Long ago, I wrote in the Guardian that a 1980 London performance by the Art Ensemble of Chicago – Lester Bowie (trumpet), Joseph Jarman (saxes), Malachi Favors Maghostut (bass), Roscoe Mitchell (sax and composition) and Famoudou Don Moye (percussion) – had felt “like a sermon, a drama … and a history lesson all at once”. The late great American jazz sage Nat Hentoff went further, suggesting the band was “reaching back conceptually to long before there ever was anything called jazz, and moving toward a future beyond category.”
