Black Saint and Soul Note are two affiliated Italian independent record labels . Since their conception in the 1970s, they have released albums from a variety of influential jazz musicians, particularly in the genre of free jazz .
30-443: Black Saint was established in 1975 by Giacomo Pelliciotti and devoted to recording avant-garde musicians who might not have an opportunity elsewhere. In 1979, a sister label, Soul Note, was established as a home for artists who, while being no less creative, might be considered slightly closer to the mainstream. The labels specialize in avant-garde jazz stemming from the free jazz tradition. Some of its roster of artists were members of
60-460: A dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art. Sociologically, as a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists, writers, architects, et al. produce artefacts — works of art, books, buildings — that intellectually and ideologically oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society. In the essay " Avant-Garde and Kitsch " (1939), Clement Greenberg said that
90-694: A 50-year retrospective exhibition of art, music and group-related artifacts, entitled, "Free at First", was held at the DuSable Museum of African American History . The AACM has been on the forefront of the avant-garde since its inception in 1965. Anthony Braxton , Henry Threadgill , and the Art Ensemble of Chicago pushed the boundaries of jazz and challenged the avant-garde classical movement led by John Cage . Concerts were heavily improvised, and many AACM members created scores that blended music, geometry, painting, and ciphers to be interpreted by
120-549: A post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy. Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1983), the critic Harold Rosenberg said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and
150-525: Is another definition of "Avant-gardism" that distinguishes it from "modernism": Peter Bürger, for example, says avant-gardism rejects the "institution of art" and challenges social and artistic values, and so necessarily involves political, social, and cultural factors. According to the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky , modernist composers from the early 20th century who do not qualify as avant-gardists include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky; later modernist composers who do not fall into
180-638: Is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of art-as-commodity determines its artistic value. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord said that the financial, commercial, and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by neoliberal capitalism makes doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant to their societies for preferring profit to cultural change and political progress. In The Theory-Death of
210-546: Is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic. The critic Charles Altieri argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde ." Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term
240-615: Is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether. By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg , Richard Strauss (in his earliest work), Charles Ives , Igor Stravinsky , Anton Webern , Edgard Varèse , Alban Berg , George Antheil (in his earliest works only), Henry Cowell (in his earliest works), Harry Partch , John Cage , Iannis Xenakis , Morton Feldman , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pauline Oliveros , Philip Glass , Meredith Monk , Laurie Anderson , and Diamanda Galás . There
270-428: The artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus,
300-458: The moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms. In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms , such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in
330-686: The AACM. The AACM also had a strong relationship with an influential sister organization, the Black Artists Group (BAG) of St. Louis, Missouri . The AACM has received aid from the MacArthur Foundation and has a strong relationship with Columbia College . A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis , has been published by the University of Chicago Press (May 2008). In 2015,
SECTION 10
#1732797496021360-600: The Advancement of Creative Musicians The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians ( AACM ) is a nonprofit organization , founded in 1965 in Chicago by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams , pianist Jodie Christian , drummer Steve McCall , and composer Phil Cohran . The AACM is devoted "to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music," according to its charter. It supports and encourages jazz performers, composers and educators. Although founded in
390-533: The Avant-Garde ( Theorie der Avantgarde , 1974), the literary critic Peter Bürger looks at The Establishment 's embrace of socially critical works of art as capitalist co-optation of the artists and the genre of avant-garde art, because "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work [of art]". In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for
420-697: The Avant-Garde (1991), Paul Mann said that the avant-garde are economically integral to the contemporary institutions of the Establishment, specifically as part of the culture industry . Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu , in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), said that Western culture entered
450-722: The Chicago-based music association Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the St. Louis-based multidisciplinary arts collectives Black Artists Group and the Human Arts Ensemble . The company was based in Tribiano , Italy. Many of the recordings were made in Milan, as the performers passed through the area on tour, although many leading Italian musicians, such as Giorgio Gaslini , have also recorded for
480-544: The Experimental Band since 1961. The musicians were generally steadfast in their commitment to their music, despite a lack of performance venues and sometimes indifferent audiences. From 1969 the AACM organised a music education program for inner-city youths. In the 1960s and 1970s AACM members were among the most important and innovative in all of jazz, though the AACM's contemporary influence has waned some in recent years. Many AACM members have recorded widely: in
510-463: The army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified Left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. In the mid-19th century, as a cultural term, avant-garde identified a genre of art that advocated art-as-politics, art as an aesthetic and political means for realising social change in a society. Since the 20th century,
540-484: The art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge the cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society . In the U.S. of the 1960s, the post–WWII changes to American culture and society allowed avant-garde artists to produce works of art that addressed
570-458: The artistic vanguard oppose high culture and reject the artifice of mass culture , because the avant-garde functionally oppose the dumbing down of society — be it with low culture or with high culture . That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are kitsch , simulations and simulacra of Art. Walter Benjamin in
600-593: The artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues 's political usage of vanguard identified
630-416: The category of avant-gardists include Elliott Carter , Milton Babbitt , György Ligeti , Witold Lutosławski , and Luciano Berio , since "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an audience." The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman , Sun Ra , Albert Ayler , Archie Shepp , John Coltrane and Miles Davis . In
SECTION 20
#1732797496021660-656: The early days on the Delmark Records Avant Garde Jazz series and later on the Black Saint/Soul Note and India Navigation labels, and to a lesser extent on the Arista Records and ECM labels. The musical endeavors of members of the AACM often include an adventurous mixing of avant-garde jazz, classical, and world music. The AACM also ran a school, The AACM School of Music, with classes in all areas taught by members of
690-514: The essay " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) said that the artifice of mass culture voids the artistic value (the aura ) of a work of art. That the capitalist culture industry (publishing and music, radio and cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption, which
720-485: The jazz tradition, the group's outreach and influence has, according to Larry Blumenfeld, "touched nearly all corners of modern music." By the 1960s, jazz music was losing ground to rock music, and the founders of the AACM felt that a proactive group of musicians would add creativity and outlet for new music. The AACM was formed in May 1965 by a group of musicians centered on pianist Muhal Richard Abrams , who had organized
750-557: The label. Giovanni Bonandrini's son Flavio ran the company until its sale in 2008, the elder Bonandrini having retired, and has supervised many recording sessions in New York City. Starting in 1984, Black Saint/Soul Note won the Down Beat Critics Poll for best record label for six subsequent years until they were replaced by Blue Note in 1990. Cam Jazz acquired the company in 2008. Association for
780-559: The late 19th and in the early 20th centuries. In art history the socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s). The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of
810-646: The matters of the day, usually in political and sociologic opposition to the cultural conformity inherent to popular culture and to consumerism as a way of life and as a worldview . In The Theory of the Avant-Garde ( Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia , 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde as art and as artistic movement. Surveying the historical and social, psychological and philosophical aspects of artistic vanguardism, Poggioli's examples of avant-garde art, poetry, and music, show that avant-garde artists share some values and ideals as contemporary bohemians . In Theory of
840-535: The mediocrity of mass culture , which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]." Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to arrière-garde , which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard. The term was less frequently used than "avant-garde" in 20th-century art criticism. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde
870-498: The performers live. The AACM was part of an artistic movement on the South Side of Chicago that included AFRICobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) and other collectives. (largely complete through at least 2015) Avant-garde In the arts and literature , the term avant-garde (from French meaning ' advance guard ' or ' vanguard ' ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art , and
900-593: The rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". Post-punk artists from the late 1970s rejected traditional rock sensibilities in favor of an avant-garde aesthetic. Whereas the avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century music, it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, and often in conjunction with music and sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to
#20979