At a certain point in the mid-1960s—the exact date escapes him—pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, a lifelong resident of the South Side of Chicago, visited New York for the first time on a gig with saxophonist Eddie Harris at Harlem’s Club Barron. “New York suited my energy,” Abrams recalled. “Of course. But I was already in that sort of energy. I had no doubt that I could be in New York. No doubt at all.”

Doubt seems to be a concept foreign to Abrams, 76, who moved to New York permanently in 1975. In 1983, he established the New York chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, commonly known as the AACM, which launches its twenty-fourth concert season on May 11, 2007 at the Community Church of New York with a recital featuring Abrams’ quartet and a duo by Abrams with guitarist Brandon Ross.

The institutional pre-history of the AACM began in 1961, when Abrams and Harris joined a West Side trumpeter named Johnny Hines to organize an orchestra where local musicians could workshop their charts. By Harris’ recollection, over one hundred musicians of various ages and skill levels attended. Although it disbanded within a few months, Abrams decided to begin another orchestra, which he called the Experimental Band. He recruited younger musicians like Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, who were interested, as Abrams puts it, “in more original approaches to composing and performing music.”

Over the next few years, musicians such as Malachi Favors, Leroy Jenkins, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith and Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre entered the mix to participate in the adventure. A certain momentum developed with the Experimental Band as the nucleus and in 1965 Abrams, fellow pianist Jodie Christian, trumpeter Phil Cohran and drummer Steve McCall convened a meeting towards the purpose of forming a new musicians’ organization devoted to the production of original music with a collective spirit. Thus, the AACM was launched.

Under the organization’s auspices, Abrams mentored composer/instrumentalist/improvisers like Mitchell, Jarman, Braxton, Smith, Henry Threadgill and George Lewis in their nascent years. He also spawned an infrastructure within which each individual had autonomy to assimilate and process an enormous body of music from a broad spectrum of sources in a critical manner and gave them manpower with whom to workshop and develop their ideas while evolving their respective voices.

The AACM first hit New York in May 1970, when cultural activist Kunle Mwanga produced a concert at the Washington Square Methodist Church with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton (who had relocated from Chicago three months earlier), their AACM mates Abrams, Smith and McCall and bassist Richard Davis (also a South Sider). At the time, Abrams had recorded two albums of his own music—Levels and Degrees of Light (Delmark, 1967) and Young At Heart, Wise In Time (Delmark, 1969). Added to the mix by 1975 were Things To Come From Those Now Gone (Delmark, 1972) and solo piano sessions Afrisong (India Navigation, 1975) and Sightsong (Black Saint, 1975).

Once settled in New York, however, Abrams would record prolifically for the next two decades, with fifteen albums on Black Saint in addition to two dates for Novus, two for New World Countercurrents and one for UMO. You can’t pigeonhole his interests—in Abrams’ singular universe, elemental blues themes and warp speed post-bop structures with challenging intervals coexist comfortably with fully-scored symphonic works, string quartets, saxophone quartets, solo and duo piano music and speech-sound collage structures.

Abrams resists the idea that location factors into the content that emerges from his creative process. “What affected my output is the opportunity to record,” he says. “In Chicago, if an opportunity presented itself, I created something for the occasion. When I got here [NYC], there was no difference. I am always composing and practicing for myself. Actually, it’s more like studying than composing; I research and seek and analyze music—or sound, rather, because sound precedes music itself—and things come up. When a recording or something else comes along, I put some of those things together and it becomes a recording. Of course, in New York, I’m hearing more around me, but it doesn’t make me process things any differently. I’m still dealing with my individualism.”