The New Black Music emanating from Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has become as strong and recognizable a "school" as the post-war Chicago blues. The idiom is a wide-open one; most of the musicians learn a variety of instruments and spice their performances with constantly changing sounds, rhythms, densities and moods. AACM-bred musicians present their own concerts and generally control their own business affairs, and AACM bands stick together with a tenacity that should be the envy of group leaders on the always-in-flux New York jazz scene.

The pioneering AACM group is the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a forum for the stimulating talents of Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman (reeds), Lester Bowie (trumpet), Malachi Favors (bass) and Don Moye (drums). Baptizum documents the group's spellbinding set from September's Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz festival. The AEC's music is perhaps the first truly original approach to group improvisation since the early-Sixties onslaught of Coleman, Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. The group's interaction is a direct result of its longevity, the members having played and recorded together continuously since the mid-Sixties. Bap-tizum features dozens of instruments (all the saxophones from soprano to bass, tempered and non-tempered percussion, etc.) and sequences of colors or moods which range from energy-raising to reflection to explosive anger to sheer soul strutting. The last tune, in fact, is almost a Mar-Keys instrumental, with Fender bass punching away and the horns (here two bass saxophones and trumpet) repeating a Memphis-style line. The performance gassed ten thousand people, most of whom had never heard of the group, and Atlantic is to be commended for releasing it in all its rough, hard-edged grandeur.

The Revolutionary Ensemble is not an AACM group, but violinist Leroy Jenkins is an AACM alumnus, and the group presents its own concerts and stays together by playing together in AACM fashion. The band had been presenting monthly concerts in New York for over two years when it cut this first recording. Jenkins is the hell-for-leather string virtuoso who has burned through recent albums by Archie Shepp, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and others. The RE's bassist, Sirone, played with every major innovator of the Sixties under his former name, Norris Jones. Jerome Cooper is a dexterous, controlled percussionist who can rise from a whisper to a bombardment and back again in no time at all. Violin and bass are amplified and, especially on side one of The Revolutionary Ensemble, create an overpowering flow of uninterrupted imagination and beauty. This is string music as it has never been heard before, as classical techniques meet the new jazz esthetic somewhere in the ozone.

Delmark records, the Chicago blues label, was the first American company to record the AACM, and its latest offering in this vein is saxophonist Maurice McIntyre's Forces And Feelings. McIntyre is a powerful player with blues roots (born in Clarksdale, Arkansas; played with many Chicago bluesmen) and his group is also a working unit with some collective experience under its belt. Especially noteworthy is Sarnie Garrett's electric guitar. Garrett sounds like a liberated veteran of James Brown's band. His playing is tight and rhythmic, with lots of choked chording during the freest sections. The music develops with a minimum of preconceived structure, now floating, now storming along, almost always evidencing a rapport between the musicians of a kind rarely captured on record.

It is clear at this point in the history of the new jazz that freedom is likely to produce chaos unless the musicians are attuned to each other through a developed working relationship. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Revolutionary Ensemble and Maurice McIntyre's various groups all demonstrate that, when this working balance of discipline and expression is achieved, the results are both spectacular as music and necessary to the ongoing development of black music as art. In either sense, these three albums are among the most satisfying and important recorded documents of the year. (RS 142)

BOB PALMER