Chicago’s influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Many of the organization’s surviving founders have spread out across the U.S., and its influence spans the globe, but our city’s importance to its formation is indisputable. Throughout the year, musicians from every chapter of the AACM’s history have been playing celebratory concerts around town, and the 2015 Chicago Jazz Festival will close with a performance of the Experimental Band, led by pianist and AACM cofounder Muhal Richard Abrams and featuring key early members such as Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Meyers, and George Lewis. At the DuSable Museum of African American History, the exhibit “Free at First: The Audacious Journey of the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians” runs through September 6. And the biggest AACM-related event of the year might be “The Freedom Principle,” which opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday and closes November 22.

Naomi Beckwith: There was always this kind of music around, mostly at these public festivals—there were some concerts, many on the south side. There were even some albums I knew; we knew Kahil El’Zabar’s music. But we had not heard of this organization called the AACM, even though we knew about the Art Ensemble.

We didn’t start with that narrative, mostly because it’s been told by George Lewis. The information is out there. The story that we wanted to tell more so was about a time where people could improvise with structures as much as they could improvise with the forms that they worked with, whether it be visual arts or sonic art.

I think this moment too, in history, or at least in this specific place on the south side of Chicago, was a moment where people were cross-fertilizing ideas. So Muhal [Richard Abrams] was painting, Roscoe Mitchell was painting, and they’re encouraged to take up these activities by visual artists, some of whom were in AfriCOBRA. And everyone felt this kind of freedom to experiment.

Even if the members of the AACM held on to historical ephemera, no one really told the definitive story until George [Lewis] did it. There’s no official history, and a lot of those guys are thinking about what comes next—with Roscoe [Mitchell], for example, there’s no sentimentality. They don’t go back and play their classic albums. They don’t revel in the past. Is that something you find in Chicago?

And there are multiple answers. Some of them are not so happy—we’ve talked about the Black Lives Matter movement, and that may be one of them. I still think many of us are trying to think through questions that the Black Arts Movement raised. What does it mean to be a citizen? You’ll see a lot of work in this exhibition riffing on this idea of citizenship and inclusivity. I think the very form of a collective brings that question to the forefront: “What does it mean to belong, in a microcosmic and a macrocosmic level?” I don’t think many folks were unfamiliar with the material, but interestingly enough, I don’t think it’s a show about the AACM and AfriCOBRA at this past moment and then the universe on the contemporary side. It’s really a show about the south side in the 60s and 70s and what kind of creative energy began to foam up there up there, and what did that creative energy do, and what were the pillars of that creative energy, and why in this contemporary moment do we still see an attraction to this material. I’m interested in these questions of utopic thinking; I’m interested in questions of multidisciplinary practice; I’m interested in questions of black cultural life in the past and how it plays out in the present.

Performances include the Douglas R. Ewart Clarinet Choir; Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things; Tomeka Reid & Silvia Bolognesi; Natural Information Society and Lisa Alvarado; Chad Kouri’s Jazz Movement Studies workshop; and Douglas R. Ewart, George Lewis, and Douglas Repetto’s unveiling of the installation Rio Negro II.

Sat 7/11, noon Museum of Contemporary Art 220 E. Chicagomcachicago.org 312-280-2660 Free (Clarinet Choir 7:30 PM, $10-$30) All ages