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“With A Power Stronger Than Itself, Lewis exceeds expectations. For rather than merely recount the ascent of the AACM, he elegantly sets it against the backdrop of cultural, racial and social changes that shook the 20th Century.… Lewis unreels this tale with dramatic flourish and scholarly authority, in effect telling the story of not only the AACM but also the city where it’s centered, Chicago.”
Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune

“Written with the eye of an ethnographer, the ear of a performer, and the heart of a hometown dweller, George Lewis’s account of the development of the AACM is an engaging story, a romance in which several generations of musicians triumph to create a music that travels around the world, yet is completely unique to their experiences. Reinscribing Chicago as a city of enormous artistic vitality and tough aesthetics, A Power Stronger Than Itself brilliantly redraws the map of jazz and widens the horizon for new and experimental music.”
John Szwed, author of Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

“The AACM is one of our great cultural inventions, and this extraordinary book embodies its principles. George Lewis draws on multiple traditions: scholarship, reportage, testament, analysis, theory and criticism come together with virtuosity and scrupulous discipline. A Power Stronger Than Itself remaps the landscape of American experimental music. Now the past yields unexpected wonders; the future unexpected possibilities.”
Margo Jefferson

A Power Stronger Than Itself
The AACM and American Experimental Music

George E. Lewis

Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. From its working-class roots on the South Side of Chicago, the AACM went on to forge an extensive legacy of cultural and social experimentation, crossing both musical and racial boundaries. The success of individual members and ensembles from Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Anthony Braxton to Douglas Ewart, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and Nicole Mitchell has been matched by the enormous international influence of the collective itself in inspiring a generation of musical experimentalists.

George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.

Faced with shrinking economic opportunities in Chicago and a segregated music industry, the original members of the AACM found inspiration in the civil rights movement’s call for change through self-determination and collective action. These musicians pooled their individual strengths in a new organization powerfully committed to a forward-thinking approach to musical creation and performance. Evolving a range of experimental methods, from invented instruments and unusual musical scores to improvisation and the early use of computers, AACM composers felt free, as longtime member Lester Bowie put it, “to express ourselves in any idiom, to draw from any source, to deny any limitation.”

Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from co-founder Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

George E. Lewis Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis’s work as composer, improviser, technologist, performer, and interpreter has appeared on more than 120 recordings.

 

George E. Lewis is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Robert Hunt at (773) 702-0279 or rhunt@press.uchicago.edu