Picture a European concert hall in 1969 where the stage floor is covered by roughly 500 instruments, from saxophones and trumpets to bicycle horns, wind chimes, and birthday-party noisemakers, and the musicians walk out in theatrical costumes and face paint. This episode tells the story of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, from its roots in the AACM cooperative on Chicago’s South Side and the 1966 Roscoe Mitchell Sextet with Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors, through the 1967 addition of Joseph Jarman and Philip Wilson, to a collective that has survived and evolved for more than half a century.

The conversation examines the group’s extreme multi-instrumentalism, its philosophy of little instruments that flattened the hierarchy between a grand piano and a bicycle horn, and how losing drummer Philip Wilson to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band forced a drumless quartet to decentralize rhythm. It follows the 1968 move to Paris, where a French promoter appended of Chicago to their name, the arrival of percussionist Don Moye in 1970, the soundtrack Les Stances a Sophie with vocalist Fontella Bass, the deaths of Bowie, Favors, and Jarman, and the 50th anniversary large ensemble and 2023 album The Sixth Decade: From Paris to Paris.

• How the AACM gave Black experimental musicians a support system outside the commercial club circuit
• Why Joseph Jarman said the face paint represented all people across the universe
• How bells, whistles, and percussive trumpet blasts implied a pulse without a drummer
• The motto Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future and what it meant in practice
• Why the surviving members treated the group as an open-source philosophy rather than a fixed lineup