We address the concurrent insertion and deletion of keys in binary almost balanced search trees (AVL trees). We show that this problem can be studied through the self-reorganization of distributed systems of processes controlled by local evolution rules in the line of the approach of Dijkstra and Scholten. This yields a simple and abstract presentation of the insertion and deletion mechanisms. In particular, we show that our approach encapsulates a number of previous attempts described in the literature. They can in fact be seen as ad hoc specializations of the nondeterministic evolution rules. This solves in a very general setting an old question raised by H.T. Kung and P.L. Lehman: where should rotations take place to rebalance arbitrary trees?