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'Poets of Action': The Saint Louis Black Artists' Group, 1968-1972 (Part 3-4)
While Paris would provide a congenial respite for BAG musicians, eventually they and their AACM compatriots migrated to New York City, where they came to dominate the influential "loft-jazz" scene of the mid-1970s. In this case also, the musicians eschewed the traditional club setting, taking advantage of a city government program that subsidized use of city-owned loft space for artistic purposes. Former BAG member Hamiett Bluiett says, "The critics who were going to the different halls where they were supposed to be were bored. They came downtown where we were playing in the different lofts, and they began jumping up and down." The New York members of BAG carved out a niche in the jazz scene. Three of them-Hemphill, Lake and Bluiett (along with David Murray of Berkeley, CA)-formed the World Saxophone Quartet, which The New York Times hailed as "probably the most protean and exciting new jazz band of the 1980s."
The artists, actors, dancers and musicians remaining in St. Louis did not fare as well in the subsequent period of grant cuts. In 1977 jazz critic Valerie Wilmer observed, "Sadly, BAG exists now only on a spiritual level. Its members continue to work together and exchange ideas, but the demise of the group was hastened by the collapse of their funding programme which coincided with the departure for Europe of their five leading members. Unlike the AACM, the younger members proved insufficiently mature to carry on the aims of BAG." St. Louis jazz was dealt another blow when, after the merger of the black and white musicians' unions (American Federation of Musicians Local 197 and Local 2) in the early 1970s, the black union's rehearsal hall was closed. But many of the participants always had seen BAG's demise as inevitable and felt that it had served its purpose during the years of its existence. "BAG was an evolutionary process, and so I never lamented the passing of BAG," says Elliott; "BAG was merely a seed that allowed so many of us to develop out into the world community of arts." By the time of BAG's demise, the influence of the collectives as models for other artists had grown, and critic John Litweiler observed that by 1975 "any number of music-producing cooperatives had appeared, some to thrive, others to disappear, from California to Connecticut and also in Europe."
CONCLUSION
How did St. Louis become, for a few short years, a crucible for such creative vitality and experimentation? Urbanist Peter Hall, in his study of creative milieux in European and American history, identifies several factors leading to periods of cultural innovation in urban settings. Among these is the material context: state of economy, mode of production, relationship between social classes, and so on; artists work "against the background to their life's experience, which is powerfully shaped by the state of the world they grow up in." Hall also asserts that marginality, due to ethnicity, gender, or class, can be key in a creative process nourished on constant interface with mainstream or establishment culture. In addition, "structural instability," or an ongoing shift in the organization of society leading to a genuine uncertainty about the future, is often a feature of urban creative milieux. In the St. Louis of the late '60s, we see these forces at work in interconnected ways: BAG members nourished their art from prevailing social, cultural and economic conditions and directed it back towards the same set of conditions; the artists drew from their experiences as a marginalized racial and occupational group; and BAG's artistic ferment was uniquely situated at a time of local and national "structural instability."
