Madrid's annual International Jazz Festival got underway this past Tuesday, November 6th, with a sold-out concert at the Fernán Gómez Cultural Center by the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago. Today's program focusses on the Spanish capital's comprehensive festival that this year offers more than a hundred concerts, films, presentations, master classes and other events to jazz aficionados during the month of November. The music heard on the program is from the Art Ensemble of Chicago's first album with Munich-based ECM Records, "Nice Guys," released in 1979. Both the AEC and ECM celebrate their respective 50th anniversaries soon, and to mark this "double-occasion" ECM has just released a comprehensive 21-CD box set under the title "The Art Ensemble of Chicago and associated ensembles." We hear the title track from "Nice Guys" (by Roscoe Mitchell), as well as "597-59" (Joseph Jarman), "Cyp" (Roscoe Mitchell), "Dreaming of the Master" (Joseph Jarman), and "Ja" (Lester Bowie).
