The Art Ensemble of Chicago first took shape with saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, and bassist Malachi Favors, later adding drummer Famoudou Don Moye, and quickly earned widespread recognition as the leading avant-garde jazz collective of the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout the closing years of the 1960s and the opening years of the 1970s, the ensemble helped fuse jazz with European concert traditions and traditional African folk forms. Their performances also wove in elements drawn from sanctified church services, minstrel shows, and early American bawdy houses, all refracted through a modernist lens and presented with an animated stage presentation that featured face paint, costumes, and an extensive array of instruments. Theatricality formed a core component of their aesthetic. Although individual members, especially Bowie and to a somewhat lesser degree Mitchell, achieved personal prominence within jazz, the group maintained a collective identity in which no single voice eclipsed the ensemble. Across landmark recordings such as the 1968 release People in Sorrow, the Fontella Bass collaboration Les Stances a Sophie, the acclaimed ECM projects of the 1980s and 1990s, and later DIW sessions, the Art Ensemble expanded its stature as leading ambassadors of avant-jazz while its members demonstrated consistent skill as both composers and improvisers.
The ensemble emerged from the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble of the mid-1960s, which itself had developed from the Experimental Band organized in the early 1960s by Chicago pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. That earlier rehearsal ensemble existed to perform works by many of the city’s innovative young Black American jazz composers and drew Mitchell, Jarman, and Favors among its participants. The two saxophonists had each completed military service, though separately, and first encountered one another as students at Wilson Junior College. Favors had already established himself on the Chicago jazz circuit during the 1950s. All three joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) at its inception, an organization founded by Abrams and similarly inclined musicians. Lester Bowie relocated from St. Louis to Chicago in 1966 and began rehearsing with Mitchell almost immediately. That same year the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, including Bowie and Favors, documented Sound, the initial album to appear under the AACM banner. In August 1967 Bowie recorded Numbers 1&2 for Delmark; the track “2” marked the first occasion on which the four musicians who would form the Art Ensemble performed together. Operating as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, the group continued without a drummer for the subsequent two years. In 1969 the musicians relocated to Paris, where they encountered and enlisted “Sun Percussionist” Don Moye, who had arrived in Europe from Detroit with trumpeter Charles Moore’s band. Rechristened the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the ensemble achieved considerable success across Europe, producing classic sessions such as Reese and the Smooth Ones for BYG and People in Sorrow for Nessa. The group returned to Chicago in 1971, and its 1972 homecoming performance was captured as Live at Mandel Hall on Delmark.
During the 1970s the band’s profile continued to rise. In 1978 the members established their own imprint, AECO, which issued solo projects by Jarman, Moye, and Favors. Late in the decade and into the early 1980s they recorded a sequence of widely praised albums for ECM, among them Nice Guys, Full Force, Urban Bushmen, and The Third Decade. The ensemble garnered multiple victories in critics’ polls and was frequently cited as the outstanding jazz group of its era. A broader waning of critical interest in avant-garde music during the second half of the 1980s reduced attention for ensembles of this kind, while individual side projects by the members also appeared to affect the collective’s momentum. Nevertheless the Art Ensemble persisted, performing and recording through the 1990s, sometimes augmented by additional musicians. Jarman departed in 1993 to concentrate on spiritual pursuits, leaving the group to continue as a quartet. After Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer, saxophonist Ari Brown substituted for him at the June 1999 Boston Globe Jazz and Blues Festival concert. Bowie died in November 1999. For its first performance after his passing, a January 2000 appearance at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, the ensemble appeared as a trio. Although the remaining members retained the capacity for exceptional work, the Art Ensemble’s future seemed uncertain at the turn of the millennium. The AEC nevertheless maintained activity, releasing Live in Milano in 2001 and Zero Sun No Point: Dedication to Mynona & Sun Ra with Hartmut Geerken in 2002. Four further albums appeared in 2003: The Meeting on Pi Recordings, Tribute to Lester on ECM, Urban Magic on Musica Jazz, and Reunion on Il Manifesto. Tragedy struck once more when Favors died; September 2004’s Sirius Calling on Pi represented the final studio recordings featuring the original bassist. Jaribu Shahid assumed the bass chair for 2006’s Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City: Live at Iridium. Thereafter the Art Ensemble appeared live only infrequently owing to the members’ other commitments and issued solely archival material. Jarman, who had long served as a Buddhist priest, eventually stepped away from performance.
In October 2017 Moye and Mitchell marked the AEC’s fiftieth anniversary with a series of concerts at London’s Cafe OTO that included bassist Junius Paul and trumpeter Hugh Ragin; the second evening expanded to feature cellist Tomeka Reid, double bassist Silvia Bolognesi, and violinist/vocalist Mazz Swift. The following year the two surviving founding members performed across two nights at the twenty-second annual Edgefest in Ann Arbor, one evening joined by Detroit colleagues and the other appearing at the center of a fourteen-piece ensemble that incorporated Reid, Shahid, Paul, Bolognesi, and flutist Nicole Mitchell. In November, ECM issued the limited-edition twenty-one-disc box The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles, encompassing the band’s complete catalog for the label together with solo recordings by its members and additional AACM-related sessions by Leo Smith and Jack DeJohnette.
Jarman died in 2019, leaving only Moye and Mitchell from the original lineup. Undeterred, the pair assembled and rehearsed a twenty-piece ensemble under the AEC name that featured Jaribu Shahid, Nicole Mitchell, Moor Mother, Hugh Ragin, and Junius Paul among its participants. This large configuration toured Europe shortly before the global COVID-19 pandemic halted live performances. In February 2020 the group appeared at Paris’s Maison des Arts de Creteil during the Sons de l’Hiver Festival. In January 2023 France’s Rogue Art label documented that performance as The Sixth Decade: From Paris to Paris.
