Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM

By Paul Steinbeck

A groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music.
 
Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical and musical investigation of the collective, analyzing individual performances and formal innovations in captivating detail. He pays particular attention to compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, the Association’s leading figures, as well as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis (and his famous computer-music experiment, Voyager), Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, along with younger AACM members such as Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Nicole Mitchell.
 
Sound Experiments represents a sonic history, spanning six decades, that affords insight not only into the individuals who created this music but also into an astonishing collective aesthetic. This aesthetic was uniquely grounded in nurturing communal ties across generations, as well as a commitment to experimentalism. The AACM’s compositions broke down the barriers between jazz and experimental music and made essential contributions to African American expression more broadly. Steinbeck shows how the creators of these extraordinary pieces pioneered novel approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, musical form, and technology, creating new soundscapes in contemporary music.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226820439

Book preview

Cover Page for Sound Experiments

Sound Experiments

Sound Experiments

The Music of the AACM

Paul Steinbeck

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82009-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82043-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820439.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steinbeck, Paul, author.

Title: Sound experiments : the music of the AACM / Paul Steinbeck.

Other titles: Music of the AACM

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022003330 | ISBN 9780226820095 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226820439 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. | Jazz—Illinois—Chicago—History and criticism. | Avant-garde (Music)—Illinois—Chicago—History. | African Americans—Illinois—Chicago—Music—History and criticism. | African American jazz musicians—Illinois—Chicago. | African American musicians—Illinois—Chicago.

Classification: LCC ML28.C4 A874 2022 ML3508.8.C5 | DDC 781.65092/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003330

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The contribution of the AACM to

creative music is in evidence

throughout the musical world.

—Wadada Leo Smith, notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  Roscoe Mitchell, Sound :: Muhal Richard Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light

2  Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah

3  Anthony Braxton, Composition 76

4  Air, Air Time

5  George Lewis, Voyager

6  Fred Anderson, Volume Two

7  AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, At Umbria Jazz 2009

8  Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers

9  Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds

Conclusion

Figures

Notes

Recordings

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book is an offering to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organization that has had a profound effect on my life. Indeed, I couldn’t have written Sound Experiments without the assistance and inspiration of the AACM members who have been my teachers and collaborators since the late 1990s. During my undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, former AACM chair Mwata Bowden invited me to play bass in the Jazz X-tet, a university ensemble that performed compositions by Douglas Ewart, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and other artists from the Association. Playing these scores made me want to compose for the X-tet, so Mwata connected me with his AACM colleague Ari Brown, who took me on as a composition student. Mwata also introduced me to Fred Anderson, an original AACM member and the proprietor of the Velvet Lounge performance space on Chicago’s South Side. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Velvet Lounge was the heart of the South Side jazz community as well as the unofficial headquarters of the AACM. From 1998 to 2002, I visited the Velvet Lounge once or twice a week, every week—participating in the Sunday-evening jam sessions, performing with my own bands, and sometimes just sitting with Fred and listening to his soliloquies about music and life.

After college, Mwata and Fred sent me to Columbia University in New York, where I studied with another AACM member, George Lewis, and embarked on a research project that eventually became my first book, Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. While in New York, I began performing and recording with a number of AACM artists, from Mwata and Fred to Thurman Barker, Douglas Ewart, Alvin Fielder, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Thompson. These experiences were integral to my development as a musician and an author, and I am thankful for everything that the members of the Association have taught me. I am especially grateful to the AACM musicians (and their families) who contributed directly to Sound Experiments by giving interviews and permitting me to include their scores and sketches in the book: Dee Alexander, Fred Anderson Estate/Many Weathers Music, Thurman Barker, Mwata Bowden, Anthony Braxton/Tri-Centric Foundation, Ernest Dawkins/Dawk Music, Douglas Ewart/Nkoranza Publishing, Alvin Fielder, George Hines, Fred Hopkins Estate/Frederic Publishing, Leonard Jones, George Lewis, Steve McCall Estate/Big Mac Publishing, Nicole Mitchell/Wheatgoddess Creations, Roscoe Mitchell/Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing, Dushun Mosley, Jeff Parker, Wadada Leo Smith/Kiom Music, Henry Threadgill/Dubra Publishing, and Taalib-Din Ziyad.

When I started writing Sound Experiments, my friends Julian Berke and Scott Garrigan helped me choose the compositions and recordings featured in each chapter. Later on, Julian and Scott carefully reviewed the entire manuscript—as did Marc Hannaford and John Litweiler. Other expert readers critiqued individual chapters: Tatsu Aoki, Brent Hayes Edwards, Luther Ivory, Andy Pierce, Chad Taylor, Carl Testa, Niklaus Troxler, and Alex Wing. Brad Short, the music librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, aided my research by acquiring an impressive collection of materials related to the AACM. Another colleague at Washington University, Felipe Guz Tinoco, drafted the musical examples that appear in chapter 4.

Sound Experiments was acquired by University of Chicago Press executive editor Doug Mitchell not long before his retirement. After Doug retired, Elizabeth Branch Dyson (the Press’s assistant editorial director and executive editor) spearheaded the publication process, with the support of editorial associates Mollie McFee and Dylan Montanari. Elizabeth, Mollie, and Dylan were a joy to work with—my thanks to them and their team, especially copyeditor Marianne Tatom and production editor Caterina MacLean. Designer Ryan Li did a remarkable job with every part of the book, from the text and the musical examples to the gallery of photos by Lauren Deutsch, Lona Foote, Markus di Francesco, Michael Jackson (jackojazz.com), Leonard Jones, Mayumi Lake, Roberto Masotti, and Alan Teller. And University of Chicago Press publicist Carrie Olivia Adams ensured that Sound Experiments, much like the AACM, would reach a worldwide audience.

Each individual named above played a key role in the making of Sound Experiments, and they have my enduring gratitude. But most of all I am thankful for my wonderful wife, Candice Ivory—and our children, Ellis and Nia, who truly light up my life. This book is dedicated to Candice, Ellis, and Nia, with all my love.

Paul Steinbeck

St. Louis, Missouri

Introduction

The AACM inspires people to band together to do what they do, because otherwise it wouldn’t be done.¹

One night in the summer of 1968, the members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) came together for a concert at the Hyde Park Art Center on the South Side of Chicago. Fifty adventurous listeners were in the audience that evening, along with a music critic and a photographer from the Chicago Tribune, whose story about the performance gave the newspaper’s readers their first glimpse of an ensemble from the Association—the AACM Big Band, directed by Muhal Richard Abrams:²

Pianist Richard Abrams, who is also the concert-master, begins the program with a flick of the wrist. A somewhat unconventional flick of the wrist. Eugene Ormandy, Jean Martinon, or Leonard Bernstein might prefer to begin a concert with a downward sweep of a baton. Richard Abrams, of the Association, ordinarily prefers to begin by jangling an old, battered cowbell.

Joseph Jarman, reed-thin and cool in a white Nehru jacket, colored braid at the throat, answers Abrams by laconically shaking a pair of maracas. . . . From the left side of the bandstand, a baritone sax begins lurching and wheezing. Flutes—fragile silver flutes, wood tribal flutes, cheap neon-sign-colored plastic Woolworth flutes—flutter alongside the kazoos and little zipping African pennywhistles. A mallet clicks against an ox jaw, more cowbells clang, a chain clanks, long leather cords like whips with scores of tiny bells attached jangle, blocks of wood imported from Africa emit eerie hooting noises when hammered, rivets dance on a cymbal like beads of mercury from a broken thermometer. . . .

Sherry Scott rises to the microphone. . . . Her eyelids drop shut, her mouth curls upward, and she begins her song, softly at first, then it rises to a strident wail, cutting through the swirling eddies of [the] band. . . . Five minutes, ten minutes, the crescendo builds and builds until there is no longer space in the sweltering room for more sound. . . . Fifteen, twenty minutes, Sherry’s face is no longer smiling; it is in agony, but her voice keeps tearing into the flesh of the music. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Forty minutes . . . and the cowbell rings again, the battered copper cowbell calls it off, and the cars outside the open door go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh before the audience casts off its trance and goes wild.³

This colorful account marked the first appearance of an AACM group in the pages of Chicago’s biggest newspaper. In 1968, very few of the Tribune’s half-million readers had ever heard or seen anything like the extraordinary performance given by Abrams’s band. However, in-the-know South Siders had been attending AACM events for the past three years, since the summer of 1965, when the Association presented its earliest concerts at a ballroom on East Seventy-Ninth Street.⁴

Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still active today, the AACM was—and is—the most significant collective organization in the history of jazz and experimental music. The AACM united dozens of African American musicians who were interested in experimental approaches to composition and improvisation. At the time of the Association’s founding, only a handful of its members were known outside Chicago. By the late 1960s, though, the AACM brand was recognized around the world. A number of AACM members became renowned performers on their instruments, and together they developed an array of creative practices that revolutionized jazz and experimental music. This revolution was more than musical. In the 1960s, music-industry gatekeepers viewed jazz and experimental music as separate spheres—one headlined by black artists and the other presided over by white composers. The members of the AACM broke down those racial barriers, moving freely between jazz and experimental music while demonstrating how African Americans could transform the music industry through collective action.

Decades later, the Association’s impact can be seen in many corners of contemporary culture, including academia, visual art, and intermedia performance. Several AACM members took up teaching positions at leading colleges and universities, where they shared the Association’s practices and philosophies with thousands of aspiring musicians. AACM members’ paintings, sculptures, and installations have been exhibited in museums across North America, as have some of their spectacular graphic scores.⁵ And the intermedia performances of the Art Ensemble of Chicago—the Association’s flagship group—forever changed the field of performing arts.⁶ However, the AACM’s influence was the greatest in the realms of jazz and experimental music. AACM members combined composition and improvisation in unprecedented ways, creating modes of music-making that bridged the gap between experimental concert music and contemporary jazz. The AACM also pioneered new approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, technology, and musical form, opening up vibrant soundscapes that previous generations of musicians had never imagined.⁷ Some of these innovations took hold in the 1960s, and others emerged in the years that followed, as the Association built on the discoveries of the musicians who brought the collective into being.

Sound Experiments is the first in-depth study of the AACM’s music, but it is not the first book about the organization. Four other books, all published by the University of Chicago Press, have examined the Association from a variety of perspectives.⁸ A Power Stronger Than Itself (2008), written by AACM member George Lewis, is the authoritative history of the collective. Ronald Radano’s New Musical Figurations (1993) is a profile of AACM composer Anthony Braxton, while my previous book, Message to Our Folks (2017), is a musicological study of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.⁹ And Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete’s The Freedom Principle (2015), published during the Association’s fiftieth-anniversary celebrations, is a survey of visual art related to the AACM. In contrast to those four books, Sound Experiments focuses on the Association’s music, as exemplified by a set of ten compositions, improvisations, and recordings. These landmark works, created by prominent AACM members at pivotal moments in the organization’s history, are investigated using a methodology that integrates musical analysis with historical inquiry. Close analyses of these pieces illustrate how AACM composers and performers advanced the Association’s signature musical practices, from extended forms and multi-instrumentalism to experimental approaches to notation and conducting. Sound Experiments also reveals the historical connections that link these pieces to the collective’s earliest innovations, and to subsequent work by AACM members whose explorations reached the frontiers of contemporary music.

The book’s chapters, which are ordered chronologically, trace the evolution of the Association’s music over a period of six decades. Accordingly, Sound Experiments can be read as a sonic history of the collective, a narrative that follows the AACM’s forays into jazz, experimental music, electronic music, and computer music. This narrative is informed by research at multiple Chicago archives—the Center for Black Music Research, the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Jazz Archive, the Chicago Public Library—and by AACM members themselves. I consulted AACM members’ published writings and oral histories, and I interviewed most of the musicians who appear in the book (face-to-face whenever possible, and also via telephone and email). A number of AACM composers graciously shared their scores and sketches with me, which gave me invaluable insights into the workings of their music. I also transcribed many of the pieces featured in Sound Experiments, using listening strategies handed down from the AACM artists I have studied and performed with for more than twenty years. Musical examples based on these scores, sketches, and transcriptions can be found throughout the book. In most of the musical examples, pitches are notated in the instruments’ keys—as in a transposing score. The text, in contrast, usually refers to pitches in concert key, and adopts the convention in which middle C is labeled C4. To hear the recordings analyzed in Sound Experiments, go to paulsteinbeck.com/av. I recommend playing the audio while reading each chapter, treating the text like a guidebook to the music of the AACM.

Chapter 1 examines two late 1960s albums, Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound (1966) and Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light (1968). On Sound, the first commercial recording by an AACM group, Mitchell and the members of his sextet play dozens of instruments, blending free jazz with countless other musical styles and textures. Shortly after the recording session, Mitchell founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a group that would spend decades developing the compositional and improvisational techniques employed on Sound. (For analyses of Art Ensemble concerts and recordings from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, see my book Message to Our Folks.) Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light, performed by musicians from his famed Experimental Band, takes the AACM’s formal investigations even further, as multi-section suites emerge from composed passages, collective improvisations, poetry recitations, and electronic sounds.

The next three chapters are set in the 1970s, when many AACM members were touring internationally and recording for major labels. Chapter 2 centers on Roscoe Mitchell’s iconic 1976 solo performance of his composition Nonaah at a jazz festival in Switzerland. Mitchell begins by playing from a score for saxophone quartet, but instead of adhering to the notated form, he reshapes Nonaah into an improvised dialogue with the audience, at one point repeating a single phrase ninety-six times until he wins over every listener in the festival hall. Chapter 3 analyzes Anthony Braxton’s Composition 76 (1977), recorded and released by the major label Arista Records. Written for three musicians playing woodwinds as well as percussion, Composition 76 epitomizes many of the creative practices that arose from the 1960s Association, including multi-instrumentalism, graphic notation, and forms of music-making that combine composition and improvisation. The AACM’s explorations of visual media are also evident in the Composition 76 score, which would eventually be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.¹⁰ Chapter 4 is devoted to the album Air Time (1978), by Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall, known collectively as Air. The trio was regarded as one of the AACM’s best bands, and Air Time shows why: the album is made up of five very different compositions, each offering a unique framework for small-group improvisation.

Chapter 5 focuses on George Lewis, who joined the AACM in 1971, and his groundbreaking computer-music composition Voyager. Premiered in 1987 and revised extensively in later years, Voyager is an interactive piece in which one or more human musicians improvise alongside a software-powered virtual orchestra. The Voyager program, like its human counterparts, improvises its own music in real time while responding to the other performers. Part computer-music program and part conceptual-art piece, Voyager is AACM-style experimentalism in digital form, a constantly changing sonic environment that asks performers and listeners alike to think about music-making in novel ways.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many AACM members relocated to New York, and a new group of leaders emerged in the collective’s hometown. By the 1990s, Fred Anderson and Mwata Bowden were heading the AACM’s Chicago contingent while creating music that was closely connected to the early years of the Association. Anderson cultivated a performance practice that fused jazz with contemporary improvised music, as heard on the album examined in chapter 6: Volume Two, recorded in 1999 at the Velvet Lounge, the South Side venue he owned and operated until 2010. Anderson’s Velvet Lounge was also the birthplace of the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, directed by Mwata Bowden. Chapter 7 centers on the Great Black Music Ensemble’s album At Umbria Jazz 2009, which reveals the musical practices used by Bowden to renew the AACM big-band format that Muhal Richard Abrams originated in the Association’s first decade.

The final chapters of the book chronicle the 2010s. Like many of the AACM’s elders, Wadada Leo Smith was more productive than ever during this period. Chapter 8 concentrates on Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless, one of the pieces from the five-hour-long suite Ten Freedom Summers (2011), for chamber orchestra and Smith’s Golden Quartet. Dedicated to a martyr of the civil rights movement, Emmett Till is distinguished by its poignant melodies and harmonies, some written in traditional notation and others in Smith’s trademark Ankhrasmation language. Chapter 9 turns to next-generation AACM leader Nicole Mitchell, who was born in 1967, the same year Wadada Leo Smith joined the Association. Mitchell entered the AACM in the 1990s, and a decade later, she became the first woman to serve as the organization’s chair. In Mandorla Awakening II, premiered in 2015, Mitchell and the members of her Black Earth Ensemble use acoustic, electric, and electronic instruments from all over the world to depict two societies from a futuristic novella written by the composer herself. Sound Experiments concludes with a look at another AACM project launched in 2015: the Artifacts trio, with Nicole Mitchell and two of the Association’s younger members, Mike Reed and Tomeka Reid. The Artifacts trio started as a repertory ensemble, playing the compositions of senior AACM figures, then began performing original works by Mitchell, Reed, and Reid—showing how the Association’s musical legacy could inspire several more decades of innovation.¹¹

1  •  Roscoe Mitchell, Sound :: Muhal Richard Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light

The AACM represents a kind of unity that most people aren’t even used to.¹

The Experimental Band and the AACM

It all started with the Experimental Band. Muhal Richard Abrams formed the ensemble in 1962, three years before he, Jodie Christian, Philip Cohran, and Steve McCall founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).² Many of the Association’s original members had played in Abrams’s ensemble, and nearly all of the musicians who joined the AACM later in the 1960s came to the organization through the Experimental Band. Of course, some AACM musicians spent only a short time in the Experimental Band, and a few early members of the Association never belonged to the ensemble.³ But even one encounter with Abrams was enough to teach a musician what the Experimental Band and the AACM were all about.

The first rule of the band, according to Abrams, was that all music had to be original material.⁴ Abrams brought a new composition to the Experimental Band virtually every week, and the other members of the ensemble were encouraged to present their scores as well, provided that the music was their own, not an arrangement of someone else’s composition.⁵ The Experimental Band’s original-music rule was adopted by the AACM at the moment of its founding. During the Association’s initial business meeting, held in May 1965, the attendees decided that the organization would be dedicated to producing concerts of original music written by AACM members. Within weeks, the membership had elected several officers, including Abrams as AACM chair, and tasked them with fulfilling the Association’s mission.⁶ By August 1965, the AACM had registered as a nonprofit corporation with the state of Illinois and presented its first concerts—a series of performances by the Fred Anderson/Joseph Jarman quintet, Philip Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble, and Roscoe Mitchell’s quartet.⁷ In this concert series, the programs were made up of new unrecorded compositions by the ensemble leaders and their bandmates, a format that would be followed in every AACM-sponsored event for years to come.⁸ These concerts were truly groundbreaking. The AACM’s productions were among the first concerts in history to feature experimental music written and performed by African Americans, and soon they became the longest-running such concert series in the world.⁹

From the very beginning, the Experimental Band and the AACM were composer-centered organizations.¹⁰ However, composing original music—or creative music, the term favored by many AACM members—was not the only way to contribute to Abrams’s ensemble or to the larger collective.¹¹ At the Experimental Band’s weekly rehearsals, Abrams might call on anyone, even a first-time visitor, to improvise over one of his compositions.¹² Additionally, all Experimental Band musicians, from longtime participants to recent arrivals, were expected to give their best effort when rehearsing one another’s scores.¹³ Likewise, AACM members contributed to the organization by attending business meetings, paying membership dues, and working together to produce and publicize concerts.¹⁴ The members of the Experimental Band and the AACM valued originality and creativity above all else, but they realized that they could not reach their full potential by operating independently. Composing original music and engaging in other forms of creative expression were activities enabled by a supportive community, where sympathetic artists helped each other develop new ideas and drew inspiration from their colleagues’ latest advances. Anthony Braxton, who joined the Experimental Band and the AACM in 1966, described this community-oriented approach to creativity as "the complete freedom of individuals in tune with each other, complementing each other. . . . We’re working toward a feeling of one."¹⁵

In the communal atmosphere cultivated by Abrams, the pace of musical innovation was remarkably rapid.¹⁶ One breakthrough led to another, and in just a few short years—from 1965 to the end of the decade—the members of the Association developed many of the musical techniques that would become synonymous with the AACM. These techniques, in turn, formed the foundation for additional discoveries made by AACM artists in later years. For decades, AACM composers and improvisers were able to build on the advances made by the collective’s first wave (the musicians who joined the Association in the 1960s).¹⁷ And, more often than not, these early innovations could be traced to Muhal Richard Abrams and the members of the Experimental Band.

Early Experiments

Before Abrams formed the Experimental Band, he served as the co-director of a South Side workshop ensemble that had been rehearsing regularly since 1961. The ensemble’s other directors were, like Abrams, experienced bebop players who wanted to hone their skills as composers, improvisers, and section leaders by working in a big band. In 1962, one of the directors attempted to remake the workshop ensemble into a commercial big band that could contend for gigs at South Side venues such as the Regal Theater. Abrams, however, wanted the ensemble to remain a private forum where African American musicians could experiment with new approaches to composition and improvisation.¹⁸ The commercially minded members eventually left the ensemble, and several younger instrumentalists took their place, including Jack DeJohnette, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill, music majors from Woodrow Wilson Junior College who had been studying privately with Abrams.¹⁹ Soon, there were a dozen players in the ensemble—saxophonists Gene Dinwiddie, Jarman, Maurice McIntyre, Mitchell, and Threadgill, trumpeter Fred Berry, trombonist Lester Lashley, bassists Charles Clark and Donald Rafael Garrett, drummer Steve McCall, pianist-drummer DeJohnette, and Abrams himself.²⁰ Abrams was the sole leader, and he gave the ensemble a new name: the Experimental Band. For the next several years, this ensemble would be the primary outlet for Abrams’s increasingly experimental compositions.²¹

Abrams was born on Chicago’s South Side in 1930.²² He attended DuSable High School, where the music program, directed by Captain Walter Dyett, was widely regarded as the best in the city. It was only after dropping out of DuSable, though, that Abrams began to pursue music, taking piano lessons with a private teacher and studying composition and theory at the Metropolitan School of Music in downtown Chicago.²³ Outside the classroom, he spent countless hours at South Side jam sessions, acquiring vital performance experience that helped him grow from a novice musician into one of the city’s better bebop pianists.²⁴ By the late 1950s, Abrams was also coming into his own as a composer, writing pieces for prominent Chicago jazz ensembles and learning orchestration techniques from South Side arrangers William Jackson and Charles Stepney. For Abrams, these one-on-one tutorials were much more congenial than his coursework at the downtown music school. Ultimately Abrams wanted to teach himself, and mentors like Jackson and Stepney gave him just enough guidance to find his own compositional voice.²⁵ During one meeting with Stepney, Abrams was introduced to The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, an encyclopedic text that became central to his lifelong program of self-directed study.²⁶ From this book, written by composer Joseph Schillinger, Abrams learned how to use mathematical principles to organize and generate musical material. Crucially, Schillinger’s methods could be applied to melody, rhythm, or any other element of music, and they did not constrain composers to a particular genre or style—an important consideration for Abrams, who was exploring twentieth-century concert music (Elliott Carter, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky) as well as modern jazz.²⁷

The Schillinger system had a profound effect on the way Abrams composed.²⁸ But the experience that truly transformed Abrams’s creative practice was his tenure as the director of the Experimental Band. Abrams had always been an adventurous composer, as evidenced by the music he wrote for the MJT+3 hard-bop quintet and pianist Walter King Fleming’s ensemble in the late 1950s and early 1960s.²⁹ By the time he launched the Experimental Band, Abrams was breaking away from the stylistic conventions of bebop and creating pieces that called for new forms of notation and conducting. The Experimental Band gave me a place to play this music I was writing, Abrams remembered, but the younger musicians couldn’t read the music, because it was too advanced for them. So I had to make up ways for them to play it, all these improvised ways for them to do stuff. I would have them learn a passage, do hand signals for them to play different things.³⁰

Abrams did not dispense entirely with traditional music notation. The scores he brought to the Experimental Band combined standard notation for pitch and rhythm with certain nontraditional techniques, from transposing clefs to written instructions outlining the actions that the musicians should perform. For instance: if Abrams wanted one of the Experimental Band’s saxophonists to play an ascending glissando spanning three octaves, he could employ conventional notation and write a rapid chromatic run from low B ♭ into the altissimo register, but that approach might be needlessly complicated, difficult to sight-read, and unlikely to yield the desired result. Alternatively, Abrams could simply write a short description of what the saxophonist ought to do: play a glissando from your instrument’s lowest note to its highest note.³¹ To help the saxophonist interpret this visual-textual notation, Abrams would use a specialized conducting gesture—extending his arm to cue the glissando, perhaps, and then sweeping his hand upward to suggest the pacing and dynamics that he wanted to hear. By the mid-1960s, Abrams had created a comprehensive system of gestures and hand signals for conducting the Experimental Band, anticipating by several years the work of composers such as Butch Morris, Walter Thompson, and Alexander von Schlippenbach, who developed their own repertoires of gestures for conducting improvising ensembles.³²

Abrams’s notation and inventive conducting techniques revolutionized his compositional style. Instead of producing complex scores to be played as written, Abrams conceived of his Experimental Band compositions as stories, psychological plots, or theatrical scripts, brought to life by his musicians at the