The pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, who co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Photograph by Catherine McGann / Getty

One of the most important figures in American creative music, Muhal Richard Abrams, died peacefully at home last Sunday, at the age of eighty-seven. “Pianist/composer” will be the description most commonly ascribed to him, but Abrams was so much more: organizer, philosopher, visionary, motivator, teacher, and always, learner. His innovation was not about developing a specific sound or style but in cultivating a certain kind of creative ethos that nurtured and launched some of the most extraordinary music and musicians of the past fifty years.

Born in Chicago, in 1930, Abrams was raised in that city’s rich musical culture, soaking in influences across genres. A dedicated autodidact from a young age, he spent his formative years working the jazz clubs and R. & B. circuits in the city and throughout the region, but recognized that his interests did not necessarily fit in those contexts. In the early sixties, he began leading a rehearsal band in which young musicians could explore new music without the pressures of pending gigs, jam-session showboating, or commercial restraints. Soon dubbed the Experimental Band, this ensemble became the incubator for a burgeoning family of brilliant outsiders beginning to congregate around Abrams.

The model of a philosophically inclined, avant-garde composer and pianist leading an exploratory big band had a strong precedent in Chicago—the Afro-futurist prophet Sun Ra emerged from the same city only a decade before. But where Sun Ra ran an extremely tight (space)ship, with all the ensemble’s activity in service to the leader’s vision, Abrams explicitly encouraged a more collective journey—any member of the group could bring in music, so long as it was original. This dedication to originality and self-sufficiency grew past the rehearsal room and expanded into the formation of a new organization—in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.) was born.

The brilliance of the A.A.C.M.’s first generation of artists, and their importance to the creative practice of musicians worldwide in the ensuing decades, cannot be overstated—neither can Abrams’s role as the organization’s co-founder, president, guiding light, and spiritual center. A crucial characteristic of the early A.A.C.M. was that it was never about a style—rather, it was about a creative process of self-actualization and investigation, resulting in a breathtaking diversity of approaches to the generative balance of composition and improvisation. In most artistic revolutions, a community of practitioners defines a new template, and the individuals find their voices within it. In the A.A.C.M., the musicians’ responsibility was even greater—not just to develop a personal approach to navigate a given structure but to continually reimagine the structure itself. Thus, Anthony Braxton’s philosophical schematics could coexist alongside Amina Claudine Myers’s gospel-drenched soul, Lester Bowie’s pop appropriations could rub elbows with Roscoe Mitchell’s austere angularities. The work might involve narrative poetry or funk rhythms, homemade instruments or full orchestras, graphic scores or interpreted movements—but it always represented the intent of the composer and the agency of the performer; it always acknowledged the past, lived in the present, and looked to the future.

It is not easy to convince a crowd of iconoclastic geniuses to work together and share ideas, or to maintain the premise that the strength of a collective is in the radical individualism of its members. Yet when it works, it is something special; and for a few years in the late sixties on the South Side of Chicago, under Muhal Richard Abrams’s inspired and indispensable leadership, the magic held. While, inevitably, the various parties pursued their separate paths, the unbridled curiosity, competitive drive, monastic dedication, and uncompromising commitment nurtured during those years spurred decades of musical innovation—and continues to this day, as evidenced by much-deserved recent accolades such as Henry Threadgill’s Pulitzer Prize or Wadada Leo Smith’s sweep at the Downbeat’s Critics Poll.

In celebrating Abrams’s organizational genius, we must not forget his profound musical gifts. As a pianist, he eschewed the dominant styles of Bill Evans’s impressionism or Cecil Taylor’s expressivity, instead crafting a spiky yet subtle touch that always sounded in complete control—whether striding through block chords or striking touches of ethereal minimalism. His long, lean body would crouch over the instrument like a praying mantis ready to strike, yet remain calm, almost meditative, even when the music was at its most explosive.

His solo recordings remain touchstones of the form, from the opening half of his album “Young at Heart/Wise in Time,” from 1969, to his commanding live performance on 2007’s “Vision Towards Essence.” His small-ensemble recordings, from his 1967 début “Levels and Degrees of Light” onward, are consistently compelling, demonstrating in condensed form the beguiling compositional voice that attracted all those musicians to the Experimental Band years before. Many of his collaborations with his A.A.C.M. colleagues have become modern classics, from his propulsive contributions to the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Fanfare for the Warriors” (1974) and the joyful conversations on Anthony Braxton’s “Duets” (1976), to the more recent interplay with Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis on 2005’s “Streaming,” where all three masters improvise with patient, mature wisdom.

However, my personal favorites in Abrams’s discography remain the series of orchestra recordings he made on the Black Saint label throughout the eighties and nineties. Listen to “Hearinga”—the opening and title track from his 1989 masterpiece, “The Hearinga Suite.” You hear echoes of Abrams’s heroes like Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford, you hear the influence of his A.A.C.M. peers, but the sound is wholly his own. It opens with a low-brass fanfare into a march-like call and response with the horns, leading to a knotty melody played with an alien timbre of flute, muted trumpet, glockenspiel, and synthesizer that unwinds over sharp punctuations from the rest of the band. The melody slips into a vamp that opens up the rhythm and introduces new melodies, finally releasing into a questing trumpet improvisation—but drops back into the march-like patterns and lines stacked with beautiful awkwardness. The tenor saxophone and piano make succinct statements as the “jazz” feel reëmerges, but before it gets too comfortable the band stumbles back into the awkward stacks and the knotty melody reprises, but this time with the instrumentation of a classic jazz combo—trumpet/sax/trombone. Just when you think it’s finished, a coda of yearning lyricism comes forward for the final thirty seconds, worthy of Billy Strayhorn or Charles Mingus at their most bitterly romantic.

I first heard this composition as a teen-ager, and it was a life changer—within its tightly constructed five minutes it seemed an impossible number of ideas and transitions and personalities came spilling out. Like so many before me, I found in Muhal Richard Abrams a gateway into a realm of fresh possibility and discovery—a creative world I have happily spent my life exploring. But the deepest lesson came a few years later, when I met him in person for the first time. After he moved to New York, Abrams established an A.A.C.M. branch in the city, which hosted a concert series at a community church in midtown (which continues to this day). Sometime in the early nineties, I attended my first N.Y.C. A.A.C.M. concert—honestly, I don’t remember who was playing. What I do remember is that Abrams was selling tickets at the box office, and Amina Claudine Myers was handing out programs at the door. I was stunned to see my musical heroes engaged in such humble tasks, but it was a message I took to heart. You don’t wait for anybody to give you anything if you can do it yourself. You do what you have to do, with hospitality and grace, to make the music happen. You support your fellow-musicians, and your fellow-musicians will support you. That way, you can make your own art, on your own terms: beautiful and weird and uncompromising and dangerous and joyful and original. Creativity matters, community matters, and it’s worth fighting for.