Biography
It's a matter of fact that the late 60s and early 70s was a time of great artistic experimentation and achievement for creative improvised music. Paris, in particular, lured some of the AACM's most important musicians from Chicago (Art Ensemble of Chicago. Anthony Braxton. Leroy Jenkins, Leo Smith, Steve McCall, et. al.). where their music faced largely indifferent reception, to participate in a community that truly appreciated discussion, interaction, innovation, adventure, intellect, and raw creativity. Rather than performing their music for a handful of folks as they had at home, they encountered large enthusiastic audiences genuinely interested and appreciative of their work. The great proliferation of recordings on excellent labels like BYG-Actuel, Freedom, and America offers testimonial to the abundant opportunities to have their music not only heard, but recorded as well. Back in the states only Delmark Records and Nessa Records, dedicated but financially limited at the time, had been interested in their music.
The remarkable recording you now possess was a part of the fruit of this fertile period. Recorded in December of 1971, it didn't see release until 1974. an era when interest in this music was quite low. Consequently, it pretty much slipped through the vast cracks that swallow so much music outside the leading movements of the day. Fusion's popularity had long knocked this stuff out of real contention.
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Although the purer thrust of issues originally addressed by that AACM as a communal organization had changed through interaction with other musicians —Braxton, for example, was in the midst of working in the landmark group Circle with Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Barry Altschul— Together Alone, as author Ronald M. Radano suggests in his excellent book on Braxton New Musical Figurations (University of Chicago Press, 1993), "looked back on performance approaches first developed in the AACM. " Braxton and Joseph Jarman, both with the Art Ensemble and on recordings of others (BYG's catalog is rempant with semi-ad hoc configurations that both Braxton and Jarman had participated in), had laid to rest the conscious insularity that made the AACM's deliberate collectivism so effective at its peak, but this album proves they hadn't surrendered the spirit that guided them in Chicago.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.