SOURCE: “Leon Forrest and the AACM: The Jazz Impulse and the Chicago Renaissance,” in Playing the Changes, University of Illinois Press, 1994, pp. 241-262.

In the following essay, Werner details the social and cultural background of Chicago contributing to the Chicago Renaissance and the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Leon Forrest's hometown of Chicago is in many ways the most paradoxical of American cities. By many measures the most segregated major American city (W. Wilson), Chicago nonetheless nurtured some of the most challenging, multiculturally inclusive black artists of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Influenced by the interracial political and cultural exchanges of what Robert Bone has labeled the “Chicago Renaissance” (1935-50), Chicago-based writers and musicians have felt little sense of contradiction between the vernacular and “high art” traditions of European-and African-American culture. Like Gwendolyn Brooks—whose life and work represent crucial links between the Chicago Renaissance and the generation of...