>> David Plylar: Good evening, everybody. It's so nice to see all of you here. I know it's not the best night out, so we really appreciate you all coming. My name is David Plylar. I'm one of the concert producers at the Library of Congress, and as I said, we're very happy to have you here. And it's my pleasure tonight to introduce George Lewis, who's our speaker for the evening. But before I do, I wanted to alert you to a few of our upcoming events, just in case you aren't aware of them, and in particular, our upcoming jazz programming, much of which has been made possible by the Revada Foundation. You can find more online at loc.gov/concerts, but I should mention that we will be presenting a trio of jazz documentaries about Miles Davis, Fred Hersch, and The Jazz Loft of W. Eugene Smith in April, all with introductions by the directors of the films. And on May 1st, the Flux Quartet will be appearing with Oliver Lake and Donal Fox, with works by Roscoe Mitchell, Ornette Coleman, Leroy Jenkins, and Oliver Lake as well. On May 13th, we'll have a drumming workshop with Terri Lyne Carrington, as well as her lecture on jazz and gender equality, followed by a concert the next day celebrating the centennial of Charlie Parker. Sherrie Jean Tucker will also give a lecture at that time, and both she and Carrington are Library of Congress jazz scholars this year. In late May, we will celebrate the life and music of Billy Strayhorn, whose collection the Library recently acquired. We will have a big band concert, several films, a symposium, and a performance by Cecile McLorin Salvant, with the Bill Charlap Trio. So we hope that you're able to come to these events. But tonight -- we're here tonight to hear from George Lewis about his 2008 book, "A Power Stronger Than Itself, The AACM and American Experimental Music." I was speaking with Dan earlier, and we were trying to think of Library commissions with composers with a relationship with the AACM, and several jumped to mind, all of which happened to be McKim Fund Commissions, which are commissions for violin and piano. There was Muhal Richard Abrams, with our commission from 1996, one of George's teachers, and Anthony Braxton, whose "Composition no 222" was from 1998. Oliver Lake, whose "Movements, Turns, and Switches" was from 1993, and George Lewis as well, whose commission "The Mangle of Practice" was from 2014. As I mentioned, these all happened to be McKim Fund Commissions, and we happen to have programmed two of them this year that you can catch if you'd like. Not George's piece, unfortunately, but you can see here the Abrams and the Lake by The Flux Quartet -- they're doing a pair of concerts. So we hope you might be able to catch those. My first opportunity to meet George in person was when he came to the Library in 2014 for the premiere of his new commission, and I quickly came to see why his colleagues and others hold him in such high esteem. This was someone whom I wish I could've had the opportunity to study. At the time, he was in the midst of working on his opera "Afterword," which he may reference this evening in the course of his talk, given its topical relationship. And I'd been familiar with his work as a composer and performer, but it was a new discovery to read his work as an historian. And we hope that one day, he might come back and give a presentation on this book. In 2018, we had a chance to hear The Spektral Quartet perform his "String Quartet 1.5" at the Library, and this year, we are so pleased that it worked out for us to present George as a speaker. We would like to acknowledge and thank Jeremy Ney and The Phillips Collection for their willingness to let us tack on this event to their events that they'd planned with George that's happening this weekend. You can hear his music at The Clarice on Friday evening, and The Phillips Collection on Sunday afternoon, both with ensemble Ensemble Dal Niente performing. I mention these despite our competing event on Friday of the Sphinx Virtuosi here at the Library. We just have too much good music happening in D.C. at the moment. We had printed a portion of George Lewis's bio in the program, so I'm not going to read it through right now, except to say that he's the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and the recipient of many well-deserved awards, including MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. "A Power Stronger Than Itself" received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society's Music in American Culture Award. Books are available for purchase, and George is willing to sign after the talk. So please join me in welcoming George Lewis. [ Applause ] >> George Lewis: Wow. Well, it's amazing to be here again. I don't even know how many times I've been here. You know, David -- thank you, David, for that wonderful introduction, and I get back in, and Jay and Mike, who are so amazing on the technology -- they got the tech going in, like, three minutes. They said, oh, hey, welcome back. I said, "Whoa, you remember me [laughter]." So thank you very much for your help with all this, and this is a talk that -- well, in a way, it's the -- it's like the book, if you've seen the book, or if you know about it. It took about 10 years to write the book. It started out as -- well, I'll put it this way. You'll hear about Muhal today. He was already mentioned by David Plylar, and my initial plan was to write a book about him. And so, you know -- and I knew he would, you know, be quizzical about that, you know. He wasn't an ego guy, you know, who's going to say, "Oh, write a book about me." And sure enough, he said, "No, I don't want to -- I don't want you to write a book about me. But what about a book about the whole AACM?" You know, that could be better. It turned out to be in a way still about him, because him and the people who founded the organization -- and this is a group that I've done the most scholarly work on. I've worked on a number of other people, but this is the group I've done the most work on. You can see something about -- that's what Chicago looked like when I was a kid, way back in the '60s, and it's -- the organization, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, was formed on the, you know, virtually all-black south side of Chicago in 1965, and it's still active today. And it's played an unusually prominent role in the development of American experimental music. You have all these processes, you know, methodologies, media, new and influential techniques and ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique, instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia. We'll see some of that today, the relationship with improvisation to composition, form, new ideas about scores, computer music, technologies, kinetic sculptures. It was quite a boundless organization, certainly beyond the limits of any notion of genre. I'm going to put this here so I can see it better. I'm getting older, and I can't really see as well as I used to. So we're going to see how this works. Oh, look, that's even bigger. It's great. So this book functions as something like the autobiography of a collective, although it was singly authored by me. And I found myself -- I couldn't -- in the methodology for the book, I couldn't just rely on, like, personal testimonies, and stringing them together. A lot of books were doing that. I needed to follow up on things, you know, put in a lot of connecting glue. So that's what you'll see if you read the book. Now, particularly in the 1960s, there were these competition-based models of music-making. You know, like you could -- even famous people, like Ralph Ellison, would talk about, you know, these social Darwinistic ideas about the jam session, you know. But that model of music-making started to -- a lot of the earliest generations of the AACM, such as Muhal, you know, they grew up playing with people like Johnny Griffin. You know, how fast could you play, and -- you know, or those of you who saw -- was it the Charlie Parker "Bird" movie of Clint Eastwood, where Charlie Parker's trying to play, and he's not really making it. And then -- was it Joe Jones or somebody takes his cymbal off and throws it at him, and all of that [laughter]? And then he comes back later, and he can really play. And then the famous saxophonist says -- gets drunk, and sing -- I love those scenes. It's my favorite. It's the only scene in the book I really -- in the movie I really like, where the guy's drunk. He's got his saxophone, and he turns to it and says, "What do you think about Yard Bird? Eh." Throws it in the river. So [laughter] -- you know, people weren't thinking like that by the '60s. I think people stopped thinking like that, because the problem was, it had this deleterious effect on the community, you know, relegating collectivity and solidarity among musicians to the background. And these models were being supplanted by, you know, more collaborative notions of the relationship of community to individuality, and it wasn't just in music, but in many segments of the African-American political -- politics -- in and out of the arts, culture. An uncounted number of Afro-diasporic music or sound collaboratives or collectivities have come into existence over the years, and a number of these, such as the AACM, have actually managed to win some space within what sociologists might call at least stochastic, random process of art world success. Of course, you know, there are the innumerable collectivities that take shape as bands, or orchestras, and there's no reason to exclude those from consideration. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but there's life beside and beyond the band model. And the band model is heavily privileged in traditional scholarship on jazz-identifying artists. I've played in some pretty big bands, you know, Count Basie and all that, but, you know, the Count Basie band, like the Sun Ra band, wasn't a collective. You know, I mean, you know -- I mean, there was a -- Count Basie, he was the chief, right? You know, the AACM didn't have a chief. So it was cool to play in a band, and I, you know, did a lot of crazy things there. But the AACM is a part of a long tradition of larger organizational efforts, one of which you see here, the Clef Club. There was also the Jazz Composer's Guild, the Collective of Black Artists, the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension, or what they called the Underground Musician Association, Horace Tapscott, and so on. So from the very first meetings, the AACM functioned as a collectively-governed unit. It was always designed to be that. I mean, they had Robert's Rules of Order to run the meetings, and I don't mean to say that, you know, despite the AACM's generally egalitarian, non-hierarchical ethos, I mean, there are a lot of strong personalities, and they did take leading roles in the direction of the organization. Now, in the other way, besides that, you have to consider that any collective operating in that way was obliged to manage diverse personalities, divergent dreams, leadership and citizenship styles, as well as musical styles. You know, some people got frustrated. You see it all the time. I go to AACM meetings. You know, you -- the collective will decide one thing, and then the next week, those people weren't at the meeting. So we'd reverse what we did at the last meeting [laughter], you know. It's a generally slow process of collective decision-making. You see that people would get -- some people would leave the organization, because they just thought, I could get things done on my own more quickly. Sometimes, that works, and sometimes it really doesn't. So -- with the sense of -- you know, and here's a few examples. This is the collective 1967 -- this is a rather well-known photo by Wadsworth Jarrell, the AfriCOBRA artist, one of the visual art collective, which we would consider analogous to the AACM. You'll see some people there. I won't name all those people, but some of them, you might recognize. And so, that was '65, '66. That's 10 years later. There's me in the center. I was actually the chair, president of the organization at that time. Then there's '82. There's another one. You know, we were always very fond of these group photos, you know. So, like, a great day in Harlem kind of stuff, you know. And then -- or you can see there's another one from '86, and there's one from the early 2000s. I'm sure there are more coming up. So the sense of what I mean by collective as distinct from a band is represented by this reminiscence from the early member, and he was a recent Pulitzer prize finalist in music, Wadada Leo Smith. He talked about the AACM's early period, and this is from the book, actually. "From time to time, a few gigs would get called in. Somebody would say, 'We have a gig at so-and-so college, and we need a trio, or a quartet, or a large ensemble.' If a gig like that came to the office and on the telephone, it was an AACM gig, and they had to be put on the table. If one person's ensemble had it the last time, it was supposed to go to somebody else the next time. Of course, sometimes people would ask for special people, like the Art Ensemble, Joseph Jarman, Muhal, and occasionally Braxton. But if it wasn't their time, they would -- for somebody else to put it together. It worked, because Muhal doesn't compromise too much. I'm sending you an AACM band. What do you want? Everybody's just as good as everybody else." [ Singing ] So this was one of the ensembles that came out of the AACM, Samana, which was said to be the first all-women's organization that came out of the AACM. This is an example of Wadada Leo Smith's scores. This is part of what I was talking about, in terms of the innovations and informal design and notation. This is with -- Wadada gave a talk on his latest ideas at Columbia University last week, and he specifically discussed these kinds of pieces, which he calls the Ankhrasmation system, "ankh" meaning Egyptian ankh, "ras" meaning, you know, the reference to Rastafari, Ethiopia, and "mation," so motion, -mation, things of that sort. So that's the -- and this came out of his earlier system, the Akreavention [phonetic] system, which is very interesting, the creative invention sort of system. So as a rule -- this is Anthony Braxton. This is a piece from 1977. We'll hear a bit of it in a minute. As a rule, though, the AACM has managed to hold fast to the practice that another -- that Anthony Braxton, another MacArthur Fellow, described in his three-volume, 1800-page "Tri-Axium Writings," first published in 1985. So you think this is a big book. Anthony wrote, like, eight books this size. So, you know, I'm not going to try to catch up with that [laughter]. Here's what he said, and they published their own newsletter before I came. I came in '71. By '68, they had published -- they were publishing a regular newsletter, and this is from the newsletter, called "The New Regime." It says, "Important to understand that although the level of communication in the organization was high, I have not meant to imply that the AACM promoted a unified approach to the actual music, because that was not the case, either. If anything, the opposite was true. My point is,, no musicians, or groups for that matter, employ the same approach to making the music. Instead, the diversity of its composite investigation has been the strength of the organization." This is something we often hear nowadays, right, diversity being strength. So this is something that people are exploring at this time. It seems obvious now, but it's still somehow contested. All that diversity, where's it led? You know, well, it led to this. I think it's pretty good. "The communication" -- continuing -- "the communication and exchanges of ideas that took place in the AACM produced a composite and vibrational attitude that transcended any single style." So there is no AACM style. [ Music ] Was this -- this lack of enforced dogma, in fact, was what enabled the organization to maintain its existence up to the present day. It allowed this AACM discourse of individualism, as Muhal would call it, to coexist with collectivity, and with what someone like Doris Lessing in her space fiction called "substance of we-feeling." As the German music scholar, Eckerhard Yost [assumed spelling] has observed, that this collective form of organization completely atypical, given the star syndrome of American jazz, was discovered in 1960s Chicago, and took on particular importance in the milieu of the AACM, was of course no accident, but rather an expression of the social consciousness of the AACM people. And I would observe not just the social consciousness of the AACM people, but this is coming out of the African-American community, both in Chicago and also nationwide. So I'd say it's an expression of much more than just a given small group of people. So following Yost, the collective articulation of musical form that had become an AACM commonplace reflected the organizational, institutional, even political conceptions that animated the organization itself. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, an all-AACM performing group that emerged from the earliest years of the collective, and lasted nearly as long as the AACM itself -- in fact, they've reformulated, and now they're working together with a whole new formulation of people. Perhaps most radically exemplified the collective conception and nature of the AACM, which anthropologist Alexandre Pierrepont, who, if you read French, has a wonderful book about the AACM called "La Nuee," exemplified the collective conception and nature of the AACM. Which he called, quote, in his book, "An association, a cooperative, a union, a partnership, a meeting and rally, a fraternity, secreted open society, a social movement, and a music school in the world." Famadou Don Moye, who they hadn't met when they -- when this picture -- when this poster was made -- they met him in Paris in 1970. This is from 1969. This was their farewell concert. Famadou Don Moye was the percussionist and longtime member, affirmed the necessity of acting in concert in order to move beyond simple strategies of resistance. Along with defiance, you have organization. There have been moments of defiance throughout the history of the music, but the strength of the effort and the strength of the cooperation between the musicians and their unity of effort is what enables us to survive. Any time the musicians are not strong in their unity, the control factor goes over to the other side. [ Music ] It's not labeled, but that's from a 1970 performance in Chateau Vallon in France. The five members of the Art Ensemble, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, Famadou Don Moye, for me, represent five different iconic articulations of the Afro-diasporic. Once again, a diversity that subverted narrow aesthetic prescription, a multi-voice, internationalist vision of blackness. As Jarman explained, "We will represent a history, from the ancient to the future. Malachi always represents the oldest entity. He would look like an African-Egyptian shaman. Moye was really in the midst of the African tradition -- not a single African tradition, but a total African tradition. I was eastern-oriented. These three were the pantheistic element of Africa and Asia. Roscoe represented the mainstream sort of shaman, the urban deliveryman. Lester was always the investigator, wearing cook clothes, which is healing, creating energy and food." So if you notice, if you think about it, despite the Art Ensemble's slogan, "Great black music" -- and that was a contested slogan, even at the time. Some people in the AACM didn't like the term "great black music." I think Muhal didn't like it, for example. People -- it was sort of greatly contested, but that was the thing. You could have your slogans, and they could have theirs, and everybody's going to get along somehow. And we're going to support each other, so that people supported this slogan. What they got rid of was stickers like "jazz is alive." That kind of stuff, they got rid of, but [laughter] -- but as it turned out, they started turning toward these larger visions. It turns out that this variegated, as you see, vigilance iconography came from -- indeed came from around the world. I mean, the idea -- imagine the idea of AACM members, the Art Ensemble appearing in a single uniform, like -- you know, like a lot of bands I played in. You had the green suit. You had the blue suit, you know. And, you know, that would be a -- they might do that. That might be a temporary part of the act, maybe a parody or something of military service, which Jarman, Mitchell, Bowie, and Favors performed. And I -- our ensemble's visual iconography was also a reflection of its sonic iconography of difference. Despite the fact that Jarman and Mitchell both perform on saxophones, listeners familiar with their sounds can easily distinguish between them. That was Roscoe Mitchell playing the solo there. I mean, I don't have to see that to know who's playing. A couple of notes, and that's it, you know. It's like listening -- you know, hearing John Coltrane. I don't care, you know, if it's when he was a kid, or at the end of his life. You hear it, and that's it. You know who it is. At least, I do [laughter]. So, you know, his master's voice, that kind of thing -- similarly, the sound of each AACM member is distinctive within the world of instrumental practitioners. However, that's not quite as remarkable or salutary as it's commonly represented in music criticism. I mean, developing a personal sound, a sonic way of life -- I mean, they make you do it. They complain if you don't, you know, like these old-timers. You'd be playing in a band. They say, "That thing you played, that sounds like it came out of one of those riff books. You don't have those riff books, do you?" It's like, oh, no, no, no [laughter]. No, I don't -- no, don't have those, you know, got to get your own sound here. You know, they tell you. It goes on and on. If you read "Notes and Tones," Arthur Taylor's book, which is an extraordinary set of interviews, Erroll Garner -- it's -- over and over, they say it. Erroll Garner says, "Well, I don't care how much you love somebody. You know, you've got to -- you've got to find out what's inside you, and you got to let that out. And that's a very important thing. If you think about it, that's, you know, part of what a post-slavery music would be about. That is to say, after a not conceptual silence of four minutes and 33 seconds, but a 400-year silencing, or at least policing, once that becomes lifted, at least partially so, you develop a music, ring shout, jazz, other forms, which everybody gets to speak. It seems pretty natural that you would do that. So that's something that actually all of us do, developing a personal style, and whether we're musicians or our own personalities, we work on them. What we achieve with that sound remains the important task. Now, according to Jarman, the Art Ensemble's like a cake, made from five ingredients. "Take away one of the ingredients, and the cake no longer exists. We developed a kind of internal fidelity, an awareness of our interdependence. All the experience we lived together, our emotional experiences, positive or dramatic, all the situations we were in together or separately -- all this brought us closer together to the point that, today, we are of one mind." So perhaps this invocation of shared intention and common purpose is what the philosopher J. David Velleman had in mind when he compared humanity to, quote, "an improvisational theater troupe that, over many years of performing together, has developed an extensive repertoire of scenes that any member of the troupe can initiate in the expectation that others will follow suit. The totality of the repertoire shared among us is what might be called our way of life." Moreover, for Velleman, this way of life is explicitly experimental. He says, "Often, we don't know in advance whether we can authentically enact a way of life that differs in some respects from our own. We don't know in advance whether one change in our way of life would eventually oblige us to make others." This business of not knowing in advance -- we're going to come back to that. It's extremely important -- "or whether maybe one change in our way of life would eventually oblige us to make others, or whether we would still find ourselves with a clearer, more coherent self-understanding once the ensuing cascade of changes came to rest. We don't know, that is, until we try." Figuring out how to live is a process of trial and error in which the trials are what Mill called "experiments in living." You talked about the Spektral Quartet, Quartet 1.5. The title of that is "Experiments in Living," just a reminder. Jacob Ney played here fantastically, I know. This is a Jacob Lawrence, part of "The Migration Series." You see these similarities here, or the reference to Ellis Island. So instead of this, the great migration motif, and I think in that light, we can consider the great migration, the largest and longest internal migration of people in U.S. history, really as a shared intention, an improvisational troupe, an experiment in living, an occupier of the Norse-style improvisation of distributed, emergent intelligence, pursued over half a century by ordinary working-class African-Americans. [ Music and Singing ] I stopped it there because, well, you know, first of all, the sound track -- that wasn't the -- I found that on the internet, but I changed the sound track. The sound track is actually several members of the AACM performing a concert in Italy. But this guy -- who is this guy? Anybody want to hazard a guess who this guy is? It looks like Jay-Z, doesn't it [laughter]? I mean, it's a little frightening. Imagine -- I mean, I -- look, I'm a big sci-fi fan. The idea of Jay-Z as a time traveler, you know -- I'm all for it [laughter]. You know, in this -- you know, in this life, he became a billionaire. He started -- you know, he kept going, kept going, never aging, you know, kind of thing, you know. It's like "The Green Mile" or something, you know. But -- so it becomes clear -- let me just show you a couple of things here. This is more of the -- this is an early experimental band rehearsal, Muhal -- Richard Abrams is in the center. I think we might see Pete Cosey in there, other people, Henry Threadgill, Leo Smith, Joel Brandon, Kalaparusha, Braxton. I see Ajaramou. There's people -- this is before I came along. I came along in '71. This was the Joseph Jarman-John Cage concert of 1966, which was unfavorably reviewed in "Down Beat," with no surprise there [laughter]. In other words, it was unfavorably reviewed. They liked Cage. They didn't like, you know, the AACM, but I could expect that. They said they didn't -- they didn't -- the AACM didn't quite understand what Cage was doing [laughter]. Anyway, so I'm sure that was a great concert. I'm sorry it probably wasn't recorded. This is a fast-forward 10 years, and this is me fooling around with a lot of stuff. This is an AACM intermedia event that Douglas Ewart is performing with dancers -- Douglas Ewart, the saxophonist, and see what -- they get older and so on. And this is -- it was -- I'll have to show you some of this. This is the intermedia participation performance event by Douglas Ewart. He does this -- he did it in Minneapolis for many years every year. He's done it in Chicago. He's done it in Paris. I think there are other cities. Here's just a glimpse of it. [ Music ] This is a wonderful video, if you can find it. Actually, I'm reminded that this took place in Washington, D.C. So I don't remember the year. I think it was probably in the '90s. But it's amazing. It comes out of Douglas's -- Douglas being Jamaican-born and raised, it comes out of the Junkanoo tradition, a carnivalesque tradition, a participation performance. Anyone can come in. It's more or less self-organizing. Douglas can say what he likes. Come on, let's get back a little bit, do this, but people are free to ignore him. You know [laughter], they go off, and they do what they want to do. And it becomes this giant celebration of diversity and multi-voice expression. And so, this allows me to consider something I want to talk about for maybe the rest of the brief time we have here -- the relationship between improvisation and pedagogy. But -- so, you know, in jazz discourse, one routinely hears talk about the learning experience of playing in bands, where you learn about music -- not only about music, but you learn about, you know, life, you know. But in my experience, I've played in a lot of bands. What was learned about life from the ad hoc informal educational system of jazz, high school band training, informal jam sessions, home schooling in living rooms and basements, general auto-didacticism produced some of the world's greatest music, but also in terms of what you learned, a lot of it was learned about life, you know, in bands, you know, the etiquette of life on the road. And so, many experienced Chicago musicians in the immediately pre-AACM period, like, say, Eddie Harris, were seeking ways to address the limitations of that model of learning. Like, for example, the absence of consistent teaching of music theory being the most obvious, with ideas about composition, form, history, or aesthetics also receiving necessarily short shrift. So this is the AACM School in 1968, which was formed in '67, and is still active now, was a communitarian realization of one of the explicit purposes crafted at one of the first AACM organizational meetings in 1965. It was designed to address the needs of musicians and audiences alike. It was like the Freedom Schools, in some respect. The AACM School was, as Yorel Lashley, the son of Lester Lashley, an early AACM member, pointed out -- it was like the Freedom School. The AACM School was born -- an idea born in the crucible of the Black Arts Movement, an alternative institution operating in the black community, facing issues of creativity and innovation through the auto-didactic development of pedagogical methodologies. They had classes in composition. I took those as a young person. The person sitting next to you would be eight or nine years old. It was a little red schoolhouse. Every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., you had to show up whether it was snowing, like Chicago used to snow, or whatever. You had to be there, because they were there. Class in performance, run by AACM members every Saturday, and -- so the school constituted an effective response not only to deficits in musical training -- and those were my first real composition lessons, but also to needs that its founders discovered only after the school started. You know, you don't know until you try. Early AACM member John Shenoy Jackson, the trumpeter, saw the AACM as 50% music and 50% uplift. "In the AACM," he said, "we're into more than just the music. So our basic thing is to protect our race, protect our black children, protect our black boys and girls, and to raise them up, be strong, and broad-shouldered, and proud. This is the undercurrent behind the AACM, and this is why we have the school." So while an important function of the AACM school involved socialization, enculturation of students, artists, and members using one-on-one or one-to-several contact, prepare the ground for both new musical ideas and more general lessons in self-determination, this enculturation was far from prescriptive. [ Music ] So this tribute to the work of Octavia -- great science fiction writer Octavia Butler by Nicole Mitchell, who was the first woman to serve as president of the AACM, and who went on to become a full professor of music at the University of California Irvine, and now in her present position as director of jazz studies and full professor at the University of Pittsburgh. So I'm playing these examples to illustrate something that Lester Bowie said. He says, "When you go to the AACM school, you don't have the particular dogma forced on you, where you've got to play free, or you've got to play this way or that way. The thing that was really taught was individualism." So that's why -- you know, I've played a lot of different kinds of music for you, and I'm going to play a little bit more. But I couldn't possibly present examples -- this was a problem with the book, too. Like, so-and-so, well, why can't you have a CD with the book? I said, "Well, I could have a CD with the book, but, you know, I couldn't really present examples of performance and say, 'This is typical of the AACM.'" There was nothing typical of the AACM, and I don't want to make people mad at me by not including them on a CD. So [laughter] -- you know, so I forget -- I just did discographies. You know, find it for yourself, and it's the best way to think about that. I mean, an unnamed AACM musician -- "New Yorker" wrote a huge article on the AACM in 1977 about the AACM's en masse visit to New York, and he said -- he told Whitney Ballard [assumed spelling], if you take all the sounds of all the AACM musicians and put them together, that's the AACM sound, but I don't think anyone's heard that yet. So we have a few examples, but -- so in a recently published book, "The Philosophy of Education," Andrea English highlights particular practices of listening as crucial to pedagogy. Addressing the ideas of 19th-century German philosopher J.F. Herbart, English tells us that teaching that cultivates growth and transformation in learners is not a series of pre-planned steps for action made independently of learners and the situation of learning. Rather, it is an improvisational practice, one that requires recognizing where learners become stuck, has in some way retreated to the comforts of habit, or has lost the desire to move on past taken-for-granted ways of seeing and being in the world. Now, I find that what she says here echoes the model of learning that the AACM School promulgated in its earliest incarnations. She defines the educational relation as, quote, "the relation between teacher and learner that supports the learner's striving toward moral self-determination, and thus neither imposes the will of the teacher onto the learner, nor forces the learner to blindly conform to societal norms." Now, similarly, Muhal Richard Abrams, pictured here, who promoted the need for this school to the early AACM members -- he envisioned the training as "collaboration between so-called teachers and so-called students. Now, the word student -- that's not what I mean. I'm just using it for communication." Statements like this emphasize the egalitarian, non-hierarchical vision of pedagogy that exemplified the private pedagogy for which Abrams had already become revered before they started the school. Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman were among many who joined the nightly throng at Peggy and Richard Abrams' tiny basement apartment on South Evans Avenue in Chicago, where they would explore musical, spiritual, cultural, social, political ideas. "Muhal's place would always stay packed with people," said Mitchell. "He was showing us all these different compositional methods, and he passed it on freely to the people that wanted to learn that." The AACM's philosophy was to learn, along with your instrument, how music functions. You were learning a lot of things -- art, philosophies. Certainly there are a lot of valid concepts. The problem comes when you get too fixated on one concept as being the only concept. You don't have to throw away one concept in order to try out another one. The AACM was more aimed at creating an individual than an assembly line. So if we think of it in that way, and we think about what Andrea English says about listening, we can think of listening itself, something we all do, as an improvisative act, as an act of improvisation, engaged in by everyone, a practice of active engagement with the world. So this brings me to my tiny philosophy of improvisation, which I hope you can read. It might be a little small for you. I can make it bigger. For me, I'm thinking of improvisation as something that's not -- well, we did a -- another book that I have, which is too expensive for you to buy, unfortunately, is "The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies." And there are 60 authors, and we're all thinking about improvisation, not just in music, but in many worlds, non-artistic and artistic alike. So I've been thinking about improvisation as something that goes beyond the artistic, that goes to what we experience in everyday life, but not in the cliched sense of "we don't know what we're doing, and we're just feeling our way through." So I'm talking about just a couple things. First of all, as Velleman pointed out, we don't know what's going to happen. That means we're operating in a condition of indeterminacy. We don't know what's going to happen next, and yet, we feel we have the possibility of making a difference. That's what agency is about. We're all agents, making a difference or trying to in an atmosphere of indeterminacy. So what we do is -- the third thing we do is, we analyze our environment for clues as to where we're headed, and to see predictions to where we're going. Imagination's a past, present, and future. That's improvisative in itself, and we make judgments about that. And the fourth thing is, we make a choice. So that's all -- agency, indeterminacy, analysis, choice. To me, that's what improvisation is basically about. Everything else, like musical style, you can toss that out. You might not be doing music. You might be farming in Sierra Leone with the women rice farmers, who have to work with an environment in which they talk about the present, the people who are yet to be born, and the ancestors, and all of that informs their rice farming, and the way they go about doing it. And the difference being that, in their improvisations, if they don't do it right, the outcome could be starvation, could be famine. So that's just as improvised as somebody sitting in a band and playing free music, so -- but it's not art. They're not making art. They're trying to figure out how to live, and all of you are improvisers in that sense. I invite you to think about that, and choice is the funny part of it. Choice is independent of just about everything. You know, we can say to ourselves, "Well, I'm going to do this because" -- give a bunch of reasons, can't prove that, you know. Or we can say, "I did this because" -- can't prove that either. The choice is like collapsed-away function. It's just that really sharp moment, what Liebnis [assumed spelling] used to call the mon ad [phonetic], you know, even tighter than the mon ad. It's just -- you make a choice. That's it. We don't know why, really. We can't justify it, but we must make choices. And so, what I wanted to do with this small definition, which I invite you to think about, is to free -- to me, improvisation as a concept had been kind of colonized by the music people, sometimes in kind of unsavory ways. The classical musicians, at least the early generation of classic music commentators, were -- felt there were problems with improvisation that couldn't be overcome. Some of the other people talking about it didn't see how other people might think differently about improvisation. For example, improvisation in the business world, where there's a strong sort of organizational science, literature on the subject, they talk about negotiation. I talk about negotiation when thinking about improvisation with computer programs that improvise music. It's more of a negotiation than you telling the computer what to do, and the computer telling you what to do. So I wanted to free the concept of improvisation from musical and artistic models. So the AACM School was a natural outgrowth of this radical collectivity of the organization's self-governance, and that could be seen as emerging from improvisation itself. So we can view improvisation of all kinds, musical or not, as a pedagogical relation in which we listen to know where we are, and where the others are, where ideas and information are communicated from each to the other, where one learns about the other through hearing what the other has to play. And where one learns about oneself through listening to the responses from the others that seem to somehow be related to you. So improvisation becomes a critical practice, as well as a means to aesthetic statement. More crucially, improvisation becomes a space where discontinuity, disruption, support, and struggle become audible pathways to new experience. So I'm almost finished, but I wanted to talk to you about a couple more things. This is an AACM -- over the past couple years -- and David Plylar mentioned this. Over the past two decades, I've been developing pieces through a combination of ethnographic method, historical and archival work, and analysis of musical practice, and with these pieces, I wanted to affirm that the world continues to draw critically important lessons from music, despite an ongoing and deleterious public ready-made that portrays art and its makers as peripheral to American life. So I want to conclude here by using an example from the AACM to trouble that bright line separating creative work from academic research, a border that I regularly cross in my academic writing and my composing. So in a number of my pieces, I dialogue with the notion of the slave's narrative, drawing on pioneering scholarship by Henry Louis Gates and Charles Davis, the father of the composer Anthony Davis. I want to show a brief excerpt from my 2015 opera, "Afterword." My collaborators on this project, the film and theater artist Catherine Sullivan, and the composer and director, Sean Griffin, joined me in building upon AACM ideas that are now part of the legacy of experimental practice to make what we feel is a vital touchstone for operatic experience. The goal of "Afterword" is to combine aesthetic exploration with a critical examination of the multiple overlapping and fundamentally human motivations that affect us all. As the musicologist Jan Powzer [assumed spelling] has said, "Music can serve as a critical tool, activating and developing multiple layers of awareness." I invite my readers to listen for music's resonance in the world, and through music, to help us imagine our future. Indeed, the economist Jacques Attali asserted in the 1970s that music itself could serve to analyze and even predict contemporary cultural, historical, and social trends. Now, you know, you'll see if you see this book, this 2008 book -- it's a really academic book. It's a big, fat academic book with a lot of big words. People complained about that. At least, they complained, but tried to warn me. They said, "Well, you know, maybe you want to tone it down, George, because you want to make something that will appeal to a wider audience." And I said, "Well, I don't know. I'm just going to write what I want, and, you know [laughter] -- you know, if they want to make Cliff Notes, they can do it [laughter]." You know, so -- but -- so "Afterword," the opera -- it was interesting to make an academic -- make an opera out of an academic book, but it's not a history of the AACM, like the book is. But it's what they call -- you know the concept of the bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel. Well, this is a bildungs-opera, or a coming-of-age opera of ideas, positionality, testament. I drew the libretto from the interviews I conducted with the book, as well as audio recordings of early AACM meetings made by Muhal Richard Abrams in 1965 and 1966. That's where I got a lot of information. After a year of working with Muhal, he said, "Well, you know, I think I might have tapes of some of these" -- you have tapes of the meetings? [Laughter] So he goes into his room, and he pulls out this box. And there's a bunch of reel-to-reel tapes in white boxes, which don't appear to have any labels on them [laughter]. He says, "I think this is the one." He pulls it out and puts it on the recorder. That was the one. So -- and on these tapes we transcribed to the book, we hear young black experimentalists interrogating issues of power, authority, identity culture, aesthetics, self-fashioning, and representation. Sung and spoken voices, instrumental music and movement become heteroglossic avatars, multi-voiced, in a process described by people -- by Toni Morrison scholars as being the expression of a community voice. In some of the opera scenes, the community voice presents from -- testimony. In others, clashes between subject positions allow audiences to eavesdrop on history as it's being made in real, human time. And part of my aim in writing the book and doing the opera was to trace the process by which young black jazz musicians came to refashion themselves in black experimentalists. And in 1957, this was Richard Abrams. [ Music ] Okay. That was 1957. This is -- there is suddenly someone named Muhal Richard Abrams, comes out in 1967. [ Music ] So how do you get from that to this? I was surprised to find that no one had even asked the question. Somehow, there was some natural process, or perhaps it was unexplained. We don't really know. And so, a lot of the book was designed to sort of explain how you get there, and I -- it's a new kind of self-image. And of course, for example, this is Muhal Richard Abrams' painting, as well as his music. And so, there's an aspect of that that relates to what Fox Harrell, the computer scientist, calls a phantasm, a particular, pervasive kind of imagination that Fox Harrell works on gaming, video gaming and computer gaming. And they work on -- also on things like, for example, what's the problem with face recognition now, or face recognition programs see black people as criminals [laughter]? You know, this is the kind of stuff they work on. So it comes down to -- for Fox Harrell, it comes down to the embedded phantasms that animate the work of the programmers, and then become embedded in the programs. Or as I said about my own programming efforts -- I do a fair amount of that -- the ideas about the nature of music become embedded in the software, and reflect the community of practice that produced the software. So we can look back, and we can listen to the music, or we can look at how a particular piece of software operates. And we can see, well, who made this software? We know, because we can see it in the operation. So this -- what Fox Harrell is calling a particular pervasive kind of imagination, one that encompasses cognitive phenomena, including sense of self, metaphor, social characterization, categorization, narrative, and poetic thinking -- this type of imagination influences almost all our everyday experiences across domain -- across diverse domains of experience, including art, entertainment, commerce, culture, and power relationships. When used for making sense of the world, phantasms inherit the ideological assumptions, biases, and innovations of the epistemic basis, and sense epistemic domains they're drawn from. Well, Harrell also sees phantasms as primordial sources of power, and I think this is in the sense -- this is in the sense I'm using the phantasm of the AACM, the anime of the AACM. The ideological assumptions, biases, or innovations can be empowering or disempowering. They can serve to reinforce other existing phantasms, or engender new ones. They can be highly individual, or broadly entrenched within and across cultures. Finally, they can be revealed as subjective, highlighting the role of the imagination in the construction of many of the things people accept as real in individual and social realities. So the original model for the opera -- and this is -- this -- you can see there's a band sitting back there, and there's a fellow on -- I guess it's on your left. Is it on your left? Is it -- the guy with the trombone, that's me, and maybe -- I look tired [laughter]. They had us staying up late [laughter]. This is from a performance in 1975. The saxophonist taking the solo -- you can't see his face very well, but that's Eugene Easton, and we're about to hear from him about what he -- from the early meeting tapes, about what they were trying to do to start the AACM. >> I think we're getting closer to this -- to an explanation of this term, "original music." Among some of us, it means something a little deeper than to others. "Original," in one sense, means something you write in the particular system that we are locked up with now in this society. We express our self in this system, because it's what we learned. And as we learn more of other systems of music around the world, I mean, as it is quite natural -- and we are getting closer to the music that our ancestors played, and which we are denied the right to really stretch out in. And this term "original," I feel that the authors of this business structure here had in mind moreso sound-conscious musicians, if necessary finding a complete new system that expresses us. If you don't express any that is known, you're ostracized. >> Now, this is Eugene Easton. You know, he wasn't making a speech in the Library of Congress. They were just -- you know, they were just in the room with everybody else, talking to each other about what their visions were, what their dreams were, and what their fears were, and what they were trying to get out of it. It seemed pretty clear that this system that we're locked up with now in this society -- they're not talking about, you know, the total harmony system, the bee-bop system. There's a much larger definition of this system that we're locked up with now -- the cultural system, the political system, the social system. You know, this is 1965 we're talking about. You know, so that's -- we're locked up with this system, and it's what we learn, but we can find other systems, and we're getting closer to this new system that expresses who we are, that expresses us. And then later, he says, "There's expression on a much higher level than we've been led to believe." In other words, we are finding out for ourselves who we are. We're doing our own investigation, self-determination, and unless we can get out of it -- in other words, they found -- through the AACM, we'll be locked up with this system for the rest of our days unless we can find some way to get out of it through a system such as this. So the AACM was something that enabled them to get out of not just the jazz system, not just the system of -- the economic system, but, you know, the way of life system in which the permanent underclass, the permanent underdogs, you know, people who didn't need to be listened to -- in other words, a new model of who they could be for themselves. So this gets turned into an aria, and here we go. [ Music and Singing ] I'd like to close this talk with a particularly perceptive view of improvised music from the political theorist Yves Citton, whose notion of mythocracy draws explicitly from Sun Ra's coining of that term. Citton writes, "Gilles Deleuze often commented on a deceptively simple observation made by Spinoza. So far, no one has been able to determine what a body can do. Remember that body and mind for Spinoza are one and the same thing. The unique intensity of improvised music, whether it is experienced as a player or as a listener, can best be encapsulated by this formula, being overwhelmed and overjoyed by what a body can do, the singular-body mind of its musician within the singular body-mind of the collective. This is the political potency of the myth, the mythocracy, fueled night after night by improvising musicians. Since no one has been able to determine what individual and collective bodies can do, while it'd be foolish to believe that everything is possible -- gas won't come for free. My factory will not reopen tomorrow morning by miracle. Yet, we can and we must believe that some things which we thought unachievable can be done by individual and collective bodies once they invent a diagram capable of unleashing a power stronger than itself." Thank you guys. Thanks. [ Applause ] Thank you very much. >> David Plylar: Would you be willing to take a couple questions? >> George Lewis: Oh, yeah, sure, questions, comments. If people have complaints, sure, yeah. Sure. Who wants to go first? Yes, please. >> This is kind of a mundane question, but I don't remember it in the book. Did -- was the -- did the AACM School have, like, a recording library? Was there a culture of sharing records and listening across the entire organization? >> George Lewis: I think the AACM School was nomadic, or is nomadic. That is to say, there was never a building. You know, if you -- if you have a building, you can have a library, you know. You can have something like what they have at my university, Columbia, where we can put things on the shelf, and people can come back to them. But that didn't mean that we weren't listening intensely. People would bring in all kinds of things. I remember the AACM was -- Muhal Richard Abrams brought, you know, Morton Subotnick's music in, and we got a chance to listen to that. Or he would bring in scores from his collection. So people -- individuals brought their own collectives in. That was my -- you know, I'd never really seen, like, a music score. So he said, "Well, what are you listening to right now?" He said -- I said, "Well, I'm listening to Stravinsky, 'Rite of Spring.'" He said, "Well, I'll bring the score in," and the next Saturday, he brought the score in. He brought the score to, like, Carter First String Quartet, couple others, you know. So basically, explorations were done in that way. It would be great to have that, I think, and at some point, perhaps it will happen. Because that's what you need to have -- well, the more stable the institution, the more possible it is to do things like that. But you have to remember that these are people that are doing it on their own. You know, they're not getting paid for it. They have their own -- I don't think -- the AACM School did get some grants, but they didn't amount to very much. In the earlier days, I think the idea would be that, well, this is actually contrary to what we believe pedagogy should really be, so that people maybe didn't want to support that. Oh, here's -- okay. >> Human nature being what it is, there had to have been egos involved, and clashes at times for what direction things should go, or differences about things. In the collective kind of sense, how did -- how were those kinds of disagreements handled? >> George Lewis: I think that if you would like to -- let me put it this way. Of course you don't survive for nearly 60 years without these kinds of disagreements, sometimes quite acute. In the book, I chronicle some people leaving the organization because they didn't feel that it was living up to what they felt the organization should be about. My experience with it was that people who tried to force the organization to move in the direction that they thought was salutary received strong resistance from others. And so, that becomes a problem with radical collective democracy, but it's one that you actually gain a lot of strength by doing the listening and working through the problems, and trying to come up with solutions to the issues. And you do come up with solutions eventually. Egos are not really the biggest problem, I don't think. I mean, people remain focused on the actual problems of what to do and how to do it, you know, the business of whether someone at one day -- I mean, all kind of things were proposed, you know, corporal punishment for people who didn't do the work. Or [laughter] -- you know, I mean, that didn't go through, but it was -- you know, it was suggested [laughter]. >> Can I ask a question? >> George Lewis: Yeah, you got -- your mic is on. >> First of all, it's so beautiful to listen to you, and so refreshing, and necessary today. A lot of what you've talked about feels to me like it is in the past, and even though you have work here that is your work in 2015. And the force of the AACM is in evidence today, and, you know, there's a 50th anniversary Roscoe Mitchell's recording. Can you -- do you mind just commenting on how you feel where it is today? I mean, is that a point? It just seems to me like there's a reflection on a force that happened in society, et cetera, with some real maverick brain trusts, and I don't -- >> George Lewis: Well, let's say -- well, let me say -- let's say for example that hit everyone in the AACM, and everyone who's associated with it disappeared. That wouldn't negate what happened, right? And so, I think it was Muhal who said that a lot of people would learn from the example of the AACM. And so, what the -- you know, in thinking about things historically, I don't feel the need for presentism to justify the -- you know, what the AACM could do today. Things change and grow. It may -- you know, I'm not a spokesman for the AACM, so I find myself thinking that, with the two chapters that are currently involved, the Chicago group and the New York group, they continue to hold their concerts. They continue to be active in the world, and -- but I don't know. I mean, I don't -- I talked about things that happened in the past, but any of the things that I've talked about are perfectly applicable to what is going on now. I mean, those phantasms that animate the AACM then still exist. I don't think that anybody's really abandoned any aspect of the practice. If someone is, you know, playing in a band that's doing some cool thing right now today, that to me is less of something I feel I need to chronicle than the -- why we're hearing about something called the AACM, and why it was important. And why we want to even know what it's doing now is dependent upon how the organization continues to articulate these ideas, these ideologies, continuing to innovate in its own way. There's several generations that I haven't even talked about. I mean, there are people in the AACM that are in their 20s. I don't know them [laughter], you know. It's very hard to know what those people are going to do. So we might need a new book, is what you're saying. >> That's what I'm saying, really -- need to write a new book. >> George Lewis: And someone's got to write that book, and I say if you -- the plan is, apparently, for Alexandre Pierrepont, who's French, and who did an ethnographic study of the AACM with some of the younger people, to -- because my book basically stopped with people who were just starting to be active by the '90s. Because I had to stop writing in 2000, because the book had already gone way over -- it was supposed to be 125,000 words, and at 270,000 words, I hadn't lost control of it. But I just said, "Well, I don't think -- maybe I could just turn it in to you now, and you guys -- and we can think about cutting it." So then, when it came back from the readers and stuff, they had talked about adding stuff. Well, I wasn't going to be able to add anything else, because to do the adding brings us into a stage that a lot of music is consigned to, which is "What have you done for me lately?" You know, presentism -- and so, I was writing a historical account. And so, I didn't feel that I needed to account for -- >> Yeah, and I'm -- >> George Lewis: -- what happened up to that point, so that -- what I'm saying is that, with this new book, I think -- and more books have come out. I don't see -- I didn't -- I don't have any problem with anyone writing a book on the AACM. Just do the research, do the ethnographic study, follow the music, do all these things, talk with the people, and create something new. I'm all for that. >> -- yeah, and I didn't mean it as a critique in any way, you know. >> George Lewis: No, no, please, it could be a critique. That's okay with me. >> I think all the music that's happening in Chicago that's not called the AACM is completely coming out of the AACM as well, you know? All this interest in Chicago right now, you know -- I think it is an extension of a current AACM, and a past, so anyway. >> George Lewis: No, that's true. No, that's absolutely true. You're right about that, and other places, too. The AACM is an idea that continues to hold sway across generations, and that's an important lesson. I don't think any of them thought it would get that far, and now that all the putative founders of the organization are now passed away, you know, I just asked some of them. I said -- you have to consider the possibility the organization could outlive you guys, right? That's really probably what's going to happen, you know. So they were cool with that. I see someone right there. >> Yeah, thank you very much, Mr. Lewis. This has been a great discussion, really has. Structural question -- I always think of the AACM as just Chicago. I forget about the New York faction. Ernest Dawkins is heading the Chicago faction still? >> George Lewis: As far as I know, yeah, Ernest is heading the Chicago group. >> Who's doing New York? >> George Lewis: Faction -- I hope they're not factions, though. >> Wrong word, wrong word [laughter]. Wrong word. Who's doing New York? >> George Lewis: Right now, Amina Claudine Myers -- >> Amina -- okay, I didn't know that. >> George Lewis: -- is sort of helping -- is sort of being the preeminent figure. But, you know, it's a collective, right? You have -- everyone who's present gets a chance to weigh in. The so-called leader is just really a nominal figure, you know, and everyone runs it differently. I mean, everybody who goes to the meetings right now, you know, Threadgill, Reggie Nicholson, me, Dave Coleson, Iqua Colson, Thurman Bogner [assumed spellings], Wadada Leo Smith -- I mean, that's -- you know, we're all involved, and try to make it go, you know? >> And do you know if Alexandre's book has an English translation? >> George Lewis: That's the idea. It's supposed to be translated. University of Chicago Press, so watch for it. >> Okay, I will. I will. >> George Lewis: You'll hear about it. >> And last thing -- when you first introduced the book, did you speak in New York at a church? >> George Lewis: God, I do a lot of speaking. It's hard for me to remember, but I might have done that. >> And I think Muhal might've been there for that. >> George Lewis: Yeah, it might've been the -- oh, yeah, the -- well, they had the concert series at the -- >> Yeah, it was a performance. >> George Lewis: -- called -- it was a Unitarian church, or the -- yeah, the Community Church of New York. That was the name of it, yeah, and we did an early AACM book signing. But the very first one was in Chicago, was at Chicago Cultural Center. And I remember that very distinctly, because my dad died the next day. And I went to visit him, and we talked after the signing, after the book signing. And I said, "Well, I was here to -- you know" -- we talked for a long time, but I never showed him the book. And we had -- well, we had more important stuff to talk about. >> Understood. >> George Lewis: Next morning, he was gone. >> I was there for that New York one, glad to be here for this one today. >> George Lewis: Thank you. >> And the last thing -- when you showed the image of "Levels and Degrees of Light," if I could just say real quickly, it reminded me -- I was up in New York for -- the early -- the first -- and I was on the street, you know, in between sets. And there was a guy on the street selling all of his records. >> George Lewis: Yeah. >> And he grabbed that one, and said, "Man, you got to hear this one." And it -- no, no, no, it's sad. It slipped out of the jacket, and hit the sidewalk, and just burst. >> George Lewis: Oh, boy. >> And that guy was so sad, you know. >> George Lewis: Well, you know -- >> It sounded like -- that's what it sounded like. >> George Lewis: -- well, let me think, because I think what happened was that somehow there was a version that was released on CD that didn't have the -- Muhal had called for all the special reverb in the studio. They were improvising in the studio with electronics, because they didn't -- I don't think they really had a lot of electronics of their own. So they were improvising in the studio, but somehow, the electronics somehow were taken off the CD. So they had to make a new version. They put the electronics back on, because the electronics were part of the whole concept. Muhal was heavily into electronics. He taught himself computer programming, you know, at one point. First, he started doing Basic. Then he started doing Max/MSP, which is a lot of what people do now, sort of the major -- one of the two major sort of platforms for doing computer music. So he became an adept in both, you know. He was always into autodidact anything, so it was just total question of him just doing it day by day. I don't know how he found time to write all that music and talk to those people, and spend time, you know, monkeying around with computer programs. I found it very frustrating, personally, although I love doing it [laughter]. But, you know, just -- and a reason is someone you'd want to follow, you know. Yes, you. >> Yeah, I was at that concert in Belgium where you showed the picture of Joseph Jarman stripping. >> George Lewis: Oh, you were at that concert? >> I was at that concert, and I actually visited the farmhouse outside of Paris. >> George Lewis: Wow. >> So I -- you know, and I interviewed Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins. And so, lot of subconscious -- but my question to you is, how did they keep a connection with Chicago, you know, pre-internet, pre cell phones, pre all of that? Was there any connectivity between Paris and Chicago? >> George Lewis: The U.S. Mail worked. Letters -- people -- people got letters, yeah. People wrote letters. I have some of the letters. I mean, the whole idea of why they went -- why they went to Chicago, they got a letter. Why they went to Paris, they got a letter. The AACM received a letter from a guy -- and since you know -- you know that you know this guy, Claude Delclue [assumed spelling], you know, the producer and drummer. And it talked about -- and they even published it in the AACM "New Regime" book, in which they said, "Well, we're trying to figure out if we can invite some AACM groups, and we want to see if you can do that. And we've been playing the music, and we've been playing the different Delmark [assumed spelling] records and everything, and getting great response." And so, I think a lot of it -- people wrote back to each other, and, you know -- so that's how it happened. I mean, they had to take a ship to go over there, right? >> Sure. >> George Lewis: So, I mean, it was all, like slowed down. I've never personally been on that kind of ship [laughter]. >> Well, I came back with the albums and played them on the airwaves ever since then. So -- but it was a wonderful experience, meeting everybody at that critical time in Paris. >> George Lewis: That must've been amazing, yeah. I mean, I didn't get to Paris until, I don't know, the late '70s, like 10 years later, and by that time, being like a -- their kind of student or whatever, it's a very -- it was like being taken up by a group of people. And I didn't quite understand. It took me a long time to figure out the world that they had made, and how they managed to do it. And also, some of the frustrations they had, you know, some of the -- you know, they experienced a lot of the things in Paris, like, you know, housing discrimination, trying to get apartments being black, you know. They experienced that. You know, they experienced some of the issues with, like, genre stereotyping, you know, things where you couldn't get certain kinds of music played. You know, you could -- and the -- and then, the difference between what Anthony was doing, and what -- was doing, and Anthony wasn't doing this sort of high-Africanity [phonetic] thing. So some people couldn't figure him out. And so, all these kinds of things were connected up with -- so looking for mobility was an important reason as to why they were there, and I remember there's an interview that I came across in one of the jazz -- French jazz magazines where Lester Bowie's saying, "What we're asking you writers to do is invent a whole new way of thinking." You know, so -- and some of them were able to do that, and some of them really weren't. >> It was very liberated in one way, but in the other way, there was a lot of repression going on, because it was a year after the great uprising of 1968. And it was, in a way, so repressive that my wife and I got arrested going to the anti-war, anti-Vietnam War demonstration. They were just sweeping up everybody off the street. So it wasn't all liberation and freedom. >> George Lewis: Well, they swept up the Art Ensemble. The police came to their house and said, "We heard you guys were terrorists [laughter]." So -- are there other questions or comments, or -- >> David Plylar: I think we have time for one more. Up front. >> It was great to hear your talk. >> George Lewis: Thank you. >> Could you talk about how -- to what extent the AACM had an effect on splitting out this binary between what maybe people who run foundations or give out grants might call serious music, and jazz, and if it really had a significant effect on breaking that up? >> George Lewis: You know, it's funny how things like that work. There's a part of the book in which I talk about the whole business of institutions, and how institutions function, and genre-typing of institutions that was taking place, and how, at one point, for example, if you wanted to get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in, like, music, really they were giving it to the same small group of Ivy League composers. And then, there was a much lower amount of money with much higher -- as I recall, if you wanted to get a grant from the jazz people, like in composition, they mandated you had to write your music in, like, totally scored, like five-lined music paper, had all these -- you know, a lot of media that, you know, people weren't using anymore in a lot of domains of music. But somehow, they were mandating that for these jazz people. The idea, I guess, somehow was to police them in some way, or to make sure they were doing sort of authentic kind of things or whatever, make sure the music had integrity, whereas if you were like Pauline Oliveros, you could just submit like a text score, and that would be cool. So that's a question of mobility, and I think what happened was that -- and that was a long time coming. People like Muhal got into the jazz panels, and started to ask them, because they were respected as musicians, would come through the ancien regime, and so, they were able to convince people who would listen, like Jimmy Owens being one, who would be very -- very broad-minded person, Stanley Cowell being another. That they knew that these other expressions were coming along, and we needed to sort of change these rules. Now, that was on the jazz side. Now, what happens later is that a lot of the people who were formerly typed as being jazz started weighing in on decisions on the other side. If we're talking about jazz, classical, the old binary, which really doesn't work anymore, but still, some of those people got in and started making decisions that allowed people who were formerly -- would be thought of -- oh, that's the jazz thing, or they'd look at the person's race, and they'd say, "Oh, that's a jazz thing." So those people would suddenly be taken seriously on the other side of the aisle. So I think a lot of that was due, first of all, to what the AACM did musically, and people were inspired by the AACM. But it was also due to direct participation, institutional -- in institutions, and actually entering some of these institutions. You know, I mean, like, you know, I'm -- you know, my current job is head of music composition at Columbia. You know, that's an unusual job. Not many people like me have a job like that. So -- and that took a while to get to that point. So -- and there are other people who've come along. So when you're in a job like this, what you want to think about is, first of all, the thing they're most afraid of is you might bring all your friends with you [laughter]. You know, and the second thing they're all concerned about is that you might not limit your investigation to just the race part, but you might also consider gender as being important. For example, at Columbia, we managed to have now an all 50/50 balance of men and women in a field that's still largely dominated by white males. So -- but if you don't find people who can code-switch, who can communicate, who can be involved in these things -- and I felt that the AACM and one other organization I was a part of back in the '70s were the most important for me. In terms of learning how to get along with different kinds of people [laughter] who had radically different ideas from yours, and learning how to present your ideas, and sort of be persuasive, and get them to operate, and to be -- to earn respect from people, and to widen the circle of what it mean to be peers. And a lot of it came down to knowing what the other people were doing, not just to come with your own ideas, but to sort of do the research and find out about the total field, and find out some of their fears, hopes, dreams, aspirations so that -- and then, they become yours. That's the other side of it. Those -- once you start investigating, you find that people aren't so different. They're not so different. So I don't know. I missed a lot of the upheavals around jazz and stuff, because I was in Europe in a lot of the '80s. I missed a lot of the stuff that happened then, and then, when I came back, what happened was that, in terms of, like -- there was a -- I think there was an attempt made by some people in the jazz -- in one aspect of the jazz world to sort of be the, you know, cultural police. But that didn't work, because, you know, the scene had diversified so much that there was no need to pay attention to people like that. You know, there are separate networks. That was something -- another thing the AACM did, built a new network. You build a new network, and you're not dependent on -- you know, you might not get as much money or notoriety or whatever, but I feel that over the years, the whole thing was to get your ideas out there, and to find out what -- you know, if there is a marketplace of ideas, your stuff should be there. And maybe if one group is not receptive, maybe there are others. >> David Plylar: Please join me in thanking George Lewis again for his talk. [ Applause ]