{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026294498381877023, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0056634304207119745, 'mean_word_length': 5.276649746192893, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. By Paul Steinbeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

October 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a remarkable achievement for any experimental music group, let alone a Black experimental music group formed in the South Side of Chicago. The quintet of trumpeter Lester Bowie, saxophonists RoscoeMitchell and Joseph Jarman, bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut, and percussionist Famoudou Don Moye has been the subject of several critical articles, and the band appears throughout George E. Lewis’s authoritative history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Black artistic collective that the Art Ensemble is affiliated with. Message to Our Folks is the first book-length account of the group and its compositions and performances. A singular study of the Art Ensemble is a formidable challenge considering the group’s fluency in multiple musical styles and their use of intermedia that included spoken word, physical movement, and theatrical sketches. As Steinbeck makes clear early on in his study, the intermingling of “music that could be alternately tranquil and raucous, mythic and political, humorous and intense” with theatrical elements are what drew audiences into a performance by the Art Ensemble (2). To bridge these diverse areas, Steinbeck focuses on “the Art Ensemble’s musical and social practices” (4). By this, he means that the musical performances and practices are shaped by the collective individualism of the group, and the members’ individual identities and approaches to music making are reflected in the performances of the group. Focusing on these two realms allows Steinbeck to create cohesion across a book that blends historical research, social contextualization, andmusical analysis. Although the book is organized chronologically, it is perhaps best to view the book as two distinct parts commingled across nine chapters. The introduction and first three chapters of Message to Our Folks present the biographies of the four original members of the group (Bowie, Favors, Jarman, andMitchell), detail how the four came to play with one another, discuss the genesis of the AACM, and provide historical and social context of post–World War II Chicago. Chapter Three, “The Art Ensemble of Paris,” presents an intriguing discussion of the Art Ensemble’s twelve-month residency in Paris from June 1969 to