Amina Claudine Myers: Keeping music open.

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. Educated young woman—smart, pretty, curious, musically gifted, a little shy—graduates from college and goes to a big city (Chicago), meets a guy (a musician), meets his friends, a creative group of likeminded fellows also passionate about music. She’s accepted into the group—and why not? She’s got the creds. She’s played the piano by ear since she was four years old—in churches, schools, and nightclubs—and her repertoire includes gospel, blues, r&b, classical, jazz. They’re an intimidating, opinionated bunch whose lofty goals (written into their charter) include: “To set an example of high moral standards for musicians and to uplift the public image of creative musicians.” In this crowd, with their progressive theories of composition, she feels naive, the country mouse with the urban cats. You can see it, can’t you? A Southern girl not fully aware of her own potential, in love, eager to belong and to contribute, and inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric—their egalitarian ideals and determination to create a musical utopia: a place to jam, yes, but also a source of jobs, learning, and a better quality of life in the slums of Chicago’s South Side.

She pays the paltry membership fee (three dollars) and the weekly dues (one dollar) and in return she accesses the inner realm of American musical ingenuity.

One of the co-founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) was Muhal Richard Abrams, who was recently named a 2010 NEA Jazz Master (“the nation’s highest honor in jazz”). A pianist and composer, Abrams founded the AACM school in 1967. Kind and strict in equal measure, he could run a music class like a military operation. Complicated charts and mind-bending theories trained the students to compose original material.

From a young age, Claudine Myers, our warm, sweet, eager Southern gal, possessed self-discipline. By age six, she was singing in churches (her own, Methodist, as well as Baptist) and by high school was forming and leading r&b and gospel groups. Some of her favorite singers: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Davis Sisters, Hank Williams. For a few years, her family relocated to Dallas but returned to Arkansas in the late ’50s—around the same time as the Central High crisis in Little Rock. Myers view of her home state may seem surprising: “In Arkansas we never felt inferior to white people. We wanted equality, but we were happy in our world.” She attended the historically black Philander Smith College, where she gained a BA in music education. During college, after playing piano in nightclubs on Saturday nights, she’d get up the next morning, no matter how tired, for church. But she wanted to see the world, so she moved to Chicago, where she taught in the public schools.

It must have been exciting for Myers to meet the AACM musicians and to join in the liberation of artistic tradition from well-worn paths. The music embodied freedom, learning from the past to break with it. Instruments were plucked from the local environment—a whistle, a bike horn, a hammer—and the sounds were strange and also weirdly familiar.

(Her first album, SONG FOR MOTHER E, features Myers on piano and organ as well as “giggle stick.” She’s accompanied by PHEEROAN akLAFF on drums, gong, and “little instruments.”)

She was jubilant (photographs show this). Just like rock & roll at the time, the music defined a generation (but just didn’t get the public adulation). Forget “jazz” because though the influences include Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, bebop, and hard-bop, you might be hard-pressed to call some of these experiments anything but noise, which the harsh critics did. In fact, there were debates over what to call it: The New Thing; Great Black Music; Free Jazz. Robert Palmer, the progressive journalist from Little Rock who was a music critic at the New York Times, took more than a shine to this daring, improvisational music and he singled out our Claudine (now renamed Amina by the musician boyfriend, Ajaramu, also from Arkansas) for her virtuosic skills and “charisma to burn,” claiming “this woman should be star.” But Myers was a natural collaborator (she played with Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, and others), with an “ability to mind melt,” as her colleague, George Lewis, the author of the definitive, fascinating book on the AACM, A POWER STRONGER THAN ITSELF, told me. “Über-empathy” is another word he used. She learned to balance the intersection of her relationship with Ajaramu and her professional life: “We were going together, and I’d be mad about some stuff. I learned that it’s about music, and to keep your personal business off the stage.”

Two albums released by Myers in the 1980s—SALUTES BESSIE SMITH and THE CIRCLE OF TIME, both wondrously expressive though quite different musically—manage to evoke thorny issues, like race, but with welcoming tones. THE CIRCLE OF TIME (all original Myers compositions) showcases her mastery of the keyboard, especially on the dynamic “Louisville” track.

One of her original compositions on the BESSIE SMITH album, “African Blues” (fourteen minutes plus, ample room to build vocal suspense), must be played loud because it is all vista—soaring, natural, and humanistic. I have listened to it on the treadmill, in the car, on my laptop, in bed with my cat, and it makes me feel tireless and hopeful. Her voice affects me the same way as Al Green’s: optimistically. She has said: “I try to feel good, so that I can be relaxed and let the Creator work through my hands. Just focus and let the spirit come through the music.”

As for “Dirty No-Gooder’s Blues”: What modern woman wouldn’t want to sing a song that pops the question, the one gals really want to address: Have you ever been in love with a man that was no good? Myers’s tribute to Bessie Smith is startling, if only because Myers doesn’t (even though I am confident she could) drown the original with her tremendous vocal pipes. On AMERICAN IDOL, for example, you don’t get good reviews for playing it safe with someone else’s song—you’ve gotta own it! But Myers is generous, her salute shows exceptional grace. It’s fun to listen to both versions—these ladies are restrained. Bessie slightly more melancholic, Amina slightly more sanguine. The go-to guide Allmusic.com says this of SALUTES BESSIE SMITH: “Vocal perfection and landmark recording for this keyboardist and singer. Desert island music.”

Why isn’t this woman a superstar? Perhaps she is another casualty of the category game, the market-driven need for a neat little catchphrase (not “avant-garde,” which, like “literary,” immediately signifies tiny audience). Collaboration, too, is a tricky thing. You give for the group (did I mention she played in Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra?) and you are all equals, but eventually someone emerges in the public eye because art needs heroes.

She’s played with countless musicians. Lester Bowie, Bill Laswell, Archie Shepp, James Blood Ulmer. Moved to NYC in 1976; traveled in Europe (generally more sympathetic to challenging music) in the 1980s. Most of the albums under her name were released in the 1980s, some better than others. Since the ’90s, she’s appeared on numerous albums with other musicians, albums with titles like EKSTASIS—an eyeball with wings on the cover—FUNKCRONOMICON, and SOUTH DELTA SPACE AGE. For an experimentalist, there is no room for laziness. She moved on: “After a while I started formulating things in my mind that I wanted to do, and that was when I split with Ajaramu. I said, I no longer want to do Ajaramu’s thing. I want to do my thing.” She’s created large-scale orchestral pieces (staged in a church) and composed music for off Broadway productions. She collaborated with Native American musician Jim Pepper on AFRO INDIAN BLUES (though iTunes doesn’t give her artist credit).

You can watch her on YouTube, singing “Dirty No-Gooder’s Blues,” her hair some sort of statement—both childlike exclamation (those two adorable puffs!) and sleek braided grownup—but you can see too how she isn’t some kind of center-stage-seeking show-off.

Myers clearly cherishes her experiences with the AACM. Even as one of the first female members, she says, “I felt that I belonged...and that I had something to say.” Early on, she didn’t want white people in the AACM, but she changed: “I was one of the ones that was against having somebody white in the organization. Whites were always having something. They always run everything, come in and take over our stuff, but this was something black that we had created, something of our own, and we should keep it black…. Today I have a different feeling. Music is open, and that’s what I look at now. There’s got to be a spiritual quality, regardless of what the color is.”

She married a Senegalese man, now deceased. Maybe it is marital love I hear in her “African Blues” masterpiece. A (nondenominational) spiritual fire burns inside her. She’s going strong at sixty-seven (the Amina Myers Trio performed this past weekend in New York City) and like the rest of us has tempered her outlook in some ways, about white folks and such, but she’s still grateful to the musicians who showed her to ignore the people who tell you there are rules for self-expression. Who tell you there is only one way to be a star. 

Photograph: Amina Claudine Myers at the Sons d'Hiver Festival, Paris, 2005.