Avant-garde music is supposed to make you feel primeval, indescribable emotions. While normal music explores emotions encountered in daily life, avant-garde music taps into a wider emotional spectrum.

The members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, trumpeter Lester Bowie, saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, bassist Malachi Favors and drummer Don Moyes, lived together in the late 1960s in house in Chicago house—where they rehearsed for 14 hours a day. They lived their music and expressed their emotions through it.

Their album “Fanfare for the Warriors” is intensely emotional: Jazz instruments shriek and squawk, and members use percussion instruments—like gongs and glockenspiels—to beat out odd polyrhythms (different rhythms played at the same time) within their pieces. All the members are skilled percussionists.

The Art Ensemble’s use of polyrhythms, incessant screeching and horn-blaring seems improvised, but their pieces are actually painstakingly orchestrated to seem spontaneous.

The album feels tribal. Many of the songs, like “Nonaah,” “Tnoona” and “Illistrum,” have an African flavor (as do their titles). The first track of the album, “Illistrum,” has the strongest tribal vibe in the album. Over gong blasts, cowbell clangs and harp twangs, a band member narrates a creation myth in which a made-up god named Odwalla leads the “people of the sun” out of a “gray haze.”

The piece “Fanfare For The Warriors” maintains a beautiful mourning theme. At first, cacophonous drums clatter over the theme, but as the drums fade out, the beauty of the song’s harmonies emerges. Roscoe Mitchell wails and screeches during his solo on the saxophone, evoking the savagery of war. This song, reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, commemorates soldiers with its melody and bemoans the injustice of death with its solos. The group, however, knows not to take its work too seriously. The members understand the ridiculousness of trying to convey an entire spectrum of emotions in their work, and thus offer humorous pieces in the album. Ironically, their humorous pieces are also the jazziest, reflecting the members’ initial skills as straight-up jazz players. “Barnyard Scuffle Shuffle” is a funky blues piece.

“Fanfare for the Warriors” is interesting, and taxing, to listen to—it’s an album you have to listen to multiple times before you get it. At first, they might sound like a bunch of weird guys from Chicago who don’t know how to play their instruments. But if you can make it past the first few listens, the music starts to move you.

The album ends with the band members coughing wildly, as if waking up from a drug-induced state, mocking the album’s trippy, tribal nature.