In October of 2008, The Kitchen hosted A Power Stronger Than Itself: A Celebration of The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, curated by George Lewis and Christopher McIntyre. Following the publication that same year of Lewis’s book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, the event at The Kitchen featured performances, panels, and a book signing. Born out of extensive research and Lewis’s personal experience, the text A Power Stronger Than Itself traces a history of the internationally renowned non-profit organization and collective of musicians and composers Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) by detailing its theoretical, spiritual, political, and aesthetic tenets, as well as its groundbreaking influence on generations of musicians and artists. The AACM was founded in 1965 in Chicago by pianists Muhal Richard Abrams and Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and trumpeter Philip Cohranan out of a radical collective visioning of individuality and a dedication to creating serious, original music. Lewis’s relationship with the AACM—which he joined as a teenager in 1971, and where he trained in trombone and composition—helped inspire his seminal contributions to the field of computer music.

The AACM was founded in “the virtually all-black side of Chicago in 1965” as a project that, according to Abrams, was dedicated to exploring “how the disadvantaged can come together to determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.” [2] In a section of the article not included in the program, Lewis contextualizes the founding of the AACM in the wake of the Black Power Movement and Black Arts Movement, quoting AACM member and drummer Don Moye’s assertion that both organization and defiance are important strategies of resistance. With a desire to break free from the white-dominated categorizations of aesthetics and the constrictions and expectations of jazz, the organization would dedicate its first-ever meeting to negotiating the meaning of “original music”—the porous, fluctuating, and ultimately undefinable thread along which AACM members would mold their practice. In many ways, this notion of originality refers to the question of how individuality can be nurtured within a collective framework. [3] These explorations gave rise to the organization’s iconoclastic, heterogeneous, and ever-evolving musical production over the decades. Many have come to articulate that there is no distinct AACM sound; rather, the AACM’s sonic output is an embodiment of a boundless dedication to self-expression as it aligns to the greater purposes of collectivity, decolonization, and liberation.

In addition to writing about the self’s inextricable relationship to the collective in the AACM, Lewis highlights how members of the organization understand the self in relation to its potential. [4] This notion is central to his own work, as he expresses in an Artforum interview with artist Terry Adkins: “Well, when you ask whether something is fixed or improvised, even in human terms, the part of what we do that’s improvised comes from a part of us that we don’t know much about. We assume that we have infinite potential, but we don’t actually know whether we have intrinsic limits. So we have to assume that we don’t, in order to save ourselves psychologically.” In a 2020 lecture on his book for The Library of Congress, Lewis expanded on this idea of self-as-potential, speaking on the pedagogical function of improvisation. He defines teaching as an improvisational practice that mirrors the improvisational nature of life itself. In the struggle to understand ourselves in relation to the other, improvisation creates pathways for new experience in the minds of performers and audience members, but also in the world at large. The title of Lewis’s book references philosopher Yves Citton, who posits that the power of improvisation lies in the ecstatic bodily experience of limitlessness: “We can and we must believe that which we thought unbelievable, can be done by individual and collective bodies, once they invent a diagram capable of releasing a power stronger than itself.” [5]

While Lewis’s understanding of improvisation conceives of a self that exists in relation to its untapped potential, he also expounds the importance of a self that is firmly planted within the sonic traditions of previous generations and in Black musical tradition at large. Lewis quotes Gene Easton’s contribution to the first AACM meeting, in which he poignantly encapsulates this cross-temporal dynamic: “As we learn more of other systems of music around the world, we’re getting closer to the music that our ancestors played—sound-conscious musicians, finding a complete new system that expresses us. Because there are far better systems, and I feel that we will be locked up for the rest of our days in this system unless we can get out of it through some means such as this.” [6] Easton’s articulation of systems has become a fundamental reference for how Lewis speaks on his practices. He has subsequently described this notion of systems as the cultural paradigms into which we are “locked”—the imagination or mythology embedded in the software of life and culture. [7] In this way, Lewis’s “creative-machines” can be read as examples of Citton’s idea of a musical diagram, which, by releasing the unknown potential of the improvising mind, might offer alternate models of living in relation.

Lewis further elaborates on these notions in his writing in other contexts, describing Rainbow Family as a “small but possibly potent provocation concerning the act of listening.” [10] Underscoring how creative machines offer the possibility to practice improvisation as listening, he frames machine–human relations as a microcosm of the social, in that they stand in for subject–object relations. The dedication to attentive and engaged listening in the context of improvisation, which he defines as a practice of intelligibility, becomes the foundation for a sense of social responsibility towards the other. For Lewis, computers can “teach us to celebrate our place as listeners as part of a continuous, interactive transformation of both Other and Self.” [11] Integrating many of these principles, Kalimbascope was another RCLM, featuring Lewis and Behrman’s compositions, a kalimba player, and music-driven graphics. In its incorporation of the Zimbabwean thumb piano as the instrument of focus, the piece also responded to AACM prerogatives on sourcing from longstanding traditions of Black music from across the world in order to envision new systems. Kalimbascope also emerged from Lewis’s budding interest in making “interactive pieces that can function as public installations.” [12]

Lewis would extend many of these concerns into a subsequent collaboration, The Empty Chair, which originally premiered in the Netherlands in 1986 before being performed at The Kitchen in 1990. Described in the program as “an interactive music video performance” and later by Lewis in an interview as “multi perspectival interactive theater,” the piece sought to transmit the subjective experience of incarceration. Lewis has also referred to the piece as an indirect homage to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned at the time of its creation. [13] The piece featured actor Bernard Mixon as the unnamed protagonist and longtime collaborator and AACM member composer and musician Douglas Ewart as “a spirit.” [14] The performance also featured Don Ritter and Ray Edgar as “music-driven computer controlled image processing music performers.” These two performers helped control video screens through their own computer systems, which featured both animation and live synthesized imagery. Lewis operated a computer that sonically responded to the performance.

An Event that Resonates Forward

In the program for the event A Power Stronger Than Itself, Lewis describes how the AACM would fundamentally challenge conventional understandings of American experimental music, “obliging the recognition of a multicultural multi-ethnic reality with a variety of perspectives, histories, traditions and methods,” and influencing artists across disciplines, generations, and geographies. Lewis brings to the fore how despite this, AACM members were often given far less credit than their white downtown contemporaries. His work organizing this 2008 event is just one example of how Lewis has breached innumerable gaps in recognition through scholarship and collaboration throughout his long career of cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional experimentation. Marking a moment that in many ways has been a long time coming, this year’s Kitchen Gala honors Lewis as an artist whose work continues to resonate forward through the seminal developments in improvisational computer music he nurtured at The Kitchen and elsewhere and his contributions to AACM’s radical boundary-breaking practices.