A Power Stronger Than Itself - Alejandrocasales.com

Chapter Summaries : : xlv
visative method being articulated by some AACM composers during this
important transitional period.
Benjamin Looker’s book on the Black Artists Group, the historically
important midwestern artists collective whose emergence was infl uenced
by the AACM, was suffi ciently thorough to preempt my own work on the
group, so in the interests of bringing to publication a project that was already
rather late, the section on BAG in this chapter has been reduced to a
size that would nonetheless respect the historical contiguity that binds BAG
to the AACM. 10 I would like to thank Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, Marty
Ehrlich, James Jabbo Ware, Baikida Carroll, the late Emilio Cruz, and in
particular, J. D. Parran, for making themselves, their photographs, and BAG
documents available to me.
Chapter 9: The AACM in New York
One important aspect of my work has been to follow the example of the
AACM musicians themselves in challenging the assumed centrality of New
York City to every jazz narrative. In the place of this romantic ideal I have
outlined a distributed, internationalist vision that recognizes the prominent
place of both European and midwestern American metropoles in nurturing
the AACM’s development and mediating its later notoriety. At the same
time, recounting the struggles and successes of the large group of AACM
musicians who invaded New York City en masse in the mid- 1970s—a phenomenon
reminiscent of the Great Migration itself—allows me to extend
the actor- network model of “jazz” that I pursue throughout the book.
In particular, I draw upon that model in showing that AACM musicians
were recognized at the time as playing a critically important role in fostering
the breakdown of traditional barriers separating jazz and classical
music, or low and high musical cultures, in ways that moved far beyond
the miscegenationist model of early Third Stream thinking. In this respect,
AACM musicians updated and revised a model pursued by black classical
composers, an important group of creative music- makers who, I maintain,
have been all but ignored by the major black cultural critics and public intellectuals
who have come to prominence since 1960.
I observe that AACM musicians working in New York pursued membership
in a variety of music scenes, including New York’s “downtown”
sociomusical networks, which had rarely included African American musicians
since the Greenwich Village split between black and white vanguardist
intellectuals in the early 1960s that I discuss in chapter 2. Powerful
social, cultural, and economic forces were arrayed in opposition to the