Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-hfldf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-14T05:41:45.228Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Art Ensemble of Chicago's ‘Get in Line’: Politics, Theatre, and Play

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2013

PAUL STEINBECK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago was often considered to be politically oriented, and many of their performances addressed controversial political issues. However, these political moments were counter-balanced by public pronouncements in which the members of the group denied that their music was motivated by politics. I interrogate this seeming contradiction by analysing the Art Ensemble's ‘Get in Line’, a musical-theatrical piece from their 1969 album A Jackson in Your House. ‘Get in Line’ critiques Vietnam-era militarism and racism, and simultaneously proposes that African Americans respond to these issues in politically unconventional, oppositional, even playful ways. In so doing, ‘Get in Line’ challenges essentialist views of black experimental music and shows how the Art Ensemble – like their colleagues in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) – prioritized pluralism and individual agency over orthodoxy, whether in politics or in aesthetics.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 3 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Discography

Art Ensemble of Chicago. A Jackson in Your House. LP, BYG/Actuel 529302, 1969.Google Scholar
Art Ensemble of Chicago. Bap-tizum. LP, Atlantic SD 1639, 1973.Google Scholar
Art Ensemble of Chicago. Fanfare for the Warriors. LP, Atlantic SD 1651, 1974.Google Scholar
Bowie, Lester. Serious Fun. LP, DIW 834, 1989.Google Scholar

Bibliography

Alessandrini, Paul. ‘Jazz on the Grass’. Jazz Magazine 169–70 (1969), 9.Google Scholar
Anderson, Iain. This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. ‘Roscoe Mitchell: The Next Step’. Coda 228 (October–November 1989), 18–21.Google Scholar
Braxton, Anthony. Composition Notes: Book D. Lebanon, NH: Frog Peak Music, 1988.Google Scholar
Constant, Denis. ‘Les présents divergents’. Jazz Magazine 177 (1970), 14.Google Scholar
Cook, Nicholas. ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance’. Music Theory Online 7/2 (2001), 1–31.Google Scholar
Coppens, George, and Lagerwerff, Frits. ‘Lester Bowie’. Coda 164–5 (January–February 1979), 12–15.Google Scholar
Cotro, Vincent. Chants Libres: le free jazz en France, 1960–1975. Paris: Éditions Outre Mesure, 1999.Google Scholar
Davis, Francis. ‘Roscoe Mitchell: the Art Ensemble's Sage Saxist Brings Order out of Improvisatory Chaos’. Musician 62 (December 1983), 26, 28, 30, 32, 34.Google Scholar
Drott, Eric. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Figi, J. B. ‘Art Ensemble of Chicago’. Sundance (November–December 1972), 43–50.Google Scholar
Gras, Philippe, Caux, Daniel, and Bernard, Marc. ‘A.A.C.M. Chicago’. Jazz Hot 254 (October 1969), 16–19.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Jarman, Joseph. Liner notes to A Jackson in Your House by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. LP, BYG/Actuel 529302, 1969.Google Scholar
Jarman, Joseph. Black Case Volume I & II: Return from Exile. Chicago: Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co., 1977.Google Scholar
Jarman, Joseph. Interview by author. 11 November 2005, New York. Private tape recording.Google Scholar
Jost, Ekkehard. Sozialgeschichte des Jazz in den USA. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1982.Google Scholar
Jost, Ekkehard. Free Jazz. New York: Da Capo, 1994.Google Scholar
Khan, Marty. Telephone interview by author. 17 October 2006, Tucson, AZ. Private tape recording.Google Scholar
Lehman, Stephen. ‘I Love You with an Asterisk: African-American Experimental Music and the French Jazz Press, 1970–1980’. Critical Studies in Improvisation 1/2 (2005), 38–53.Google Scholar
Lewis, George E. ‘Singing Omar's Song: a (Re)construction of Great Black Music’. Lenox Avenue 4 (1998), 69–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, George E. ‘Gittin’ to Know Y'all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism and the Racial Imagination’. Critical Studies in Improvisation 1/1 (2004), 1–33.Google Scholar
Lewis, George E.A Power Stronger than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Litweiler, John. ‘There Won't Be Any More Music’, in Down Beat Music '71: 16th Yearbook. Chicago: Maher Publications, 1971. 23–6, 37.Google Scholar
Litweiler, John. Interview by author. 21 February 2006, Chicago. Private tape recording.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Roscoe. Email to author. 15 September 2007.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Roscoe. Interview by author. 18 November 2010, Chicago. Private tape recording.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Peters, Gary. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Rosenstone, Robert A. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin': the Music of Protest’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382 (1969), 131–44.Google Scholar
Ross, Kristin. May '68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Rout, Leslie B. Jr. ‘AACM: New Music (!) New Ideas (?)’. Journal of Popular Culture 1/2 (1967), 128–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rusch, Bob and Ryan, Hillary J.. ‘Malachi Favors’. Cadence 17 (March 1991), 5–14.Google Scholar
Shahid, Jaribu. Telephone interview by author. 23 October 2006, Long Beach, NY. Private tape recording.Google Scholar
Shepp, Archie. ‘A View from the Inside’, in Down Beat Music '66: 11th Yearbook. Chicago: Maher Publications, 1966. 39–42, 44.Google Scholar
Smith, Leo. notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music. Self-published, 1973.Google Scholar
Steinbeck, Paul. ‘Urban Magic: the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Great Black Music’. PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008.Google Scholar
Steinbeck, Paul. ‘“Area by Area the Machine Unfolds”: the Improvisational Performance Practice of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’. Journal of the Society for American Music 2/3 (2008), 397–427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steinbeck, Paul. ‘Intermusicality, Humor, and Cultural Critique in the Art Ensemble of Chicago's “A Jackson in Your House”’. Jazz Perspectives 5/2 (2011), 135–54.Google Scholar
Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Trombert, Thierry. ‘Soiré de soutien au Black Panthers Party: Mutualité le 2–11–70’. Jazz Hot 267 (December 1970), 9.Google Scholar
Washington, Salim. ‘“All the Things You Could Be by Now”: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz’, in Uptown Conversation: the New Jazz Studies, ed. O'Meally, Robert G., Edwards, Brent Hayes, and Griffin, Farah Jasmine. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 27–49.Google Scholar
Willener, Alfred. The Action-Image of Society: on Cultural Politicization, trans. Sheridan Smith, A. M.. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970.Google Scholar
Zbikowski, Lawrence M.Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.Google Scholar