A band mate of Roscoe Mitchell during his military service in the 1950s, Albert Ayler's famous "'Trane was the Father...Pharoah was the son...I am the Holy Ghost" is a terrifically mysterious slogan, though a demeaning remark to the rest of his peers.

Adhering to this Christian lineage, you might label Mitchell the Moses: a ground-floor member of AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and founder of a similar program, CAC (Creative Arts Collective), who took his experience and knowledge and, as an educator, led inner city Chicago youth to music with the Gospel of "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future" (Mitchell currently serves as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College). Or perhaps he's the Noah of this story, an oddball that performs Serialistic compositional techniques to a bebop audience, wearing bright African costumes and even louder face paint while bringing as many toy instruments and rattles as sax reeds to the gig.

This disc is a re-release � plus four bonus tracks � of music from Mitchell and the precursory members of Art Ensemble of Chicago (here in 1968 named The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble), the late Malachi Favors and Lester Bowie, and Afro-Arts Ensemble percussionist Robert Crowder. Ever the wonky trendsetters, the band begins with the solos, the first tracks featuring the respective language of each of the three AEC players. Favors groans, snarls, slaps, plucks, plunks, detunes and retunes, walks and sprints via contrabass on "Tutankhamen", offering a rich, near-seven-minute open-ended history lesson of the instrument. Mitchell initially weaves "TKHKE" in an etude-like ambience, acquiescing tender moonlit serenades a teenager would learn to win someone's heart. Smoothly, he moves into a slow chug of pitch/pause/pitch one octave up/repeat, augmenting tension with chomping squawks on the higher note. Wriggling passing tones to just the point where you think, "I could play this", Mitchell convulses into blinding runs and grinding sonic abnormalities. On "Jazz Death?", Bowie literally clears his throat and drops a few bars of military spirit before feigning a two-sided conversation/interview as performer and "Dave Flexingburgstein" of "Jism Magazine", the latter posing the question, "Is Jazz as we know it dead?" With that, he presents an adventure as equally misanthropic and gorgeous as his colleagues, jumping from soothing cool to tongued wah-wah-like filtering to breathy gasps, concluding with, "Well I guess that all depends on, uh, what you know", a farty trumpet exhalation and diabolical whispered laughter.

After the apropos straight-forward "Carefree (take 3)" and the heart-thumping blast of "Tatas-Matoes" (both absent from the original pressing), Crowder joins the trio for the main event, "Congliptuous / Old", a nineteen-minute work as raucous, bizarre, fey, and otherwise beautifully skewed as any AEC stamped material of their careers. A mix of myriad wind instruments (alto, soprano, bass sax, whistle, flutes etc.), gongs, microtonal zither strums, humming, shouts, crank sirens and everyone on "little instruments", a written description would eclipse this poetry to facts, figures and anecdotes, robbing it of its emotional brilliance, unsurpassed complexity, spirituality and personal interpretation. As Terry Martin said in the original liner notes, "The technical origins of this unity, which emerges from group sympathy and memory born of extensive and creative rehearsal, are beyond the scope of this brief note...the listener will find his own paths through the evolving texture of sounds, rhythm and melody." Well put.

However you want to bill or rank him in The Mythology of the Saxophone, Mitchell is a cogent figure in the jazz world: Congliptious (along with AEC's Urban Bushmen, Reese and the Smooth Ones and on and on) is a reason to amend Ayler's remarks.