Art Ensemble of Chicago - Americans Swinging In Paris (Les Stances a Sophie/People In Sorrow)
SKU
15-EMI5396672
This recording, comprised of two complete Art Ensemble of Chicago albums Les Stances a Sophie with singer Fontella Bass from 1970 and People in Sorrow from 1969 offers two very different sides of the group's sound from this key period in their development. Living in self-imposed exile in France, the band explored the complete historical continuum of jazz and moved the free jazz boundary further to the left. While Les Stances a Sophie is perhaps the most accessible AEC album from the 1960s or 1970s, it nonetheless showcases the love of adventure inside traditional forms. Fontella Bass, married to Bowie at the time, was a catalyst coming from the gospel and R&B traditions. She brought out the sense of groove and grit in the band's rampant experimentalism, and Bowie reigned them in further with his own swinging pastoralism that came just as much from Louis Armstrong as it did from Ted Curson and Albert Ayler. The finest examples of the culture clash in the jazz lineage come on Theme de Yoyo," on which Bass sings, and the shuffling New Orleans swing of "Variations on a Theme of Monteverdi." There's plenty of AEC weirdness here, too; beautiful passages of multi-textured dissonance and elongated improvisations on thematic statements. But as fine an album as Les Stances a Sophie is, it cannot compare to one of the true masterworks in the AEC's catalog, People in Sorrow. Comprised of just one piece split into two long sections as it was on the original LP People in Sorrow is a meditation on sound itself. This is the AEC at their most adventurous, yet their most dynamically restrained. There are periods of long silence interrupted sometimes only by a single percussion instrument, bass note, or series of tonal breathing from the horns. The effect is crystalline, sad, beautiful, and haunting. It is heartbreaking in its beauty and poignant in its intent. This is perhaps the most essential of all AEC reissues to appear on CD, as it was previously thought that the master to People in Sorrow might have been lost. Thank goodness it was not, because this record, along with its more famous counterpart, Les Stances a Sophie, deepens the AEC's legacy considerably; these recordings sound as contemporary and futuristic as they did when they were released."-Thom Jurek/All Music Guide