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Art Ensemble of Chicago: People in Sorrow

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO 

People In Sorrow 

(reissue, 1969) 

PLAY LOUD! 

8/10

Early free-improv landmark, finally back in print 

Chicago’s vibrant and exploratory avant-garde jazz scene brought them together, but it took a trip to Paris for the Art Ensemble to find themselves. At the invitation of record label Actuel, the quartet of Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors crossed the ocean and holed up at Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in the city’s 6th arrondissement. There, they played a string of rapturously received live performances advertised as Art Ensemble Of Chicago. The name stuck, and they recorded a startling 14 albums in 23 months. Long out of print, People In Sorrow finds the four refining their own unique style over a single 40-minute track. Playing without a drummer, the ensemble intersperses ugly-beautiful blasts of free saxophone with more hushed and exploratory passages that draw on the group’s growing arsenal of “little instruments” – xylophones, chimes, bells, woodblocks, even at one point a police whistle. At the time it must have sounded revolutionary; even today, it still sounds like little else.