jazz

Ars Nova Workshop's 40th anniversary celebration of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians kicks off in apt fashion, with multireedist Roscoe Mitchell's quartet featuring AACM co-founder and first president Muhal Richard Abrams. Mitchell's Sound was the first AACM recording, and served to introduce the Chicago-based organization's musical radicalism to the rest of the world. Featuring several musicians who would go on to form the core of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sound used the recent free-playing experiments of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane as a jumping-off point. But the AACM embraced a higher degree of freedom from, not just of, musicality, as embodied in the title of that first album. Exploring extremes of noise and space, and utilizing unusual instrumentation, they pushed the new jazz into undreamed-of abstraction, at the same time incorporating concepts from modern classical composition. The AACM encouraged an open-minded embrace of all things sonic that sees many of its members still innovating four decades on.

Sat., Oct. 8, 8 p.m., $10-$20, with Muhal Richard Abrams, International House Philadelphia, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6569.