Leroy Jenkins - R.I.P.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Originally Posted by lazarus

Yesterday Chuck Nessa posted on another board the sad news that "Leroy Jenkins died today in NYC - lung cancer".
I saw Revolutionary Ensemble play a wonderful concert in my little swedish hometown in mid 70´s and have been a fan ever since.



RIP Leroy Jenkins

One of the great jazz violinists. Very sad news.

I especially loved his two beautiful Equal Interest albums with Joseph Jarman and Myra Melford, but also very much liked his work on Paul Motian's Conception Vessel and George Lewis' Shadowgraph.


°°°°°°°°





Leroy Jenkins: born March 11, 1932 in Chicago, Illinois, died February 24, 2007 in New York City


(from AACM website)

...Jenkins was already performing violin at the age of 8 at his local Ebenezeer Baptist Church. The flavor of spritiuals still remains in his music. He studied music in high school and then attended Florida A&M University Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1932, Jenkins was already performing violin at the age of 8 at his local Ebenezeer Baptist Church. The flavor of spritiuals still remains in his music. He studied music in high school and then attended Florida A&M University where he studied with Bruce Hayden and completed his B.S. in music. For the next ten years Jenkins remained in the South teaching music.
Jenkins returned to Chicago in 1965 and was drawn into the well spring of Chicago s creative music activities. Almost immediately, he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM). Jenkins recalls that this union marked the first time that as a violin player he was truly welcomed into creative music performances. During this time he played and recorded with Muhal Richard Abrams , Leo Smith and Anthony Braxton .
In 1969, Jenkins left for Paris with Braxton and Smith. With the addition of drummer Steve McCall , they formed the Creative Construction Company . Their 1970 performance in New York, joined by Richard Davis on bass and Abrams on piano, gave New York the first taste of the new music that Chicago musicians were creating.
Jenkins continued to work with the finest creative musicians.... Archie Shepp , Albert Ayler , Alice Coltrane , Mtume , Cal Massey , to name a few. But it was the work of the collective Revolutionary Enemble (co-founded with bassist Sirone and drummer Jerome Cooper) that gained Jenkins prominence as the most significant violinist of the modern era. par
Leroy works in a multitude of contexts. His recording on Tomato, Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival in America has received rave reviews. He is performing in solo, trio and quintet contexts, and is also performing in duo settings with woodwindist Oliver Lake .

[olie brice]

RIP, and thanks for all the music leroy...

[Lois Gilbert]

Very sad to hear this. Leroy, Malachi, Lester Bowie. Very sad indeed

[Brian Olewnick]

Awful, awful news. Since I first heard him, Jenkins had always been my favorite violinist in jazz and one of my favorite musicians period. So much more beautiful music emerged from him, imho, than any other more "classically" trained violinists in the music; he wrote and played some of the most heartbreakingly beautiful melodies and improvisations I've ever heard. I remember the tongue-in-cheek inscription on some ads for his releases in the old New Music Distribution catalog: Pound for pound, the greatest jazz violinist alive.

Thanks for all the beautiful music, Mr. Jenkins.

Swift Are the Winds of Life.

[Captain Hate]

Well stated Ollie; I only had the pleasure of seeing him perform once but I walked away from it having seen and heard an intensely personal conception of music, incorporating influences in a highly unique manner.

RIP

[Uli]

RIP, Mr. Jenkins!

[walto]

Oh, no.

[Mike Schwartz]

I had seen him in concert 2 or 3 times in my life.....the 1st was at the tail end of the NYC loft scene.

He was a huge influence to me in opening new possibilities in music on a grand scale.

I was thrilled to have seen the Revolutionary Ensemble come back with a CD last year.

RIP

[hornplayer]

very very sad.

Rest in peace...

[Dennis Gonzalez]

We were at a concert of Leroy's in Houston, and Carol went up to him to tell him that she loved his music...he seemed a bit skeptical until she sang the melody of the Revolutionary Ensemble's composition Chinese Rock. He gave her a huge smile and went off chuckling and giggling to himself.

So sorry to learn of his death.

[Gerardo A]

RIP, Mr. Jenkins!

[Dan G]

Damn.

For some reason yesterday, I had an urge to listen to For Players Only and Space Minds/New Worlds/Survival... last night. The former is good, the latter is a masterpiece.

It's a real drag living in an era when so many of the greats are leaving us.

RIP.

[Sandy Brown]

This has not been a good first two months of the new year.

My sincerest condolences go out to the family of Leroy Jenkins.

[Ron Thorne]

What a loss.

Condolences to his family and friends.



R.I.P., Leroy Jenkins~

[sonic1]

I am getting used to seeing a thread like this every month or so. They seem to be dropping off like flies lately. I guess many of them are just that age. And musicians to boot...

[Nate Dorward]

First time I saw any non-mainstream jazz was as a teenager in Toronto during the Toronto jazzfest's heyday: was walking around downtown, noticed that a concert was about to start in a small outdoor venue at a parking lot. It was terrific, enough to make me always remember the concert. Leroy Jenkins' Sting.

R.I.P. Leroy. -- Has the issue of (the often incredibly behind-schedule) Shuffle Boil appeared yet with Jim McAuley's interview with Jenkins? If not, maybe NOW it'll appear at last......

[Frisco]

Oh no. I didn't know he was ill. I think the last time I saw him was the Revolutionary Ens. date at Vision Fest. Leroy was really a beautiful soul. We had the pleasure to host two of his concerts here in Detroit. One solo and one with Equal Interest. I'm growing weary of doing radio tributes. It's too sad. But somehow it gives some sense of closure and feels like a little gift back. I'm happy to have had the pleasure to know his music and to have some beautiful documents to last a lifetime.

[Tom Storer]

Oh no! I feel much the same way Brian does about how beautiful and moving Jenkins' playing was. I saw the Revolutionary Ensemble in a very exciting concert back in the day. I also remember attending the solo concert he recorded for India Navigation, at the "peace church" in Manhattan. Anthony Braxton and Dave Holland were in the audience, very enthusiastic. A whole era.

RIP, Leroy Jenkins.

[gonzo]

leroy too!! the jazz world has taken some big hits as of late. leroy was absolutely one of the best fiddle players in jazz. very innovative exciting approach to the instrument. very sad for the loss.

[Brian Olewnick]

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

I also remember attending the solo concert he recorded for India Navigation, at the "peace church" in Manhattan. Anthony Braxton and Dave Holland were in the audience, very enthusiastic.

Hey, cool. Yeah, I remember getting to chat with Braxton afterwards, the first time I ever spoke with the man.

Played yesterday:

Swift Are the Winds of Life
Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America
The Psyche
People's Republic
Revolutionary Ensemble (Inner City)

Some great music in there.

[MRS]

Sad news. I was fortunate enough to see him in duo with Denman Maroney at a big old church a couple years ago. Fantastic musician.

[walto]

Not only was he wonderful, but AFAIK nobody played anything like that before him, and it's pretty clear that nobody will ever play like that again. I feel fortunate to have seen him, too.

[Gerardo A]

A good interview with Leroy (PDF file download)

[LutherBlissett]

Sad news one more gr8t gone

Only saw once with Jarman + Equal Interest at Queen Elizabeth Hall back in 2000. Important player/composer on his instrument the violin, nice reunion with Rev. trio also few yrs back

RIP Leroy Jenkins

[Dennis Gonzalez]

I got this updated bio from Douglas Ewart:

Leroy Jenkins is renowned as a virtuoso violinist and for his compositions and operas which are an extraordinary bonding of a variety of sounds associated with the African American music tradition and European styles.

Throughout his long career, Jenkins never stopped experimenting. At Harvestworks Digital Art Center where he was Artist in Residence in 2005, he and Mary Griffin developed an interactive music/video instrument which allows Jenkins, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and the other musicians in Coincidents to manipulate multiple video tapes with their acoustic instruments and voices. Most recently, he assembled a world music improvisatory group — Jin Hi Kim (Komungo) Korea, Rmesh Misra (Sarangi) India, Yacorba Sissoko (Kora) Africa, Leroy Jenkins (Violin) USA. A recording of the group, made at an AACM concert will be released shortly.

In the last fifteen years, Jenkins has turned his attention to music/theater pieces: Fresh Faust, a rap opera was presented in workshop at the Institute of Creative Arts in Boston. The Negro Burial Ground, a cantata, was presented in workshop at the Kitchen Center in New York. A later work, The Three Willies, an operatic collaboration with Homer Jackson was presented at The Painted Bride in Philadelphia (1996), and at the Kitchen, NYC (2001). Coincidents an opera, with librettist Mary Griffin will receive its premiere in June at Roulette. Jenkins is developing two new operas: Bronzeville, a history of South Side Chicago in the 20s through 50s with Mary Griffin, and Minor Triad, a musical drama with composer/librettist, Carmen Moore.

Leroy Jenkins was born on March 11, 1932 and began his violin training as a child, studying with Professor O. W. Frederick at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Chicago. He studied clarinet, saxophone and bassoon under the direction of legendary Captain Walter Dyett at Du Sable High School in Chicago, and received a music scholarship to study classical violin with Bruce Hayden at Florida A&M University. He received a B.S. in Music Education in 1961. Immediately following graduation, he taught music in Alabama schools, and then in Chicago.

Classically trained, Jenkins was also influenced by the great jazz masters, and played saxophone and clarinet in a number of jazz ensembles, but his passion, from the age of eight, was the violin, and he found a way to meld his classical technique and his love of jazz when he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a pivotal Chicago organization which originated a vibrant new form of creative improvised music. Moving to Paris in 1969, Jenkins toured Europe with his first group: The Creative Construction Company of Chicago, with Anthony Braxton and Leo Smith. In 1970, he came to New York and formed another cooperative, The Revolutionary Ensemble, a trio of bass, (Sirone) violin, and drums (Jerome Cooper), which toured internationally to critical acclaim, and went on to record five albums. He also developed his solo compositions and premiered his first works in this format at a concert at the Washington Square Peace Church in Greenwich Village.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s Jenkins received major support for music composition with many grants and commissions for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and theater. During this period, in addition to touring as a soloist and with various instrumental groups under his leadership, his music was performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Albany Symphony, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Kronos Quartet, the Dessoff Choirs, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and the New Music Consort, among others.

In 1989 Jenkins was commissioned by Hans Werner Henze for the Munich Bienale New Music Theater Festival to write the opera/ballet, Mother Of Three Sons, choreographed and directed by Bill T. Jones. It premiered in Munich and was later staged by the New York City Opera, the Houston Opera, and was broadcast on German television. He received a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) “for the lyrical, intricately constructed river of jazz and opera”.

In 1998, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony performed and recorded Wonderlust, a work for chamber orchestra and two soloists and in the last six years Jenkins has performed at numerous festivals and venues here and in Europe including the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, California Institute for the Arts, the Contemporary Museum in New Orleans, the Chicago Jazz Festival, as well as international jazz festivals in Portugal, Sardinia, and Canada. Other recent projects have been a commissioned piece for tenor, baritone, and brass quartet which was performed at Merlin Hall as part of the World Music series in New York, in San Francisco and at North Florida State University.

His most recent touring group — Equal Interest, a trio with violin, (Jenkins), piano, (Myra Melford), and woodwinds (Joseph Jarman) — was formed in 1999. The British Arts Council commissioned its members to write pieces for a group of nine British musicians, and Equal Interest performed with these musicians on a ten-city tour of England.

Jenkins held residencies and guest professorships at many American universities including Oberlin, Bennington, Harvard, Brown, University of Michigan, Williams, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, and Duke. He was guest composer/ master teacher/performer at the Della Rosa of Portland, Tom Buckner’s Interpretations series in New York, the American Composers series at the Kennedy Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Atlanta Virtuoso, and the First American Violin Congress at the invitation of Sir Yehudi Menuhin.

He received numerous commissions and awards — from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation’s Multi Arts Production Fund among others, and was awarded a 2003 composition grant from the Fromm Foundation for Coincidents. In 2004 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jenkins also collaborated with dancer Felicia Norton and was commissioned by Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Series for collaborations with choreographers Molissa Fenley and Mark Dendy.

Jenkins served on the Board of Directors of Meet the Composer in New York and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and as Artistic Director and Board Member of Composers’ Forum. He has sat on many panels for music including the National Endowment, the Herb Alpert Foundation, The Bush Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council for the Arts. He placed numerous times in critics’ and readers’ polls in Downbeat and Jazz Magazine.

In groupings from solo to chamber orchestras, Jenkins has recorded 25 albums/ CD’s, nine of which have been reissued. Recent recordings include: Solo, a suite for solo violin and viola, Lovely Music (1999), Equal Interest, Omnitone (2000), The Revolutionary Ensemble, Mutable Music (2004), And Now, The Revolutionary Ensemble, Pi Recordings (2004), and The Art of Improvisation, Mutable Music (2006).

[Al in NYC]

Wow... I was just thinking about him today and now I read this. Sad, sad news. I loved his music from the first time I saw him in Ann Arbor many years ago. As many others have said here, he had such an individual sound, and a beautiful one as well. Myra Melford introduced me to him after an Equal Interest show at Vision Fest several years ago and in our brief talk I found him to be a sweet, funny, and very engaging man

[Dennis Gonzalez]

Some paragraphs about Leroy Jenkins:
[I][…] Early years (1932-1960)
Leroy Jenkins’ great-uncle Buck had come to Chicago under very different conditions from the fabled train ride of Louis Armstrong from New Orleans that has become the stuff of nostalgia. Like many migrants, Buck Jenkins lacked train fare, so one day in the 1920s he simply hopped a freight train from the little town of Prospect, Tennessee. After securing employment and housing, Uncle Buck earned enough money to send for Leroy's father Henry, who found steady work at "The Spot," a tavern at 43rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on Chicago's South Side. Henry Jenkins, who, as it happens, became acquainted with Richard Abrams’ father at The Spot, eventually married the boss’ Mississippi-born niece, and in 1932, Leroy was born in Chicago's Cook County Hospital, the public hospital that was the common birthplace of countless black Chicagoans. <#_edn1> The marriage ended in divorce, however, and Jenkins’ mother moved to 45th and Champlain.
If migrants to Chicago were hoping to escape from segregation, their disappointment had to be profound, as the 1920s and 1930s saw the developing stages of Chicago’s effective confinement of African-Americans to designated areas on the city's South Side and West Sides. The 1930 census revealed that two-thirds of all black Chicagoans lived in hypersegregated tracts that were at least ninety percent black.[ii] <#_edn2> Depression-era Bronzeville's once-spacious apartments and houses were now being radically subdivided to gather in the burgeoning black population. The young Leroy Jenkins, along with his sister, his mother, his grandmother, two aunts, and the occasional boarder, all lived in the same three-bedroom apartment.[iii] <#_edn3> The Depression hit black Chicagoans especially hard, and almost half of Chicago's 1930s black population was receiving some form of public relief.[iv] <#_edn4> After his parents’ divorce, as Leroy Jenkins recalls, "We were on welfare for a little while. We used to get free milk. They had a place where you could go and get your milk and butter and cheese."[v] <#_edn5>

[…] Musical beginnings

Many classical music events were also organized by black women's clubs such as the "Ritzy Matrons," of which Leroy Jenkins’ mother was a member in the 1940s.[vi] <#_edn6> In 1939 or 1940, Leroy Jenkins’ aunt, barely four years older than he was, brought home a boyfriend named Riley, who had brought a curious musical instrument with him. “He played the violin for me, a piece called "Czardas," the Hungarian dance by Victor Monti. It's a standard violin piece at recitals [sings difficult finger-busting passage]. I had never heard anything like that before. All I was hearing was Eckstine, Louis Jordan, Billie Holiday, The Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers.”
Young Leroy pleaded with his mother to get him a violin. Jenkins’ first instrument, a half-size, red-colored violin, came from Montgomery Wards, and cost $25, which his mother paid for on credit. Jenkins thought that his new instrument had "an awful sound. I almost gave it up, but Riley was around, and he was the star pupil. I could hear him and say, oh, it was me and not the violin. I figured I'd keep doing it and I'd sound like Riley.”

Jenkins’ mother, a devout churchgoer, regularly brought her son to St. Luke's Baptist Church, where the pianist was Ruth Jones, later known as Dinah Washington. Miss Jones accompanied the young boy in performances of Bach and Gounod, while herself being tutored by the great gospel singers, Sallie and Roberta Martin. Soon, Jenkins joined the church orchestra and the choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church, under the direction of Dr. O.W. Fredericks, Riley's teacher. "Fess," as Dr. Fredericks was known, became Jenkins’ first formal music teacher. Jenkins grew up under the baton of Dr. Fredericks, with his spouse, Miss Rita Love, at the piano, performing on the violin at church socials, teas and banquets, and often playing the music of black composers such as William Grant Still, Clarence Cameron White, and Will Marion Cook.[vii] <#_edn7>
[…]
Many of the musicians who extended the discoveries of bebop in Chicago learned important musical skills under the tenacious baton of DuSable High School’s legendary band director, “Captain” Walter Dyett. A multi-instrumentalist who played violin, banjo and piano, Dyett was celebrated far and wide for the pupils he had nurtured to success in the music world. Pianists Martha Davis and John Young, singers Dinah Washington and Nat "King" Cole, bassists Milt Hinton and Richard Davis, organist Dorothy Donegan, saxophonists Gene Ammons, Clifford Jordan, and John Gilmore--all of these and more studied under Dyett. Famous professional musicians performed with the students in Dyett’s high-school assemblies; Lionel Hampton hired the young phenom, saxophonist Johnny Griffin, right out of Dyett’s high school band.
As befitting his military title, Captain Dyett headed a relatively autocratic pedagogical regime. In particular, "Cap" was well known for his extreme irascibility. "I remember one time I fell asleep," said saxophonist Eddie Harris. "He kicked the chair out from under me, and I got up off the floor with my clarinet all sprawled everywhere!" The intensely committed Dyett would do just about anything to get the students to realize their potential. "I guess everybody has a Walter Dyett story," said Leroy Jenkins. "I even saw him cry one time. ‘Aw man [quavery voice], you're messing up the music, all you have to do is this…’” Jenkins chuckled. "When we saw Captain Dyett cry, we said, oh, we gotta do something about this, because we were used to this man cussing us out and carrying on.”[viii] <#_edn8> Later, Dyett would follow these students’ careers, even visiting them in New York.[ix] <#_edn9>
[…]
Prudently, black students like Leroy Jenkins pursued post-secondary education to obtain teaching credentials that qualified them for work as a grade school or high school music teacher. Jenkins went from DuSable High to the historically black Florida A&M University in Tallahassee on a bassoon scholarship, but soon switched back to violin. “I was studying from two great black violinists, Bruce Hayden, and Elwin Adams. Both probably, deep down in their hearts, disappointment killed them. These were bonafide players. The only reason why they weren't accepted was purely because of their color.”[x] <#_edn10>
[…] After the founding of the AACM, around 1966:

Back in 1950, Jenkins had obtained a scholarship to Florida A&M in the city of Tallahassee, playing in both the concert band (on saxophone and clarinet) and the high-stepping football band. He quickly found himself immersed in the social and musical life of the area, however: “Actually I wasn't doing anything but drinking and carousing, studying the violin and playing in blues bands.”[xi] <#_edn11> Moreover, Tallahassee was hardly a hotbed of musical experimentation. Jenkins found Miami a bit more hospitable, playing sessions on saxophone in Frenchtown and visiting area clubs and juke joints.
After receiving his advanced degree in 1961, Jenkins spent four years as a roving violin and viola instructor in Mobile, Alabama. He returned to Chicago around the summer of 1965, taking a job in the public schools. He had given up his other instruments to concentrate on the violin, and was developing a more or less conventional jazz violin repertoire when a set of chance occurrences sent him in a different direction. “My former violin instructor, Bruce Hayden, had come to Chicago,” recalled Jenkins in our interview. “He stayed at my house until he got his stuff together. He started seeking out work, and he got a gig playing with Muhal, somewhere. He came back and told me about it. He told me about a concert that night, and told me I should come, an organization called the AACM or something. So we went, Bruce and I.”
The concert, one of the earliest regular AACM events, presented Roscoe Mitchell's music at St. John's Grand Lodge, and featured Maurice McIntyre, Charles Clark, Malachi Favors, Alvin Fielder, and Thurman Barker. “Roscoe was way ahead, you know,” said Jenkins. “It wasn't anything about changes or bar lines, or even musical notes. After intermission, Bruce and I went out, because we felt so ignorant. For the first time, he asked me [whispering], man, what are they doing? Bruce was highly steeped in bebop. He couldn't understand it, so he didn't want anything to do with it. I was fascinated by it.” Jenkins, who knew Richard Abrams slightly, soon found himself taking part in an AACM rehearsal at Abraham Lincoln Center.
There was Kalaparusha [Maurice McIntyre], [Christopher] Gaddy, Charles Clark, Thurman Barker, Roscoe, Lester Lashley. Muhal was conducting, bringing us in, bringing us out. I thought it was Muhal's band, but really it was just Muhal's night to experiment with his ideas. He was doing a form of conduction, actually.[xii] <#_edn12> At first I didn't dig it, but I kept coming down there. I was curious. I thought to myself, these motherfuckers are crazy, and they were dead serious.
Jenkins slowly found himself drawn into this new music:
The atmosphere was free enough for you to do your thing, and nobody was putting it down. I didn't have to copy off Roscoe or Joseph or Muhal or anybody. I could just do my thing. It was different from what I had associated with jazz before. So I joined up, and after a while I changed my whole style on the violin.


Europe (1969-70)


The July-August edition of France's flagship magazine, Jazz, announced the early-June arrival in Paris of Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors, Lester Bowie, "and Mrs. Bowie (better known as a singer under the name of Fontella Bass),” as well as the immanent arrival, by the end of June, of Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, and Leo Smith.[xiii] <#_edn13> Leroy Jenkins, Leo Smith, and Smith's future spouse Kathy Sinclair, the sister of John Sinclair, landed in Le Havre, and headed directly for Paris, where Steve McCall and his family had been based for at least a year, perhaps even living at the American Center.
Like the Art Ensemble, the Paris debut of the Braxton-Smith-Jenkins-McCall quartet was a month-long stay at the Theatre du Lucernaire,[xiv] <#_edn14> which by now had become a showcase for the new music--"our Lincoln Center," as Leroy Jenkins put it.[xv] <#_edn15> The bracing, even breathtaking attention that their music received lifted the spirits of the AACM musicians in Paris, as they realized that their music was succeeding in an international arena. It was evident to concertgoers that the music of "l'école de Chicago” had broken sharply with the sustained high energy performances that characterized 1960s free jazz. Quick changes of mood were the rule, ranging from the reverent to the ludic. A quiet, sustained, “spiritual” texture offered by one musician might be rudely interrupted by an ah-ooh-gah horn or a field holler from another. A New Orleans-style brass fanfare would quickly be dunked in a roiling sea of tuned metal trash cans. An ironically demented fake-bebop theme could be cut up into a series of miniatures, punctuated by long silences and derisively terminated by a Marx Brothers raspberry.
No sound was excluded and no tradition was sacrosanct, and French audiences and the jazz press quickly fell in love with the ruptures and surprises. The audiences for the events sometimes approached rock-concert levels. In the wake of Woodstock and May 1968, enormous festivals such as Actuel and Chateauvallon, combining musics of all kinds, drew hundreds of thousands from around Europe in this pre-Schengen era of closed borders between European countries. AACM musicians found themselves sharing the bill with Frank Zappa, with an equal claim to audience affection.
As Leroy Jenkins summarized it, "Country boys from Chicago, we weren't used to that kind of thing."[xvi] <#_edn16>
[…]

Homecoming
Despite their successes, by 1971 most of the AACM expatriates had left Europe. Leroy Jenkins, Leo Smith, and Anthony Braxton were the first to depart, returning to Chicago in early 1970. It is impossible to generalize about the reasons for the departures; Leroy Jenkins saw it rather prosaically. "I didn't want to be in Paris because I couldn't speak the language," he explained. "I was fairly illiterate, and I didn't like the idea of that, so I thought I'd make it on back to America."[xvii] <#_edn17> […] For those who were returning from Europe, the thought of remaining to Chicago was, quite understandably, far from uppermost in their minds. As Jenkins related, “I just went back to collect my retirement money from the teaching job that I had, a couple of thousand. I figured I'd go to New York, because when I came back to Chicago I knew I wouldn't be able to go there any more. So I decided I'd go to New York, in February of 1970. Braxton and I came together. We drove up.”[xviii] <#_edn18>
[...]
John Stubblefield and drummer Phillip Wilson were already on hand when Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins returned from Europe in early 1970 to pursue an encounter with New York City. In a 1978 interview, Jenkins described his earliest days in New York:

We stayed downstairs at Ornette's Artist House, which at the time wasn't decorated. It was cold down there, where we slept. Ornette gave us a mattress but he didn't realize how cold it was. One night something happened and he came downstairs to wake us up. He said, “Wow, you cats better come upstairs.” We stayed there and that's when I went to the University of Ornette. He put the finishing touches on me. I spent three months up there, staying at his house, doing everything. Answering the door, helping him copy music, arguing about his harmolodic theory.[xix] <#_edn19>
The first wave of New York-based AACM musicians presented their own work in concert programs of both contemporary notated music and improvised music. In May of 1970, promoter Kunle Mwanga organized perhaps the first AACM concert in New York, at the Washington Square Methodist Church (Peace Church) in the West Village. Featured was the "Creative Construction Company,” consisting of Leroy Jenkins, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve McCall, Leo Smith, and Chicago-born bassist Richard Davis.[xx] <#_edn20>
Jenkins worked with Archie Shepp, whom he had met in Paris, and was also a participant in the Carla Bley/Paul Haines collaboration, Escalator Over The Hill, a kind of post-beat jazz opera that incorporated a highly diverse group of artists.[xxi] <#_edn21> The Jazz Composer's Orchestra workshop, formed by composer-pianist Carla Bley and trumpeter Mike Mantler in the wake of the demise of the Jazz Composers Guild, presented Jenkins and Smith in successive events at CAMI Hall.[xxii] <#_edn22>
The Revolutionary Ensemble, one of the signal groups of the period, was formed around this time, when Mwanga introduced Jenkins to bassist Sirone. The first concerts included drummer Frank Clayton, and when Chicagoan Jerome Cooper joined the group, the reformulated trio took off. The ensemble presented a concert at Ornette Coleman's Artist's House, located on Prince Street in New York City's Soho district. The review served as something of an introduction to the group, noting that it had been formed nearly two years prior. According to the review, the ambiance of Artists House included African décor and original paintings. The reviewer concluded that seeing the Revolutionary Ensemble "might teach you something horribly true about yourself."[xxiii] <#_edn23> Earlier that year, the group performed at the Public Theatre,[xxiv] <#_edn24> founded in 1967 by producer and entrepreneur Joseph Papp.
[…]

The new music of the AACM, BAG and the Californians was in the process of becoming widely influential. In a May 1977 article, Village Voice writer Gary Giddins sought "to get to the bottom of why an inner-city organization from the Midwest founded in 1965 should revitalize New York's music scene a decade later."
[…] Leroy on labels:
As Leroy Jenkins put it in a 1997 interview, however, these “labels” (in musician parlance) were flexible and not necessarily related to actual musical directions or content, but rather to the potential for obtaining work and commissions. “Since I didn’t seem to be welcome with so-called Jazz,” Jenkins reasoned, “I thought I would deal with ‘new music’...I don’t mind the labels; they can put the labels one right after the other; if it will get me work. But then, on the other hand, if it’s going to keep me from getting work, I don’t want to be put in that position.”[xxv] <#_edn25>

[…]
Following the recommendations of the 1977 caucuses, between 1978 and 1982 an AACM New York chapter began to take shape, including New York and East Coast-based musicians such as Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, Lester Bowie, Leroy Jenkins, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton, Kalaparusha, Chico Freeman, Frank Gordon, Steve McCall, Amina Claudine Myers, Leo Smith, John Stubblefield, and me.[xxvi] <#_edn26> In 1982 the New York Chapter had already begun presenting concerts, beginning with a two-day event at the Upper West Side theater, Symphony Space. After Federal certification of its non-profit tax status in 1985, the New York Chapter began presenting several concerts yearly, as budgets permitted in the far more expensive environment of Manhattan, including an ongoing concert season, first at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and subsequently at the Community Church of New York. The series also presented large-form notated works by Jenkins and others, performed by conductor and composer Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble.



Ultimately, the AACM’s gamble, and that of Leroy Jenkins, can be viewed as pointing the way toward a mobile, boundary-crossing experimentalism. led by a new kind of musician who works across genres, cultures, and traditions with fluidity, grace, discernment and trenchancy.

[ericdevin]

This one hits hard, very hard. As a younger listener (22) I have not seen a whole lot of live performances, but one I will never forget was the 2005 Vision Festival, with Leroy Jenkins and Felicia Norton. Both were dressed all in white, and Leroy played without an amplifier. The experience was liken to angels landing on earth, as the audience was pindrop silent. This is the first time that a musician whom I greatly admire and have seen perform in person has passed away, and it is really painful. Coincidentally enough, I had just purchased Space Minds... on the day of his passing, along with Zorn and Sharp string quartets. I don't ordinarily listen to much string music, and I feel that I was guided by his spirit and that of the violin in this instance, as I had gone into the store to buy a Melvins CD.

Here are two video clips, one with Norton and one solo:

http://www.location1.org/mediadb/artist.php#j

Love and light in this time of pain,
Eric

[Mike Schwartz]

I saw Myra Melford at Yoshi's last night.
She dedicated the performance in the memory of Jenkins.

I had a chance to speak with her after the show and thank her for the wonderful music and for the dedication. She reminded me that when she appeared on my radio program in November, the # I was calling in NY was to Leroy's home (as Melford now lives in CA), as she was doing a gig with Mr. Jenkins.

I asked if he seemed ill at the time, and she said there were comcerns as he was taking long rests, but didn't have a cough, and seemed generally OK.

She went on to say that the diagnosis for Lung Cancer came but 3 weeks ago, and took Mr. Jenkins this past week, as we all now know.

[Walt Davis]

A great musician and a sweet, gentle man in my two encounters.