Amina Claudine Myers by George Lewis
Amina Claudine Myers is one of the major first-wave members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an experimental music collective that included Leo Smith, Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Thurman Barker, Henry Threadgill, and the future members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This group of young working-class artists of the 1960s barged into standard music histories by creating a hybrid of improvisation and composition that redefined the premises of experimental music-making. A virtuoso pianist and organist whose work is presented internationally and appears on scores of recordings, Myers draws upon her backgrounds in classical music and the music of the black church of her native rural South to create a recombinant sensibility within improvisation-imbued extended compositions. Her work is insistently post-genre at a moment when reinscriptive collage pretends to postmodern transgression.