I’ve only been to Chicago once, to interview the metal band Disturbed for Alternative Press in the summer of 2002. But at the end of a day of hanging out with Disturbed at their drummer’s house in the suburbs, I made a pilgrimage to the Velvet Lounge, where I met saxophonist and club owner Fred Anderson and drummer Chad Taylor. Taylor was at the bar, Anderson behind it. I bought a CD — Anderson’s The Missing Link — and a T-shirt.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with jazz musicians from Chicago over the years: Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Jaimie Branch, Ken Vandermark, Tomeka Reid, Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Mike Reed, Rob Mazurek, Taylor, and more. And one of the things we’ve talked about is the stark and fundamental difference between Chicago and New York in terms of how musical community is structured.

New York, simply put, is a shark tank. “Scenes” emerge mostly due to geographic proximity: a bunch of musicians all live in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, or Harlem, or the Lower East Side, so they band together — they play on each other’s gigs, make records under one or another’s name, et cetera. But they are all also still competing with each other for gigs, for the attention of record labels, for sheer survival. If you are making it as a musician in New York, your neighbor is not.

There are exceptions to this rule. The loft jazz era of the late 1970s was one, the ongoing work of Arts For Art (creators of the Vision Festival) is another, the annual Winter Jazzfest is another. But overall, New York is for those who are out for themselves.

Chicago, on the other hand, seems from my outsider’s perspective like a much more community-oriented artistic environment. Musicians work together to create a sustainable ecosystem. There is a spirit of collective effort between clubs, record labels, and artists to help one another and create an audience for adventurous music. The city’s legendary independent labels — Delmark and Nessa in the 1960s, Thrill Jockey, Atavistic and Okka Disk in the ’90s, and International Anthem today — have quite literally chronicled the history of a community.

Here’s a concrete example: Chicago is the home of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1965 by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and Phil Cohran, the AACM has been active for 60 years and its members, past and present, include the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Nicole Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Kahil El’Zabar, Fred Anderson, and countless others. George Lewis’s book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music and Threadgill’s autobiography, Easily Slip Into Another World, provide a stunning sense of possibility.

Meanwhile, at roughly the same time that Abrams et al. were getting the AACM off the ground, Bill Dixon formed the Jazz Composers Guild in New York with Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Michael Mantler, Carla Bley, Sun Ra, Roswell Rudd and others. The intention was more or less to unionize in order to get better treatment from nightclub owners and better deals from record labels; in Dixon’s words, it was meant “as an alternative to the conditions of apathy and exploitation… Many musicians have been made so unstable that if they see their names in print a couple of times, they begin to believe, and try to convince you, that the Establishment isn’t really that bad.”

It lasted barely six months. Shepp had already signed a contract with Impulse! Records before the Guild even formed, and other members opted to leverage the organization’s name for publicity. You could say that New York musicians were simply temperamentally unsuited to collective effort, but you could also say that the city itself was designed to make such endeavors impossible.

The Bottle Tapes is a new 6CD set documenting the Empty Bottle Jazz & Improvised Music Series, a more or less weekly concert series put together by writer John Corbett and saxophonist/composer Ken Vandermark and held in a punk rock club for a decade, from 1996 to 2005. And in addition to being a stunning collection of performances, many by unique ensembles, it’s a document of that unique Chicago spirit, of people getting together week after week for a decade to create something larger than themselves. Not just a gig, but a scene, an artistic environment that continues to inspire, 20 years after it happened.

Corbett’s liner notes do a typically great job of telling the story. He argues that what they did wasn’t unique, just one turn of the historical wheel. “The ’90s is often discussed as a renaissance in Chicago creative music. It was that, in my estimation, but I’d prefer to situate it relative to other creative music upwellings in the city, which, in very rough terms, seem to occur every 30–40 years.” He mentions the 1920s, when Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and others were all living and working in the city; the rise of the AACM in the 1960s; and then, as he puts it, “By the early ’90s, Chicago was beginning to vibrate again, and that periodic volcano… was set to erupt.”

The Empty Bottle series wasn’t just about providing a place for Chicago musicians to play, though. It was also about establishing international connections. Artists from the Dutch, German, and Scandinavian scenes came to town to meet their American peers, so players like Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, Mats Gustafsson, Peter Brötzmann, Alexander von Schlippenbach and others are prominently represented alongside Ken Vandermark, Fred Anderson, Von Freeman, Hamid Drake, Wadada Leo Smith, and others, as well as performers from other parts of the US like LA’s Bobby Bradford and New Yorkers Milford Graves and the Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd Quartet.

What makes this set valuable is not just the vibrant energy coming through every performance, or the quality of the recordings (all courtesy of Malachi Ritscher, a local engineer and political activist who died by self-immolation in November 2006), but the fact that so many of these sets were by one-off combinations of players. You get Anderson with Drake and bassist Kent Kessler — the rhythm section of Vandermark’s DKV Trio — with the drummer on congas. You get Brötzmann with trombonist Paul Rutherford, Kessler, and drummer Nasheet Waits. You get Gustafsson with In Zenith (the trio of cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, trombonist/bassist Jeb Bishop, and drummer Michael Zerang) and later with Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore. You get Freeman with Mengelberg and Bennink, playing one of the wildest versions of Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” you’ll ever hear. You get saxophone wizard John Butcher dueling with electronic noise artist Kevin Drumm. You get Bradford with Anderson, bassist Harrison Bankhead, and Chad Taylor on drums.

There are also some performances by established groups, like Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet +1 and the Schlippenbach Trio (here joined by trombonist Conrad Bauer), the Chicago Underground Quartet, Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble, and the AALY Trio and DKV Trio teaming up onstage before the recording of their should-be-legendary collaborative album Double Or Nothing.

It’s worth pointing out that some of the performances preserved here are quite long. The Schlippenbach Trio piece is almost a whole CD by itself, running more than 55 minutes; the Chicago Tentet’s version of “Stone/Water” (different from the one issued on Okka Disk) lasts 41:16; the AALY/DKV track sprints by in a mere 23:15. But the amount of energy and creativity and sheer fun on display at all times makes it feel like no time has passed at all. If you’re at all the audience for this music, trust me, you’ll be captivated. And even if you’re not sure you’re the audience for this music, you’ll find something here that’ll inspire further investigation.

I hate to even bring up the cursed p-word, but one of the only smart things ever said about poptimism (I know! I know! I’m sorry!) is that it doesn’t mean “you are obligated to take pop seriously,” it means “there is good, interesting music being made everywhere, all the time, including on the pop charts, so if you can’t find anything to hold your attention, that’s a you problem.” Now, I am immune to pop music; it has no effect on me. “Catchy song” is my absolute least favorite musical form. But if you have truly open ears — if you are able to hear the good in stuff you did not believe yourself predisposed to like — dive into The Bottle Tapes.

Start with something like the Ken Vandermark/Nate McBride/Hamid Drake track embedded several paragraphs back, a medley of two Funkadelic tunes. Or the Bobby Bradford/Fred Anderson/Harrison Bankhead/Chad Taylor track just above, a mournful post-Ornette Coleman rubato ballad. Then just bounce around, seeing what catches your ear. Something will, I guarantee it.

In the liner notes, Corbett compares this set to other scene-documenting compilations like Wildflowers (which attempted to sum up the New York loft scene of the 1970s across five LPs) or the FMP triple-LP set For Example (which I reviewed a decade ago). The Bottle Tapes is longer than both of those put together, but it has a similar goal, and succeeds just as well. I’m thrilled to have all this amazing music available, and will be coming back to it often.

Want to read more? Leor Galil interviewed Corbett about the set for the Chicago Reader.