Group’s 25-Year Goal: The Great Black Music Orchestra

“Our music is primarily intended to stimulate thought, to get people to make new rationales,” said Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester Bowie. “We come from jazz, blues and everything, but we’re about establishing sort of a new reality on that, relating to those forms in a different way.

“We’re creating a music that people of the world can relate to. Jazz served as a link to all these forms because jazz gives a foundation that develops your ears.”

The veteran quintet--Bowie, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell (reeds), Malachi Favors Maghostut (bass) and Famoudou Don Moye (drums)--makes its first Los Angeles appearance in six years at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater tonight.

Since November, the Art Ensemble has been recording a seven-record project for DIW, the Japanese label that has released its three most recent albums. The new batch includes two records with the South African a cappella vocal group Amabutho, a homage to Thelonious Monk with pianist Cecil Taylor, a tribute to John Coltrane, a studio album by Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy group and the Art Ensemble with Brass Fantasy recorded live in Japan.

The group has focused its concert performances as a unit on special projects--like the string of West Coast concerts with Women of the Calabash, the vocal/percussion trio who will perform their own set and join the Art Ensemble at UCLA tonight.

“Calabash fit in with our scheme of trying to present a larger production,” explained Moye. “We’re building toward the Great Black Music Orchestra, which would encompass all of the bands (associated with them)--the Leaders, Art Ensemble, Brass Fantasy, Joe Bowie, etc.”

The Art Ensemble was formed as an outgrowth of the creative ferment spawned by the Assn. for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) organization in Chicago during the mid-’60s. Initially a quartet, the group moved to Paris in 1969, absorbed the Detroit-bred Moye the following year, and quickly developed an international reputation while performing under the motto of “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future.”

Not all the comments were favorable. Maghostut (who goes by the name Favors), Jarman and Moye had started their ongoing practice of performing in face paint and African robes, and that led some critics to accuse the Art Ensemble of using visual gimmickry to mask musical shortcomings.

“When I first started to paint, people were saying that we were playing hate music,” remembered Favors. “People have to recognize that we are basically an African people. Even though we have a lost a lot of our traditions as African people, we still have a connection spiritually with that.”

The members of the Art Ensemble also developed individual careers from their separate home bases--Bowie and Jarman live in New York City, Favors and Moye in Chicago, and Mitchell calls Madison, Wis., home. The ideas and experiences gleaned from those projects are fed into the group’s free-flowing improvisations.

Recording for a Japanese label won’t make the Art Ensemble of Chicago a household name here but neither will a lack of American recognition deter the group from pursuing its long-term goals.

“We are the eternal optimists,” declared Moye. “If we encounter resistance in a certain area, we pull back. In the context of 20-25 years of activity, a blank in a certain zone over a couple of years doesn’t mean that much. We structured our whole (organization), conceptually, to be able to pick and choose an area where there’s true interest.”