Some days were easy enough, Quartz Day practically wrote itself, but other days proved more of a challenge. Today, the frigid 17th of this seemingly endless month of January, is Day of the Gap in the USC. The immediate image that jumped to my mind was of a gap-toothed smile, but apparently AI image generators are incapable of depicting gapped teeth. Something in their programming tells them to perfect the smile and straighten the teeth and create a picture-perfect, camera-ready smile. I've even tried depicting famously gap-toothed celebrities (David Letterman, Michael Strahan, Sandra Bernhard, even Alfred E. Newman) and got reasonable facsimiles of their faces, but with dentist-perfect teeth.
The upper-left picture in the montage above is actually a Shutterstock photo I found in a Google image search. The rest are all AI-generated based on some obvious concepts of "gap." It was difficult to generate a non-pornographic image for "thigh gap." Most AI image generators shut down without providing an image if they think the output might be even remotely salacious, while others go in the opposite direction and generate needlessly explicit pictures based on innocuous prompts. The final picture that I selected may be exploitative, but its summery warmth is comforting on this chilly day.
My imagination couldn't visualize anything for a gap in time.
But none of that is what I want to talk about. I'm still working my way through A Power Greater Than Itself, George Lewis' history of the AACM, I've been on it a while - the book is a bit of a tome - 676 pages and written in an often dense academic and scholarly manner. But it's also endlessly interesting and well worth the effort. I've gotten through the initial struggles of the founding members and the formation of the AACM. I'm now on my favorite part of the story as I understand it - the Art Ensemble of Chicago's time in Paris.
I tend to think of AEOC albums in terms of when I first heard them, which was often many years after they were actually recorded. The book impressed on me how incredibly fertile the French year of 1969 was on the newly formed quartet. They headed to France that year as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Quartet, but decided to change their name to Art Ensemble of Chicago to better emphasize the collaborative, communal nature of their music. It 1969 alone, they recorded their debut, People in Sorrow, as well as Message to Our Folks, Reese and the Smooth Ones, and A Jackson In Your House, and still had time to record Comme À La Radio with Brigitte Fontaine and also appear on Archie Shepp's Yasmina, A Black Woman and Poem for Malcolm. For all that I know, there might still be even more.
All the albums are great and worthy of a listen, and you should go out immediately and buy every one of them, or at least playlist them on Spotify. But I want to call particular attention to Fontaine's Comme À La Radio, which as Lewis points out in the book, has become an underground classic. The trumpet on the album is not the Art Ensemble's Lester Bowie but actually AACM stalwart Wadada Leo Smith. However, the AEOC were at the height of their popularity in France at the time, and the record company wanted to promote the album as a Brigitte Fontaine/Art Ensemble collaboration, so they listed Bowie as the trumpet player instead of Smith. The title track was even released as a 45 rpm single.
The reason I bring this particular record to your attention, though, is first because it's so fucking cool, and second it's a great indicator of how far afield the Art Ensemble's playing was during their formative French years.
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