Muhal Richard Abrams (1930 - 2017)

By Howard Reich Contact Reporter Chicago Tribune
In 1965, Chicago pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and colleagues formed an organization that would change the course of jazz and much more.
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians dramatically redefined how individuals and ensembles could compose and improvise their works, and how they could take control of their own performances and recordings.
Abrams was integral to those achievements and influenced generations as composer, teacher, organizer and scholar. He died Sunday evening in his New York home with his wife, Peggy Abrams, and daughter, Richarda Abrams, at his side, they said. Muhal Richard Abrams, who was born in Chicago and launched his career here, was 87.
In co-founding the AACM, “He was able to create a community of artists who all respected each other, all shared the responsibility of playing with each other and all actually taught each other,” said Wadada Leo Smith, an early AACM member whose “Ten Freedom Summers” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013.
“Muhal spent his life in service to us, his fellow musicians, composers and the world,” said George Lewis, a MacArthur Fellowship winner and author of the definitive study “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.”
“He was a great teacher, but he also taught us to teach ourselves and to teach other people. … Now all four of the (AACM) founders have passed away, and we are on our own,” added Lewis, referring to AACM co-founders Abrams, drummer Steve McCall, multi-instrumentalist Kelan Phil Cohran and pianist Jodie Christian. (Recording secretary Sandra Lashley also signed the AACM’s articles of incorporation on May 8, 1965.)
Abrams attended DuSable and Wendell Phillips high schools and took classes at Roosevelt University and Governors State University, but he considered himself a mostly self-taught musician.
“He used to come to the Roosevelt sessions,” remembered Joe Segal, who organized jazz performances at the school starting in 1947.
“He was one of many very fine pianists. He was straight-ahead,” added Segal, meaning that Abrams was playing in the bebop manner of the day.
“In fact, I have some cuts of him playing. If I didn’t tell you who it was, you’d never guess.”
Abrams’ keyboard prowess won him engagements accompanying major figures who played Chicago, including Max Roach, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Ray Nance and Sonny Stitt.
But by the late 1950s and early ’60s, the jazz landscape in Chicago was imploding because of changing musical tastes, the rise of rock ’n’ roll, disappearing clubs and urban renewal.
Unwilling to give up on music even as opportunities for work were evaporating, Abrams in 1962 formed the Experimental Band, inviting fellow free thinkers to expand stylistic and expressive boundaries. Staffed by such rising figures as saxophonist Fred Anderson, woodwinds masters Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell, and drummers McCall and Jack DeJohnette, the Experimental Band drew inspiration from Sun Ra’s Arkestra and set the stage for the emergence of the AACM in 1965.
“Not only did Muhal cultivate this community, but we were able to practice a discipline that the world has never seen from a musical organization,” said trumpeter-composer Smith.
“During those times we never received a single grant, never had any deep pockets from private donors. We walked the streets, posted signs, made mimeographed announcements.”
Within a few years, the AACM was gaining fame and admiration in Europe and beyond, thanks to the travels of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Anthony Braxton’s trio. Early AACM bands such as Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble and units led by Abrams, Christian, Jarman and Mitchell opened up new sonic possibilities. Freewheeling ensemble interplay, ancient and invented instruments, age-old New Orleans musical traditions, unabashed dissonance and Afro-centric musical rituals were behind the AACM’s motto: “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future.”
“We had no idea the AACM would catch on as it did,” Abrams said in a 1990 Tribune interview. “We certainly didn’t establish it to be some kind of important institution.
“We weren’t looking for notoriety, or anything. If we had, it probably wouldn’t have turned out that way.
“We simply were turning to each other for support, and that was all it took. The resources were within us.”
In the late 1960s, Abrams also emerged as a co-founder of the nonprofit Jazz Institute of Chicago, which to this day programs the Chicago Jazz Festival and organizes educational events across the city.
“He came to the meetings, though he wouldn’t let us put his name on as a board member … but he was very much part of it,” said Harriet Choice, a co-founder of the organization and a former Tribune jazz critic.

Abrams also was involved in planning the massive Grant Park jazz concerts of the mid-1970s that led to the creation of the Chicago Jazz Festival, in 1979.
By 1977, Abrams had moved to New York, establishing a chapter of the AACM there and developing into one of the most uncategorizable composer-pianists of the late 20th century. Jazz, classical, blues, avant-garde, folkloric and other musical languages coursed through his work — some meticulously composed, some invented spontaneously at the piano.
“He was a student of esoteric knowledge,” said Lewis. “He went far beyond the standards of academically acceptable modes of thinking and of knowledge production and transmission.
“He was a tireless inventor, constantly searching for new information — voracious appetite and curiosity and love of learning.”
Abrams’ enormously wide view of music was unmistakable when he sat down at the piano, unfurling an epic sweep of sound and ideas. Strands of melody and harmony intertwined, orchestral splashes of color emerged from his fingertips, shades of Alban Berg and Claude Debussy met up with jazz riffs and blue-note figurations. It all attested to Abrams’ vast knowledge of the breadth of Western and non-Western music.
“Muhal, in his later years as a pianist, he had this sort of hypertranscendental mode of performance,” observed Lewis.
“It was meditative, and it was long-form, and it built up very slowly over time — the emotional fervor of it. And you just had to go with it. It was unpredictable, but it wasn’t dictatorial.”
Meaning that his music welcomed anyone open to its far-flung influences.
Abrams was widely recognized for his achievements. He was the first winner of the Danish JAZZPAR Award, in 1990; won a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship, the United States’ highest jazz honor, in 2010; and received an honorary doctoral degree from Columbia University in 2012.
And he never stopped championing bold new ideas in music, leading a new version of Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band at the Chicago Jazz Festival in Millennium Park in 2015, to celebrate the AACM’s 50th anniversary.
“The major issue is still reaching the public,” he said in the 1990 Tribune interview, on the eve of the AACM’s silver anniversary.
“Many musics have been exposed to the public over the past 25 years, so the situation is a little different, but not very much.
“In a way, it’s the same as when we began.”
Memorials for Abrams are being planned for Chicago and New York.