Just read this article about the influential musician and musical figureheads. I am not too familiar with Abram's music although what I have heard sounds far more approachable and "in the tradition" than the avant garde tag would suggest, The article is probably correct insofar that the wide jazz public was not too aware of his music. Like a lot of the music from that era, the jazz audience is only now starting to gather these significance of the innovations. I seem to recall a really good big band album he produced. (One of Jazzrook's requests on JRR from a few years back? )
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If you think of music with an "avant-garde tag" as "unapproachable" then it probably will be, and/or you'll be surprised when it isn't - maybe better not to begin by conflating those two things!
I don't know Abrams's work very well, but it was centrally important to many musicians whose work I appreciate highly, not just those who came up through the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which MRA was involved in founding, like George Lewis or Anthony Braxton or the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but also compatriots like Pat Thomas and Orphy Robinson. I first came across him through an Arista album of duos with Braxton, which, alongside some more abstract compositions and freely improvised pieces, contains a rather crazily Monkesque version of "Maple Leaf Rag". -
There are two massive box sets if Abrams work for Soul Note / Black Saint that are currently on sale and the range of musicians involved in quite intriguing with a number of names listed in the personal who might not have been expected.
I have always thought that Muhal Richard Abrams seemed to be a musician cited as being a teacher and major influence on other players and someone you are more likely to encounter in album sleeves than on the radio / own records. I believe that Jason Moran, John Hollenbeck and John Escreet all studied with him and I always had the impression that he was a kind of jazz version Nadia Boulanger. He was one of the founders of the AACM, an organisation which was initiated to provide a platform for more adventurous musicians in 1960's Chicago but which has grown in to something far more encompassing with players like Tomeka Reid and Nicole Mitchell now involved. I have the impression that the AACM is far more all-encompassing these days and nowhere as near as niche as it might have been. Certainly the recent articles I have read are suggestive that it seems to have a much higher profile and equally involved in music education. Amazing to think that it has a history of in excess of 50's - a long as jazz itself when it was first formed.Comment
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