From: mingus@cbnewsl.cb.att.com (Damballah Wedo)
Subject: Re: Jazz Composers Guild
Organization: The Poto Mitan in the Houmfor
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1992 06:21:03 GMT

> jbulyk@telesciences.com (Jerry E. Bulyk):
> 
> Reading through the liner notes on some of these XYZ ESP reissues,
> I came across references to the Jazz Composers Guild and their
> "October Revolution" of 1964.  The only other place I have heard
> of the JCG was in rlc's Sun Ra discography under FEATURING PHAROAH 
> SANDERS AND BLACK HAROLD [Saturn IHNY 165] recorded 6/15/64.
> 
> Can someone fill-in who were the players who comprised the Jazz
> Composers Guild, and what, if any, sessions were ever recorded by 
> this collective? What was their mandate, and did they eventually 
> reform as the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association (JCOA) in 1968?
> - the first known record by the JCOA being the Cecil co-led date 
> "The Jazz Composer's Orchestra" [JCOA 1001/2 841 124-2].
> There is too big a gap between the two dates to be explained, unless
> they went under all to fast.

In THE 101 BEST JAZZ ALBUMS (inflammatory title, but a pretty good book)
Len Lyons has this to say about the Guild:

"Collectivism in New York, having to surmount a tradition of
competitiveness and several sharply drawn personalities, evolved
falteringly in stages. The first occurred in 1964, in the form of a
concert politically dubbed 'The October Revolution In Jazz', organized
by trumpeter Bill Dixon with the help of Cecil Taylor and a few others.
Over a four-day period in the Cellar Cafe near Broadway, 'the new thing'
was displayed by twenty different groups of musicians, ranging from the
now famous to the long forgotten. The event confirmed two noteworthy
facts: there was a large reservoir of talent working with the innovations
of free jazz; and, what seemed more surprising, this music could get a
hearing if the musicians took the initiative in producing it.

"The more ambitious Jazz Composer's Guild was formed quickly on the heels
of the October Revolution concert. Its charter members were Bill Dixon,
Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Paul Bley, the composer Carla Bley, then Paul's
wife, George Russell, and Archie Shepp. They had hoped, in effect, to
replace the local chapter of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM),
which they felt had failed them on several counts. The guild members did
not recommend total severance from the AFM, but saw themselves as a
special-interest group which the union was simply ill-prepared to serve.
The guild, however, had its own problems in the strong, idiosyncratic
personalities of its founders. Without a father figure like RIchard
Abrams to unify it, its life was short -- but not in vain.

"The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association (JCOA) was created in 1966 by
Carla Bley who with her partner, Austrian trumpeter Mike Mantler, transformed
the advocacy idea into a quasi-commercial launching pad for new noncommercial
music. The association's first raison d'etre was to support composers who
wrote extended works for large jazz orchestras. The JCOA established its own
record label, which Bley described as 'like the Wildlife Preserve,
protecting all this possibly extinct music... that doesn't fit into
(industry) categories.' As a nonprofit organization, the JCOA soon
received funding from New York state for concerts and workshops, and from
private sources for recordings. In 1972 the New Music Distribution Service
(NMDS) was created as the JCOA's distribution arm, proving its product's
viability by selling within two years over 80,000 LPs on consignment
from a variety of 'new-thing' labels.

"The JCOA label itself produced three classic albums of large orchestra
works: Mantler's THE JAZZ COMPOSERS' ORCHESTRA with soloists Cecil Taylor,
Pharoah Sanders, Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, and Roswell Rudd; Bley's
opera-like ESCALATOR OVER THE HILL; and Cherry's RELATIVITY SUITE....."

Lyons goes on to talk about musician-owned labels like Strata-East,
Unit Core, Tomato, Delmark, India Navigation, etc (you know, all the
labels all us bluenoters search for in dusty stores in dubious parts
of town :-))

The book was published in 1980, and two things are amazing about it:
first, how optministic it is that the do-it-yourself thing would work
out; and second, how relentless the major labels have been in trying
to snuff out this brave attempt by musicians to take charge of their
own destiny...

-- 
Marcel-Franck Simon             	mingus@usl.com, usl!mingus

	" Papa Loko, ou se' van, ou-a pouse'-n ale'
	  Nou se' papiyon, n'a pote' nouvel bay Agwe' "
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