ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO: BAP-TIZUM

Back in print after 25 years! This epochal recording of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Sept. 9, 1972, performance at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival is the third play loud! reissue of an AEC classic, succeeding the soundtrack for the film Les Stances à Sophie and the sprawling collective improvisation People in Sorrow. The LP captured the spirited free jazz quintet’s very first U.S. festival appearance, just months after their return from nearly two years of work in Europe. The resultant album became their first American major label release and awakened a much-broadened homeland audience to their genius. Atlantic Records spent three days in the Michigan college town capturing the festival, which was co-produced by the notorious counterculture czar John Sinclair, who managed the MC5, the Detroit auteurs of another legendary live album, Kick Out the Jams. A two-LP set comprising 19 highlights from the fest was issued by the label in 1973, but the AEC’s storming 45-minute appearance was issued separately, in its entirety. “This spectacular performance earned the Art Ensemble a standing ovation,” the band’s historian Paul Steinbeck noted. This extraordinary set, crisply remastered by Moritz Illner and newly annotated by American music journalist Chris Morris, restores what is arguably the band’s finest and most intensely focused concert work.


Original liner notes by John Sinclair

"The Art Ensemble of Chicago has been a major force in new music making for some years now, yet it is only with the release of this record of their performance at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 (their first festival appearance in the United States!) that they begin to reach an audience the dimensions of which still do not approach the size of their perfect music. I mean, their music is not even played on the radio up to now, when it should be as popular (in the best sense of that word) as anything you can hear now ten times a day. It is clear that the music of these innovators can move people when they can get to hear it — that much is certainly evident from the audience response to be heard on this record, response from a body of more that 10,000 people, most of whom have never heard anything like this music before in their young lives. There are reasons for that lack in their lives, but on the other hand, there are reasons why this music will eventually reach all the people it is intended for, and the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival is only one of them. This record is another. Please take this music as far inside yourselves as the musicians have gone inside themselves to present it to you, and we can begin then to complete the term the music has established for itself. Let it be a BAP-TIZUM, as it was for the people who got it direct that afternoon in Ann Arbor, September 9th, 1972, sitting under the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago in the sun. Let it be whatever it wants to be, let it do whatever it wants to do to you — let it wash over you and be your BAP-TIZUM too, as it was that day for so many of us, and rise up out of it as far as you can go. that’s what it’s all about, for real."
Ann Arbor (1973)


RECREATION OF THE ORIGINAL 1973 ARTWORK & SOUND

The vinyl LP includes an inlay with detailed liner notes by US journalist Chris Morris, while the CD Digipak comes with a 12-page booklet containing the same material.

The album has been newly remastered from the original tapes by Moritz Illner (duophonic), who also handled play loud!’s acclaimed reissues of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Les Stances à Sophie and People in Sorrow.

play loud! productions will reissue one further album by the Art Ensemble of Chicago: Fanfare for the Warriors (1974).

Stay tuned.