Sometimes you honor tradition, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you recognize that you’ve become part of it. For their self-titled debut album, released in 2015, the Chicago-based trio Artifacts—flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer/percussionist Mike Reed—showcased compositions that had been written and originally performed by some of the most esteemed guiding lights of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), including Anthony Braxton, Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell, and Amina Claudine Myers. For their follow-up, last year’s …and then there’s this, they took a different tack, acknowledging that all three Artifacts members are themselves longstanding AACM members (Mitchell was the association’s chair from 2009 to 2011). Although the disc includes two pieces from the oeuvres of their forebears—Muhal Richard Abrams’ “Soprano Song” and Roscoe Mitchell’s “No Side Effects” —the emphasis is on fresh compositions.
This is the way Reid puts it: “We were just paying tribute to AACM composers, and then we were like, ‘Oh! Well, we’re AACM composers ourselves, so we can contribute music [too].’”
From the opening passages of Mike Reed’s “Pleasure Palace,” the album’s first track, a spirit of celebration coupled with earnest but lightly worn artistic craftsmanship infuses the proceedings; it’s no accident that words like “groove” and “fun” pop up repeatedly in the group’s press releases. Meanwhile, two of the new tunes— “J.J.,” a tribute to the late reed/woodwind virtuoso Joseph Jarman, which serves as both a manifesto and a welcoming.
