By this time last week the calls had already piled up from Vermont and New Mexico, from Alabama and Quebec, and even from Switzerland: calls from fans of free-music improvisation who had heard, or read, or downloaded details about this weekend’s activities in Chicago. So when a sizable contingent of musicians arrive from Free Music Productions, Europe’s most respected collective of avant-garde improvisers; and when the subsequent storm of cross-cultural sound settles in over Chicago (their only stateside port of call); and when they finally join forces with a slew of Chicago compatriots–well, it would be unseemly to claim that nobody warned you.
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In new-music circles, FMP carries a resonance not unlike that of Chicago’s own Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Part production company, part record label, and part artistic think tank, FMP grew out of the short-lived New Artists Guild, conceived by saxophonist Peter Brotzmann as a loose cooperative of avant-gardists. After organizing a sort of “counter-festival” to a mainstream jazz event in Cologne in the summer of ’68, these musicians moved east, where they organized another series of concerts to oppose the Berlin Jazz Festival. Christened the “Total Music Meeting,” this event drew artists from Germany, Holland, and Britain, which are still the hot spots of European free jazz; it has recurred every year since, gradually evolving into a fully accepted adjunct to the Berlin festival–and a true mecca for free-jazz aficionados.
All of which gave Marguerite Horberg the idea of an FMP festival in Chicago. Horberg–proprietor of the currently nomadic HotHouse and founder of the Center for International Performance and Exhibition–received a call from Hans-Georg Knopp, director of the Goethe-Institut Chicago, asking if she was interested in presenting German artists. Having recently visited Germany, and having previously hosted both Brotzmann and Parker at the old HotHouse, Horberg proposed an FMP invasion; the Goethe-Institut provided monetary assistance and enlisted the efforts of the German American Arts Foundation.
