Wow.Apropos of all the recent chatter here about AACM artists...apparently today is George Lewis' birthday. A friend posted this excerpt from a Lewis interview in Bomb Magazine:
“I was 19 years old when I met the people in the AACM. It was just dumb luck that I almost literally stumbled upon Muhal, Pete Cosey, people like that. I was walking on 87th and Bennett and I saw a band rehearsing in this children’s center. I poked my head in, and that was how I met them. They had their Monday night band, and then after the initial period of “Who is this guy?” they let me play.
It seemed that the AACM was a place where if you didn’t have a clue, you were encouraged to develop one. If you had an idea, no matter how half-baked it was, they would try to realize it, and they would demand that you create your own concepts, your own compositions. They had their Saturday classes, and people were being encouraged to compose. They never discussed improvisation; the only classes were in composition. So to bring this whole thing full circle, this whole business of my approaching things compositionally came from the AACM, because it was assumed that you were there because you wanted to be a composer, and by being a composer you were manifesting a kind of alternative model of what African American creativity would be about.
People like Fred Anderson, Lester Lashley, and Roscoe were constantly questioning you about what you were trying to do. I remember riding in a van with Anthony Braxton, and he turns to me and says, George, what is your music like? So I gave him what I thought was a pretty cool answer, and he said, You know, George, that kind of sounds like bullsh!t to me. (laughter) I mean, he was right, you know?
People took it personally as to whether you advanced as a musician. I had a whole community of benevolent aunts and uncles who were trying to help me do stuff. That seems almost utopian, but I have to say that’s my recollection of it. They wanted to institutionalize that attitude toward nurturing artists. Rather than keeping it on the individual basis of mentorship, you have a whole group of people who feel that it’s necessary to take each other on. It’s a model I haven’t really found in any other world of music I’ve been involved in."
George Lewis
Interviewed by Jeff Parker
BOMB Magazine
Talk about AACM getting things right!!!
Not just one mentor.....but an entire family.