In the 1960s, Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) became a beacon for artists seeking to play a new jazz that could often sound fiercely unfamiliar, but without losing the tradition’s communal vivacity – “joyous and pugnacious” was the Guardian’s description of a show celebrating the association in 2015. AACM nurtured avant-jazz stars including Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill and the adventurous yet ever-lyrical trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, and gospel-to-free-jazz pianist and organist Amina Claudine Myers.
Longtime ensemble colleagues now in their 80s, Smith and Myers have belatedly become a duo for album this elegiac homage to New York’s Central Park, whose site housed, in the 19th century, a community of freed African Americans. Smith told the Guardian in a 2012 interview that he aims to catch the psychological impressions locations make on him, rather than trying to paint sound-pictures, and Myers is a sensitive soulmate for that.
