This year Chicagoans have flocked to an array of events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a made-in-Chicago collective that changed ...

They changed the way we think about music. Fifty years ago, a group of South Side jazz musicians found themselves backed against a wall. Clubs were closing, radio stations were going pop, America’s ...

Paul Steinbeck's Sound Experiments is a historical narrative and technical analysis of the music of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Steinbeck traces the chronology of ...

A working-class, grassroots, musical/cultural organization that got its start at percussionist/co-founder Steve McCall's kitchen table on Chicago's south side in 1965 ...

“Two significant things shaped my childhood in Hyde Park: One was the beautiful network of public parks; the other was the arts festivals. There’s a tendency in my field to silo away certain things, ...

The Association of the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) was created 50 years ago in Chicago to give voice to adventurous African American musicians and to express the political turmoil of the era.

A couple of weeks ago I caught one of International Contemporary Ensemble’s two performances of George Lewis’s ambitious new opera Afterword: The AACM (as) Opera, a challenging piece based on the ...

Fifty years ago, the popularity of rock ‘n roll was in the process of eclipsing, or some even say killing jazz. Changing tastes, sagging record sales, and shuttered clubs left a lot of musicians out ...

Wadsworth Jarrell of AfriCOBRA took this photo for the AACM in his backyard, probably in 1968. Left to right, on the ground: Wadada Leo Smith, Sarnie Garrett, Wadsworth Jarrell Jr., Muhal Richard ...

Before she became a female member of the groundbreaking Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and prior to collaborating with all of the big names – Archie Shepp, Charlie Haden, James ...

Before he moved to New York and became a key drummer in Miles Davis’ powerful electric lineup, circa Bitches Brew, Jack DeJohnette played drums all over Chicago in the early 1960s. This was the same ...