In 1969, his music turned dramatically when he decided to go to meet African-American roots of black music. Thus he joined the avant-garde jazz group founded by her husband years ago, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, where he helped shape his singing a bit frantic rhythms that combo expressed in every performance. In the seventies and eighties, Fontella Bass alternated performances with the group of Lester Bowie, touring solo appearances with virtually every United States.

In the eighties he participated in the creation of the musical “From the Roots to the Source”, where he sang with such quality that even today is remembered as one show one of the best of his career in speaking with his mother, also a singer, Math Bass, her husband, Lester Bowie, the pianist Amina Nyers, alto sax, Arthur Blythe, the outstanding bassist, Malachi Favors and drummer Philip Wilson.

In 1992, Fontella Bass, it reappears in an album by one of the major groups of contemporary jazz’s most important avant-garde jazz in Chicago and was the “World Saxophone Quartet” and which includes, among other prominent musicians, saxophonist tenor, David Murray, and alto saxophonist, Oliver Lake. The album was titled “Breath of Life” and the critical and commercial success was extraordinary and also served to remind the world of jazz back to a magnificent black singer named Fontella Bass.