history, hard research and insightful scrutiny of a complicated organism."

Paul Steinbeck | Journal of Music Theory

"More than any other recent new-jazz-studies or improvisation-studies monograph, A Power Stronger Than Itself draws clear connections between the collective history and aesthetics of a community of improvisers and the musical procedures they have employed."

The New York City Jazz Record

“A Power Stronger Than Itself is not only an essential history of the organization but a critical analysis into its place in American art, politics and socioeconomics.”

American Musicological Society: AMS Music in American Culture Award
Won

Before Columbus Foundation: American Book Award
Won

Association for Recorded Sound Collections: Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence
Won

Association of American Publishers: PROSE Book Award
Honorable Mention
Music and Performing Arts category

View Recent Awards page for more award winning books.

For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://www.press.uchicago.edu

Black Studies

Chicago and Illinois

History: American History

Music: Ethnomusicology | General Music

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