narrative, extramusical form, and the metamodernism of the art ensemble of chicago

Narrative, Extramusical Form, and the Metamodernism of the Art Ensemble of ChicagoAuthor(s): Bruce TuckerSource: Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, Vol. 3 (1997), pp. 29-41Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177060 .

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Narrative, Extramusical Form, and the Metamodernism of the Art Ensemble of Chicago Bruce Tucker

The aim of the entertainment was, by means of the symbiosis of the arts-poetry, song, dance, sculpture, and painting, used as techniques of integration-to recreate the universe and the contemporary world, but in a more harmonious way by making use of African humor, which corrects distortions at the expense of the foreign Fu- lani and the white conquerors. But this ontological vision was an entertainment-that is, an artistic demonstration-as well: ajoy for the soul because ajoy for the eyes and ears.

- Senghor ([1966] 1995, 52), describing a Dogon "play-concert"

The vastness of the Art Ensemble of Chica- go's ambition defies categorization. They simultaneously evoke Africa past and present, encompass widely varying musical periods and styles, adopt ritualistic performance practices, and exercise their individual and collective invention at the furthest reaches of contemporary music. In their rich and complex work, it is possible to see virtually anything we wish: programmatic Afrocen- tricity, Pan-Africanist transcendence, sinu- ous diasporic filiations, avant-garde shaman- ism, playful postmodernism, avatars of "au- thenticity," or-perhaps the easiest way out-a great and mysterious synthesis well beyond the reach of the dead hand of analy- SiS.

Although my charge here is to look at narrative in the work of the Art Ensemble, this circumscribed perspective could not possibly comprehend the richness of their work. Nevertheless, it is difficult to think of any other largely instrumental music that raises the issues of myth, ritual, narrative, history, and historiography as explicitly and challengingly as the Art Ensemble does. A consideration of narrative, even allowing for

the limitations of its assumptions of textuality, may help approach the question that lurks beneath Lester Bowie's remark that "the history of our music does not just go back to 1890 or to New Orleans. It goes back thousands of years! We try to express this with our music" (Berendt 1982, 173). Is the Art Ensemble's music oriented to the "thousands of years"-that is, to a historical reductionism of the-more-things-change,- the-more-things-stay-the-same variety-or is the emphasis on history itself, on the unfolding, on the expressing of that history, rather than on collapsing it in a myth of origin? Or does the answer lie somewhere else?

These questions are most fully, if equiv- ocally, answered by the work itself and by its actual performance. Approaching it specu- latively-and only provisionally-I attempt three things, in unequal proportions and in ascending order of foolhardiness. First, I raise the possibility of narrative in instrumental music; second, I sketch a few of the narrative lines and techniques in an Art En- semble of Chicago performance, especially where their performance practices quite consciously evoke myth and ritual, two high-

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30 Lenox Avenue

ly narrative forms; and third, I offer some brief observations about the Art Ensemble's recoding of modernism.

Extramusical Form in Instrumental Music

Employing an arresting, if sometimes unillu- minating, metaphor, commentators on jazz often rapturously insist that when the great jazz practitioners perform they are "telling their story." Sometimes justified by a ge- nealogical explanation that leads back to the talking drums of the Yoruba, this metaphor is, in any case, reinforced by the wealth of imitative sounds found in the music: horns growl, laugh, and wail; drums, pianos, harmonicas, and sometimes entire orchestras reproduce the rhythm of a train's wheels or the moan of its whistle. Converse- ly, in vocal practices such as scat singing, the human voice is used like a horn or as an instrument of rhythmic accent as in, for example, James Brown's rich assortment of grunts, shouts, and cries.

Musicians themselves have promoted the notion of music telling a story, although they often hedge it with many qualifications. Duke Ellington, in his autobiography Music Is My Mistress, writes of the early cutting con- tests between Bubber Miley and Sidney Bechet: "Painting a picture, or having a story to go with what you were going to play, was of vital importance in those days. The audience didn't know anything about it, but the cats in the band did" (Ellington 1973, 47). In other words, the story itself is not communicated, or it is communicated in code, or it remains the exclusive knowledge of insiders. Meanwhile, the arresting metaphor arrests: "telling a story" stops at imitative sounds or a kind of soulful, individual expressiveness, neither of which is much concerned with narrative.

But for Ellington, as for many others (William Grant Still, William Dawson,

Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Abbey Lin- coln, and Sonny Rollins, to name only a few'), music can be the vehicle of a much larger story, the history of a people or peoples. Ellington often spoke of his ambition, dating from the early 1930s, to write an opera "dealing with the history of the Amer- ican Negro, starting with the Negro back in the jungles of Africa, and following through to the modern Harlemite" (quoted in Tuck- er 1993, 153). Although his ambition went unrealized in opera, his numerous suites provide evidence of the continuing allure of the idea for him in largely instrumental music, a far more problematic site than opera for historical narrative. Of his New Orleans Suite, Ellington (1973, 201) writes:

The original five sections acknowledge various aspects of the city's past and present, such as the aristocracy andJean Lafitte; that indispensable part of every street parade, the Second Line; the ex- cruciating ecstasies one finds oneself sus- pended in when one is in the throes of the jingling rhythmic jollies of Bourbon Street; that omnipresent music, the blues; and, equally omnipresent, the reli- gious element in New Orleans life. To these we added portraits of four New Or- leans notables with whom we were well acquainted: Sidney Bechet, Wellman Braud, Louis Armstrong, and Mahalia Jackson.

Ellington also famously described Black, Brown and Beige, a work that still has the ca- pacity to stir controversy about its methods and procedures more than half a century

1. A few of the relevant works include Still's Afro- Amercan Symphony, Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony, numerous long and short works of Mingus, Roach and Lincoln's We Iruist! Freefdom Now Suite, and Rollins's The Freedom Suite. Related issues in the work of Bart6k, Kodaily, Ralph Vaughan Williams, andJean Sibelius and the general issue of national music in the romantic pe- riod, with its dependence on folk song to evoke culture and history, are outside my scope here. So is the twentieth-century practice in concert music of employing "Africanist discourse," devastatingly dissected by Lawrence Kramer (n.d.).



Narrative, Extramusical Form, and the Metamodernism of the Art Ensemble 31

after its only complete performance, as "a tone parallel to the history of the American Negro" (181).2 As Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen point out in an extensive musical analysis of Black, Brown and Beige, the programmatic content, untypically for Elling- ton, consists "not of specific vignettes but of generalized history, . . . requiring techniques that were new to the composer" (Priestley and Cohen 1993, 188). The meaning and validity of such techniques remain a largely unacknowledged crux in the understanding of much black music. Gunther Schuller, despite his great admiration for Ellington, applies to Black, Brown and Beige a formalist standard, the appropriateness of which is perhaps assumed to have been de- cided in now-ancient debates about pro- gram music:

[Ellington] never did make the transition to a language and grammar ofjazz capa- ble of producing music on its own unique terms, out of its own intrinsic musical-lin- guistic resources, i.e. without benefit of extra-musical or visual inspirations. And this fundamental difference represents, of course, the dramatic dividing line between the Swing Era and all post-1945 jazz. (Schuller 1989, 152)

Such a standard, although addressing the musical "problem" of the work's long form, effaces the historical content that is the piece's reason for being. In fact, it is hard to see how such formalism would allow even the possibility of history in instrumental music to account for the work of the Art En- semble of Chicago, certainly a post-1945 manifestation ofjazz. But Schuller is certainly correct that there is much in Black, Brown and Beige that is, in his terms, "extramusical." Priestley and Cohen (1993, 188) suggest that it arose not from the imitating of earlier symphonic models but from "the programmatic motivation itself':

2. For a useful compendium of the controversy over Black, Brown an(d Beige, see Tucker (1993, 153-204).

In other words, . . . the fragmentation and development of short thematic mo- tifs in "Black" is intended to represent musically the fragmentation of African tradition on American soil; similarly, the conflict during "Work Song" between mo- tifs referring to the blues scale and those affirming the major mode may just be a metaphor for the clash between two cultures.

As this passage suggests, there is a quite obvious way in which particular African- American musical forms, such as work songs, can evoke the particulars of history. Although Priestley and Cohen devote the remainder of their article to purely musical analysis, their assiduous tracing of the recur- rences of work song motives points the way toward an understanding of how narrative works in Black, Brown and Beige. For example, in the "Come Sunday" section, Elling- ton interpolates the work song motive once again, suggesting that the collective effort exploited by masters can be reappropriated for the spiritual purposes of the group, purposes that reach the highest pitch of grandeur and beauty in the spirituals. More- over, its temporal placement in the piece suggests that the real work of the work song is the song as a work, both for the origina- tors and for their latter-day redactor Elling- ton.

By evoking wider history and its transformations through musical history and its transformations, Ellington achieves narrative transformations in his music. In short, he tells a story. Such narrative techniques are not necessarily exclusive to African-Ameri- can music, but they are so pervasive in it as to constitute a qualitative difference. As the word narrative, with its faint whiff of the fictional, implies, that story is highly artful and even difficult to discern with finality. Nei- ther literal history nor pictorialist sound painting but undeniably carrying semantic content, the story achieves a momentum and a shape as narrative that unfolds with



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the music. In other words, the extramusical features of black music open up new formal possibilities (such as narrative) for particular musical works. Dance, as the work of Sterling Stuckey (1987) and Samuel A. FloydJr. (1991, 1995) demonstrates, is another powerful source of extramusical form. To foreclose the formal possibilities of such extramusical features is to deny the music much of its extraordinary expressive range and power. And to acknowledge them is to acknowledge the usefulness of integrative studies.

The semantic charge of the specifically black musical elements tends to distribute, diacritically, meanings to the other musical elements of the work as well. As in all dia- critical systems, these assignments of meaning are always shifting, each in relation to each and to shifts elsewhere in the system. For example, every subsequent occurrence of the clash of major and minor keys in Black, Brown and Beige, as interpreted by Priestley and Cohen, does not carry the meaning it carries in the quite specific system of the work song portion of the piece. In addition, of course, the meaning of any element at any time is conditioned by numerous other elements and, indeed, by vast networks of signification crossing and re- crossing each other.

The narrative and extramusical formal possibilities that are available in African- American music because of the extramusical charge that much of the music bears is another instance of the music's often-remarked self-reflexivity and dialogical character. As Paul Gilroy (1993b, 132-133) argues,

The power of music in developing our struggles by communicating information, organizing consciousness, deploying or amplifying the forms of subjectivity which are required by political agency-individual and collective, defensive and transfor- mational-demands attention to both

the formal attributes of this tradition of expression and its distinctive moral basis.

When the music self-reflexively refers to its own history as well as to the history of other musics, it is not merely deploying musical allusions; it is also serving-often narrative- ly-the functions that Gilroy enumerates. Interestingly, he observes that at precisely the moment prominent Euro-American cultural theorists are proclaiming the collapse of grand narratives, the expressive cultures of the African diaspora are producing "a potent historical memory" (42).

Nornan Weinstein's discussion of Roscoe Mitchell's treatment of "Oh! Susan- na" in this issue of Lenox Avenue captures the essence of the techniques of instrumental musical narrative employed by Ellington and prefigured in the work of countless black musicians signifying on the vast store- house of music. Like Ellington, Mitchell knows that musical history is itself extramusical. To invoke Stephen Foster musically is to mobilize all the complicated extramusical history of minstrelsy, exploitation, pleasure, and misunderstanding that Foster's music enacts. To refigure him musically is not merely to offer a corrective lecture. Mitchell rewrites the story through musical transformations that diacritically distribute and re- distribute meanings among musical elements throughout the duration of the piece. He inscribes a new narrative of black musical history, identity, and originality that is achieved in the unfolding of the performance. This is not simply a matter of theme and variations; it is a convoluted narrative procedure that not only realizes its historical aims but makes the further historio- graphical point that such historical rewrit- ings may require a mise-en-abyme structure: Mitchell is telling his story by retelling Fos- ter's (inadequate) retelling of a story that was originally embodied in the black music Foster misappropriated. Weinstein's metaphor of "a broad historical weave




encompassing the antebellum South and the present" is, in narrative terms, this complicated rhetorical position of the teller of the tale in which music itself is a principle figure in the mythic-historical drama.

Looking only at narrative elements in the Art Ensemble, many of which Weinstein has succinctly characterized in his provocative meditations, necessarily risks the kind of fragmentariness he righdy warns against. Any discussion of narrative in their work must also acknowledge the limits of narrative and what lies beyond it, limits and possibilities pointedly explored in the Art En- semble's performance practices themselves. To confine their art to a discursive practice like narrative is to miss the musical and enunciative aspects. Again, Gilroy (1993b, 105) has been the most eloquent and per- suasive voice on "the inadequacy of language in general for articulating the intensi- ty of meaning that diaspora history necessitates." He also cautions against approaches to black culture that are exclusively based on "textuality and narrative rather than dra- maturgy, enunciation and gesture-the pre- and anti-discursive elements of black meta- communication" (75).

From yet another point of view, too great an emphasis on the plastic arts and on symbol and metaphor in the Art Ensemble's work gives a misleadingly static picture of their enterprise, tending to assimilate it to familiar modernist ideals of spatial form (with which their work may traffic but from which too-hasty critical invocation of puta- tively African concepts of space and time fails to distinguish it). My argument, tenta- tive and exploratory here, is that narrative- in history, myth, ritual-provides a discursive bridge from that spatialized center to an unfolding enunciative present. In the Art Ensemble's narrative, Africa as the symbolic core of the diaspora passes over from space to time, and in performance, it moves be-

yond narrative into what Weinstein calls the spiritual energy of the music.

The Art Ensemble of Chicago Live

The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Live from the Jazz Showcase (1990), a videotape of a November 1, 1981, appearance, is representative of the band in performance. The Art Ensemble's fifty-minute continuous performance of highly diverse music connects eight discrete songs into a single, unitary work that is for- mally held together not by the familiar techniques of themes, variations, and motives, but in part by extramusical narrative de- rived from history, both musical and non- musical, and from the narrative dimension of myth and ritual arising in the performance itself. The form may, of course, vary from performance to performance as the improvisations or song order vary along with corresponding (if extremely subtle) changes in ritual elements of the occasion. The point is that the form is no less formal for being mutable, coextensive with performance, and partly extramusical.

Before the music begins, however, there is the striking physical appearance of the band itself. Although audiences are long ac- customed to the Art Ensemble's distinctive look, it is worth remembering that the inter- pretive challenge they pose begins there: Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors Maghostut, and Famoudou Don Moye are costumed in real or imitated African dress, including masks and face paints, while, in striking contrast, Mitchell wears casual contemporary clothing and Bowie wears his trade- mark white lab coat. Clearly, this is no folk- lore troupe promising "authentic" music. With what, then, is the audience confront- ed? An experimental band (like the Experi- mental Band of their AACM mentor, Richard Muhal Abrams) whose avant-garde intentions are humorously signaled by Bowie's coat? Bricolage? A system of hermet- ic symbolism? The rhetoric of cultural insid-



34 Lenox Avenue

erism? A complicated signifying on the discourse of performance, replacing the mask of minstrelsy with the mask of Africa?

The banner under which the group per- forms-"Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future" -is similarly ambiguous and ambi- tious. It suggests origins and endings, history and timelessness, with a hint of eschatol- ogy. At the top of that banner is the group's provocative name: "Art" suggests that its work is beyond musical genre and, to some extent, beyond music; "Ensemble" empha- sizes the collective nature of the enterprise and suggests the world of the concert hall; "Chicago" grounds their work in a particular place (and the live performance grounds it in a particular historical time). There is also the matter of hundreds of instruments assembled on the stage, prefigur- ing the category-stomping eclecticism and sheer musical abundance to come. Yet there is no piano, an omission injazz often meant to signal freedom from the tyranny of pianism and harmony.

It is easy to dismiss all these matters as superficial and irrelevant to the music. The determined formalist will see them as mere matters of inert ideology or, even less plausi- bly, as the ruffles and flourishes of entertainment. But all these elements-the group's attire, logo, and instrumentation- establish contexts and expectations that dif- fer markedly from those of the concert hall or the jazz club, without leaving either venue entirely behind.

These contexts are extramusical-even when, as with the instrumentation, they are associated with music. These extramusical contexts partially displace attention from the performance of the music to the performance of the performance. Neither mere em- bellishments, metaphors, or simple asser- tions, they are differing domains of discourse-visual, textual, iconographic, dra- maturgic-that, taken together, orient the

performance as one that is simultaneously mythic and historical, ritualistic and open- ended, all-inclusive but undertaken from the perspective of a particular time and place.

The grounding of the performance in time and place provides the key to the rhetorical position of the teller of, for example, the story of "Oh! Susanna." That position is the present-day Art Ensemble itself as first-person, plural narrator.3 It is from this perspective-in literature, what is customar- ily called point of view-that the Ensemble arranges the disparate musical styles, time periods, places, and events of its complicated, instrumental musical narrative.

The presence of a narrator distinguish- es the Art Ensemble's performance from a purely dramatic presentation-despite, or in addition to, their evident interest in dra- maturgy-just as the presence of the cam- era in fictional films establishes a rhetorical point of view that makes film a narrative rather than a dramatic form. By calling attention to the teller, the Art Ensemble em- phasizes that they are, in fact, telling a tale, not simply offering a theatrical presentation.

But what is that tale? And whose story is it? As in many, although by no means all, first-person narrations, the protagonist here is to some extent the narrator, made clear in the title of the concert's first tune, "We- Bop." But the mythic-ritual elements of the performance suggest a larger collectivity, succinctly caught by "epic memory," Alvin Ailey's evocative phrase cited by Weinstein. "Epic" suggests not only the kind of narrative the Art Ensemble is unfolding-a story of group identity-but their significant revi- sions of such genres, including both nation-

3. Examples from literature of first-person, plural narrators are extremely rare. Multiple perspectives, including multiple first-person narrators, are quite common, of course, especially in the modern novel.




al epic of the Virgilian sort and tribal history of African oral poetry. Specifically, the Art Ensemble's connection to the African griot, that professional storyteller of unwrit- ten history, can be seen as a revision (as opposed to a repetition) of traditional African oral poetry in a distinctive and contemporary aural narrative instrumentalism.

Yet the people whose identity is at issue in the Art Ensemble's work is neither a national group nor a tribe. And the epic ves- sel-the music-is marked by characteristics that have as many differences as similarities between times, places, and peoples. In short, the Art Ensemble is offering an epic myth of identity in a diasporic context of profound discontinuities of time, place, nationality, language, historical experience, and much else, while significantly revising the notion of epic itself.

With characteristic multilayered ambiguity, the Art Ensemble signals the beginning of the performance with a sharp blast from a whistle, an ancient African instrument as well as a modern functional tool for police officers, referees, and marching bands. In the songs to come, many of these implications will be played out in the street sounds of New York, in the Art Ensemble's rendering of a New Orleans parade band, and in the reincarnation of this initial whistle in various slide whistles, tin whistles, and similar instruments that punctuate significant points in the performance. Initially, however, the simultaneous simplicity and ambiguity of the whistle encapsulates their enterprise, and they begin the performance under the sign of its discipline.

"We-Bop" quickly establishes the Art Ensemble as protagonists, sets the narrative stakes as musical identity, and initiates their story against the background of bebop, long considered a decisive, historic break in jazz; Schuller calls it the "1945 dividing line." But the Art Ensemble evokes that dividing line

only to erase it, using musical transformations to achieve narrative transformations through the evocation of a wider, in this case, musical, history.4 As in bebop, they begin with a unison playing of the "head," which includes an allusion to "Salt Peanuts" (the first bebop version of which was recorded by Dizzy Gillespie in 1945). Then Bowie takes a solo, much as he might in a standard bebop setting.

A story of black music that does not have room forJelly Roll Morton andJames Brown, Ornette Coleman and Coleman Hawkins, funk and fusion, and free jazz and hard bop has simply got it wrong. In fact, such an exclusionary story is not properly a story at all; it is a static formalism miscalled tradition and misunderstood as history.

Rather than offer a display of individual virtuosity only, as Bowie builds his solo, he appears to listen carefully to the other musicians, who are not merely comping behind him but engaging him and one another in a multivoiced dialogue. He answers a slide whistle with a corresponding smear in his high register. He responds to various per- cussionists with rhythmic accents of his own. Other whistles are heard. Mitchell employs crash cymbals, initiating through the associ- ation with marching bands what will become a central narrative device in the performance: transformations and permuta- tions of various kinds of peregrination. Through marching, walking, promenading, parading, moving through streets-each evoked musically in the course of the performance and dramatically through the band members' restless movement from instrument to instrument about the stage- the Art Ensemble makes its journey through the geography and history of music. As a narrative device and as a metaphor for the

4. For an additional view of the permeability of the 1945 dividing line, see Stuckey (1995, 79n) on Brer Rabbit in Redhill Churchyard.



36 Lenox Avenue

narrative itself-that is, for the Art Ensem- ble's musical picaresque-peregrination unites space and time, the geography and history that are the dimensions across which the band must create the identity of "great black music."

As Bowie's solo stretches out, it moves farther and farther away from the orbit of bebop. The bass and drums maintain a bebop feel behind him, but additional percussion features bells, chimes, and a gong. While Bowie moves beyond bebop through modal playing and hard bop, Moye's work on drums takes on some ElvinJones-like polyrhythms and dynamics. Meanwhile, much of the percussion acquires an increas- ingly African feel. Thus the music moves simultaneously forward in the history ofjazz and back to Africa, eventually converging in shimmering sound-fields of free jazz, eras- ing that 1945 dividing line by expanding the music in both directions on either side of it and then converging in music that defies description. The Art Ensemble erases genre lines, geographic lines, and often melodic and bar lines to inscribe their own set of connections, to traverse the musical terrain and create a narrative line. In contrast to simple, static boundaries, their narrative line must be supple enough to comprehend and make coherent all the disparate elements along the way. It must form a living story, neither creating artificial divi- sions nor failing to delineate difference.

Among the lines that they erase are those between the songs of the performance. It is difficult for the listener to determine when "We-Bop" leaves off and "Promenade" begins; perhaps the transition is provided by a pre-bop walking bass passage, suggesting promenading and the first of the band's peregrinations, which then takes them back across the 1945 dividing line into a bass solo by Favors and then to the C6te Bamako.

Mali, with its rich histories of the Dogon and the Mandingo and its overlay of French colonialism and Islam, provides precisely the diasporic challenge and musical diversity that is the subject of the Art En- semble's enterprise. The throwing of confet- ti, suggesting parades as well as ritual, marks the beginning of their peregrination through the music of Mali. Initially, they employ the drums, bells, trumpets, and flute of the Dogon people. Mitchell adds what could be a balofon, the xylophone-like instrument that is used by the Mandingo gri- ots responsible for historical and genealogi- cal narratives. As the band plays, they favor the ensemble style of the Bambara over the more virtuosic style found elsewhere in the country, just as they have previously moved away from the virtuosic style of bebop to the collective style of "We-Bop." In fact, this section concludes with the most unitary ensemble playing possible: all five members of the band collectively drumming in a polyrhyth- mic, African style. It is a measure of the success and clarity of this narrative that the audience bursts into applause for the first time at this point, valuing the ensemble playing over individual virtuosity.

It is worth recounting how far the Art Ensemble has come in their narrative. From the unison playing of the bebop head with which they began, they have arrived at a different kind of unity, outside the tyranny of harmony, in the collective-but polyrhyth- mic-social harmony of drumming. This narrative of unity in diversity, with its rewrit- ing of musical history intertwined with the story of the band's artistic genealogy, has been achieved largely through musical transforrnations-such as those worked on unison playing, harmony, the conventions of bebop, and so on-that become narrative transformations as they distribute their meanings diacritically in the unfolding of the performance.

Pointedly refusing to rest the narrative




at what could be misconstrued as a static myth of origin, the band signals the end of the drumming and the beginning of the "Bedouin Village" section with a slide whistle. Moving from Mali to North Africa, they continue their geographical and musical travels-and the diasporic theme of travel itself-by exploring the music of tribes noted for being nomads. To rhythms like those with which the previous section concluded, Jarman's skirling soprano saxophone captures the frenetic lyricism of a North African oboe. There is room for virtuosity after all. The possibility glimpsed at the end of the previous section is only one of many, and it is far from any of the simple pseudo- anthropological notions about uncomplicat- ed African communalism into which essentialism would collapse the music.

The bass introduces "New York Is Full of Lonely People," complicating the narrative of musical figuration and identity con- siderably. Musically, the Art Ensemble once again stands on both sides of the 1945 dividing line, employing elements of swing and elements of post-bebop, Mingus-like orches- trations, which all eventually mutate into the band's distinctive free jazz. The slow tempo and melancholy tone with which the piece begins establish an ironic urban idyll, a reverse image of the (equally paradoxical) frenetic pastoral of the Bedouin village. Bird calls, gunshots, and police whistles evoke the urban jungle, a conventional comparison that the Bamako excursion into African urbanity, in every sense of the word, implicitly undercuts. The band also slyly re- figures that conventional comparison in the cacophonous, chaotic passage that follows. Marked by noise and simple, mechanical rhythms, the passage gradually mutates into one of the Art Ensemble's distinctive sound- fields by way, once again, of African bells and percussion, including a talking drum. The ensemble not only musically imposes a new definition of urbanity on New York but, given the diasporic provenance of that ur-

banity, a new definition of what it means to be truly cosmopolitan, as well.

At the meditative center of that sound- field, Bowie on flugelhorn andJarman on tenor saxophone work through hymnlike and spiritual passages that gradually convert the chaotic streets of New York into the joyful streets of New Orleans and a band on parade. Again, polyphony points the way out of the dead end of isolated individual- ism, but only after an excursion into the anonymous, collectively composed spirituals-what Du Bois ([1903] 1997, 713) mem- orably described as "the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas"-which provide a vernacular, local source of the divine for this particular group of seekers.5 The trumpet announces the parade band's up-tempo return, and the joyful, polyphonic ensemble playing ends decisively with the "shave and a haircut" riff, putting a full stop to the piece, the peregrinations, and the narrative.

Signaling a return to the present, the band takes a bow andJarman introduces its members. Ostensibly, the performance is over, but there is more to come. Having brought the narrative back to the present, the Art Ensemble suggests an elaboration of their lessons and their extension into the future. In 1981 that present to which the performance has returned is the world ofjazz- funk fusion. Favors, for the first time in the performance, takes up an electric bass, and the band launches into "Funky AECO" with some unison funk riffs. At a stroke, they invoke the decade-long controversy that had swirled around fusion since In a Silent Way and implicitly declare their position: it is great black music.

5. The Art Ensemble's particularism, their ulti- mate sense of identity as "identity for us," avoids the kind of African-American exceptionalism, centered in the experience of slavery, that Gilroy (1993a) has tellingly criticized.



38 Lenox Avenue

They don't leave it at that, however. They are telling a story, and by this point in the performance, we should be well attuned to the nuances of their narrative techniques, the power of their rhetorical stance, and the subtlety of multiple time frames evoked through their deployment of musical elements that carry extramusical freight. While maintaining an underlying funk pulse, the piece spins out into polyphonic passages that connect with the polyphony of the early New Orleans music with which they ended the first part of their performance, in essence bringing together Funky Butt Hall and, say, James Brown's "It's Too Funky in Here." It is an exemplary fusion that pits the Art Ensemble's deeper historical story against the critical asperities ofjazz purists.

The Art Ensemble's mythic narrative seeks to understand and make connections among the musics of disparate times, places, and peoples, including African-American, African, European- American, and European musics.

As the piece moves into a long coda that marries funk, New Orleans polyphony, and the Art Ensemble's polyphonic free jazz, the fusion controversy is implicitly likened to the controversy over free jazz that had raged a decade before the fusion debate. Both debates are laid to rest here by the Art Ensemble's broad humanism: a story of black music that does not have room for Jelly Roll Morton and James Brown, Ornette Coleman and Coleman Hawkins, funk and fusion, and free jazz and hard bop has simply got it wrong. In fact, such an exclusionary story is not properly a story at all; it is a static formalism miscalled tradition and misunderstood as history.

By contrast, the Art Ensemble, using musical transformations to achieve narrative transformations, offers a convoluted and complicated story that pushes beyond the

binary opposition of tradition versus the hy- bridized new. Its character as narrative also pushes it beyond musical history as history- of-styles on one hand and declarative the- more-things-change,-the-more-things-stay- the-same essentialism on the other. It is a story that is replete with polemics, subtle historical and geographic connections, and metacommentary undreamed of by historians of style, and it is elaborated with individual and group creativity that, in making the Art Ensemble itself part of the open-ended and unfinished story, gives the lie to essentialism.

With "Theme (Odwalla)" the performance comes to an end and circles back to the beginning both with the unison playing of what could be a "head" and another allusion to the bebop classic "Salt Peanuts." Jar- man thanks the audience for participating in the evening's "manifestations," introduces the band members again, and says, "As you know, this is our hometown." And over the theme, he intones: "The Art En- semble of Chicago: great black music." With Moye holding aloft a ceremonial staff, the band then leaves the stage and winds in a line through the audience, their musical peregrinations giving way to a literal stroll toward the next performance and the future.

This brief tracing of the broad outlines of their performance by no means exhausts all its narrative elements. But to someone who objects that these elements are merely thematic bits and pieces that form, at most, a discursive-but hardly narrative-level of the music, an even more detailed exegesis would likely prove no more satisfying. There is simply too much in the music that cannot be accounted for in narrative terms, except in those global ones I have already set out: music as the site on which the agon of identity-making takes place.

Conversely, however, something in the




making of this music can be accounted for in no other way; that is what takes place at the intersection of improvisation with the mythic and ritual elements of the performance, the interplay of the lines and circles of their music, the peregrinations and returns of their narrative. Narrative in myth is the means of reconnecting the shattered and fragmentary present with the realm of the unitary. As Paul Ricoeur (1967, 171) writes, "It is the myth as narration that puts the present experience of fault into relation with the totality of meaning." But narrative, time-bound and contingent, as Ricoeur argues, is equally a mark of the mythmaker's distance from such wholeness, whether that wholeness is the realm of the timeless, or origins, or psychic integrity, or an eschato- logical redemption. The Art Ensemble's mythic narrative seeks to understand and make connections among the musics of disparate times, places, and peoples, including African-American, African, European-Amer- ican, and European musics. Their work cuts across boundaries of language, nationality, and history and simultaneously registers those differences. Thus their instrumental music becomes the appropriate vehicle for myth, which symbolically heals diasporic ruptures and discontinuities but, as narrative, traces the time-bound historical experience that necessitates the restoration of wholeness in the first place. It should be clear that this tension between rupture and restoration in mythic narrative is not dialec- tical; rather, it is a simultaneous double movement through which the experience is acted out, ultimately resisting representa- tion as well as reflective reduction from the ritual praxis itself.

Of course, there are many ways in which the performance might enact this double movement. The Art Ensemble's mythopoeia could produce any of numerous kinds of myths: of origin, etiology, identity, and so on. Composition and, more specifically, improvisation, coupled with the

rhetorical stance of the Art Ensemble, however, are decisive for the direction their myth takes. In their ritual performance we watch and listen as the narrative is created from the point of view of the tellers of the tale, established rhetorically as the Art En- semble itself. They are the "We" of "We- Bop," the band that is of Chicago: "This is our hometown." Improvisation, as well as the compositional incorporation of all these disparate musics, returns us to the Ensem- ble members as music makers and their genuine open-ended struggle to create the music. They do not reenact the identity making of the disparate musicians that pre- ceded them but undertake it anew for themselves in their own time and place. In their distinctive first-person narration, they are simultaneously narrators and protagonists, historians and actors. Their identity in relation to other diaspora musicians, past and present, is ultimately found in their common identity as music makers rather than in the identity of the music. In short, they do not essentialize Africa; they narra- tize it and thus establish their identity and difference, while leaving open the same possibilities for musicians to come.

The self-reflexivity of the Art Ensem- ble's performance asserts that the myth must be made now, that such healing of the fragmentary must be achieved over and over, not simply reexperienced every time we hear relevant styles of music. The music is not timeless, but time-bound, which is to say free. Hence its emphasis is on multilinearity in its rhythmic and melodic inventions, as opposed to the vertical tyranny of European (and bebop) harmony (Radano 1993, 105). Their myth of identity is not simply invoked; it is endlessly rewritten. Such resolution as there is occurs less in the narrative itself than in the creation of the narrative. That is what it means, in AACM terms, to be "cre- ative musicians": it is to shift the emphasis from product to process, to move, in the old cliche "telling a story," from the substan-



40 Lenox Avenue

tive "story" to the verb "telling." Resolution is not a foregone conclusion. The story has to be told, retold, reinvented, and extended into the future. The artist can fail, and fail badly, but that genuine risk makes success that much more significant and underwrites the sense of spiritual joy that accompanies the performance.

It is the transformation and creation at the heart of the Art Ensemble's work that makes the performance a living ritual rather than a simple ceremony of foregone conclusions. As Victor Turner (1980, 161) puts it, "Ceremony indicates, ritual trans- forms." Such living ritual neither "reflects" a social or cultural structure nor acts as a kind of social glue promoting group solidarity. Nor is it a struggle between chaos and order, with order ultimately reasserting itself. Rather, says Turner, it is "a transforma- tive self-immolation of order as presently constituted.... Only in this way, through destruction and reconstruction, that is, transformation, may an authentic reorder- ing come about. Actuality takes the sacrifi- cial plunge into possibility and emerges as a different kind of actuality" (164).

In an indispensable book on Anthony Braxton, Ronald M. Radano has painstak- ingly explored the "aesthetic spiritualism" that drives not only the music of AACM musicians, including the Art Ensemble, but that also inhabits much African and African- American music generally. Similarly, Gilroy (1993a, 36) has remarked on black music's "obstinate and consistent commitment to a better future." For the AACM, writes Radano, "Aesthetic spiritualism represented a confluence of observations on African musical practice with a counter-cultural quest for self-expression and spiritual freedom. ... Equating spiritualism with free expression revealed, moreover, something about the sensibility of the radical freejazz musicians who displayed a propensity for change, a willingness to take chances in the

name of aesthetic and personal progress" (101). It is that devotion to change and progress, to self-expression, that must be ceaselessly renewed, that orients the Art En- semble's time-bound procedures to a view of time as emancipatory. Although African and African-American anteriority comprises much of the historical and cultural material of the quest, in performance the locus of unity shifts away from anteriority and toward posterity. Beyond that point-where successful performance begins to bring into being, however fleetingly, that future state of emancipation-discursive practices like narrative cannot go.

Aesthetic Spiritualism and Metamodernism

The Art Ensemble's "aesthetic spiritualism" and the means that they use to achieve it suggest a provocative refiguring of modernity that is not precisely modern, premodern, or postmodern. It is a simultaneous engage- ment with, and independence from, the modern that could perhaps be called meta- modern. As avant-garde experimentalism, their work traffics in modernist music, both free jazz and the European concert variety. It also embraces the premodern, but neither in the colonialist fashion that much early twentieth-century painting and concert music did nor in the folkloristic "authentic" way that is, finally, a form of colonialist nostalgia. Meanwhile, the Art Ensem- ble's prodigal setting loose of signifiers in performance is postmodern without being a pastiche. In addition, its partial, qualified faith in the power of myth-or, at least, myth making-resembles that of some early modernism.

But the center of the Art Ensemble's myth is neither ontological wholeness (either as origin or psychic integrity) nor atemporal redemption (either eschatologi- cally or in artificial paradise). The integrity that their mythic narrative seeks to establish




is not centered at all, but is excentric, locat- ed in collective emancipation, which is pro- jected forward in time, not outside it. This is "great black music . .. to the future." Thus the Art Ensemble's myth of identity, created anew in each ritual performance to achieve the spiritual aesthetically, certainly resonates with the modernist religion of art. Butjust as the form of their music lies partially outside that music, so does their affirmative spiritualism. The expressive practices that produce that affirmative spiritualism bear little resemblance to the modernists' rear- guard attempts to erect, through symbolist- expressionist aesthetics, a bulwark against the encroaching dislocations of modernity or, alternatively, to their avant-garde attempts to pursue aesthetic experiments, gleeful or despairing, designed to create order axiologically in the face of its collapse. For such moderns, aesthetes and ex- perimentalists alike, the aesthetic is the spiritual; for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the aesthetic is a means to the spiritual. It is, finally, the difference between the religion of art and the art of religion.

References

The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Live from theJazz Show- case. 1990. New York: Rhapsody Films. Video- tape, recorded on November 1, 1981.

Berendt, Joachim E. 1982. The jazz book: From ragtime to fusion and beyond, translated by H. Bredigkeit and D. Bredigkeit with Dan Mor- genstern. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Du Bois, W.E.B. [1903] 1997. The souls of black folk. In The Norton anthology of African American literature, edited by Henry Louis GatesJr., Nellie Y McKay, et. al., 613-740. New York: W. W. Norton.

Ellington, Edward Kennedy. 1973. Music is my mistress. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1991. Ring shout! Literary studies, historical studies, and black music inquiry. Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2:265-287.

. 1995. The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993a. The black Atlantic: Modenity and double consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

. 1993b. Small acts: Thought on the politics of black cultures. London: Serpent's Tail.

Kramer, Lawrence. n.d. Powers of blackness: Africanist discourse in modern concert music. Unpublished manuscript.

Priestley, Brian, and Alan Cohen. 1993. Black, brown & beige. In The Duke Ellington reader, edited by Mark Tucker, 185-204. New York: Oxford University Press. (Original publica- tion, 1974-1975)

Radano, Ronald M. 1993. New musicalfigurations: Anthony Braxton's cultural critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1967. The symbolism of evil, translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press.

Schuller, Gunther. 1989. The swing era: The development ofjazz, 1930-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.

Senghor, Leopold Sedar. [1966] 1995. Negri- tude: A humanism of the twentieth century. In I am because we are: Readings in black philoso- phy, edited by Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan Scott Lee, 45-54. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Stuckey, Sterling. 1987. Slave culture: Nationalist theory and the foundations of black America. New York: Oxford University Press.

. 1995. The music that is in one's soul: On the sacred origins ofjazz and the blues. Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interartistic Inquiry 1:73-88.

Tucker, Mark, ed. 1993. The Duke Ellington reader New York: Oxford University Press.

Turner, Victor. 1980. Social dramas and stories about them. Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1:141-168.



narrative, extramusical form, and the metamodernism of the art ensemble of chicago

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