new ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and in strumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of im provisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures.! In a 1973 article, two early AACM members, trumpeter John Shenoy Jackson and co-founder and pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, as serted that, "The AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies" (Abrams and Jackson 1973:72). This optimistic declaration, based on no tions of self-help as fundamental to racial uplift, cultural preservation, and spiritual rebirth, was in accord with many other challenges to traditional notions of order and authority that emerged in the wake of the Black Power Movement. The AACM's goals of individual and collective self-production and pro motion challenged racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure, serving as an example to other artists in rethinking the artist/business re lationship. A number of organizations in which Mrican American musi cians took leadership roles, including the early-twentieth-century Clef Club, the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, the Collective Black Artists, and the Los Angeles-based Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension, or Underground Musicians Association (UGMAA/UGMA), preceded the AACM in attempting to pursue these self-help strategies. The AACM, how ever, has become the most well-known and influential of the post-1960 organizations, and is still active almost forty years later. 2 The Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC), which emerged from the AACM and has been active in one form or another from 1969 to the present, is one of the groups that most radically exemplifies AACM-style collectivity, or in the words of Samuel Floyd, "individuality within the aggregate" (Floyd Current Musicology, nos. 71-73 (Spring 200l-Spring 2002) © 2002 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York