Like many other fans I’d assumed that the Art Ensemble had breathed their last with the retirement of Jarman and the death of Lester Bowie, their discography winding up with Coming Home Jamaica and the belatedly released collaboration with Hartmut Geerken, Zero Sun No Point. But lo and behold, 2003 saw two new albums from the group, in defiance of all the omens: on ECM, Tribute to Lester Bowie by the Mitchell-Favors-Moye version of the group, and this new disc on Pi. On The Meeting the AEOC’s lineup fills out again with the reintroduction of Jarman, although the disc’s title suggests that this may be a one-off meeting rather than a permanent reunion.

Of the 59 minutes of the album, the vast majority – 41 minutes – is turned over to four gentle, mostly unpulsed, collective percussion improvisations, ranging from the enormous “It’s the Sign of the Times” (19 minutes) to the short, rather inconclusive “The Trian to Io” (yes, that’s how it’s spelled here). The pieces are decorated, very sparsely, with flute, piccolo and recorder; at one point on “Wind and Drum” there’s even what sounds like a melodica quoting a fragment of Benny Goodman’s old standby “Goodbye.” 41 minutes of this kind of stuff is probably too much for any except the diehard AEOC nut, but nonetheless I found them quite enjoyable if approached in the right frame of mind: perhaps fans of meditative Cage compositions like Ryoanji would get most out of them. Of the three shorter, jazzier pieces, Jarman’s “Hail We Now Sing Joy” makes for an inauspiciously slapdash opening to the album; Mitchell’s two pieces are rather more like it – the ironized funk of “Tech Ritter and the Megabytes” and the title-track’s free-jazz uproar – althought they still come off as middleweight performances.

Consensus among AEOC fans has been that the ECM disc is the stronger of the two new releases. Hell, I think the ECM is the better disc and I haven’t even heard it. But if your hopes aren’t raised too high, The Meeting is a pleasing enough reminder that these guys are still around; becalmed and scrappy, it’s rather charming nonetheless. If you’ve followed them this far already, it’s worth a listen.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, December 2003