Centering on the AACM: The Length of Dignity

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) was founded in 1965 in Chicago by composers and musicians Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and KelanPhil Cohran. They built the organization to harness the collective effort of Black composers to expand opportunities for presentation, musical growth, and exploration of the legacies and imaginations in transformation of music and culture. After two years of informal classes launched the AACM School of Music in 1967, teaching music theory, composition, and instrument technique to build the strength and depth of composition and musicianship among players in the scene.

Rooted in:

The soils of the African Continent. The ingenuity, spiritual dances, and majesty of the Black Diaspora. The dignity of Black journeying. A refusal to remain where there is no expansion. An alignment with liberation movements breaking open the stringent constraints and definitions of Black people as less than human. Sound as a practice of liberation. Liberation is only possible together. Liberation is only sustained through nurturing the future. Head and breath in the cosmos, the atmosphere a threshold. The cellular movement of the cosmos unfurling as a generative metaphor for seeking, birthing technique, ritual, presence, communion, conversation. A limitlessness grounded in ancestral determination and innovation.

The width of connection—we are because WE ARE.

A prismatic Ubuntu

We become people by activating in community: I am because you are. An economy of possibility. Crew. Collective practice makes lighter work. Collective effort and rotating roles. An original masculine initiation nested in the tending of Black women—creative kin. To share the spotlight and space set up, flyering and welcoming. To be audience, bandmate, and clean up crew. To support each other’s growing—to multiply impact. They made a river of expectation and practice, sonic curiosity, and claimed it for generations of association. They made a rigorous, wide field of possibility that has supported 60 years of sonic exploration.

The Inside—of insistent making

Keeping a group together for 60 years is a laborious and monumental feat. The legacy, music, and tenacity of the long-time members refuse to let an organization with as many complex, devoted people go away. The respect and passion of new members for the music and the lineage. A legacy like no other, as old and as free as the AACM. The digestion, the heartbeat, the liver, the lungs. The music is the center and what keeps the spirit and the body alive, keeps the heart beating and the lungs breathing, the blood flowing, and the gut happy.

The Front—to make what is to come

The field of music has shifted. What was shocking noise is a reality. It is established as a form and genre; it is no longer new and wild. How does one innovate forward from freedom? The instruments are no longer in schools—no longer in the hands of the children. The screens are the instruments capturing the attention of the young. The school brings the possibility of continuity. The collective makes possible the understanding of the wider efforts that make room for more than an individual. The future is in the listening and the combining, the welcoming in and that reminding, remaining, reclaiming. The future is in the combination, in the learning and teaching cycle between generations. The productive tension of values and practices, and cultures changing forward to meet the realities of what is and what is to come.

The Back, the Before AACM: A personal reflection

My family had music in it from the radio, the piano, the voice, the record. As I listened to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Miriam Makeba, I developed an international palate that sat side by side next to:

• Frustrations with definitions of Blackness that did not fit
• Insistence on creativity as a generator of transformative possibilities within the human and extra-human worlds—the personal and the structural
• A hunger for Black expansive and experimental creative institutions
• An experimentation and frustration with the everyday, easy sounds
• Wanting sounds that express the full range of human experience, of the land living.

A making of community through collective work that brought me into the orbit of Janis Lane and Douglas R. Ewart. Creative music, what others might call “Free Jazz,” gave access to the entire legacy of sound—the legacy of the sounds of creation and expectation to combine in unique ways. Each practice, each concert a training, an awareness, a making of worlds, a listening, creating, and generative instinct. What music is waiting to be born? What texture is required of the moment? What study is to be combined with the study of my bandmates?

Douglas brought me to the Velvet Lounge in Chicago to begin learning—what I fondly call my graduate school in music. A dunking into the world of deeply rigorous and inventive musical practitioners who would not wait or be polite, but would listen and respond, take space and make space, make meditation and congestion of elephants and lions.

In a Chicago where Blackness is just what you are—who you are—wherever you are. Definitions were not constraints but choices and adornments on a Blackness that was kaleidoscopic and irrefutable. A reclamation of before enslavement pushed Black folks past the edges of what humans could do. A self-defining. The legacies of enslavement made into industry, all while degrading and denigrating those who are abused (without questioning the humanity of the abuser or their enforced reality). A recognition of the throughline for African peoples and a branching into the Diaspora. Ancestry that was not contained by enslavement and that called forth to futures where enslavement was a story that we went through as a humanity—and not an immovable foundation for our ways of living together. Ancient, ritual, cosmic, landscaped.

Douglas invited me into his world and his ensemble Orchestra Inventions, and my world, my desires, my expectations for music and myself changed. I entered and was nourished by a new family of creative music. To stretch and be stretched. To learn and make a mark.

The Center: The commitment

I am a commitment to remembering how much I have gained from this movement: A place to practice freedom. To be unconstrained and self-defined. To practice this freedom every day. To honor and make places to find innovative colleagues and tender souls. To find sisterhood and brotherhood and explore worlds with sound. To practice the spirit of Ubuntu and struggle with the material brilliance and imperfection of us all. To work the tangle of our humanness in the service of continuing to practice freedom and to make worlds with sound. I am a commitment to questioning. To giving and receiving. To making musical space for the generations to come.▪︎

Celebrate the 60th anniversary of AACM in person on Saturday, Sept 13, 2025 with a live performance at the Walker. Learn more and get tickets here.