JAZZ : A Whole New World : American and European jazz artists are hooking up with African and Brazilian musicians to share rhythms--and polyrhythms--from Chicago to Soweto

When trumpeter Lester Bowie and the other members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago decided to work with a South African choir, they knew there would be more to it than a meeting in a studio.

There would be rehearsals, but there would also be trips to the movies and restaurants, family gatherings and sharing experiences with wives and children. There was also the matter of finding a house.

“We rented a house for them next door to my house in Brooklyn for a month,” Bowie says, recalling the collaboration with the five members of Amabutho, which generated the 1992 album “Art Ensemble of Soweto” and 1991’s “America-South Africa.” It was a necessary ingredient to the musical mix.

Bowie is one of several jazz musicians whose experiences working with African players have led to a continual creative relationship for recordings and tours. From the Africans, the American players have learned new musical vocabularies. From the Americans, the Africans get a new forum to advance their musical heritage.

“Before we create, there has to be the right mood and spirit, and that’s not just from meeting in the studio and playing some tunes,” says Bowie, a leader in the free-jazz movement of the 1960s. “It’s about meeting somebody’s family, about . . . living together. Then we can relax and create because we’re in tune with each other. It’s not about method--it’s got to be about life.”

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The music the Art Ensemble and Amabutho produced is ambitious and almost suite-like, a combination call to arms and history lesson for both South Africans and Americans, filled with elements of anthems, free jazz, be-bop and tribal drumming.

Bowie’s experience is mirrored by several other American musicians who have found creative rewards by playing with African musicians.

Jazz-rock violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, for example, has now recorded two albums with African musicians he met in Paris and is currently touring with them.

Pianist Don Pullen is enjoying the greatest commercial success of his 30-year career with the second disc by his African Brazilian Connection.

And saxophonist Michael Brecker, long known for his fusion exploits as a soloist and with his brother, Randy, has so enjoyed his three years of touring with Paul Simon’s band of African and Brazilian musicians that he is exploring recording his own Africa-inspired works.

With the exception of the Art Ensemble project, each band features natives of the West African nations of Senegal and Cameroon. Many of Africa’s premiere musicians have moved to Europe, particularly Paris, where they have been able to hook up with pop and jazz musicians from the West. This has also led to a cross-pollination of rhythms in which, for example, Senegalese drummers can learn and adapt to Moroccan or Ghanaian beats.

The attraction, the jazz musicians interviewed agree, are the polyrhythms, the confluence of two or more contrasting rhythms that make a singular statement. To Westerners, these polyrhythms are difficult to both grasp and play--a musical equivalent of the childhood exercise of making circles on your stomach with one hand while tapping your head with the other.

“Coming into new rhythms made me reconsider my playing,” Ponty says. “There’s a complexity to the polyrhythms, but it’s not an intellectual complexity. It’s not enough to understand (them)--you must feel them.”

To develop that intuition requires the development of a bond.

“For two musicians to work together there must be a common objective,” said Mor Thiam, the griot drummer, teacher and author from Senegal who constructed the rhythms for Pullen’s African Brazilian Connection. “If we don’t have the same objective, the music will be affected. Music is a relationship--if you know the other guys well, the music will stick better.”

Or as Brecker says: “By spending hours on the bus tapping rhythms and learning the music, you can’t not be affected. I was working on writing music that’s performed in two time signatures at once--works that are musically 3-D. The African stuff has that same approach, but it’s a more natural way.”

Ponty, who informally worked with African musicians while visiting Paris three years ago, learned through experience the difficulty of the African rhythms. During the recording of “Tchokola” in 1991, he says, “I made an effort to respect the scales of these dance rhythms, (in which) there’s not much harmonic development. I was more of an interpreter on ‘Tchokola’--it’s not really Jean-Luc Ponty music.

“There was one particular feel that I couldn’t get,” Ponty says, recalling a videotape of a two-day funeral that a band member showed him. In the video, he says, “I saw how the people moved to this music played on the belafon (an African percussion instrument). It’s not really dancing, just moving in line. I finally knew the feel.”

After those sessions Ponty used the troupe for an eight-week tour of the United States. “That’s when I got to spend time with them talking about life and society and sharing with them,” he says.

That led to his new album, “No Absolute Time,” a considerably more Western album than “Tchokola” yet one with an African birthmark. “Time” emphasizes the speed and dexterity that have been Ponty’s trademark since his early ‘70s stints with Frank Zappa and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

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Pullen, on the other hand, approached his work with African and Brazilian musicians as a two-week-long residency outside Philadelphia that would conclude with a single performance. It has now led to two recordings--1992’s “Kele Mou Bana” and “Ode to Life,” which is currently in the Top 10 on Billboard’s jazz charts.

“I didn’t intend for the band to work that much,” Pullen says, noting that he saw the African Brazilian Connection as a break from his trio work. “The second album indicates this is a working group.”

“Ode to Life,” a tribute to his late collaborator, saxophonist George Adams, features compositions from Pullen’s band members Thiam and Brazilians Guilherme Franco, a percussionist, and Nilson Matta, a bassist.

Rather than create a fusion of the cultures, as his former employer Charles Mingus did throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, Pullen showcases each heritage separately. Works on “Ode to Life,” for example, feature traditional African instruments and themes as well as a formal take on the Brazilian bossa nova, complete with gentle backing vocal. And there is little of Pullen’s soloing technique of emphatically stroking clusters of keys with the backs of his fingers.

“I asked each member to compose to get some authenticity,” Pullen says. “I could write that way, but it’s different when the person contributing comes from that culture and that experience. . . . Each of us was familiar with the African and Brazilian rhythms, and we intrinsically knew where to go (musically) and improvise. That was where we connected.”

Like other griot drummers, Thiam learned from his grandfather how to “speak the language of the drum,” how each sound was actually part of a story.

“You have to be a historian and a storyteller,” says Thiam, who moved to Illinois in 1968 to teach drumming. “It’s spiritual. This group works as a collective, like a band of African drummers. It makes us unique.”

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Jazz, with its roots in African music long acknowledged, will always have projects that attempt to illuminate that connection. Some musicians will make the African connection a regular part of their work.

Pianist Randy Weston, who has been making the connection for more than 30 years, has turned to the blues on his new release, “Volcano Blues,” a follow-up to his acclaimed “Spirits of Our Ancestors. “If you take out the African elements of bossa nova, samba, jazz, blues,” he has said, “you have nothing.”

Of the current movement, Thiam praised Brecker’s employer, Paul Simon.

“Right now, the cycle is right for African music,” he says. “Everybody wants to do something to stretch their own experience--Paul Simon, (Grateful Dead drummer) Mickey Hart. People realize and accept that this is where music came from. They bring musical skills, but (through African drumming) they learn communication and that without the drums you cannot communicate.”

For the Westerner Brecker, there’s the other side:

“This music is offering alternatives for improvisation. It’s refreshing.”