1970 · Album
Certain Blacks
Recorded 1969 · Nessa Records · Produced by Charles Stepney
Voices in the Shadows, Colors in the Dark
The Art Ensemble strips jazz down to its rawest emotional components and builds something entirely their own.
Certain Blacks arrives as a startling statement of purpose, a record that announces the Art Ensemble of Chicago as something you haven't quite heard before. This is music operating in the margins and shadows of jazz tradition, pulling from spirituals, free improvisation, theatrical gesture, and pure sonic exploration without announcing which is which. There's a deliberate strangeness here that never feels precious or academic—it sounds like people making music because they have something to say that standard jazz vocabulary can't contain.
What makes this record distinct is its refusal to play the game. There's no walking bass line, no chord changes you can predict, no comfort zone. Instead, you get layered voices, unconventional percussion, intervals that shouldn't work but do, and a sense that every note was chosen because it felt true rather than because it fit a harmonic framework. The ensemble sound is intimate and unsettling in ways that earlier Chicago jazz records typically weren't. It's chamber music for the avant-garde, somehow both minimal and densely textured depending on the track. This isn't fusion, not yet, and it's barely jazz in the way most people use that word—it's something closer to a new language being developed in real time.
Certain Blacks isn't the easiest entry point into the Art Ensemble's work, and that's partly the point. But if you're curious about what happens when musicians decide to completely reimagine the possibilities of ensemble playing, this record rewards careful listening. It's a closed door that slowly opens the more you sit with it. The Art Ensemble would develop and refine these ideas in subsequent work, but this captures something raw and urgent that you can't quite get anywhere else.
