Muhal Richard Abrams — R.I.P.

[Ron Thorne]

Muhal Richard Abrams, 87, Individualistic Pianist and Composer, Is Dead

By HOWARD MANDEL | NOV. 1, 2017


Muhal Richard Abrams at Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan in 2004. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Muhal Richard Abrams, the autodidactic pianist, composer and educator who was known both for his diverse, unclassifiable compositions and improvisations and for establishing and sustaining the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Richarda Abrams.

As a pianist, Mr. Abrams could spontaneously weave references to historical jazz styles — including ragtime, stride piano, the compositions of Duke Ellington, swing and bebop — together with his own fleet modernism, far-reaching harmonies and dissonance.

As a composer, he represented a similarly wide range. Steeped in the blues, he also created works for chamber ensembles and orchestras, sometimes but not always including improvisation.

Mr. Abrams, who was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2010 and was the first recipient of Denmark’s generous Jazzpar Award in 1990, was critically acclaimed for the breadth, depth and originality of his music.

In his book “The Freedom Principle” (1984), the critic John Litweiler wrote that Mr. Abrams’s phrasing was “turbulent, broken, constantly busy, yet his soloing sounds flowing, freely lyrical.”

“Abrams has never lost his early wonder at the vast possibilities of free music,” he added.

Mr. Abrams explored those possibilities with the Experimental Band, which he organized in Chicago in 1962 to workshop new compositions and arrangements by a coterie of like-minded instrumentalists.

He helped found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians collective in 1965, teaming up with the pianist Jodie Christian, the trumpeter Philip Cohran (who died this year) and the drummer Steve McCall.

By not imposing or promoting a single aesthetic but instead encouraging unconventional originality, the association, which presented concerts and conferences, became an incubator for the genre-defying group the Art Ensemble of Chicago as well as the multi-instrumentalists and composers Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill, along with many others who channeled the high-energy “free” jazz of the early 1960s into more organized works.


Mr. Abrams leading the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at Frederick P. Rose Hall in Manhattan in 2010.
Credit Matthew Murphy for The New York Times

The first generation of A.A.C.M. musicians concentrated on sounds themselves, often employing so-called little instruments like bells, toy noisemakers and whistles to complement their performances. They investigated structured alternatives to standard song forms as well as the long, declamatory improvisations favored by New York City’s jazz avant-garde, exploring dissonance, serialism and polyphony, 20th-century concert music and non-Western idioms.

As Mr. Abrams did in his 1969 recording “Young at Heart / Wise in Time,” A.A.C.M. members acknowledged jazz, blues and other forms of African-American music as their heritage, but adopted Duke Ellington’s refusal to be defined by the past and Ornette Coleman’s break from chord progressions as an infallible guideline for improvisations.

Their presentations might involve performance art activities, multidisciplinary collaborations, abstract musical systems, newly invented instruments or anything else under the Art Ensemble’s inclusive motto, “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future.”

Mr. Abrams was the first president of the A.A.C.M. and until his death was regarded as its eminence. Through its chapters in Chicago and New York, the organization continues to present concerts, provide promotional support and offer free training in theory, composition and instrumental mastery to young musicians.

Richard Louis Abrams was born in Chicago on Sept. 19, 1930. He was the second of nine children of Milton Abrams, a self-employed handyman, and his wife, Edna, who took the boy with her to weekly piano lessons at the Y.M.C.A.

Mr. Abrams took the name Muhal in 1967. Interviewed by the French magazine Jazz in 1973, he said that the word, its origin unclear, means “number one.”

A product of Chicago’s public schools, Mr. Abrams spent time in a reformatory for fighting and truancy, then entered DuSable High School. Although DuSable is noted for graduating many successful jazz musicians, he was more interested in sports and did not benefit from its music program. He left school in 1946, began studying with a pianist from his church and enrolled in Chicago Musical College.

By 1948 Mr. Abrams was playing professionally and engaged in a disciplined course of self-directed study of a broad range of subjects.