Picture a European concert hall in 1969 where the stage floor is covered by roughly 500 instruments, from saxophones and trumpets to bicycle horns, wind chimes, and birthday-party noisemakers, and the musicians walk out in theatrical costumes and face paint. This episode tells the story of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, from its roots in the AACM cooperative on Chicago's South Side and the 1966 Roscoe Mitchell Sextet with Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors, through the 1967 addition of Joseph Jarman and Philip Wilson, to a collective that has survived and evolved for more than half a century.

The conversation examines the group's extreme multi-instrumentalism, its philosophy of little instruments that flattened the hierarchy between a grand piano and a bicycle horn, and how losing drummer Philip Wilson to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band forced a ...