Paul Steinbeck

Paul Steinbeck is a bassist, professor, and author. His books include Sound Experiments, a sonic history of the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM); Message to Our Folks, the definitive study of the Art Ensemble of Chicago; and Exercises for the Creative Musician, a method book for improvisers, co-authored with Fred Anderson. Additional publications about the AACM, the Art Ensemble, Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, visual art, and improvisation are collected at paulsteinbeck.com/writings.

Steinbeck studied bass with Harrison Bankhead and composition with Ari Brown. His compositions and improvisations are documented on twenty-four recordings. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers a sonic history of the collective, analyzing AACM artists’ best-known compositions and their farthest-reaching formal innovations. The compositions examined in Sound Experiments span the entire history of the AACM, from 1960s and 1970s works by Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton to recent pieces by Wadada Leo Smith, Nicole Mitchell, and the Artifacts trio. Sound Experiments shows how the creators of these extraordinary works pioneered new approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, and technology while continually renewing the AACM’s commitment to musical experimentation.

Published by the University of Chicago Press.

To access the recordings analyzed in Sound Experiments, go to paulsteinbeck.com/av.

Message to Our Folks tells the story of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship group of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Formed in 1966 and flourishing until the 2010s, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself through its unique performance practices: the members of the band played hundreds of instruments onstage, recited poetry, and performed theatrical sketches while wearing evocative costumes, face paint, and masks. The group, which built a global audience and toured on six continents, presented its work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry’s traditionalist aesthetics. In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck examines several performances by the Art Ensemble, showing how the group members were able to improvise together in many different musical styles while drawing on an extensive repertoire of original compositions. The book also investigates the group’s social practices of cooperation and autonomy, which kept the members together for five decades, making the Art Ensemble one of the longest-lived bands in the history of jazz and experimental music.

Published by the University of Chicago Press, Edizioni Quodlibet and the Presses universitaires du Midi.

To access the recordings analyzed in Message to Our Folks, go to paulsteinbeck.com/av.

Developed in the early 1960s and first published in 2002, Exercises for the Creative Musician is Fred Anderson’s method book for improvisers. Each exercise traces a melodic figure, chord progression, or scale through all twelve keys, providing musicians with inexhaustible ideas for improvisation.

To order Exercises for the Creative Musician, go to: https://square.link/u/2UCRKAaN.