For half a century now, The Art Ensemble Of Chicago have been a cartoonish presence in the usually austere world of avant-garde music. In concert, they turned free improvisation into a compelling pantomime – saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell might have vegetation growing from his hat; trumpeter Lester Bowie would wear a white lab coat; bassist Malachi Favors and drummer Don Moye would wear tribal body paint, while Joseph Jarman once came on stage wearing naught but 
a saxophone sling.

Between them, they’d play hundreds of instruments – from conch shells to gongs, from duck calls to bicycle bells, from squeaky toys to the giant bass saxophone – their playful improvisations punctuated by total silence and by ecstatic, thrashing dissonance. They rejected the category of ‘jazz’ and instead declared their output “Great Black Music: From Ancient To Future” – fittingly, the Art Ensemble dipped back in time to music that pre-dated jazz (jug bands, chain-gang hollers, antique blues, African religious rituals, baroque dances) and projected forward to an avant-garde music that defied category.

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The wildness that the band displayed in concert was, however, rather difficult to capture on LP. 1969’s punky, ritualistic Message To Our Folks is a good starting point for curious rock fans, but many of their early albums were rather scrappy recordings for French and American indie labels that never really captured their appeal. That was until this most Afrocentric of outfits were signed – to many people’s surprise – by the ‘whitest’ and most European of jazz labels, ECM.

It was actually a good fit for a band that, despite their roots in Chicago’s experimental scene, had developed strong links with the European avant-garde (they actually came into being while exiled in Paris in 1968). And Manfred Eicher’s German label reinvigorated the band, allowing them the time, space and budget to record in sonic detail. This mammoth, 21-disc boxset compiles everything that AEOC members have recorded for ECM over the last 40 years, from the four albums released between 1978 and 1984, to myriad projects that Bowie and Mitchell recorded with other heavyweight musicians, including Kenny Wheeler, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker and Muhal Richard Abrams.

The AEOC’s ECM debut, Nice Guys (1978), is a fine starting point. From the drunken swing of the title track, to the reggae-tinged “Ja”, to the Miles Davis tribute “Dreaming Of The Master”, this is a thoroughly accessible and confident selection, while the gloriously spooky “Folkus” shows how serene and atmospheric free improvisation can be. The 1980 album Full Force (featuring the Indian-tinged improvisations of “Magg Zelma” and the freewheeling Mingus tribute “Charlie M”) was followed by a contemporaneous double-album Urban Bushmen (the best document of their insane live shows); while The Third Decade, their final band album for ECM in 1984, lurches from ancient to modern, from trad jazz (“Walking In The Moonlight”) to brassy hip-hop (“Funky AECO”) via John Cage-style minimalism (“The Bell Piece”).

Just as interesting are the myriad spin-offs that Art Ensemble members have recorded for ECM. Lester Bowie’s first two ECM albums are a whimsical mix of funk, gospel, doo-wop, salsa and bebop, all the time using his impressive repertoire of smears, growls and whinnying squeals, while the two albums with his Brass Fantasy – 1985’s I Only Have Eyes For You and 1986’s Avant Pop – see him covering a series of unlikely pop songs, from Whitney Houston to Willie Nelson, from Fats Domino to the Dells, with a New Orleans-style marching band featuring Bob Stewart on tuba.

Bowie’s death in 1999 did rob the AEOC of its most gloriously unhinged member: 2001’s Tribute To Lester is poignant but rather more ascetic than previous Art Ensemble releases. And subsequent iterations of the band are dominated by the rather more astringent Roscoe Mitchell, whose more orchestral instincts are given full vent on his two albums with the Transatlantic Art Ensemble. 2007’s Composition/Improvisation Nos 1, 2 & 3 and 2008’s Boustrophedon see Mitchell and Minneapolis pianist Craig Taborn joined by a European outfit, led by circular-breathing saxophonist Evan Parker. There are lengthy improvisations, written-through chamber orchestral works for strings and woodwind, with some startling solos from the likes of Parker and flautist Neil Metcalfe.

Part of the Art Ensemble’s USP was to avoid pianos or guitars on their albums, so it’s surprising to hear their members in more orthodox jazz settings. New Directions, a 1978 Jack DeJohnette album featuring Bowie on trumpet and a fiery John Abercrombie on guitar, is a charged session where Bowie deploys his full battery of unusual effects over Abercrombie’s woozy chords, while 2015’s Made In Chicago is a compelling piece of improv. But still, those distinctive Art Ensemble qualities – fidgety, funny, funky and febrile – are present throughout.

The January 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with Jack White on the cover. Inside, White heads up our Review Of The Year – which also features the best new albums, archive releases, films and books of the last 12 months. Aside from White, there are exclusive interviews with Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Stephen Malkmus, Courtney Barnett, Low and Mélissa Laveaux. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best music of 2018.

When Rosali Middleman was writing songs for her second solo album, she lived in an apartment next to noisy railroad tracks. At first the sound of passing freights was deafening, especially when she was trying to work out melodies and lyrics. “I write very improvisationally and intuitively, and I record everything,” says the Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter. “I love the sound of trains and everything they represent, but it was right outside my bedroom window, this loud sound of screeching brakes.” While it disrupted her songwriting, eventually she grew to appreciate that unpredictable racket, which inspired, in a roundabout way, the chugging 
guitars and persistent rolling tempo of the psychedelic number “Rise To Fall”.

The song is a showcase for her nimble backing band, which includes members of The War On Drugs, Purling Hiss and other Philadelphia acts, but mostly it’s a showcase for Middleman herself, for her subtly inventive guitar playing, for her understated vocals, and for her elusive songwriting, which zeroes in on a lover so obsessively that it takes on the unstoppable power of a locomotive. “There’s no-one above you, no-one below,” she sings. “Feeling alarmed, feeling alarmed.” “Rise To Fall” reveals a singer-songwriter who gives ample time over to lengthy guitar jams, letting her songs sprawl beyond the words she’s written. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: perhaps Middleman is an instrumentalist first, an adventurous player who ratchets her jams to carefully constructed, yet still impressionistic songs.

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Trouble Anyway is only Middleman’s second album. Originally from Michigan, she went to college in Minnesota and worked as a dairy farmer in Vermont before moving to Philadelphia 12 years ago. Since then she has spent time in a number of local bands, first as one half of the duo Blood Like Mine and later as one-third of the power-punk trio the Long Hots and the improvisational supergroup Wandering Shade. Those various acts have allowed her to hone her chops in a range of roles: as a solo artist, as a supporting player, as a collaborator, as an improviser. All of that came to play on her solo debut, Out Of Love, which made Uncut’s list of top albums for 2016. Devised with Gerhardt Koerner of the Lilys, it featured a lo-fi, predominantly acoustic palette in which Middleman’s guitar playing could stretch out and take on different sounds and forms. The music was cerebral, but the songs were anything but. She wrung maximum emotion out of her lyrics, thanks to a voice that was both deadpan and soulful, vulnerable and determined. She came across as an artist permanently steeling herself against bad news.

Trouble Anyway amplifies all of those qualities. The arrangements are lusher and less lonely, more detailed and more open to improvisation. They sound spontaneous, as though these recordings capture only one iteration out of infinite possibilities. Nothing is settled on songs like the languid epic “Silver Eyes” or the starry-sky shuffle “Who’s To Say”. The music slips easily from urban indie-rock to country-tinged folk, from edges-blurred psychedelia to low-key torch balladry. Trouble Anyway ultimately sounds like a communal record, not the product of a lone artist but that of a musician surrounding herself with friends and deploying them like she would an effects pedal or a keyboard patch. Middleman duels with guitarists Paul Sukeena (Spacin’) and Mike Polizze (Purling Hiss) on “Lie To Me” and “Rise To Fall”, while Mary Lattimore adds dramatic flutters of harp to “If I Was Your Heart” and keyboards to “Dead And Gone”. Stitching everything together is a makeshift rhythm section featuring bassist Dan Provenzano of local noisemakers the Writhing Squares and drummer Nathan Bowles, best known as an American Primitive banjo player but also formerly a drummer in Steve Gunn’s touring band.

Of all the sounds and styles these players indulge, perhaps the dominant mode here is blues. Middleman is not a blues artist per se, and any influence from Howlin Wolf or Robert Johnson or Junior Kimbrough is indirect. Rather, her songs have the feel of blues, if not exactly the sound. She’s got trouble in mind, to quote Lightnin’ Hopkins. Indeed, Middleman writes probingly about sexual politics and the inability of men and women to truly connect – a popular subject of blues songs. “I’ll be half a woman to your half a man,” she sings over a parallax cluster of guitars on “Lie To Me”, “and I’ll keep the other half ’til you learn how to stand.” 
You could imagine Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith delivering those lines with a leer and a wink.

Trouble Anyway is not exactly a breakup record, but something a bit more elusive, a bit more unsettled. At times it sounds like a record of staying together when you know breaking up would be so much better, so much healthier. “The trouble I’ve found lying in your arms is the trouble I’d be troubled with anyway,” Middleman sings on the title track, as the guitars do the worrying and hand-wringing for her. By the time she gets to the final track, “Maybe I’m Right”, her perspective sounds hard won, the song quiet but the sentiments very loud: “Felt like self-destruction in the middle of the night,” she ponders. “Starting to question the path of a line. Maybe I’m right… Maybe I’m right.”

Rather than belting out these songs, Middleman deploys a deadpan that prizes subtle and microcosmic shifts in tone and intention. Like Aimee Mann, another singer-songwriter to whom she bears more than a passing resemblance, she understates her lyrics so that that they hit you harder; she makes you lean into these songs, listen a bit more carefully, carefully parse her phrasing and her words. And perhaps that’s another aspect of the blues in these songs, this sense of evoking a feeling just out of reach, either too intense or too enormous or too nebulous or simply too horrific to put into words with much accuracy. These are songs about emotions, but they are not necessarily emotional songs. “Tears they rolled away, cried a lake,” she confesses on opener “I Wanna Know”. “What am I today?/Cry a little longer.” “Cried a lake” is so succinct and evocative, pointing to a grief as large and as dangerous as any body of water in which you could drown. Another songwriter might have made that image the whole point of the song, but Middleman has the confidence to tuck it away into a corner of a verse, where it lies in wait for the listener.

Middleman sings “I Wanna Know” in a hush, as though she’s a safe distance from whatever made her cry a little longer in the first place. To her credit, however, she is never at a safe distance from her listeners. She makes these songs sound edgy in their immediacy, prickly in their intimacy, as disruptive as a passing train. Trouble Anyway announces the arrival of an artist who fits neatly into no category, but thrives in the inbetween.

The January 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with Jack White on the cover. Inside, White heads up our Review Of The Year – which also features the best new albums, archive releases, films and books of the last 12 months. Aside from White, there are exclusive interviews with Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Stephen Malkmus, Courtney Barnett, Low and Mélissa Laveaux. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best music of 2018.