A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
ROSCOE MITCHELL (b. August 3, 1940): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, music theorist, conductor, ensemble leader, and teacher
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2015
VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE
JIMI HENDRIX
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
LAURA MVULA October 10-16
DIZZY GILLESPIE October 17-23 LESTER YOUNG October 24-30 TIA FULLER October 31-November 6 ROSCOE MITCHELL November 7-13
ROSCOE MITCHELL: VISIONARY SOUND SCIENTIST, GROUNDBREAKING IMPROVISOR, AND WORLD CLASS COMPOSER, 1961-PRESENT
ROSCOE MITCHELL
by Kofi Natambu The Panopticon Review
The
history of sound and the conscious (re)organization and structural
manipulation of its elemental dimensions (which we culturally and
socially designate and define as "music") is nothing less than the
history of our very existence on this planet and is thus an integral
part of the physical and metaphysical DNA of what constitutes our lives
and living in all its guises. Immersed in consciously wrestling with the
creative demands and environmental terrain of this sonic forcefield are
fearless and innovative musicians and composers who seek to not only
actively engage and register these sounds at the level of the aural (and
oral) aspects of absorbing and (re)producing its multivaried reality,
but creatively and intellectually challenge our conventional perceptions
and ideas of what the canonical histories and ritual traditions of
music making means to us and our various conceptions and understandings
of how we jointly experience and express this shared inheritance at both
the quotidian and cosmic levels of our human engagement with this
larger reality we call "nature."
It is in that broader and all
encompassing context that we encounter and experience the varying sounds
offered us by musicians and composers who have mastered the art of
critically and/or joyfully examining intricate nuances of these
histories and traditions in ways that simultaneously embrace and yet go
beyond known artistic genres and expressive styles into a new realm of
knowing and being that requires our sonic and textural connection to
'other aspects' of ourselves that we may have neglected or simply taken
for granted in the past. It is this gateway to our experience via sound
and its endless reverberations that such profound and deeply attentive
musicians and composers as Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) have made possible
while remaining both loyal to and openly challenging what we have been
told about what constitutes various musics throughout our known world.
This total commitment to the entire range of generic and stylistic
traditions in this world (from "Jazz" to "classical", "blues", "rhythm
and blues", "rock" and many other different "folk" and "spiritual"
forms). Thus what we find in Mitchell is a man and an artist who has
over the past 50 years(!) been and remains a major leading force in the
creative rise and expansion and influence of what presently constitutes
improvised and composed ensemble music on both a national and global
scale.
Roscoe
Mitchell, internationally renowned musician, composer, and innovator,
began his distinguished career in the spirited 1960s of Chicago,
Illinois. His role in the resurrection of long neglected woodwind
instruments of extreme register, his innovation as a solo woodwind
performer, his and his reassertion of the composer into what has
traditionally been an improvisational form have placed him at the
forefront of contemporary music for over four decades. A leader in the
field of avant-garde jazz and contemporary music, Mr. Mitchell is a
founding member of the world renowned Art Ensemble of Chicago, the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and the Trio
Space.
Mr. Mitchell has recorded 87 albums and has written over
250 compositions. His compositions range from classical to contemporary,
from wild and forceful free jazz to ornate chamber music. His
instrumental expertise includes the saxophone family, from the sopranino
to the bass saxophone; the recorder family, from sopranino to great
bass recorder; flute, piccolo, clarinet, and the transverse flute.
His
teaching credits include the University of Illinois, the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, the California Institute of the Arts, the AACM School
of Music, the Creative Music Studio, The New England Conservatory
Boston Masschusetts, University of Wisconsin Plattville, Wisconsin,
Oberlin College Ohio and numerous workshops and artists-in-residence
positions throughout the world. August 2007, Mr. Mitchell assumed the
Darius Milhaud Chair at Mills College, Oakland, California.
The subtle sounds of this saxophonist defy definition.
by Brian Morton November 15, 2007 The Nation
A
musician’s “voice” is not simply a metaphor. No two creative
instrumentalists ever sound quite alike. Even on the piano, the touch
and attack of Ashkenazy are immediately distinguishable from those of
Brendel or Gould. And so it is, right through the orchestra, even if it
takes a certain refinement of perception to tell one oboe soloist from
another.
The saxophone represents a special case. It is an instrument that,
for reasons of design and history, almost entirely depends on the
personality of the player. The peculiarities of its manufacture–the
saxophone family is all conical-bored and overblows at the octave–and
its emergence at a time when the basic language of the classical
instrumentarium was well established, bequeathed it a curiously marginal
status. Despite the enthusiasm of Hector Berlioz and occasional
appearances in the nineteenth-century orchestra, the saxophone’s
apparent destiny was to play a down-market role in vernacular music:
marching bands, pit orchestras, bal musette and, of course, jazz.
All instruments–Strads, Gazzelloni’s titanium flute–have “wolf
tones,” places on the instrument where the specific design or that
particular instrument’s history requires the player to alter technique
to keep it in pitch. The saxophone has nothing but. A basic scale played
on a tenor saxophone has less character than those same notes written
on a stave, and yet most jazz fans will identify the great saxophonists
from the shortest phrase or measure. Their voices are as distinctive as
the whorls and loops of a fingerprint, or the particular cadence and
timbre of a speaking voice.
Who would not immediately recognize Johnny Hodges, that high,
erotic wail that rose out of Duke Ellington’s ensembles; or Sonny
Rollins’s muscular street orator’s discourse; or Lester Young’s wounded
grace; or John Coltrane’s hard-toned intensity? The list goes on: Sidney
Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz, Paul
Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, Jan
Garbarek–all of them possessed of a rich idiolect. If Charlie Parker had
lost his passport, and he was erratic enough to do just that, a single
tone on his horn would have been enough to get him past immigration.
Among saxophonists, Roscoe Mitchell is an anomaly. Although he
is one of the most innovative and important of the current senior
generation, few could describe with any confidence what is distinctive
about Mitchell’s “voice” or reliably recognize it in any of its
multifarious contexts. Of course, that may be part of the problem.
Mitchell’s dogged commitment to experiment has led him into projects far
removed from the conventional jazz combo. Or it may be that, since he
has spent a large proportion of his career as part of the most
successful “avant-garde” jazz group of modern times, the Art Ensemble of
Chicago (AEC), we hear him only as part of an ensemble voice. Or it may
be that because of Mitchell’s dedication to multi-instrumentalism,
playing a full range of horns from the soprano to the bass saxophones,
as well as flutes and noncanonical instruments, we are liable to be
misled by an unfamiliar tonality or sound color. Yet Anthony Braxton,
another multi-instrumentalist with a very similar background and
philosophy, always sounds like himself whether playing alto saxophone,
the unfeasibly large contrabass or, indeed, any of the more exotic
varieties in between. The enigma is relatively easily resolved. Mitchell’s roots in jazz
are deep, but he is also profoundly versed in European art music, and
particularly the atonal music of the early twentieth century. In fact,
his interests in music seem to have no boundaries. Though he has worked
in free improvisation–hewing to no predetermined parameters and often
playing “little instruments” of ad hoc design–and though his recorded
and public work frequently alludes to the blues, field hollers, folk
narratives and even standard thirty-two-bar song structure, his real
interest lies in a little-understood nexus of two apparently
contradictory approaches to music. If anything can be read into the
trajectory of a recording career, it’s no accident that Mitchell’s first
record, released in 1966 on Delmark, is called Sound and that his latest, a return to the European ECM label, is Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2, & 3. We are not properly prepared to detect his “voice” if we listen
for it only in the overtones of his saxophones. To hear Mitchell, it’s
necessary to understand that his work is premised on improvisation as a
form of composition and that the usual sharp distinction between the two
processes has been suspended. His goal is to be a “super-musician” to
whom matters of style, form, instrumentality, even personality have
become irrelevant.
Roscoe Mitchell was born in Chicago in the summer of 1940. He
first took up the clarinet at the age of 12. While serving in the Army
in Germany, he studied with the first clarinet of the Heidelberg
Symphony and played in a band with tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler.
Returning to Chicago in 1961, Mitchell found himself in a scene in which
the old communitarian spirit had begun to acquire a new political edge,
sharpened on one side by the civil rights movement, on the other by the
simple contingency of making a living in a club scene where rule
changes had made larger group performance commercially unviable.
Mitchell was soon in contact with pianist and composer Muhal
Richard Abrams, a powerful catalyst on the Chicago scene. He had been
playing bebop with a group from Wilson College that included Braxton,
fellow saxophonist Henry Threadgill, bassist Malachi Favors and
saxophonist Joseph Jarman (the latter two being future AEC members).
From Abrams he got invaluable encouragement, not least to write as much
and in as many varied styles as possible. He began to work with the
pianist’s rehearsal group, the Experimental Band. Mitchell took from the
experience an understanding that the production of sound was, in
Western music, reserved for an extremely hierarchical group of
objects–pianos, violins, trumpets, kettle drums–when in fact sound, and
therefore music, could be produced by almost any means. Also, the
experience of playing in what was essentially a workshop allowed
Mitchell to reconsider the relationship between music-making in pure
form and public performance. The absence of an audience made
crowd-pleasing histrionics meaningless. It also made silence less
uncomfortable. These were ideas that had recently been explored by alto
saxophonist Ornette Coleman, a Texan maverick whose own struggle to be
heard had led him to explore the use of silence.
The opening track of Mitchell’s first recording was a tribute to “Ornette.” The music presented on Sound
was very different from that of the New York avant-garde, whose
signature features were intensity of expression and individualistic
soloing. By contrast, Sound seemed to arise from a collective
philosophy, alternating periods of dynamic playing with relative
silence, incorporating sonorities not usually associated with modern or
avant-garde jazz–cello, harmonica, recorder–as well as all the informal
instruments and toys deployed by group members.
By the time Sound was released, Mitchell was a member of
the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a
nonprofit body founded by Abrams with pianist Jodie Christian, drummer
Steve McCall and composer Phil Cohran. At a time when there was severe
economic pressure on players, it made surprisingly little difference how
unorthodox their work was: little work either way, beyond what was
happening under Abrams’s experimental umbrella.
The Mitchell sextet, which was the first AACM group to make a
record, evolved into the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble and subsequently
into the Art Ensemble, with a personnel including trumpeter Lester Bowie
and Malachi Favors on bass. Other sextet players moved on. Joseph
Jarman joined as a second saxophonist. Percussionist Alvin Fiedler was
briefly replaced by Phillip Wilson, but it was as a drummerless quartet
that the group left the United States for France in 1969.
The Art Ensemble of Chicago–the location was added to give the
group a more specific identity in Europe–was an immediate success there.
Perversely, it was easier in Europe to assert the African origins of
jazz, in the sense of privileging rhythm rather than harmony or even
melody, and in restoring a concept of music as social ritual. Though
Mitchell (and Bowie) seemed to stand somewhat apart from the group’s
more theatrical dimension–appearing onstage in colorful costumes and
face paint–the AEC’s stage show was in its way as definitive as that of
the Sun Ra Arkestra, and similarly deceptive. It was a clever stratagem,
with obvious audience appeal, but ironically it also allowed the
musicians to develop their advanced compositional ideas more
privately–behind the masks, as it were. At first the four members played
small percussion, thereby creating rhythmic backgrounds for the group
that were very different from the heavy, regular counts provided by a
swing or bebop drummer. But it was in France that the group met Don Moye
(later Famoudou), who joined as percussionist, thus completing the
familiar AEC lineup.
All the while, individual members continued to pursue creative
paths beyond the AEC. Jarman made two records for the Chicago-based
Delmark label, which had released Sound and later put out Mitchell records such as Hey Donald and Sound Songs (both 1994). Bowie began his solo recording career at the same time as Mitchell, with Numbers 1 & 2 on Nessa. This was the imprint that in 1977, six years after the AEC’s return from Europe, released Mitchell’s classic Nonaah, a series of performances with group members and others, also duos and saxophone solos similar to those on the earlier Solo Saxophone Concerts (Sackville,
1974). Here one finds Mitchell exploring extremes of tonality and
timbre, playing soprano, alto, tenor and bass saxophones on the earlier
disc, and on the later one in an ensemble setting that includes Anthony
Braxton on the impossibly pitched sopranino. At other times in his
recording career, Mitchell has also played baritone saxophone and the
now rarely used C-melody saxophone, an attempt to provide a horn in
concert pitch rather than the more familiar E flat and B flat of the
saxophone family. How securely Mitchell can be defined as an avant-garde artist is
open to question. To be sure, the music on the solo saxophone concerts
is radical and stripped down–Braxton is mistakenly given sole credit for
pioneering this area of inquiry with his 1968 For Alto–but the
non-AEC Mitchell discography is far more varied and tuneful than the
shorthand version might suggest. Alongside the more abstract-sounding
sets–Four Compositions, Two Improvisations, Solo x 3, Sound and Space Ensembles–it includes such delights as Snurdy McGurdyandHer Dancin’ Shoes,
which neither threaten nor deliver music of a fearsome sort; in fact,
no fewer than five Mitchell records include “song” or “dance” in their
titles, while his ECM solo debut in 1999 was Nine to Get Ready! The blue-chip European label was as logical a destination for a
composer of Mitchell’s Modernist tendencies as Delmark, Sackville and
Nessa had been for a player of his deeply rooted traditionalism. For a
large part of his career, he has been dependent on transatlantic
imprints, particularly the Italian Black Saint, to put out his work.
Returning to the United States in 1971, the AEC found itself in an
environment where jazz had been largely eclipsed by pop and rock, and
where the political tremors of the late ’60s had led to a substantial
backlash against black militancy and nationalism. Again, Mitchell’s and
his colleagues’ reaction was neither quietist nor compromised, but
neither was it a wholesale involvement with the political scene. In 1974
Mitchell moved to East Lansing, Michigan, where he also formed the
significantly named Creative Arts Collective and an associated group
called the Sound Ensemble. These were further steps on Mitchell’s long
journey toward composition based directly on the spontaneity of
improvised music.
The 1980s were divided between AEC duties and recordings for
Black Saint, which saw Mitchell working a sometimes precarious line
between advanced composition techniques and vernacular forms, a divide
in his work that sometimes blurred and confused his public profile.
Working in Michigan had made available to him the resources of Michigan
State University and particularly the music and performance schools.
Mitchell made contact with new-music composer-performers like
accordionist Pauline Oliveros, pioneer of Deep Listening, and the
vocalist Thomas Buckner. Oliveros’s use of an essentially vernacular
instrument to develop avant-garde ideas intrigued Mitchell, as did
Buckner’s confident appropriation of a huge range of singing styles,
canonical and noncanonical. Those lessons are beautifully expressed in
the 1999 Delmark album In Walked Buckner, dedicated to but not actually featuring the singer.
Mitchell and Buckner had, by this time, worked together very
fruitfully as Space, in which they were joined by multi-instrumentalist
Gerald Oshita, who used such unlikely horns as the Conn-o-sax and the
contrabass sarrusophone. For a musician as interested in the placement
of note choices as Mitchell was and is, the ability to work in proximity
to such extremes of pitch and with Buckner’s unconventional sounds was
extremely liberating. A still later group was called Note Factory, a
clear indication that for all the rhythmic democracy of the AEC,
Mitchell was increasingly thinking in terms of pitches and scales,
adapting the fast scalar improvisation that is so fitting for the
saxophone to more elaborate constructions. Typically, though, he has
tried to avoid imprisoning himself in vertical harmony or in any
approach that requires a strictly hierarchical understanding of pitches.
As recently as 2004, on the Mutable disc Solo 3, he released
improv/compositions that make use of a “percussion cage” that combines
“found” and real percussion instruments (and maybe name checks John Cage
as well).
The only area of contemporary music Mitchell did not seem to have
explored was the field of electronics. In that, he resembled the
somewhat younger English saxophonist Evan Parker, whose solo saxophone
explorations (mostly on soprano) were increasingly devoted to finding
overtone series and fields of great mathematical precision and
expressive intensity. Fifteen years ago, though, Parker began to explore
electro-acoustic approaches, partly through a brief collaboration with
Danish trio Ghost-in-the-Machine and subsequently through his own
Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, which has now released four records with ECM.
In the autumn of 2004, Parker and Mitchell came together in a
concert hall in Munich to record a grouping that involved members of the
Englishman’s ensemble–including bassist Barry Guy and violinist Philipp
Wachsmann–and members of Note Factory and others, under the ad hoc
title The Transatlantic Ensemble. The immediate feel of Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2, & 3 is
very much of a classical group, with strings, tymps and piano,
generating a sound-world that makes one think first of European art
music. Indeed, there is little about the longish opening track that
would lead one to feel that improvisation plays any substantial part in
this performance or that jazz is in any way part of its genetic make-up.
Intriguingly, the first inkling that this is not the case comes toward
the end of the short second section, when percussionists Tani Tabbal and
Paul Lytton engage in the first of several instrumental dialogues that
punctuate this remarkable record.
Mitchell plays soprano saxophone throughout, while Parker
deploys his tenor, yet what defines this music most clearly as the
American’s is not the sound of his horn but something about the way the
music organizes itself into periods of intense activity bracketed by
silence, duos breaking out of the ensemble in a spirit that veers
between conversation and contention and in contexts that are alternately
ordered and chaotic, or seemingly so. The sequence of “movements,” nine
in all, and the title reference to three parts don’t quite seem to
square unless one checks the sleeve frequently. That is why the title is
not given as Composition & Improvisation (as if a set of
themes and variations) but with a slash that more or less suspends any
fundamental distinction between the two. As with much of Mitchell’s
work, the delivery is mostly rather quiet and unemphatic, with a
tendency to dwell not just on exact pitchings but also on the precise
tone color of particular sounds. Pianist Craig Taborn’s role is
fascinating. At some moments, he seems to be articulating some
approximate tonal center for the music, some gravitational point of
reference that never quite manages to resist the centrifugal energy of
the strings and horns; at others, he is the archetypal
pianist-as-percussionist, banging out sharp attacks that are more
reminiscent of Cecil Taylor’s famous “eighty-eight tuned drums”
definition than most of the work lazily and misleadingly attributed to
Taylor’s influence.
The long movement “III” moves into something like “free jazz,”
but while there is considerable exhilaration in the playing, this is
arguably the least typical and least successful aspect of the
performance. After some more short sequences, there are two extended
movements (“VII/VIII”) in which the integration of elements seems more
complete though not subject to any discernible logic or determination.
The coda is deliciously ambiguous. Far from reaching a climax, the
sequence dissolves into a shimmer, as if some tiny subset of the whole
cosmological process has gone into reverse, solids turning to gas,
orbits no longer regular or fixed, location and velocity uncertain.
Nothing in the whole canon of twentieth-century Western art music
conveys so much satisfying mystery. Like most exploratory artists, Mitchell prefers the forward
glance to the retrospective and fears repeating himself. But even in
this most formally conceived of performances, he has managed to bring
together elements that have been part of his work from the beginning:
pure sound, sound that obeys or resists hierarchical organization,
rhythm as fundamental rather than embellishment, improvisation not as a
gone-in-the-air end in itself but as an inseparable element of the
composition process, composition as a dynamic rather than an ossifying
procedure, passion, cerebral abstraction, a sense that musical “meaning”
is always subject to slippage. Multi-instrumentalism has only enlarged
and enhanced his playing personality rather than obscured it; at base,
Mitchell’s only “instrument” is sound itself. Over the years, he has
followed a doggedly individual track, whether within the joyous
exuberance and discipline of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, out on his own
as a solo saxophonist on an instrument only ever meant to play low
accompaniments, as a song-based bandleader, as a “classical” composer,
whether playing sounds as dry and delicate as those he conjures from his
percussion cage or hollering a rap on “You Wastin’ My Time.”
These are the qualities that make him Roscoe
Mitchell, but still indefinable. One sympathizes with anyone charged
with pinning down in a few words what he sounds like, which is why more
than a few reference books and critical articles fall back on quick
formulations like “multi-instrumentalist” or “avant-garde” or “AACM
musician” or even “member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.” His “voice”
can’t be detected in a single saxophone phrase or timbre, but that is
not to say it can’t be found. It is present and utterly distinctive in
everything he has done over four decades.
Sco Knows In 1961 Roscoe Edward Mitchell left the U.S. Army after a three- year hitch and returned to his native city of Chicago, Illinois. He was 21 years old. During that same year the legendary John Coltrane left the Miles Davis band and recorded his first album on a brand new label called Impulse! This seminal recording was called Africa/Brass, and marked the real beginning of the famcd Coltrane quartet (Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Trane). Coltrane was 35, and even though he had recorded 25 albums as a “leader” of various groups before 1961, this was the year that he clearly emerged as a dominant force in American music. It was also in 1961 that his Atlantic recording “My Favorite Things” was released. The record was so popular that it made the charts in many areas of the country, and sold over 50,000 copies its first year—a phenomenal total for a “jazz” record. This classic Coltrane record received very heavy airplay throughout the country and turned an entire generation of musicians around with its sound. One of those musicians was Roscoe E. Mitchell, who was just beginning to, in his words, “take music seriously.”
ROSCOE MITCHELL IN 1968
1961 also marked the year that an ex-Ford assembly line worker and blues songwriter by the name of Berry Gordy, Jr., first made it big with a black owned recording company that he founded called Motown. The first major hit of this struggling new enterprise was a record called “Shop Around” by a 20-year-old singer/songwriter by the name of William “Smokey” Robinson and The Miracles had sold over one million records, and popular music in the U.S. would never be the same again. Back in Chicago, Mitchell and his fellow musicians and friends listened closely and played. Clearly an exciting new era had begun. But the creative and spiritual influences didn’t end there. There were other voices and sounds to contend with as well. These new sounds exploded on the consciousness of young, dynamic artists, who, like Mitchell, were searching for new ideas and values. Also like Mitchell they were unknown “local cats” learning their craft in bars, nightclubs, churches, community centers, basements and living rooms all over the black community. These young turks became the nucleus of a revolution in black creative music. This group of musicians: Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jack DeJohnette, Steve McCall, Scotty Holt, Fred Anderson, Billy Brimfield, etc., all later became renowned as innovative forces in contemporary music. But in 1961 everyone listened carefully to such masters as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, the Temptations,James Brown and B. B. King. SOUND was everyone and everywhere, and the intensity of the period swept everything before it--including Roscoe Mitchell. It was becoming increasingly clear with each new extraordinary voice that only those artists who continued to study and grow and LISTEN would ultimately be HEARD. And Roscoe had real BIG EARS.
Throughout the fiery 1960s, Mitchell and his colleagues absorbed and became an integral part of the newest developments in world music. An incredible period of activity and gestation of ideas and procedures took place. An extremely wide range of methodologies and systems were used, refined, manipulated, extended and abandoned. Formal elements introduced by artists as seemingly disparate in taste, sensibility and philosophy as Kartheinz Stockhausen, Jimi Hendrix, John Cage, Jackie McLean, Cecil Taylor, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Terry Riley, Ornette Coleman and Lamont Young were all considered grist in the creative mill of these visionaries.
In 1965 this group of black musicians decided to take the next step in their cultural and social evolution. In March of that year over 300 musicians came together to implement the move toward artistic independence and political self-determination. The name of the organization that was formed was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The members of this grouping included the core of the original Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble that in 1967 metamorphosized into the now world-famous Art Ensemble of Chicago.
From the very beginning all of the philosophical and technical values that currently characterizes Mitchell’s music were present. There was a deeply felt appreciation and understanding of the entire history of creative music, especially its rich swing, blues and bebop traditions. There’s an intellectually rigorous attention to structural detail and a telepathic perception of the intricate relationship between style and content in modern art. Mitchell is a painter of sound who uses his broad strokes to evoke a bright kaleidoscope of melodic and rhythmic colors. The canvas can be informed by collagistic elements or a severely minimalist pointillism. Mitchell also works as a sculptor of organized “harmonic” areas that create a lush landscape that is often juxtaposed to a cartoon-like whimsicality of improvised imagery. These images are derived from Mitchell’s encyclopedic knowledge of formal, stylistic and technical devices drawn from many different traditions in 20th century World Music. But the ironic thing is that he is not merely eclectic. All of these ideas and methods are subsumed under Mitchell’s uniquely prophetic vision. The fact that Mitchell, who has influenced the direction and activity of an entire generation of new musicians throughout the globe, is almost completely ignored by reviewers and “critics” in the United States shows how backward and uninformed the established critical community really is.
In Mitchell’s latest opus entitled Snurdy McGurdy and herDancin’ Shoes (dedicated to his two daughters Lisa and Atala), we witness a true giant of contemporary music fuse these concerns into a wide palette ofsound that is stunning in its conceptual depth and creative execution. The musicians who Mitchell recruited for this awesome task are especially suited for his purposes because they are not tied to any particular stylistic idiom. In fact, these musicians share Mitchell’s vision of an independently expressive music that embraces and extends thy myriad cultural and intellectual traditions that makes use of.
This flexibility and extensive experience in the many musics that have characterized American culture in the post-World War I period serves as both the metaphorical and literal focus for the work in Snurdy McGurdy For in this suite-like opus we find Mitchell still, in the highly perceptive words of Lawrence Kart, “jitterbugging with the artifacts in the imaginary museum.”’ That is, Mitchell has appropriated the “languages” of other distinct artistic idioms and played (improvised) with them in order to reveal the essences of his own conceptual and spiritual philosophies. In Mitchell’s world irony leads to clarity.
Thus, in composition like “Sing/Song,” “The Stomp and Far East Blues” and the title track, we find Roscoe calling on musical devices and resources from Bo Diddley and Louis Jordan, Traditional Japanese forms like the Kabuki, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, Albert Ayler, and lyricist-composers from the American popular song genre. But the fascinating feature of these compositional frameworks for improvisational communication is that the contexts that the ensemble has chosen for itself only serve to complement and enhance their own vision of the music. This is achieved with a high level of wit, dramatic force and instrumental virtuosity--three ever-present qualities in Mitchell’s art.
Elsewhere in this recording, particularly in pieces like “Round” and “March” (by Anthony Braxton), the ensemble draws on Mitchell’s highly original approaches to well-known “western” music forms. By accentuating the rhythmic contrasts peculiar to these rather conventional frameworks, and then overlaying them with broad melodic and tonal variations that leap and glide away (then thru) the fading form itself, Mitchell redefines the nature of the form. The result is what all innovators in the arts create: the foundation for a new aesthetic.
With Snurdy McCurdy, as in his brilliant work as a solo performer, and as an integral member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roscoe reminds us that the function and responsibility of all true “art” is to get us to see, feel and experience more than we are “accustomed” to perceiving and knowing. That it’s not enough to interpret and intellectualize about the possibilities of creative development, but to express them as well. In Mitchell’s music CHANGE is the password. Ask Snurdy McCurdy. Her dancin’ shoes will show you the way...
Roscoe
Mitchell is one of the most important composer-improvisers of our time
as well as a major musical thinker and conceptualist. His work has been
important to my thinking since I became aware of it, over 30 years ago.
He is certainly best known for his work with the Art Ensemble of
Chicago, but I have a special fascination for two of the records he has
released under his own name: Sound (Delmark, 1966) and Nonaah (Nessa,
1978). In addition to his mastery of the saxophone, he is an innovator
in the use of collage techniques, repetition, silence, noise, and the
AEC’s specialty “little instruments”: recorder, harmonica, whistle, and a
range of small percussives like gourds and bells. Mitchell, along with
his colleagues in the Chicago-based AACM (Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians) particularly Anthony Braxton and Leo
Smith, took the next step from the innovations of first-generation Free
Jazz (Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor. Albert Ayler). The paroxysm or
“ecstatic moment” that one finds in so much of early Free Jazz is
channeled into a music which follows the stream of consciousness through
a vastly different arc, one which relies much more on peaks and
valleys. Where and how did this group of composer-performers grasp the
necessity of this step? Although it has global implications, the jazz
mainstream has never truly embraced it. On the fringes, however, this
work has been extremely influential and I was delighted to have the
chance to ask Roscoe Mitchell some of the questions that his music has
raised for me.
Anthony
Coleman So, I just got to hear the rehearsal of your new piece, “The
Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City.” Where does the title come from? The
text is from Joseph Jarman, is that right?
Roscoe
Mitchell Yes, that’s correct, it’s from a poem he wrote. I became
interested in setting it to music after doing a performance with Joseph
reciting it back in the ’60s, A recording and videotape of that
performance was originally made by Channel Four, the English channel.
The videotape was later reissued by DIW/Art Ensemble.
AC
It’s been very good for me to go back and listen to your records. You
use radically different languages depending on projects. Some pieces are
almost minimalist, with phrase repetition, and other pieces come much
more clearly out of the jazz tradition. I’m thinking of the the Moers
Creative Orchestra . . .
PM
Well, that is true. All of these different aspects of music are great
and you don’t want to be excluded from any of them, so the best thing in
your studies is to look at all of these things. Talking about the Moers
Creative Orchestra music, one piece on that album is a swing piece,
there’s another one that is rather minimalist but that comes out of a
system of cards that I developed. I was doing a lot of workshops with
improvisers and I noticed that there were some common problems that most
of these ensembles would have. So I went about trying to create
something that would help people with these problems. The cards have
music written on them and each musician gets six cards that they can
arrange in any way that they want, at their own tempo, to create their
own improvisation. You actually score the improvisation, thereby
eliminating the musician having to come up with the material to play,
which is one of the problems I’ve had in playing with inexperienced
improvisers.
AC I noticed on Song For My Sister, you also have a piece that talks about the cards.
RM Yeah, that piece was also generated from the card catalogue.
AC
Would you talk a little bit more about the problems of inexperienced
improvisers? I played for a long time in John Zorn’s project Cobra,
that’s not about inexperienced improvisers, but about the kinds of
things improvisers do by rote. For example, improvisers tend to show
that they’re listening by imitating what the other person’s playing.
That can get to be an enormous cliché and in fact you can really show
that you’re listening to people by doing something radically different
from what they’re doing. Cobra sets up both situations.
RM
Well, you actually hit on one of the problems. You’re doing the phrase
and then someone else is coming up and doing it. That means that they’re
not really there in the moment. They’re waiting around to listen to see
what you’re doing. I would describe it like being behind on a written
piece of music—you really know your part, and I don’t really know mine,
so I’m kind of following and listening to see what you’re doing and
because of that I can’t really be with you. That was one of the problems
I wanted to correct, getting people to function as individuals inside
of the improvisation so that counterpoint is maintained, which is a very
important element in music. I also addressed the issue of people
leaving some space of rest in between what they’re doing. You wouldn’t
compose a piece that was a run-on sentence, but this is what a lot of
inexperienced improvisers do. I introduce complex rhythmic figures so
that everybody’s not always hitting on one all the time. You know, I
bring them in at different parts of the beat—all of these things that
you would have in a written piece of music.
AC
You mentioned silence, AACM brought the use of silence to the world of
black music or jazz as a very strong parameter. It’s something you and
[Anthony] Braxton and Leo [Smith] all share in your music. When I listen
to your record Sound, Braxton’s For Alto, and early Leo, the
connections are so obvious and very deep. You’ve mentioned the concerts
that you did together. Did you all talk about theories of silence or was
it just understood that you had arrived at this moment together?
RM
See, this is the difference between Chicago and New York. Musicians
really got together and rehearsed in Chicago, over a long period, on a
consistent basis. So all of these questions came up, and we were
constantly trying to figure out how the improvisation related to each
piece in the song. And we spent a lot of time developing improvisation
for a particular piece. If you were to write a piece of music, you might
have these instruments leading for a minute and then these over here
and so on, and then some silent, and some playing at one point and then
those instruments silent. So, it’s all those kinds of things. I feel
like if you want to be a good improviser you have to know how
composition works. Music is 50 percent sound and 50 percent silence. If
you sit down and listen to nothing but silence, it’s very intense. So,
when you interrupt that silence with a sound, then they start to work
together, depending on how you use the space. I’ve practiced it in lots
of different ways. A lot of younger improvisers will get into this
rhythm that doesn’t exist, that they feel somehow committed to, and just
pound away at that. I’ve found that these different card strategies can
move you out of that and move you into an area where things start to
become a bit more open.
AC Were you at all influenced by Cage?
RM
Oh, we used to have concerts with Cage. In the early days, Joseph
Jarman and John Cage would do performances together. See, this is the
thing that we’ve gotten away from. Back then, you’d have concerts with a
very wide palate musically; you were always listening to all these
different people. Now people get involved in these narrow fads and that
has really cut off a lot of their options, when in fact most of our
listeners are accustomed to being challenged on several levels.
AC
This may be a side question, but when you look at Cage’s statements on
black music or jazz, they’re very, very limited. Was he present at these
concerts?
RM Yeah, they were performing there. Though I wouldn’t call what they were doing jazz, either.
AC Right, but still, it should have given him some sort of idea that there were other possibilities in that language.
RM
The impression that I got was that they were meeting as improvisers,
and they were exploring from that end. I mean, John Cage would be hooked
up to different microphones on his throat and he’d drink something, and
so on. It didn’t really have any elements of jazz or rhythm in it.
AC
So much of what the AACM was about, and so much of what the Art
Ensemble was about was the distinctness of the personalities involved,
the counterpoint between the personalities. Do you feel any kind of
stylistic difference between your own music and the music that you’ve
done within the Art Ensemble?
RM
No. The way I see it, the Art Ensemble is like what you just said. It
was a band of individuals who would go out and explore different things
and bring in new ideas to the collective. It was a unit that studied
music all the time and was constantly exploring different ways of doing
music. Over the years, you develop this vocabulary that you can expand
and extend. I can go back now and look at some of those concepts in a
whole other kind of way that I couldn’t have done back then because I
didn’t have the knowledge or the language to be able to do that. For
instance, in the ’60s I heard these long lines at a rapid pace that
never stopped. I couldn’t put those lines together then because I
couldn’t circular breathe. But once I was able to, I could practice and
perfect them. With me, everything is a study. If I’ve done something
this way tonight, I’m trying to do that a little bit differently the
next night, because the element of music that interests me is the
exploration. I think I’ve probably said this before, but we’re living in
the era of the Super Musician now; this is what I’m trying to be.
AC So you want to be able to fit into all of these contexts equally, with equal strength, equal passion.
RM
Oh, that would be great. I can’t stand to hear somebody doing something
that I really like and then I don’t know how to do it. And that’s part
of the motivation.
AC What’s the thing you want to find out how to do now?
RM
So much, man. I need another life! I definitely want to go back to
working with the earlier instruments after I get off the road this time.
I’ve already set up a bunch of rehearsals. I was really starting to get
into the whole concept and improvisational aspect of it, playing with
recorders, the baroque flute . . .
AC Do you listen to a lot of Renaissance music?
RM
Oh yeah, definitely, and play it. We did a big concert in Madison where
I took some existing pieces that we had and brought Joe Kubera and
Thomas Buckner. Like I said, there’s a lot of stuff out there to learn.
My fascination with the instruments is that the sound is so incredible.
AC
I’m interested in all the different musical languages that you access.
But when I think about your music, there are certain patterns that
really come to me as your thing. If you look at Noonah, for example,
there’s an obsessiveness that you’re able to access that seems to be
yours. You don’t use it all the time, of course, but it’s in a certain
relation to early minimalism, you know, minimalism before it became fun.
(laughter)
RM
Right. You know, there are different types of minimalism too. There’s a
minimalism that deals with things rhythmically, there’s another type
that deals with very few notes. The piece I’m working on right now is
like that. It’s for this thing in Munich called Symposium in Munich, two
weeks of music, lectures, demonstrations with myself and Evan Parker as
the composers. We have a 12-piece ensemble and our concerts will be
recorded by ECM. What I’m interested in with this piece is that it’s
limited to a few notes but then when you put all these different rhythms
together, that makes things react in a very strange way, all of these
different sounds come out.
AC So the pitch field is set? How limited is it?
RM Three notes.
AC And then the rhythms are given? Or they are freely improvised?
RM
No, I’m writing them down. There’ll be improvisation with the piece,
but it’ll be on the improvisers to construct the improvisations
according to what they have experienced in the piece. And I’ll probably
suggest a few approaches for improvisation. There’ll be one section
where each player has three notes. And then maybe I’ll work up a section
where each player only has one note of the three, and then at the end
of that, the selected player or players would be asked to do an
improvisation with just that one note to see what they can really do
with that one note.
AC
I’m glad you still work in that way. It’s a part of your music that has
always meant a lot to me. From the record Sound to Nonaah.
RM
Well, it’s a constant study, what I find is that it just doesn’t stop.
If you really want to develop yourself as an improviser, you have to do
it that way. Sometimes you jump up there and can’t do any wrong, but
most of the time music is work.
AC
For sure. I was talking about the similarities between you and Leo and
Braxton, how they never worked with those repetitive phrases. This is a
kind of a personal question, but in the Art Ensemble did you ever find
that your obsessive way of working was not well received? It’s very
different from their music.
RM
Well, see that’s the thing about the Art Ensemble. Nobody tried to tell
anybody what to do. What I do is study extremes. So if you have the
obsessive, you also have things that are not so obsessive.
AC
But even in your bebop tunes, I’ve noticed sometimes, there’ll be a
cycling of a couple of pitches, almost Monkish, or maybe even more
connected to someone like Sonny Rollins’ playing, where a couple of
notes are sort of worried or turned around, like in “Song for Atala.”
RM
Oh, yeah, that’s the song I wrote for my daughter. That’s a little bit
different format. Instead of being 8-8-8, and a bridge, it is an A-A-B-A
but 16-16-8-16. A lot of my tunes have a twist in them like that. Like
the “Ninth Room” is 9-9-9-9-9, it’s nine measures. It is, I guess, just
trying to take something a little further or put a different twist on
it. Actually, different forms for things are created, and so you either
stick with that or you create yet another form.
AC
There’s something I noticed around the end of the ’70s, where the Art
Ensemble went from being more stream-of-consciousness, a big canvas
where one kind of stylistic thing flowed into another, and became more
like a catalogue. A Message to our Folks was a partitioned record from
earlier, but as the late ’70s came along discrete pieces seemed to
become the rule: the Roscoe piece, the Lester piece . . . How conscious
was that?
RM
I don’t know if it was a conscious thing. You know that as that era
approached, everything was changing. The Art Ensemble was one of a very
small number of groups that even survived the late ’70s. The music in
general changed, in some ways it got a little more conservative, but
thank God we’re coming to the end of that.
AC You think?
RM Yeah, I think we are, man.
AC I hope so. Do you see it from your touring?
RM
In the touring, from students asking me different questions . . . A lot
of them have gone to college, they come out and they’re disillusioned. A
young trumpet player that I’m playing with now, Corey Wilkes, he goes
out to sit in at a lot of jam sessions, the same thing that I used to do
when I was young, and he’s getting tired of it. Everybody’s up there
sounding the same or playing the same kind of a thing and it doesn’t
have any meaning because they don’t really know what they’re doing. I
mean it’s hard to think of a situation that doesn’t really exist anymore
and try to relate that to something that’s really happening. But you
can look at it in the sense of re-creation.
AC You think the idea of a jazz repertory orchestra is good thing?
RM Oh yeah, I think it is. But I don’t think it’s a good thing to say that they’re the only thing happening and nobody else is.
AC
But the jazz repertory orchestra brings up a lot of questions. Like
when you have the saxophone sound not being the right saxophone sound,
then it’s not really—
RM —It’s not right.
AC
But on the other hand, take an improviser, if they’re going to get
themselves to be able to play with the saxophone sound of a Johnny
Hodges, how creative can they be with it in terms of their own playing?
RM
It’s hard, because if you look at the real-life stories, I mean, Bird
used to listen to Lester Young. They don’t sound anything like each
other. What I’ve noticed about the masters of the music is that it’s
really music. It’s not mechanical in any sense of the word. They’re
hearing ideas and bringing them about based on their lifestyles. This is
what I think makes their music so important. I look at the saxophone as
one of the most versatile instruments there is. There are so many
people with so many different approaches to the saxophone; it’s a study.
So you study these different styles. You think about the tenor, there
are a lot of people to study there. It goes on and on. What I would say
to a musician is this: That’s there for you to study, you take that, and
then you bring your own thing to it, and that’s where your own message
comes from.
AC
Tell me a little about your approach to saxophone sound, especially on
the tenor. You have a unique, very particular sound on the tenor. I
could recognize you anywhere. Also on the alto, but on tenor you have
this way of approaching articulation where you really put it in the face
of the listener. I could say maybe it comes out of Rollins, but it’s
still very much your own thing. Sometimes almost consciously not
articulating. I know you’re a master of articulating. But sometimes you
use the same articulation with a lot of notes in a row.
RM
There I am at the extremes again. I’ll take a particular rhythm through
all of its courses. That way you really do get familiar with it. But
the tenor for me was problematic. I was always hearing it higher than
what it is because I come from alto. And then with the alto I’d be
trying to get a lower sound. But once I came to grips with what the
sound of the tenor really was I think then I started to advance a little
bit on it. If I’m playing the soprano, I’m trying to get it down low,
so it doesn’t sound irritating. Those higher instruments, there’s a
special skill in playing those to get them where they really sound warm.
Now I’m starting to get a sound on the tenor that I can rely on. And
that’s been a long time coming. What helped me with it was playing the
bass saxophone because I could approach it the other way, and that
helped put it in perspective.
AC Bass saxophone is really special.
RM Oh my God. I love it. It’s just so difficult to get around. And now, they make it so hard for you, like at the airports.
AC
(laughter) What about this new piece that we just heard in rehearsal?
It has a kind of tonal language that is surprising in a way. I guess I
don’t know some of your other music that goes in that particular
direction. It has something to do with the instruments, the way the
voice is underscored. It’s a very attractive tonal language with a lot
of diminished coloring. I’m curious about how you approached that.
Having heard some of your earlier orchestral music, not particularly for
symphony orchestra, but the Creative Orchestra music, it’s surprising.
RM
What I’ve found working with text is to a certain degree the text
dictates how the music should be. You can’t take a sad song and write a
bunch of major stuff around it, so a lot of the time a text will inspire
the way I approach it musically.
AC Have you written a lot of pieces that use musical language in this way?
RM
For orchestra I have Variations and Sketches from the Bamboo Terrace
and Fallen Heroes. Those are the largest works. But a lot of times the
musical pieces develop over a long period. If you look at Variations and
Sketches from the Bamboo Terrace, it started out as a piece for the
trio space, Thomas Buckner, voice, Gerald Oshita, and myself on
woodwinds. It eventually developed into a chamber orchestra piece that
incorporated improvisation inside of it. A lot of my works start off
with an initial idea that I may decide to continue later. After hearing
the improvisation, I was inspired to extend and write some of it out. It
has two parts for soloists in it, one for bass, which was inspired by
an improvisational solo that Mel Graves played on this piece, and it
also has a rather extended, written-out part for the violin. I wrote
that after I wrote the bass solo, just in terms of the way I wanted to
lay the piece out. It’s the voice, which is featured in “Variation
Number 1” and then you move into the second part, which is “Sketches,”
that features a solo for bass and a solo for violin, and then the last
part is “Variations Number 2” which features the voice again.
AC
I want to talk a little bit about the Note Factory. I’ve seen the Note
Factory in concert a couple of times, I’ve heard the records, and its
interesting, when you were talking about the Super Musician of
today—people like Craig Taborn, Vijay Ayer, these are really the prime
examples of what you’re describing.
RM
Well, I would say that the Super Musician is concerned with the study
of music, wherever it takes him. The Super Musician is someone that is
able to move freely in and out of several musical genres. And that
incorporates a lot. I see the Super Musician as someone who not only
plays with an ensemble but who also does solo concerts. You have to know
how to do that on your own and it helps you because it really teaches
you how to function individually.
AC
But if I think about the musicians of the ’70s, who were Super
Musicians in their own way, but more quirky in a sense, they had one
thing that they could do fantastically. Jarman is a genius, but I would
never say that he was a Super Musician in the terms that you were
talking about. His limitations, like some of the early greats such as
Johnny Dodds or King Oliver, were so much a part of what made him who he
was. If you listen to the early ’70s players, there was always a big
edge on the sound. I find I’m not as drawn in by the Super Musician’s
sound today as I have been by some people who maybe didn’t have as big a
vocabulary.
RM
Well, I think that’s what draws you in, the sound. I certainly get
drawn in by the sound. If I hear Johnny Griffin, it’s the sound. If I
hear Sonny Rollins, I’m drawn in. It’s the sound.
AC
I’ve played with Gerald Cleaver, Craig Taborn. They have the ability to
leap between the mainstream and the avant-garde with no trouble.
RM Yeah, I agree. But it’s still a long road. At some point I’m going to do a record of classical flute.
AC What repertoire would you want to play?
RM
Well, I like all the great composers, like Bach and Beethoven. And I do
concerts where I perform their music. I have a trio called the Nonaah
trio for flute, bassoon, and piano that performs concerts regularly here
in Madison.
AC Who’s the pianist?
RM
Jim Erickson. And Willie Walters is the bassoonist. I’ve got a piece
that I’m working on right now with a composer from Puerto Rico named
William Ortiz for flute and guitar. Before I was on tour, Jaime
Guiscafre and I were working on it rather consistently. William sent us
the piece because he heard this recording of Jaime’s where I’m playing
flute on some of the pieces, bossa novas, sambas and stuff like that,
flute and guitar and so on. There’s a lot out there that I’m fascinated
by. I figured the only way that you can really learn the flute is by
taking it through the standard repertory to avoid becoming a saxophone
player that just plays the flute on the side.
AC
One of the most interesting things I’ve ever heard was when I asked
John Zorn whether he considered himself a jazz musician. He said,
“Listen, I play the classical music of the saxophone. And the classical
music of the saxophone is Charlie Parker, Lester Young. If you learn the
classical repertoire of the flute you have to learn Bach and so on, if
you want to learn the classical music of the saxophone, it’s not going
to be Jacques Ibert.” That’s not what has established the saxophone as a
language.
RM But see, like, I’m interested also in Jacques Ibert. (laughter) I mean, all the tonguing and stuff in there, man.
AC Marcel Mule, you interested in Marcel Mule records?
RM Definitely. And Rudy Wiedoff.
AC Rudy Wiedoff is a very special case. Chicago also, right?
RM
That’s right. Rudy Wiedoff had this tonguing thing happening. I have
all his books. These pieces where he’s got the saxophone laughing. I
love the saxophone, anybody that’s playing. I mean, I’m not crazy, I
know whether or not somebody’s playing the saxophone!
AC
Those guys were, definitely. I mean Lester Young adored Frankie
Trumbauer. Whatever else you can say about them, they’re definitely
playing the saxophone.
Roscoe Mitchell. Images: Roscoe Mitchell. Photos: Joseph Blough. Courtesy of the photographer.
In his 1963 essay "Jazz and the White Critic," Amiri Baraka (then Leroi
Jones) writes, "The New Thing, as recent jazz is called, is a reaction
to the hard bop-funk-groove-soul camp, which itself came into being in
protest against the squelching of most of the blues elements in cool and
progressive jazz. Funk (groove, soul) has become as formal and clichéd
as cool or swing, and opportunities for imaginative expression have
dwindled almost to nothing."
In today's "almost to nothing"
post-everything musical wasteland, there is a persistent dwindling yet
again. So much musical freedom has given way to downloaded snippets and
the time restrictions of YouTube videos. Even our old popular rebel
friends, hip-hop and punk rock, have lost their teeth to corporate bling
or easy-bake obscurity. Improvisation, experimentation, and innovation
are still so hard to come by that I can't help but wonder — don't we
need a new thing?
The "New Thing" that Baraka defends in his
essay is now the mainstay of a modern, and still thriving, jazz movement
that included the likes of Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Today you can find
it in the sounds of musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Roscoe
Mitchell.
In
1965, Mitchell helped found the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM). His 1966 album Sound (Delmark) is heralded by
many as a milestone that helped usher in "The New Thing." Along with
Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and others,
Mitchell became a founding member of The Art Ensemble of Chicago in the
late 1960s. He's since continued to explore the fringes of avant-garde
jazz, noise, classical, folk, and world music to create hybrid
compositions that mesmerize and provoke.
This week, on Martin
Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Yoshi's is inviting Mitchell to join Baraka,
the author of more than 40 books, poet icon, revolutionary activist,
and father of Afrosurreal Expressionism.
Baraka is renowned as
the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s, just as
Mitchell is revered as the founder of the AACM in Chicago around the
same time. Both men have a reputation for the type of work regimens and
standards of excellence that produce results. Baraka is a master
performer and reader. Mitchell is a master musician who, along with
saxophone, plays clarinet, flute, piccolo, oboe, and many handmade
"little instruments" that create ethereal, and eerily familiar, sounds.
In short, having these two men on stage doing their thing is like having
more than 100 years of the radical avant-garde blowing fire and ice in
your face. You'll like it. Trust me.
The
idea that American music never fully explored "The New Thing" when it
emerged nearly 50 years ago is slowly coming to light, thanks to Soul
Jazz's 2004 compilation New Thing! and a recent resurgence of interest
in — and reissuing of — works by Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, and George
Lewis. It leaves me to wonder: is the old "New Thing" just the new "New
Thing" we've been waiting for? AMIRI BARAKA AND ROSCOE MITCHELL
In 2010 Chicago's venerable Delmark Records
purchased the avant-garde catalog of the moribund Canadian jazz imprint
Sackville Records, which was formed in 1968 by Bill Smith and John
Norris. In general, the former, who also edited and published the jazz
magazine Coda, was
responsible for the label's free-jazz offerings, while the latter
focused on more traditional sounds. Delmark ended up buying that part of
the catalog last year. By 2011 Delmark was distributing the remaining
Sackville avant-garde catalog, promising to eventually issue previously
unreleased material. That promise came true last month when Delmark
released Live at "A Space" 1975,
a fantastic live recording by the Roscoe Mitchell Quartet. That title
has been previously issued both on vinyl and CD, but the new Delmark
release adds on four previously unreleased tracks from that concert,
adding another 20 or so minutes to the album.
It's tempting to say that Mitchell, a founding member of
the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was at the height of his creative peak when
this album was made, but few improvisers and composers have maintained
the creative drive for as long as Mitchell, who proved that he's still
an indefatigable force when he played a duet concert
with Mike Reed at Constellation in April. For this date Detroit
guitarist Spencer Barefield and AACM cohorts in pianist Muhal Richard
Abrams and trombonist George Lewis joined him. There's a brief, intimate
reading of John Coltrane's classic "Naima" and an austere solo piece by
Lewis called "Olobo," but otherwise the material is all by Mitchell at
his most bracing. Aside from a strong emphasis on group improvisation,
the music is decidedly abstract, following on conceptual structures
devised by the leader. Below you can hear one such example on the
pointillistic, spartan "Cards," for which he passes out cards to each
musician. As he explained to Anthony Coleman in a great interview published by Bomb
Magazine in 2005, "The cards have music written on them and each
musician gets six cards that they can arrange in any way that they want,
at their own tempo, to create their own improvisation." But this
particular performance stands out, in part, because someone in the group
occasionally guns an electric drill—not as pioneering as Tom Zé, who incorporated power tools in his music a few years earlier, but well ahead of Einstürzende Neubauten.
Sound (august 1966), mainly taken up by the 21-minute Sound,
truly set the standard for the rest of Chicago's creative
music. The sextet (with trumpeter Lester Bowie,
tenor saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre,
trombonist/cellist Lester Lashley, bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut, drummer Alvin Fiedler)
challenged the dogmas of jazz improvisation and composition, venturing into
dissonance and unusual timbres (even toy instruments).
The instruments just did not sound like themselves: they were mere vehicles
to produce abstract sounds.
These sounds derived from the extended (and mostly dissonant) ranges of the instruments were made to interact and overlap.
Sound explored the timbres of percussion instruments, and the ten-minute Little Suite focused on the subtleties of "little instruments".
But the real breakthrough was the very notion of how to play: this was highly
intellectual music, meant to be used by a brain, not by a heart, unlike
New York's free jazz that was meant to be emphatic and frantic.
These musicians were European scientists, not African shamans.
They were scientists of the subtle.
Thus the effect was that they were more interested in "silence" and in microtones than in "music".
Silence was indeed the "space" in which music happened: silence was a key
ingredient in the musical event.
Old/ Quartet (may 1967), mainly taken up by the 38-minute Quartet
(november)
and released only in 1975, showed further progress/regress towards a
music
of minimal and primitive gestures.
The live shows, that included pantomimes and clownish acts, besides the
arsenal of "odd" instruments, increased the
feeling that Mitchell's music was a form of theater.
Free-jazz musicians, no matter how radical their experiments, had
performed using bebop instrumentation and behaving like bebop
performers, but the Art Ensemble showed no respect for these
conventions.
In 1967 the renamed Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble was paired down to a
quartet with Bowie, Favors and a drummer.
Early Combinations contains the 21-minute A To Ericka (september 1967) and the 23-minute Quintet (november 1967).
And perhaps the real manifesto of Mitchell's revolution was
Congliptious (march 1968), an album that first redefined the jazz solo with
three solos for bass (Tutankhamen), alto saxophone (Tkhke)
and trumpet (Jazz Death?), and then resumed the project of
redefining harmony with the 19-minute Congliptious/Old.
As the Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEOC), without a drummer and with the addition
of saxophonist Joseph Jarman, took on an identity of its own, Mitchell's
austere, highbrow experiment was somewhat modified to interpret a more
humane, populist and even playful concept of music.
Instead of a futuristic revolution, the AEOC embodied a synthesis of
classical jazz, African music, American folk music and European classical music.
It also embodied a strong sense of humour (unheard of in jazz since the heydays
of New Orleans) and a political message. It even emphasized a circus-like
theatrical element that harked back to the plantations and to Africa itself.
This group was extremely prolific during its stay in Europe. Much of the music
that they recorded was trivial and redundant, but some pieces do stand out:
A Jackson in Your House (june 1969), dominated by Mitchell's 17-minute Song For Charles,
Tutankhamun (june 1969), with Mitchell's 15-minute The Ninth Room (and a tedious version of the title-track),
The Spiritual (june 1969), with Mitchell's 20-minute The Spiritual,
People in Sorrow (july 1969), that contained just one 40-minute piece, perhaps their masterpiece,
A Message to Our Folks (august 1969), with the 20-minute A Brain For The Seine and the eight-minute Rock Out (Jarman on guitar, Favors on bass, Mitchell and Bowie on percussion),
Reese and the Smooth Ones (august 1969), another 40-minute piece,
Eda Wobu (october 1969), an even longer (but far less engaging) live jam,
Certain Blacks (february 1970), another minor album, with a 24-minute cover of Chicago Beau's Certain Blacks,
Go Home (april 1970), with the 15-minute Dance.
There were elements that acknowledged the innovations of Miles Davis and Ornette
Coleman, but reinterpreted according to the quartet's unique aesthetic, that had
little patience for musical dogmas.
The AEOC became a quintet with the addition of drummer Don Moye, whose devilish
polyrhythms added a new dimension to the band's sound on
Chi Congo (june 1970), with the 11-minute tribal maelstrom Chi-Congo, the 14-minute free-jazz work-out Enlorfe and the ten-minute orgy of Hipparippp,
the film soundtrack Les Stances a Sophie (july 1970), with Fontella Bass on vocals and piano (Theme de Yoyo, a pioneering fusion of funk, soul and jazz),
With Fontella Bass (august 1970), mainly divided between the 18-minute Ole Jed and the 19-minute Horn Web,
and Phase One (february 1971), divided into two side-long jams, Ohnedaruth and Lebert Aaly.
The AEOC returned to Chicago in january 1972 and recorded Live at Mandel Hall (january 1972),
the politicized Bap-Tizum (september 1972), including Unanka and Ohnedaruth,
and
Fanfare for the Warriors (september 1973), with Muhal Richard Abrams on piano, containing Mitchell's Nonaah, Favors' Illistrum and
Jarman's Fanfare For The Warriors.
Despite the publicity, the quintet had lost much of its charm.
On the other hand, its music had become much more accessible.
In the meantime, Mitchell had recorded some more milestones of the creative
music.
The live Solo Saxophone Concerts (july 1974)
focused on Mitchell's playing,
alternating on soprano, alto, tenor and bass saxophones.
Quartet (october 1975), featuring guitarist Spencer Barefield,
pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and trombonist George Lewis, offered a
summary of Mitchell's ideas, from the emotional Tnoona to the unemotional duet of
Music for Trombone and B Flat Soprano, from the cerebral group piece
Cards to the lyrical trombone solo of Olobo.
Nonaah (february 1977), featuring an all-star cast of improvisers
in different combinations, delivered two expanded versions of
Mitchell's most famous composition, Nonaah (a 22-minute solo and
especially a 17-minute version for the alto saxophone quartet of
Mitchell, Jarman, Threadgill and Wallace McMillan) and assorted
experiments, notably Tahquemenon in trio with Abrams and Lewis, A1 TAL 2LA in duo with Favors and the 13-minute solo Improvisation 1.
Sketches from Bamboo (june 1979) tackled the large-ensemble format (which he
called Creative Orchestra).
Mitchell's chamber music reached a zenith with the double LP
LRG/ The Maze/ S2 Examples (july 1978), that contained three of his most
austere, complex and difficult compositions:
the 17-minute soprano saxophone solo S2 Examples,
the 36-minute LRG (which stands for Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis),
and the 21-minute The Maze for nonet, mostly on percussion (even
Braxton, Threadgill, Favors and Jarman, besides Moye and Douglas Ewart)
except Mitchell (saxes), Leo Smith (trumpet) and George Lewis
(trombone).
Not only were they fantastically disjointed, but they were more composed
than
they looked, being kept together by a cold logic of sound.
The Maze ranked among the most sophisticated compositions for percussion ever.
The Art Ensemble of Chicago was still alive. They released Nice Guys (may 1978), with Bowie's Ja, Moye's Folkus and Jarman's Dreaming Of The Master,
Full Force (january 1980), mainly taken up by Favors' Magg Zelma,
the live Urban Bushmen (june 1980), perhaps the best of the later albums, with the 15-minute four-movement suite Urban Magic, Mitchell's Uncle and Moye's 22-minute Sun Precondition Two.
The Third Decade (june 1984), and Naked (july 1986), the commercial sell-out.
Mitchell's career continued with his new creatures,
the Sound Ensemble
(trumpeter Hugh Ragin, guitarist Spencer Barefield,
bassist Jaribu Shahid and percussionist Tani Tabal)
and the Space Ensemble,
that adopted a friendlier, more spontaneous and even hummable sound:
Snurdy McGurdy and Her Dancin' Shoes (december 1980),
3X4 Eye (february 1981), with Cutouts for Quintet and 3x4 Eye,
The Sound and Space Ensembles (june 1983), that added vocalist Thomas Buckner, trumpeter Michael-Philip Mossman and saxophonist Gerald Oshita.
Out of collaborations with members of these ensembles came Mitchell's most experimental recordings of the period:
More Cutouts (february 1981), with Hugh Ragin and Tani Tabbal;
New Music for Woodwinds and Voice (january 1981), with Buckner and Oshita;
An Interesting Breakfast Conversation (1984), again with Buckner and Oshita;
First Meeting (december 1994), with pianist Borah Bergman and Buckner;
and 8 O'Clock (december 2000), the third trio recording with Oshita and Buckner.
Buckner's voice was a challenging factor for most of this phase.
A new quartet (Mitchell, Favors, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall)
recorded The Flow of Things (september 1986).
The Note Factory (Matthew Shipp on piano, Jaribu Shahid and William Parker on basses, and two percussionists) recorded This Dance is for Steve McCall (may 1992), that contained mostly tributes to dead friends.
These ensemble works became less and less interesting, although at least
the nonet of Nine To Get Ready (may 1997), with Hugh Ragin on
trumpet, George Lewis on trombone, Matthew Shipp on piano, Craig Taborn
on piano, Jaribu Shahid on bass, William Parker on double-bass, and two
percussionists,
the quartet of In Walked Buckner (february 1999), With Jodie Christian on piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Albert Heath on drums,
and the nonet of Song For My Sister (february 2002)
displayed sections of brilliant counterpoint.
Mitchell's career was now clearly split between jazz and classical music.
Some of his classical compositions fared a lot better than his jazz combos:
Prelude for vocals (Buckner), bass saxophone (Mitchell), contrabass
sarrusophone (Gerald Oshita) and triple contrabass violin (Brian Smith)
on Four Compositions (1988);
some of the pieces for solo woodwinds and overdubbed woodwinds and little percussion of Sound Songs (october 1994), entirely played by himself;
O the Sun Comes up up up in the Opening on Pilgrimage
(1994), credited to the New Chamber Ensemble (violinist Vartan
Manoogian, pianist Joseph Kubera and especially baritone Thomas
Buckner);
and especially Solo 3 (2004), three discs of solo improvisations.
Mitchell also composed
Variations and Sketches From The Bamboo Terrace for chamber orchestra (1988), Contacts Turbulents (1986), Memoirs of A Dying Parachutist for chamber orchestra (1995), Fallen Heroes for baritone and orchestra (1998), The Bells of FiftyNinth Street for alto saxophone and gamelan orchestra (2000), 59A for solo soprano saxophone (2000), Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City (2002), etc.
Streaming (january 2005) documents a session by Muhal Richard
Abrams (on piano, percussion, flute), George Lewis (on trombone and
laptop) and Roscoe Mitchell (on saxophones).
Contact (october 2002) documents a live performance.
Numbers (2011) collects solos and duets recorded from
2002 to 2010.
Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble performed some of
Roscoe Mitchell's classical composition on
Live At Sant'Anna Arresi (august 2009), including
Quintet #1 for Eleven and
Quintet #9 for Eleven, as well as
Cards for Orchestra.
Not Yet (march 2012) contains live performances of
six compositions by Roscoe Mitchell,
including a chamber orchestra:
Bells For New Orleans
for tubular bells and orchestra,
the title-track for alto sax
and piano,
9/9/99 With Cards for string quartet,
Nonaah for alto sax quartet,
Would You Wear My Eyes? for baritone (Thomas Buckner) and chamber
orchestra,
and Nonaah again for orchestra.
Improvisations (march 2012) documents a live collaboration
with drummer Tony Marsh
and double bassist John Edwards.
In Pursuit Of Magic (april 2013) documents a live collaboration
between Roscoe Mitchell (on sopranino and alto sax and several
woodwinds) and drummer Mike Reed. including the 21-minute Constellations Over Denmark and the 25-minute Light Can Bend.
Tone Ventures (Sciensonic, 2014) documents a collaboration with
fellow reedist Scott Robinson.
Mitchell, pianist Craig Taborn (also on
organ and synthesizers) and drummer Kikanju Baku recorded the improvisations
that surfaced on Conversations I (september 2013) and
Conversations II (september 2013).
Roscoe Mitchell
played sopranino and bass saxes, baroque flute, bass recorder,
whistles and even percussion in the trio effort of
Angel City (november 2012 - RogueArt, 2015), a 55-minute composition,
with James Fei (sopranino, alto and baritone saxes,
Bb bass and Bb contrabass clarinets, analog electronics) and William
Winant (orchestra bells, tubular bells, marimba, timpani, bass drum,
snare drum, cymbals, cow bells, triangles, woodblocks, gongs,
percussion).
“The super musician has a big task in front of them because they have to know something about all the music that went down because we are approaching this age of spontaneous composition. ”
For more than 35 years Roscoe Mitchell's innovation as an improvisor, composer, and solo performer has placed him at the forefront of modern music. He is a founding member of the Creative Arts Collective of East Lansing, Michigan, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He is the recipient of many honors and awards including the Outstanding Service to Jazz Education Award from the National Association of Jazz Educators; the Certificate of Appreciation from the St. Louis Public Schools Role Model Experiences Program; the Certificate of Appreciation for the Art Ensemble of Chicago from the Smithsonian Institution; the Jazz Masters Award from Arts Midwest; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Image Award. He has conducted numerous workshops and has held numerous artist-in-resident positions throughout the world, and has taught at the Creative Music Studio, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians' School of Music, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and the California Institute of the Arts. (Reference: Francois Couture, journalist) On October 28, 2003, Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago performed at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in Seattle where the following interview took place.
All About Jazz: At what age did you start playing?
Roscoe Mitchell: Well, I consider myself like a late starter. My family was always musically orientated, but when I was very young I would sing, you know, because my dad was a singer. But, I started the clarinet when I was like 12 years old.
AAJ: Did you have any early influences?
RM: My older brother turned me on to music because he had — they used to call them killers — the old 78s. The community I grew up in, there was a lot of music there too, lots of clubs, and everybody was listening to the music. So, it was very musically orientated.
AAJ: Did you study music in school or anything like that?
RM: Yes, I did. I studied music in high school. I studied the clarinet in Milwaukee and then we came back to Chicago and I continued to study at Inglewood High School. I also studied when I was in the Army with the first clarinetist of the Heidelberg Symphony. I would say I started to develop some musician chops when I was in the Army because there you were functioning 24 hours a day as a professional musician.
AAJ: Do you teach also, or are you primarily just performing?
RM: Well, I'm not teaching at any university right now. I have a student in Madison that I teach. I have taught before at different places. I don't know if you remember the Creative Music Studio that Carl Berger had up in Woodstock. I did several workshops there. I taught at the University of Wisconsin for awhile, also at Kellogg's out in Valencia, California, and, you know, workshops and things throughout the States and Europe.
AAJ: Did you originally start playing around Chicago?
RM: Yeah, Chicago.
AAJ: When it was called "Roscoe Mitchell's Art Ensemble," you spent some time in France....
RM: Yeah, well, the Art Ensemble became the Art Ensemble of Chicago when we went to France, but like the Art Ensemble and other small groups like Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Muhal Richard Abrams, all of these groups are outgrowths from the larger organization which was the AACM: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and this is an organization that came together because musicians wanted to have more control over their destinies and they wanted to sponsor each other in concerts of their own creative music. So, the earlier groups were Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble on Congliptious, but when we went to Europe — this is when Joseph joined us — we became the Art Ensemble of Chicago. We decided on that name because it kind of let people know, in Europe, where we were from.
AAJ: That was around the early '60s?
RM: Late '60s, yeah. '69 is, I think, when we went to Europe.
AAJ: And you were there for...?
RM: A couple of years, the first time. Yeah, a couple of years. We got ourselves established there and we ended up doing a tour of France, all on Maison de la Courtiers, while we were there. We did concerts in Denmark, in Sweden.
AAJ: What would you say you got out of that, versus if you would have stayed in Chicago?
RM: Well, we never were that type. I mean, we'd be in Chicago for awhile but before we went to Europe we had been out on the West Coast a couple of times, you know, and we had just exhausted our places to go, like in the States. We had been to Canada, and so on. And back then it took, maybe, we figured it would take about 20 years to get known because you didn't have the Internet like you do now. So for us it was the next kind of logical step. At that time, Lester sold all of his furniture to sponsor our trip to Europe and we stayed there for a couple of years and of course that's how we got known in Europe.
“Nonaah is extraordinarily confrontational music--it
presents instrument, composer and materials in a profoundly naked light.
Perhaps more important than opening up one's preconceptions about the
saxophone, it also complicates the AACM aesthetic.
”
Roscoe Mitchell Nonaah Nessa Records 2008
One
of the significant things that set AACM music apart from its brethren
in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s was its use of space, of
opening up the music so that things could occur within broad,
environmental relationships. That sense of space was very important. In
an entirely different take on "energy" music, the challenge of
discerning what could be perceived as multiple, self-contained orbits
was uniquely gratifying. To listeners weaned on the intervallic leaps of
reed player Eric Dolphy and the ringing "wrong" notes of pianist
Thelonious Monk, and the areas of quietude and vastness made perfect
sense in the early music of reed players Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony
Braxton.
On first hearing, Mitchell's Nonaah
turns the perceived spaciousness of AACM-music on its end. Gone are the
silences punctuated by little instruments or brief, anguished saxophone
squalls that seemed to recoil as quickly as they appeared. Nonaah
was something else entirely, an exorcism of the alto saxophone as much
as putting the instrument through its paces. Released in 1977 on Nessa
Records as part of a continual and tireless documentation of the music
of the AACM, starting with Lester Bowie's Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967), Nonaah
consisted of a double vinyl set including solo alto saxophone, a
saxophone quartet, duos with saxophonist Anthony Braxton and bassist
Malachi Favors, and a trio with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and
trombonist George Lewis. Now on CD for the first time, this set adds
five additional alto solos.
"Nonaah" itself is
represented in both solo and quartet versions. The solo, which opens
disc one, comes from a 1976 Wilisau concert, and lasts just over a half
hour (including eight minutes of the Joseph Jarman composition
"Ericka"). The title piece was previously referenced on the Art Ensemble
of Chicago's Bap-tizum (Atlantic, 1972) andMitchell's Solo Saxophone Concerts
(Sackville, 1973), but this is its fullest explication. The piece
begins with a jagged eight-note phrase, with its last note being held in
gradually longer intervals. Each attack of the phrase itself becomes
more distorted, each repetition goading the audience into a mixture of
cheers and guffaws at some of the most naked saxophone playing they'd
probably ever heard. At about five minutes in, the held tone becomes
smeared, bent, and torqued; Mitchell begins rushing the phrase and the
key becomes ambiguous. It is a furious troweling of hard ground—of
forcing a very contained phrase into malleability and to either give up
its fruits or die trying.
At nine minutes, Mitchell has
exhausted this phrase, torqued it into recognizable but worked-over
fragments. Here he moves on to the form of a plaintive ballad, running
his keyed, reeded fingers over a delicate line, an insect with feelers
for sound. Seemingly trepid, the intervals he's working with are
incredibly vast, from low, velvety purrs to high-pitched, rounded pops.
The next movement is faster, harsher and high-volume, buzzing and
metallic. It seems to cull its language from both the original theme and
the ballad portion, and is resoundingly physical—one can feel
Mitchell's body contorting along with the phrases he's building up and
tearing apart. One wants to say this is staunchly avant-garde music, and
it is, but it's not without the trilled leaps of saxophonists Charlie
Parker and Lester Young, the smoky, crushed fabric of a swing player, or
the searing honk of R&B.
Jarman's staple "Ericka" is
a ballad of extraordinary depth and beauty; Mitchell approaches it with
warmth, stateliness and whimsy. His solo is full of curlicues, lines
rushing down the staircase, and blurs in which notes pop out like
flickers of light. By the end of the piece, Mitchell has found his way
to clenched air and popping veins, energy being bottled and trying to
escape both at once.
In January of 1977, Mitchell brought
saxophonists Jarman, Wallace McMillan and Henry Threadgill together for
a seventeen-minute saxophone quartet recording of the title piece. As
the final work on the original double album, it marked an expanded
exploration of the materials on side one. Operating at what appear to be
slightly different intervals, the first movement is rendered like a
rickety string quartet, clearly intertwined but operating with a logic
that's distressingly internal. There's a bounce to it akin to a Steve
Lacy piece gone horribly awry or a player piano stuck on repeat. The
second section sounds lush, reminscent of Duke Ellington in its colorful
expanse and woody timbres (you could almost swear there are a cello and
violin present). Delicate measures and caressed intervals become
brilliant orchestral floes, hints of saxophonist Johnny Hodges bringing
the section to a unison close. To hear the contrasts between
pointillist, scrabbling jounce and tone poem is something more
pronounced in the quartet, proof (as if one needs it) of an excavating
process leading to a compositional plenum.
Nonaah
is extraordinarily confrontational music—it presents instrument,
composer and materials in a profoundly naked light. Perhaps more
important than opening up one's preconceptions about the saxophone, it
also complicates the AACM aesthetic and vision. Rather than providing
space, this is incredibly dense music, bristling with tension that is
not overcome by ecstatic release. Nonaah is about as direct as
one can get and, lest one forget, the music of Mitchell, Abrams, Jarman,
Braxton and their cohorts is rebellious to this day.
Tracks:
CD1: Nonaah; Ericka; Nonaah; Off Five Dark Six; A1 TAL 2LA;
Tahquemenon. CD2: Improvisation 1; Ballad; Nonaah; Sing; Improvisation
2; Sing; Chant; Off Five Dark Six.
Personnel: Roscoe
Mitchell: alto saxophone; Anthony Braxton: sopranino saxophone; Wallace
McMillan: alto saxophone; Henry Threadgill: alto saxophone; Joseph
Jarman: alto saxophone; George Lewis: trombone; Muhal Richard Abrams:
piano; Malachi Favors: bass.
Saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell has been at the forefront of
innovation in jazz — hell, in music in general — ever since his
landmark 1966 recording Sound. With that debut, he helped usher
in a less constantly frenetic avant-garde. Though Mitchell and his
cohorts from Chicago’s South Side revolutionaries in the Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) could bust reeds and pound
with the best experimental screamers, they also thrilled to the spare,
austerely gentle classical modernism of Anton Webern (for example).
Sound, along with subsequent titles from the “Roscoe
Mitchell Art Ensemble,” issued by the Delmark label, would the proving
ground for a band that would eventually take on a different,
better-known name: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. While serving a year as
the toasts of France in 1969-70, the band cut more than a dozen records.
By the time they rotated back to the U.S., the Chicago scene that had
influenced Mitchell in his post-Army days had already made significant
inroads in New York. Mitchell hasn’t looked back since, whether as a
teacher at Mills College (where he currently has the Darius Milhaud
chair in composition) or as a gigging and recording musician. This year
has already seen two fantastic new albums from Mitchell: the
classically-oriented Not Yet, on Mutable Music, and a record of duets with drummer-pianist Tyshawn Sorey. (Trumpeter Hugh Ragin appears on a few cuts, too.) Here are five of Mitchell’s essential recordings.
Three hugely important 1969 albums — some of them
infrequently available digitally — by Roscoe Mitchell's breakout
project, the Art Ensemble of Chicago are collected here in a high-value,
no-duh purchase. (Look at that price point!) The title track of Jackson
reveals the band's postmodern mashup strategy: after the opening,
jump-cut switches between free playing and modern composition, the band
transitions to a New Orleans-flavored outro (one that is sincerely
soulful, not mocking). Message is even better, and somehow more
varied: "Old Time Religion" blends gospel and drone textures;
"Dexterity" underlines the band's connection to Bird; while "Rock Out,"
as an abstraction of popular song-form, feels like avant-jazz's answer
to White Heat-era Velvet Underground. Reese is one long
improvisation, split into two tracks, that is particularly worthy for
the noise-guitar freakout on the second side of the original LP.
In which the polymath Mitchell embraces the emergent sounds
of hip-hop as well as those of late 20th-century chamber music styles —
on the same album. Four of the six tracks here are austere, small
ensemble compositions (some of them featuring modern-opera singer Tom
Buckner). But two uptempo groovers, "You Wastin' My Tyme" and "Linefine
Lyon Seven" show that, some 15 years after the Art Ensemble created
R&B-inflected avant-jazz jams like "Rock Out" and "Theme De Yoyo,"
our hero can still return to the wellspring of pop inspiration. The
former even offers a chance for Mitchell to try his hand at
appropriating the good-humor cadences of early NYC rap. He works it!
This is a late-period tour de force: three different "solo" albums, packaged together. The opening "album," subtitled Tech Ritter and the Megabytes,
opens with a multi-tracked Mitchell (on different horns), blasting
through a staccato composition called "The Little Big Horn 2." Two long,
proper solo improvisations follow (featuring various extended
techniques, circular breathing, the works); while the "Tech
Ritter"-titled pieces bring the multi-tracked intensity back. The more
familiar, purely alto-saxophone album starts with the lovely "Nemus."
The final album, a percussion-heavy suite that harkens back to some of
the Art Ensemble's "little instrument" pieces, isn't as dynamic — but
the set as a whole brings welcome evidence of Mitchell's conceptual,
performative and compositional power in a new century.
Far Side
Roscoe Mitchell
How influential and
well-respected is Roscoe Mitchell, at this point? Well, on this live
date for ECM, the two pianists in his octet are Vijay Iyer and Craig
Taborn (arguably the two biggest names in contemporary jazz piano). The
rumbling, droning opening suite of three pieces takes its time winding
up — but explodes in a gratifying way at the midway point. (Hearing
Taborn going nuts behind Mitchell's soprano playing is a singular
highlight of modern jazz.) The "Quintet" and "Trio" pieces are shorter,
and more consistently driven by pulse, while "Ex Flower Five" is driven
by the stellar piano power on offer.
This is Roscoe Mitchell's finest classical album yet. And,
interestingly, it's one on which his own horn playing is absent; he's
intent on fully inhabiting the role of composer. It's no secret how a
modern conceptualist gets good performances of fiercely difficult,
experimental works: you get a chair in composition at a major music
school, draw interested students to your side, and present concerts.
Mitchell has done that as a chair of composition studies at Mills
College. And his student Jacob Zimmerman does the teacher proud in the
skittering, sheets-of-sound atonality of the title track (for saxophone
and piano), as well as in the sax-quartet arrangement of the infamous
Mitchell piece "Nonaah." Some more senior eminences drop by to tackle a
chamber orchestra version of "Nonaah," also. When paired with the finest
recorded example we have of Mitchell's writing for string quartet
("9/9/99 with Cards"), this album becomes an essential document of a
portion of the composer's legacy.
Stream a selection of tracks by the Art Ensemble Of Chicago founder,
AACM member, improvisor, composer, team player and soloist Roscoe
Mitchell
Howard Mandel writes about Roscoe Mitchell in The Wire 375:
"It is tempting to write about Roscoe Mitchell as the man who put the
art in The Art Ensemble Of Chicago, who most took to heart both the
experimentalism of Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band, and the
creative imperative of the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (AACM), who has defied once and for all any gaps between jazz
and post-Cageian composition. To do so is insufficient. Those
identifiers aren’t wrong, but they depend too much on the man’s past. At
the age of 74, Roscoe Mitchell remains a composing and improvising
insurrectionist, a reeds-winds-percussion innovator intent on
penetrating the deepest, most fundamental and furthest flung reaches of
sound."
All the above tracks are taken from some of Mitchell's releases on the RogueArt label. And for details on all AACM activities click here
Musician, Composer
Born Chicago, IL, 1940
Lives in Oakland, CA
“In this period of my life, time is most precious. The award gave me the time needed to write, practice, and study music.”
--Roscoe Mitchell, December 31, 1997
Biography
Roscoe Mitchell is a musician, composer, and innovator. He is a solo
woodwind performer. His compositional work is concerned with
resurrecting long-neglected woodwind instruments of extreme register.
Mitchell
has recorded over 100 albums and has written hundreds of compositions
as a solo artist and with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. His compositions
range from classical to contemporary, from free jazz to orchestral
music. His instrumental expertise includes the saxophone family, the
recorder family, flute, piccolo, clarinet, and the transverse flute.
Over the course of four decades, he has designed an elaborate percussion
instrument called the “Percussion Cage." His music has been presented
at venues including the University of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary
Art Montreal, Zellberbach Auditorium in Berkeley, Herbst Hall in San
Francisco, Centre Pompidou in Paris, World Music Institute in New York,
The Knitting Factory, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Merkin Concert
Hall, and Ars Musica Festival in Brussels, among others.
In the
same year as his 1996 FCPA support, Mitchell received grants from Meet
the Composer (1996) and Arts Midwest Jazz Masters (1996). Prior to his
1996 Grants to Artists award, Mitchell received grants from National
Endowment for the Arts (1979, 1985), Wisconsin Arts Board (1981, 1986,
1987), Minnesota Composers Forum (1986), and Madison Festival of the
Lakes (1988). He also received a Certificate of Appreciation to the Art
Ensemble of Chicago from the Smithsonian Institute (1979), a National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Image Award (1982),
and an Outstanding Service to Jazz Education Award (1988), among others.
Mitchell is a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago,
the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and the Trio
Space. He is also the founder of the Creative Arts Collective, The
Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, The Sound
Ensemble, The New Chamber Ensemble, and the Note Factory. He is the
Darius Milhaud Chair at Mills College.
Artist Statement
If one wants to be a good improviser, one has to know how
composition works so one can execute it in real time. Therefore, it is
imperative to study composition and improvisation as a parallel. Music
is 50 percent sound and 50 percent silence. If one sits down and listens
to nothing but silence in a very quiet place, it's very intense. So,
when one interrupts that silence with a sound, one must make sure that
the sound has the same intensity as the silence. When this is achieved,
sound and silence start to work together opening doors to multiple
choices that should always exist in good improvisation and composition.
When writing a composition, one is given more time to make these
selections. Improvising in real time, one must be able to make these
selections spontaneously. I strive to incorporate these elements in my
work and have found them to be extremely helpful.
Since its inception in 1963, the mission of the Foundation for
Contemporary Arts has been to encourage, sponsor, and promote innovative
work in the arts created and presented by individuals, groups, and
organizations. Its legacy continues today with unrestricted,
by-nomination grants supporting pioneering work across the fields of
dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, poetry, and the visual
arts. A fund is also maintained to assist artists with emergencies and
unexpected opportunities related to their work. To date, over 900
artists have made these grants possible by contributing paintings,
sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs to fourteen fund-raising
exhibitions held over the years.
At this stage in his career, Roscoe Mitchell—who did pioneering and irreplaceable work with both the AACM and the Art Ensemble of Chicago in addition to his own boundary-pushing solo efforts, not to mentioning finishing a respectable 15th in this publication’s list of the 50 greatest saxophonists of all time—certainly has nothing to prove. But that very accomplished career marks him as a relentless worker, a restless inventor, and a man very much concerned with not resting on his laurels. February 2014 will find him in London, where he will oversee a full production by the BBC Orchestra of a new piece tentatively known as “Agave in Full Bloom,” but while that ambitious project is still being written, Mitchell visited Seattle’s Benaroya Hall on Friday, June 7, to present five versions of his legendary piece, “Nonaah.”
First appearing as one of the most striking pieces on the AEC’s Fanfare for the Warriors album in 1973, “Nonaah” has been painstakingly workshopped by Mitchell ever since. Its first section lulls the listener with hypnotic repetition of spiky blasts of atonal sound, marking itself as a product of Mitchell’s rigorous avant-garde tendencies, but its remarkably expressive middle stretch slows things down and introduces passages of bluesy swing that reflect his stated desire to create “the sound of one big alto.” This all gives way to a quick, aggressive final movement, blending the two approaches into a furious burst of warring tones before coming to a softening, contemplative finish. Though he’s arranged “Nonaah” for many different methods of presentation, from solo saxophone to full orchestra, the Seattle performance was the first time it was played in so many different ways in a single setting.
The performance was organized by Table & Chairs, a local record label focused on new music with a progressive bent that represents everything from avant-garde jazz to improvised electronics. (It’s also familiar to locals, as it grew out of the Racer Sessions, a weekly spotlight of free music at the legendary Café Racer, and players from the scene were well-represented on stage.) Local composer Jacob Zimmerman—a former student of Mitchell’s at Mills College—hosted a Q&A before the music started. The origins of “Nonaah,” Mitchell explained, began when “I was trying to exploit the three registers of the alto saxophone, and I wanted it to sound like there was more than one instrument playing.” Eventually expanding the piece to include a broader harmonic range, he found that the piece lent itself easily to a variety of compositional and performance modes. “I’ve worked with this piece so much, it’s almost like a color palette that I can expand or reduce depending on what I want to do,” he said of arranging “Nonaah” for the ten-piece Lawson ensemble. “It represented a challenge, but a nice challenge.”
The three passages of “Nonaah” represent Mitchell’s three main musical obsessions: improvisation, pure sound, and opposition. These qualities are essential to any performance of the piece, he explained, but beyond that, “the character changes from the versions that are arranged and the versions that are improvised. This (performance) is a situation where every one is a composition, but there are elements of improvisation that let it remain true to its origin. When you’re at home composing, you have ideas that you think are going to work in live performance, but you can’t on the face of it think, oh, I know this will work out in a certain way until you hear it happen. Likewise, you can play a certain way in a live setting that you’ll never capture through notation.”
The opening performance of “Nonaah,” by a cello quartet made up of Sonja Myklebust, David Balatero, Maria Scherer-Wilson, and Natalie Hall, was the piece at its most intellectually focused, lacking almost all elements of free play or swing and honed to a laser-like precision. As such, it worked for me the least; while it was evocative of some of Mitchell’s better concert music (and owed an extreme debt to both Milhaud and Bartók), it lacked some of the unexpected elements of his best work. Some of the mournful passages of the middle section worked best, while the keening wails leading up to the late conclusion came across as rather subdued rather than subtle.
Any nitpicking vanished when Mitchell himself took the stage afterwards, to present two selections for solo saxophone. Looking dapper and showing a remarkable physical presence for a man of 72—his elbow jutting out at stabbing angles for on-a-dime tonal shifts, his fingers arched like a gentleman at tea, and his head rolling loosely around his neck in moments of astonishing breath control—he ran through the first, a previously composed piece titled “The Cactus and the Rose,” on the soprano saxophone before switching to the alto for the second, completely improvised, piece. Mitchell’s precision on “Cactus” was murderous, throwing his whole weight into a series of colorful tonal leaps and precisely developing a series of thematically linked musical patterns over time to a faint, broken conclusion. Reaching the limits of the instrument, he reduced it to wheezing, almost soundless breaths punctuated by keen foghorn cries at the end of the selection. The second piece began with a series of almost Eastern chord progressions before shifting into a creepy, insinuating riffs interrupted by skronky blats and crystalline grace notes. Its middle passage perfectly illustrated his process of making the alto sax sound like a half-dozen other instruments, at times creating an almost minimalist drone. It concluded with some deep bluesy lowing, reaching higher and higher to achieve a harsh cawing familiar from his later work.
After a brief intermission, it was back to “Nonaah,” this time performed by a saxophone quartet featuring Jacob Zimmerman, Ivan Arteaga, Andrew Swanson, and Neil Welch. Still using major elements of Mitchell’s original composition, enough looseness crept into this version that it seemed better suited than the cello version. The four saxes made for a hulking storm of sound in the opening passages before settling down to the more languid, bluesy elements of the middle. Of course, it’s easy to spot how the material differs in the hands of a real virtuoso; it often took all four players to register the same sounds that Mitchell had just managed to create all on his own just minutes before. But it was still a very strong interpretation of the material.
Next up was “Nonaah Re-Imagined,” performed by saxophonist Neil Welch and drummer Chris Icasiano, better know to the jazz world as Bad Luck. Their arrangement of “Nonaah” was both exacting and full of surprises, extremely powerful and aggressive at times but fully capable of quiet when the passage demanded it. It started out with the sharp jabbing notes dropped down to a low ominous range by the pedals and effects arrayed around Welch’s sax, accompanied by rumbling percussion and faint looped electronics, before bursting into some cleverly arranged swing driven by Icasian’s hot-shit drumming. He used his kit edges and all, playing every available surface like a Plains Indian making use of a dead buffalo, letting no part go to waste. The bluesy passages were filled with a sonic intensity that recalled Albert Ayler to my ears, with plenty of room for free play and loads of rhythmic intensity. By far the best performance of the night not involving Roscoe Mitchell himself, Bad Luck justified its strong reputation with this searing tear-through of a very new “Nonaah.”
The final piece was “Nonaah” as arranged for Lawson, a new music ensemble headed by Zimmerman and featuring alto and tenor sax, clarinet, trombone, cello, double bass, guitar, double bass, electric organ and synthesizer. The riskiest performance of the night, it proved to be perfectly serviceable, though it’s easy to see why Mitchell found it such a challenge to put together. The electric elements were actually fairly non-intrusive, letting the acoustic instruments do the heavy lifting, but the entire ensemble played in lockstep, with practiced familiarity, and managed to pull off the difficult task of making a piece we’d heard four times in succession sound relatively fresh. As a group of individual performances, the night of “Nonaah” ranged from adequate to spectacular, but its real value was as a tour through the styles and capabilities of Roscoe Mitchell, a man who can still bring more variety and texture to a single piece than many players and composers can to an entire career.
Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey Roscoe Mitchell is the rare jazz musician who also moves comfortably within the realm of contemporary classical music. It might even be said that Mitchell is a more convincing artist when working in European-influenced forms. When relying on structural and formal jazz conventions, Mitchell can often come off as stilted and unswinging. On the other hand, his forays into free-time, nontonal improvisation (both structured and unstructured) are as spontaneous and as emotionally satisfying as the best jazz. Mitchell's improvisations exercise extraordinary discipline and intellectual rigor. He's at once a patient and impulsive improviser, prone to alternating episodes of order and chaos, clarity and complexity. Mitchell is a technically superb -- if idiosyncratic -- saxophonist. His tone on alto and soprano tends to be edgy and brittle. At his most lyrical, Mitchell's saxophone lines exploit the instrument's strength as an interval-making machine; his improvised melodies often bear similarity to works by the classical composer Morton Feldman, though Mitchell's music is more overtly emotional. At his most energetic, Mitchell takes advantage of the saxophone's timbral flexibility and the horn's natural tendencies, which allow a player to play fast, scalar lines. Whether playing soft or loud, slow or fast, Mitchell's playing is invariably suffused with passion and intensity.
Mitchell played saxophone and clarinet as a teenager. While stationed in Germany as a member of the Army, Mitchell played in a band with tenor saxophone innovator Albert Ayler. Upon returning to the U.S. in 1961, Mitchell played bop with a group of Wilson Junior College students who included bassist Malachi Favors and saxophonists Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Braxton. Mitchell began listening to the recordings of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. He studied with pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams. In 1962, he began playing in Abrams' newly organized Experimental Band, a rehearsal group that explored many of the contemporary alternatives to conventional jazz improvisation and composition.
Sound
In 1965, he became one of the first members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a nonprofit organization established by Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran. The AACM were devoted to the same principles as the Experimental Band. In 1966, Mitchell's sextet (with trumpeter Lester Bowie, tenor saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, bassist Favors, trombonist Lester Lashley, and drummer Alvin Fiedler) became the first AACM group to record. Abstract in concept and execution, the album, Sound (Delmark), was an in-depth examination of the interaction between sound and silence, utilizing such unorthodox devices as spontaneous collective improvisation, toy instruments, and non-musical noise. A departure from the more extroverted work of the New York-based free jazz players, Sound pointed the way to a new manner of playing jazz-based music. Around this time, Mitchell also performed and recorded as a solo saxophonist. By 1967, the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble consisted of the leader, Favors, trumpeter Lester Bowie, and drummer Phillip Wilson. That combination did not record; Wilson was replaced by Jarman, and in 1969 the group traveled to Europe. The sojourn was very successful. The band -- renamed the Art Ensemble of Chicago -- recorded extensively, particularly in France. The resulting albums formed the initial basis of their reputation.
Solo 3 Mitchell played briefly in St. Louis upon returning to the United States in 1971. He then resettled in Chicago. Around 1974 he established the Creative Arts Collective. Based in East Lansing, MI, the group was similar in purpose to The AACM. The '70s found Mitchell expanding on his solo saxophone concept, working with his AACM cohorts in various combinations and performing with the Art Ensemble. The latter group became possibly the most highly acclaimed jazz band of the next two decades, winning critics' polls with regularity. In the '80s and '90s, Mitchell also led the Sound Ensemble, who included members of his Creative Arts Collective. In the '90s, Mitchell branched out even more, collaborating more frequently with such classical composer/performers as Pauline Oliveros and Thomas Buckner. A trio with Buckner and the virtuoso pianist Borah Bergman was an ongoing and effective unit. Since 2000, Mitchell has remained active, releasing a handful of recordings including Solo 3 in 2004 and Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3 and Samsara in 2007. Beginning in the 1990s and extending into the 21st century, Mitchell has also performed and recorded extensively as the leader of his Note Factory ensemble, a group ranging in size from a sextet to a nonet; Note Factory albums include This Dance Is for Steve McCall (Black Saint, 1993), Nine to Get Ready (1999, ECM), Song for My Sister (Pi, 2002), Bad Guys (2003, Around Jazz), and Far Side (2010, ECM).
Chuleenan and I attended Mr. Mitchell's talk and musical performance at 'The Marsh' in San Francisco last wednesday evening (February 20). Extraordinary lecture, exquisite music, and very informative question-and-answer session with a rapt and deeply appreciative audience. It was everything I had hoped for and expected and more. Roscoe is one of the most creative, important, and influential American musician/composers in the world over the past 40 years and as always it was a great pleasure to experience him and his music live. I have just about every single album and CD the man has led and appeared on since 1966 I'm very proud to say and it's absolutely thrilling that he will be here in the Bay Area for the next three years as the prestigious Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Oakland's Mills College. We are indeed very fortunate to have such a great artist in our midst.
Kofi
NOTE: For still more information about Mitchell and his music see article by New York Times critic Adam Shatz from 1999 directly following the new SF Chronicle article below. I will also soon be providing a discography of Mitchell's work on this site.
Roscoe Mitchell brings jazz history to Mills David Rubien, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, February 18, 2008
The building that houses the music department at Mills College is undergoing rehabilitation, so Roscoe Mitchell, the saxophonist who was hired last fall as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition, has been given a temporary office in another hall down the road that winds through the leafy Oakland campus.
The room is large but barely furnished, with a scratched-up '60s-vintage desk, an empty bookshelf and two grand pianos abutting each other. The wooden chair Mitchell is sitting in seems incommensurate with his status as perhaps the most prestigious instructor at one of the most prestigious graduate music schools in the country. Not that this seems to bother him.
"Yes, it is prestigious," he acknowledges nonchalantly. "A lot of great people have been in this chair" - not meaning the one he's sitting on. Previous occupants of the position, named after the French composer who taught at Mills from 1941 to 1971, include Lou Harrison, Iannis Xenakis, Pauline Oliveros and Anthony Braxton.
Talking to Mitchell, you get the sense that sitting in an old wooden chair and being an exalted professor are about equivalent in the grand scheme of things - at least at this particular moment, when he is concentrating on an interviewer with that uncanny focus jazz musicians have when they're listening to each other on the bandstand.
In fact, a cheap chair and a fancy professorship represent the twin poles of what Mitchell, 67, could have become, as a budding jazz artist blazing trails in sonic realms neither understood nor respected by many people - unless they happened to observe the music being performed, in which case they'd likely be tweaked for life.
Mitchell, who teaches composition and improvisation at Mills, is best known as one of the founding members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a quintet that existed with its original personnel for 30 years, and continues with some fresh blood now that two of its members, trumpeter Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors, have passed away. One of the great groups in all of jazz history, the Art Ensemble had the misfortune of doing its key work from the late '60s through the early '80s, something of a lost era in jazz. You didn't hear much about this incredibly fruitful period in the otherwise excellent documentary "Jazz," a shameful omission on director Ken Burns' part.
"I was lucky to be around people who were so committed to what they were doing, and that's what kept us going for so long," Mitchell says.
The Art Ensemble of Chicago grew out of two bands Mitchell formed in the early '60s, the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet and the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. As did many important bands in jazz history - Charlie Parker's and John Coltrane's pioneering groups, for instance - the Art Ensemble embodied exactly the point that jazz had evolved to at the time of the band's existence. The Art Ensemble made and still makes astonishing, joyful, swinging, sometimes difficult music based not only on the revolutions of the '60s, but on bebop, big band swing, kitschy vaudeville, 20th century classical and African percussion.
When Mitchell's sextet released "Sound" on Delmark Records in 1966, it was the birth of a new approach to improvised music, one based on an examination of music almost at the level of wavelength, where the saxophonist set about dissecting individual notes in order to unlock their mysteries. In performance, Mitchell often showed off this approach in hypnotic solo saxophone playing with a remarkable circular breathing technique.
In the few dozen albums he's made as a leader outside the Art Ensemble, he's pursued this from-the-ground-up approach, erecting suites and sheets of sound with various combinations of musicians.
Larry Ochs, a founding member of the Rova Saxophone Quartet who organized the Improv: 21 "informance" series where Mitchell is talking Wednesday, says Mitchell has influenced countless musicians even if they don't realize it.
"When I was a young man, Roscoe's electrifying tenor solos on the Art Ensemble's live recording from a concert in Ann Arbor ("Bap-Tizum") was crucial to my own playing, and the band's recording 'Les Stances a Sophie,' which is probably still in my top 10 albums of all time, showed one critical way to combine forms and feelings that spoke to me," Ochs says. "And certainly the Art Ensemble pointed the way for Rova to see the value of keeping a band together for a long time."
The commitment factor emerged early on in Chicago when Mitchell, along with several other musicians who were rehearsing with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams' big band, decided to form an organization that would teach artists to become self-sufficient. That's when, in 1961, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music was born.
"We were able to establish a unit of people who gave us a foundation, where we really didn't have to be dependent on things that were outside of us," Mitchell says.
The association still exists today, and has spawned such artists as former Darius Milhaud Chair Braxton, reed player Henry Threadgill, trombonist George Lewis, keyboardist Amina Claudine Myers, violinist Leroy Jenkins, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and dozens more.
Mitchell says that when he was a kid, all kinds of music were everywhere in Chicago. "If you went to a movie, after the movie there'd be Count Basie's big band. Duke Ellington. Ella Fitzgerald. Lester Young. On and on like that."
Mitchell took up the clarinet while attending Inglewood High School on Chicago's South Side. "Back then, it was kind of a normal rule that if you wanted to play saxophone, you had to start with clarinet."
In the Army, he says, he started "functioning 24 hours a day as a musician." While stationed in Orleans, France, Mitchell first saw a performance by another Army player, tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler. "He had an enormous sound on his instrument. And though I didn't quite understand what it was that he was doing ... he made a big impression on me - but not enough to deter me from studying a more straight-ahead form.
"It wasn't until I got out of the Army and I heard Coltrane's record 'Coltrane,' when he was doing 'Inch Worm' and 'Out of This World,' that I thought, 'Oh my god, you can do that?' And then I thought, 'OK, I better go back and listen to Eric Dolphy a bit.' And then I said, 'Hmm, I better pull out these Ornette Coleman records.' And then it all started to make sense to me."
Mitchell is much too earnest and self-possessed to indulge in hero worship, but when recalling his early infatuation with the mighty 'Trane, his eyes fog up a bit.
"Man, I used to go around and think: Oh my god, what must it be like to be going down the street, and someone asks you, 'What's your name?' and the reply would be, 'John Coltrane.' I couldn't imagine what that would be like."
Mitchell got to sit in with Coltrane, too. Drummer Jack DeJohnette - who was a friend of Mitchell's when they both played in that nascent Abrams big band - had a brief gig with Coltrane after Elvin Jones left the group. The band came through Chicago, and "Jack told Coltrane you should ask this guy to play. And I was like, 'Wait a minute, Jack, man.' But Coltrane did ask me to come up and play. ... It was a remarkable experience for me. I mean (drummer) Roy Haynes came in that night and sat in, and it ended up with the club owner putting us out of the club because we played so late."
As a scientist of sound, Mitchell seems uniquely suited to teaching. One approach he uses involves a scored-improvisational system he developed decades ago that he calls the "card catalog." It's a series of cards that contain different kinds of cues to help students with improvisation.
"I noticed that when it came time to improvise, my students would often make mistakes. So I derived this system to help them discover some different options."
The big picture for Mitchell as a teacher, though, is to help his students figure out their own paths.
"I think the best thing you can teach a person is how to learn," he says. "And once they discover their own individual approach to that - which is inside all of us - then all of a sudden they've opened up a door of endless resources."
Roscoe Mitchell: "Informance" conversation with Derk Richardson. 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets: $10. Call (415) 826-5750 or go to themarsh.org/rising.html.
Roscoe Mitchell with the Stanford Jazz Orchestra: 8 p.m. Feb. 27. Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University. Tickets: $10 general public; $5 students; free for Stanford students. Call (650) 723-2720 or go to music.stanford.edu.
To hear music by Roscoe Mitchell, go to sfgate.com/eguide.To see a video of Mitchell performing, go to youtube.com/watch?v=Tbfd8_U4Ac.
MUSIC: A Maestro Of Esoteric Invention Becomes Accessible By ADAM SHATZ Published: March 28, 1999
IN 1937 John Cage inaugurated a musical revolution in three sentences of typically Zenlike simplicity: ''Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.'' In the future, he declared, music would be replaced by a broader field of creativity, which he called ''the organization of sound.''
In 1966 Roscoe Mitchell, then a 26-year-old saxophonist living on the South Side of Chicago, released a stunning album called ''Sound.'' Mr. Mitchell's band looked like a jazz sextet, but it didn't play like one. For starters, the music had no fixed pulse: the drums were used atmospherically, not rhythmically. The solos were explorations of timbre and noise punctuated by long silences; the overall effect was a trippy suspension of time. ''Sound'' belonged as much to the future Cage envisioned as to the jazz tradition.
Any similarities to Cage, however, were serendipitous. Unlike Cage, a privileged insider who delighted in mischief, Mr. Mitchell was a purposeful outsider, intent on claiming new rights for himself and his peers. ''Sound'' was no mere esthetic experiment. It was a pointed challenge to what Mr. Mitchell's fellow Chicagoan Anthony Braxton has called ''the myth of the sweating brow'' -- the notion that black music is an expression of native grace rather than introspection. And in 1966, the year Stokely Carmichael raised the cry of black power, ''Sound'' had the force of a manifesto.
Roscoe Mitchell, whose album ''Nine to Get Ready'' has just appeared, is a leading member of jazz's forgotten avant-garde. Once hailed as an heir to Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler, Mr. Mitchell found himself pushed to the margins in the 1980's by Wynton Marsalis and his traditionalist followers, who viewed free jazz as an evil second only to fusion. Since the early 90's, Mr. Mitchell has been staging a comeback, recording and performing at a furious clip. He might not be welcome at Lincoln Center, where musicians are expected to adhere to blues-derived forms and steer clear of European dissonances. But among younger jazz players who chafe at such restrictions, Mr. Mitchell is increasingly recognized as an elder statesman.
''Jazz,'' he said recently, ''is a part of the whole picture, but the communication lines are all over the place now. If you're truly in love with music, you can't help being affected by that fact.''
A small, wiry man with close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, Mr. Mitchell, 59, is best known as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the most important free-jazz groups since Mr. Coleman's 1960's quartet. But it is in Mr. Mitchell's work as a solo performer and as a leader that he has expressed his vision most rigorously.
A saxophonist and flutist with a hard, acerbic sound reminiscent of Eric Dolphy, Mr. Mitchell has a predilection for unusual effects like circular breathing, a technique of simultaneously inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth that allows a musician to blow for marathon stretches. His compositions have been performed by a wide array of ensembles, ranging from his own experimental jazz bands to contemporary classical groups like the S.E.M. Ensemble.
Although he has been accused of making self-consciously cerebral music, he said: ''It does not bother me to hear my music described that way. I am a scientist involved in the study of music, and it may well be that my work possesses some of those qualities.''
On ''Nine to Get Ready,'' the scientist has unbuttoned his lab coat and delivered some of the most lyrically accessible music of his career. Half the album is devoted to Mr. Mitchell's thorny, stylishly polytonal chamber music. But the jazzier half blazes with feelings that Mr. Mitchell once seemed bent on renouncing in his pursuit of sonic invention.
The unusual nine-piece band on ''Nine to Get Ready'' is composed of Mr. Mitchell on reeds, his longtime associate George Lewis on trombone and Hugh Ragin on trumpet, simultaneously backed by two full rhythm sections: the pianists Craig Taborn and Matthew Shipp, the bassists Jaribu Shahid and William Parker and the drummers Tani Tabbal and Gerald Cleaver. As Mr. Mitchell pointed out, the rhythm sections ''can function together or separately.''
Although most of the music on ''Nine to Get Ready'' is notated, Mr. Mitchell's composing methods blur the line between written and improvised music. To preserve the spontaneity of improvised music, he uses written instructions and graphic symbols as well as notes in his sheet music. (In one concert, Mr. Mitchell divided a stage into squares, each containing suggestions for the performers, who would move from one to the next.) At the same time, Mr. Mitchell abhors off-the-cuff expressiveness; he expects musicians to shape each improvisation as if it were composed. As he put it, ''You've got to know your part in improvised music, too.''
MR. MITCHELL, who was born and reared in Chicago, reached musical maturity at a time when the South Side nearly surpassed New York as a center of jazz innovation. In the early 60's, Mr. Mitchell began playing in the pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams's Experimental Band, which gave birth to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (now better known as simply A.A.C.M.). Drawing inspiration from the music of Mr. Coleman and from the politics of Malcolm X, the collective staged concerts and provided music lessons to inner-city children. ''We knew what happened to people who were out there on their own, and we didn't want to end up like that,'' Mr. Mitchell recalled. ''We wanted to have a scene that we controlled.''
The collective nurtured some of the most significant composers of the 70's and 80's, including Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Braxton and Henry Threadgill. ''There was a feeling of not waiting around for someone to say you're O.K.'' said Mr. Mitchell. ''You'd go to someone's concert, get really inspired and go back home to prepare for your own concert.'' A distinctive regional sound arose, one that valued shadings of color and structural experiments over rhythmic motion and soloing. If New York loft musicians were the action painters of free jazz, these Chicagoans were its constructivists, working through appropriation and collage.
In 1968, Mr. Mitchell founded the collective's flagship band, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with the bassist Malachi Favors, the trumpeter Lester Bowie and the saxophonist Joseph Jarman. While traveling in France the next year, the Art Ensemble added the drummer Don Moye. Its motto was ''Great Black Music: Past, Present and Future.'' (Early album titles like ''Certain Blacks Do What They Wanna! -- Join Them!'' gave the band a certain radical chic cachet.) The Art Ensemble produced sophisticated pastiches of advanced jazz, big band music, blues, African percussion and reggae that honored -- and sent up -- the black musical tradition.
Mr. Mitchell was the band's intellectual-in-residence. (Mr. Bowie was its jester, Mr. Jarman its mystic.) He was also the only member to appear on stage in street clothes. Since Mr. Moye, Mr. Favors and Mr. Jarman covered their faces with tribal paint and Mr. Bowie wore a physician's suit, Mr. Mitchell's appearance was a symbolic rejection of ornament. It reflected the lean, analytic style he was cultivating as a composer.
Although Mr. Mitchell still performs with the Art Ensemble, since the late 70's he has focused on his work as a composer and leader. In 1976, he moved with his family to a big farm in Wisconsin, where he could finally hear, he said, ''silence and the way things move in nature.'' As he explained: ''When you're in the city you're always being influenced by what's going on around you. I needed to get out of the city to find myself, though I admit when I first looked in the mirror I didn't see all that much. I found that I wasn't all that great and I kept working, from morning to night.''
On his records, Mr. Mitchell has painstakingly documented this process of self-examination. Although he has produced marvels like the 1981 album ''Snurdy McGurdy and Her Dancin' Shoes,'' some of his records demonstrated that avant-garde jazz could be as arid as academic serialism. With ''Nine to Get Ready'' -- his best record since ''Snurdy'' -- Mr. Mitchell has succeeded in fusing his scientific investigations of sound with the humanism of his Art Ensemble work. The chamber pieces have an unusual suppleness; the ballads are almost voluptuous. The opening track, ''Leola,'' is a breathtaking requiem for the composer's stepmother. In ''Jamaican Farewell,'' a beautiful, cloud-like formation, Mr. Ragin's trumpeting sounds virtually Coplandesque.
Mr. Mitchell, who now lives in Madison, Wis., leads a fairly ascetic life for a jazz musician. He often wakes up early to run through Bach's flute sonatas with Joan Wildman, a pianist on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he occasionally teaches. He spends most of the day composing, studying and practicing. Baroque music is his latest obsession, and he has been transcribing some of his compositions for a recorder orchestra. ''Berkeley Fudge, a saxophonist, gave me my recorder, and it felt so natural, just the one key and the six holes,'' he said. ''And of course the sound is just incredible. I've been in a lot of halls in Italy that were just built for that sound.''
If all of this seems a long way from his Chicago jazz roots, Mr. Mitchell continues to uphold what he calls ''A.A.C.M. philosophy.'' His dream, he said, is to set up a collective of his own -- in the country, of course: ''I'd love to have a school and a big performance space. And I'd love to have a state of the art video studio because the only example we have is MTV.'' He paused, then added: ''I'd never have to leave the house. Can you think of a hipper life than that?'' Adam Shatz's most recent article for Arts and Leisure was on DJ interpretations of Steve Reich's music.
Tuesday, 02 December 2014 'It's on the younger musicians to create a music that is alive right now': An interview with Roscoe Mitchell
commons.wikimedia.org / Pasquale Ottaiano
Written by Alex Cunningham
As a key figure in the evolution of American jazz, multi-instrumentalist and composer Roscoe Mitchell continues to alter the face of avant-garde music.
In 1965, Mitchell became a driving force behind the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a non-profit artist support group now entering its 50th year. From within the AACM's membership rose the Mitchell-led Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Pairing fierce improvisation with Mitchell's singular compositional voice, the Art Ensemble pushed the boundaries of the budding American free-jazz scene. The immense influence of the Art Ensemble steps beyond the jazz world, with early AEC records forming a rite of passage for experimental musicians of all stripes.
Mitchell has found a lasting impact outside of the Art Ensemble, with a solo output that inarguably establishes him as one of America's most visionary composers. "Nonaah," a Mitchell piece originally written for solo saxophone, has been the subject of numerous rearrangements, orchestral performances, literature and dissertations over a course of four decades, gaining newfound vibrancy with every iteration.
With a vast discography and numerous collaborations behind him, Mitchell remains one of the most prolific and important voices in modern jazz. This year alone has seen collaborative releases with multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson and drummer Mike Reed on top of two collaborative releases with drummer Kikanju Baku and pianist Craig Taborn.
On Friday, December 5, Mitchell and Taborn will grace the Stage at KDHX for a rare St. Louis performance of improv-laced compositions. I spoke to Mitchell about this upcoming performance, reconciling improvisation and composition, and the changing face of his work in the modern musical climate.
Alex Cunningham: What do you have in store for the St. Louis performance?
Roscoe Mitchell: Craig and I will probably be doing some things that are similar to what we did on our recent CD, pieces in the series that we call "Conversations," the ones with [Kikanju] Baku. For that, I set different parameters. I sent them music to listen to or think about as ways of constructing these improvisations. We'll be concentrating on those for our performance in St. Louis.
How did you first meet Craig and when did you first start playing together?
Let's see…that was a long time ago. I would have to dig out recordings to go back.
How has that musical relationship evolved over time? It's been a wonderful journey working with Craig. We both have been recording in several configurations that go all the way back to the Note Factory or our quintet recordings and things like that. It's been a lot of years.
Considering all of your different collaborators over the years, what do you take away from each collaboration?
I think the thing about all of us is that we're all individuals, and when you're being individuals you can always learn from each other. That's what I really appreciated about who I've had the pleasure of working with over the years. That's really the best learning environment.
Moving onto composition, how does having a deep compositional background shape your improvisational output?
To me, improvisation is spontaneous composition. I study composition and improvisation as a parallel. When you're writing a composition, you're at home, you have time. You think of an idea today, you think of a response tomorrow. In improvisation, you're developing a composition right on the spot so you're trying to develop your compositional skills so you can make these compositional decisions in the moment. That's a lot. It's a lot for people who do improvisations together. They're making those decisions right on the moment and developing composition. It's very important for people who really want to develop as mature improvisers to study composition and improvisation as a parallel.
What are some problems that you see as common between improvisers?
A long time ago I was teaching workshops for inexperienced improvisers, and what I noticed was that a lot of them were making the same mistakes. I set out to try to address these mistakes, and one method I used was scored improvisation, which is when you give the improvisers the materials that are going to be played during the improvisation, but you present it in a way so that they are able to make choices as to which parts of the materials they are going to present during the improvisation. What that does is help inexperienced improvisers develop concentration because that is a very important part of becoming a good improviser: being able to hang in longer and longer and develop the skills of concentration. Concentration is something you really have to work on to be able to extend it.
Another problem I wanted to address is the following aspect that occurs with younger improvisers or inexperienced improvisers: You're playing together, you know what you're doing, I don't quite know what I'm doing, I'm listening to see what you're doing...
Trying to catch up…
Not even catch up. I'm behind you. That's the same as being behind on a written piece of music. You know your part, I don't really know mine. I'm sitting there waiting to see what's going to happen. That's another problem that happens which also negates counterpoint and all of these other things that are really required for music making. Again, it's very important to study composition and improvisation as a parallel to be a good improviser.
Why do you think some players see improvisation and composition as separate spheres rather than bleeding into one another?
With music, you can't just throw everything out the window. When you don't follow the rules of music, you lose. That's what I've found out. The only thing that helps you in music is what you really learn. What I do in my studies is sometimes I take just a very small element of music and try to become very intimate with it. Other than that, you're just playing around with the surface, and music doesn't start to reveal itself to you. I'm looking at this picture of Frederic Rzewski on my wall here. I remember he came here to Mills [College] and did a concert, and one of his pieces was just filled with a trill. He was trilling from the top of the piano to the bottom of the piano and it took him 25 minutes for him to get there with all of these different variations going on. So what that says to me is he's really studied the trill. He really knows what's going on with that. It's got to be like that. With me, all of the music that I go back and listen to over and over again, that element is always there. Always that element, that element where people have really gotten themselves involved with what they were working on in music. That whole notion of "it's going to fall out of the sky" -- maybe some nights it does, but mostly you're working 99% of the time.
Coming back to composition, how do your compositions evolve over time? With something like "Nonaah," did you think this would be a topic of discussion so many years later and that you would have so many different iterations of that piece?
I never did. I had no idea that this piece would take on a life of its own the way it did. I moved to the country because I wanted to get out of Chicago, just away from the city so that I could get the space so I could have more time to write music. I remember when I got there I looked in the mirror and I didn't see that much. One of the projects that I wanted to do at that time was five works for solo alto saxophone. The basic principles that I set for "Nonaah" were to take the three ranges of the saxophone, the three registers, so that I could see the effect of the saxophone sounding like more than one. The way I went about that was to use wide interval skips that moved along rapidly so you could get that effect. And then, not all the time, but this time I just sat down and wrote it. I wrote the basic structure of the piece.
In February of this year, I'll have "Nonaah" for orchestra by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with the conductor Ilan Volkov. What it is for me now is that I've taken this piece from solo saxophone to full orchestra. The next thing that I'd like to do is to write a book on the process. A lot of people have written about the piece. I'm collecting all of that information. Paul Steinbeck, who is at Washington University, said that he would help me with this process when I wanted to do it.
But no, I never thought that. What I did discover after working with these materials is that it's kind of like a system on its own. In some cases when opportunities came up and there was no time to do anything, like there was an opportunity in New York to have it performed in a chamber orchestra situation, there was not really enough time to write a whole new piece, but I was able to do a version of that for chamber orchestra. One of my students from out here, Jacob Zimmerman, did this whole thing in Seattle with all these different variations of the piece. I've got a lot of materials on this piece. It kind of just happened over the years.
What is that like to spend so much time with a piece?
Well, that goes right in line with getting to know something intimately. The way I see it, if you take something like Bach, for instance, what I see there is a well thought-out system that he was writing out of. If you venture into those sets of mathematics, you're probably going to be sounding like Bach. A lot of other people have done that: Charlie Parker, many, many people. I wonder what Charlie Parker would be doing today if he was still living.
Your work has been highly influential in the jazz realm but also to musicians outside of that realm, especially your work in Art Ensemble of Chicago, which has really been a touchstone for artists in noise and free-improv spheres. Why do you think that music translates so well with these musicians who might not have a jazz background?
I think a lot of musicians from all different types of fields nowadays are interested in that word, "improvisation." I tell my students, it's on you guys to help make that bridge, being able to really write things that people coming from different fields can really relate to and tying the two elements together so that it all works. To me, it's a very exciting time in music right now. There's a piece that I had that got performed in the Czech Republic by the Janacek Philharmonic in 1998 called "Fallen Heroes." On that piece, I'm playing as an improviser and Thomas Buckner is also improvising on that piece. When I first did that piece in 1998, the approach I wanted to have in my improvisation was to use a 12-tone thing that I was improvising with, so I wrote out a bunch of 12-tone rows as a guide so that wherever I started I knew that I wouldn't repeat a note before I got through all 12-tone notes.
I was asked to present a piece in New York in full orchestra next year as part of the AACM's 50th anniversary. They were saying, "Would you like to do 'Nonaah' or 'Fallen Heroes?'" I decided to do "Fallen Heroes" and I had been thinking about that because of friends of mine who said, "You should write a piece with you playing on it for orchestra." Now here's an opportunity to do that and I'm really excited about that. Of course I've had to go back and put it in a format that I can really work on because the version of Finale [music notation software] that it was on way back then does not adapt well to what Finale is now. I didn't really put that piece on the computer, a friend of mine put it on the computer, so I'm just sorting through all of that and getting it into a format that I can work on. But now, I've got even more ideas on how I can fix that and how to fix the parts of the orchestra doing improvisation to extend them even more. I'm working on that now. Some of the elements that are in conversations in that [piece] I want to explore even more in orchestral settings.
It's really a very exciting period in music for those who want to roll up their sleeves and go to work. It's on the younger people now to develop these different elements and be able to function in all of these different types of musical environments.
You've crossed over into some of these modern musical environments yourself too in collaborating with electronic musicians, like some of the work you've done with David Wessel. What attracted you to exploring that realm?
Well, you hit the nail on the head. It was David Wessel. I remember him from way back when. We first met when the Art Ensemble, it was Malachi Favors, Lester Bowie and myself, went to California and David Wessel was teaching at Stanford and he had brought out the Cecil Taylor Unit that was forming at Stanford. He had this house right next door to his house in east Palo Alto, this little bitty house. By the time we got our instruments and everything set up, there was no room hardly to walk around. What we could do was put our sleeping bags on the floor under our instruments and we could just crawl up under there, get in our sleeping bags and then when we woke up we could just get out of our sleeping bags and start playing. This is when I first met David Wessel. I remember when him and another fellow who played trumpet started the computer music festivals in the States here. I remember he helped me get my first place here in the States in East Lansing.
He called me one day. He was just so excited. He said, "You got to come over, you got come over. I've been up all night. You have to come over." I went over there and he plays one note for me on the computer. I said, "David. Listen, man, I think I better stick with the saxophone."
He was the one who got me really interested in trying to develop the language that could go along with people that were doing that. This is what I tried to do. I worked with people like George Lewis and other people like that. It's been a very exciting journey. A lot of my students who are doing music like that owe a lot to David Wessel. David Wessel was the one who brought all this out on the scene. He was out there in Paris when they were building IRCAM [Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique] for Pierre Boulez. When I was there, he would take me to the building and show me what they were doing there. He was there actually helping composers that were coming there that wanted to use the computer in their orchestra pieces but didn't know anything about the computer at all. They didn't know anything about the computer.
God, man, I was just looking at photographs of David and myself on my computer this morning and this whole thing...I'm still having a problem trying to address the point that David is not here anymore, on this physical plane that is.
With how much computer-based music has advanced, where do you see musicians collaborating with electronic musicians using more traditional instrumentation going in the future?
I think it's going in a great direction. With my improv class this semester, I've got some amazing young musicians in there because the class is a mix of computer-music people and acoustic-music people. One of my students, Kataryna [Kopelevich], who is this excellent pianist, when the class first started, she said, "Oh, I don't know." I've watched her as the semester has progressed. She has really developed a method of playing the piano where she can get just pure sound out of it, with a keyboard. Also inside the piano she can do stuff too. It's been amazing to watch that come about like that. This stuff is really happening with these younger musicians. I say it's alive and well.
Because of the exciting time we live in musically, where do you think jazz is headed?
Always on the move. The history of it is always on the move. If you go back, you see that it is constantly growing. I have to bring up Coltrane. If he was still alive, what would he be doing now? You can see that whole thing in his development, where he came from and where he's going. In that interview that he did where he was with Miles [Davis] in Stockholm, he was saying that he wanted to go further back to the beginning. He wanted to develop a singular line. The reason why he was playing so many things was that he wanted to develop a singular line that would communicate even more.
I think that all of these ideas are alive and well and I think that it's on the younger musicians to create a music that is alive right now. If we look at the great musics of the past and we go back to them, what I see is that they were created in that time.
How do you think your career would have been different if you had started in this decade?
I look at some of the things that people are doing and they definitely have hands up on this technology, but I'm not regretful as to where I place in terms of environment. It has certainly pushed me in the direction of being able to meet these challenges with the saxophone, which is, I have to mention, one of the most versatile instruments if you look at all the music that's been played on it by all these different people. I think that certainly I'm affected by what's going on right now. It pushes me in the directions to be able meet those challenges. So much of your output has been pushing against boundaries and challenges. What boundaries still exist to be explored? Lifetimes...you just keep working on stuff. I would definitely need a few lifetimes to accomplish all of the things that I would like to accomplish in music.
The more you learn about multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell's work, you just have to be more and more impressed by this icon of avant garde jazz. If his only legacy was as a founding member of the Chicago's legendary Assocation for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (the AACM as its known, along with Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton among many others) and later, as an off-shoot of this, the Art Ensemble of Chicago (which began as an extension of one of his own groups), his place in history would be secured and then some. But that's only the beginning of Mitchell's work. Even the most cursory book about the history of post-war jazz has to deal with Mitchell's work. His enormous catalog of works have included pieces for string ensembles, trios, percussion ensembles, orchestras, a recorder ensemble, toy instruments and his own solo horns. In Robert Jourdain's MUSIC, THE BRAIN, AND ECSTACY, the author describes how humans are able to take different sounds from instruments and configure this information in our brain as 'music.' An important part of Mitchell's work has been to deconfigure and reconfigure these sounds into strange new patterns that aren't bound by conventional melody or rhythm, and thus rethink what we consider to be 'music.' Recent performances of "L-R-G/The Maze/S II Examples" (with Art Ensemble members Malachi Favors and Joseph Jarman among others) were the perfect reminder that Mitchell's work doesn't ignore his past achievements, which today still seem very revolutionary.
Special thanks to Richard Abrams and William G. Sacks for their help with this piece.
PSF: I wanted to ask about the pieces that you performed recently. "L-R-G" for you, Leo Smith, and George Lewis, seemed like a dialog or conversation with sixteen different instruments. The way that I constructed that piece was to make a study of each player's vocabulary and then put it together like that, along with different notes, different sounds, different effects and things like that. It is like a conversation in a way because any one person can control the conversation at any one time- it doesn't have a fixed tempo and that's movable from time to time, depending on the individual players' indivdual flows.
Having the different instruments also builds in the spatial factor. I've always been interested in shaping music in odd ways, with odd riffs and that's been probably something that I've continued on with my studies with improvisation as I'm working with people. Creating that odd space like that and also there's more than that. Just the timbre of different instruments, sounds, going from one instrument to another. Let's say you play the B flat soprano and change that over to alto and change that to tenor and so on and so forth. When you change instruments, each instrument has a different timbre, even if you're playing the same notes. I find that interesting also, when you're able to switch actual phrases back and forth.
PSF: With another piece from that evening, "The Maze," your ensemble was using a lot of unconventional percussion instruments- rattles, pans, hubcaps.
In Chicago at that time, there were a number of people who developed in that area. Not everyone was a percusssionist. Overall at that time, people were really starting to explore sounds and different ways of putting together their own sounds. For me, it was something similar to putting together "L-R-G"- putting the piece together according to the instruments that each person was dealing with. Then also maintaining that individual flow so that the performances could change from night to night. For me, I like that kind of thing, doing pieces that are a bit unusual.
PSF: Are percussion ensembles something that you'd like to continue with? Have you worked in with groups like that before?
Well, the Art Ensemble did play for a while without a percussionist after Philip Wilson left. We stayed without a real drummer with each of us playing percussion until we left to go to Europe where we brought in Don Moye as a regular drummer- basically the idea was always to have woodwinds in the group. I haven't really done other percussion pieces but I would like to write more of those. I've wanted to do something with the ensemble (that performed "Maze") with just bells. There's so many bell sounds that are available, different levels, soft ones and loud ones and so on. In the orchestral piece I've written ("Fallen Heros"), there's a small part for solo percussion.
I have so many ideas that my head is EXPLODING with ideas! (laughs) There's so much music that I almost feel that things are coming back around in a circle and things are opening up. I think people have always wanted to hear this kind of music but there hasn't been much of an opportunity for people to hear it. Now, it seems like it's coming back around to that again. I remember times when the whole music scene was just flourishing.
PSF: What do you think has made that happen?
I just think that everything goes in a circle. That was the '60's before and we're in the '90's now- that's a complete circle. It's that time. Not to mention that now you can have a whole other group of people who are now interested in that music. When I was young and doing it, there were also young people. So there's the people that were there a long time ago. And now, it's starting to be like a whole younger crowd of people that are interested also.
PSF: You started talking about your recent orchestral piece. You've done others, haven't you?
Yes, there's "Non Cognitive Aspects of the City" which was done by Eric Lund in Champaigne Urbana. There's another work I have called "Memories of A Dying Parachutist" that was done by the SEM Ensemble. Another work for orchestra was "Variations and Sketches from the Bamboo Terrace." I've had a few performances of that- it was done here in Madison and out in L.A. and by the 1750 Arch Ensemble on a tour of Europe in Cologne.
PSF: Is there anything that sets "Fallen Heros" apart from these other works?
I don't think so, not in the way that I work. I'll get into one area and I'll explore it. That's happened to me. Even "Variations" started out as trio for the group Space and then went on to be an orchestra piece. I think I did a transcription for mezzo-soprano at another time. It developed on. There were parts of it that I had which were improvisations. When I went back and listened to it, I said 'oh, I'll put that in.' Mel Graves inspired the bass solo that I wound up writting for that piece, which became a solo piece for contrabass within the structure of the orchestra. With "Nonaah," it started out the same way. I just thought that I would create a body of music that I would go back and forth to extract different compositions.
So in that way, it's kind of like in keeping with the way that I write most of the time. Certainly, there are pieces that I write where there's only one version of it. But that's one way that I've been doing it.
PSF: "Nonaah" is something that you've come back to again and again. What is it about that piece that intrigues you?
I guess it represents a time for me when I left the cities and moved out into the country. I felt that I had been influenced by being in the city enough and I wanted to go off by myself to see what was going on. I remember going out there and looking in the mirror and thinking I wasn't anything. (laughs) That's when I wrote the piece though there's several different versions. But again, I was inspired by hearing one version that made me want to do another. When I did the saxophone quartet version on the Nessa recording, after listening to the middle part with the four saxophones, the slower section, I thought 'oh my god- it would be nice to have something like this for strings.' I was talking to a friend of mine who's a composer and I said that this might be nice for a string quartet. And he said 'well, how about four cellos?' That's how I went on to do the completely notated version for four cellos. Now, what I want to do with that is something for four bass recorders. Look at that material and condense it in a way. One of the main features of "Nonaah" is that it has these very large intervals. I like to do it like that. For me, I know it makes me think it's easier to generate a piece if I need to do that.
PSF: A recent release of yours, Sound Songs, has you playing alone the whole time, including a version of "Fallen Heros." What made you go back to working solo?
I developed the material like that. I'll do that a lot of times with pieces. Then I'll go on from there. It's the same way that I developed "Nonaah"- I'll move the intervals real fast so that it appears to be more than one instrument and you get that effect because of the way that the horn is soundings in all the different registers. I work like that sometimes. What I wanted to do was develop a language that I felt comfortable with so when I did sit down to write the orchestra piece, I knew I would be sitting down writing and not saying 'oh, I can't write today.' (laughs) That's the reason that it's like that.
PSF: One of your methods of composition is 'scored improvisation' that you've used for the Sound Ensemble. How would you describe this?
I developed those for a lot of classes that I taught in improvisation. I found that the inexperienced improviser always has the same problems. Once they understand it, they deal with it clearer. Somehow imagine yourself as an improviser that really knew your part, if you had taken a piece of music and studied it and figured out how you were going to play each note, which dynamic level, what attack and so on. This is the kind of thing that you're after here. I found that a lot of times in improvisation, a lot of people don't know what to play. That was a problem for me. I figured that I would have some systems that will give the player information to play but distribute it in such a way that it's a improvisation. So that each time that this material is played, it will present a different improvisation. Theses scored improvisations were build to do this- fix players so that they don't follow. Following is like being behind on a written piece of music. This does that. You can do that and then you'll have an improvisation. What it does is it gives players a longer time to function in an improvisation that's really working. That helps because I found that it builds concentration. Knowing compositional form, the study of improvisation parallels composition.
PSF: How so? You have to know composition to be a good improviser. If you don't know how to think like a composer, you'll never be able to construct long pieces.
PSF: Do you think that silence is an important component of your work?
Yes, that's true. I weigh it as about fifty percent. It's like you got silence, that's a strong element. If you're just sitting somewhere and it's totally silent, a lot of people don't even have that luxury anymore, living in a city. In a concert hall, you can have that. When you interrupt that with a sound, then you have music. It's fascinating to study what efffect that has and what effect it has on silence. I think that's one of the things that inspires me to keep working in these irregular patterns.
PSF: Your work also seems to deal with not just rhythms and melodies but the SOUNDS of the instruments themselves.
Absolutely. "SII Examples" was a study of a curved soprano saxophone that I had. I looked at all the different fingering possibilities and wrote down the sounds that they produced. With saxophones, sometimes the mechanisms of the older instruments work more independently than the newer ones so that what you can get will vary from saxophone to saxophone. I might study that instrument to put together melodic structures that weren't quite in the regular way where they might be moving one sound to another, a quarter tone instead of a regular note or using quarter tone and then a regular note and so on. I've always been fascinated by that. I like to hear melodies that go from one extreme to the next- saxophone to a bell to a whistle, for instance.
PSF: It is true that sometimes you'll compose a piece without worrying how the piece will sound in the end?
I'm probably not worrying about that too much. I'm after something else. Everything that I try to do is relaxed. I try to relate that to nature. If you listen to nature, all the sounds are done in a confident way. I'm trying to do that. With improvisation, there's a lot of factors that come in. You have to open yourself up, of course after you've got your skills down. It's not some sort of thing that comes out of the sky to you. Then you can get into some areas that you're not accustomed to.
I don't like to box myself in when I'm composing. I'll outline in a piece what I want to happen. When I'm writing, I exhaust each situation just to convince myself that it's the right choice that I'm making. With the piano piece I'm doing, it started on 8-8-88 (August 8, 1988) so it relates to the piano with 88 keys. I'm going to have three movements and I want them to relate to an 8, that would be 35 measures for the first movement, very long measures. I'm still flexible- the middle movement I said was going to be 17 measures and I may change that.
PSF: You've said before that you'd prefer to stay home and write music and let other people perform your works. Is that still true?
Not really. I'd like to perform. I'm approaching a period in my life though where I'd like to be totally absorbed into music, doing concerts, writing something. Basically, that IS what I am doing. (laughs) I just want to get more into it somehow, in this period especially. Maybe I think I can get some of these things happening. I know I've spent a lot of time doing different things. I figured that when I got back into these baroque instruments, I thought 'oh my god, what am I doing?' But really, it's a very rich experience. Working with all these people who play these instruments, I've learned so much and then a year or so has gone by and I'm actually playing them. I just feel that the most valuble thing right now is time to do all these different things.
PSF: Could you talk about some of your playing techniques like circular breathing and multi-phonics?
Circular breathing is a very old tradition, done by Egyptian musicians and in Australia. I probably got interested in it because of Roland Kirk. He's the guy that could really do all these things- play the double, triple horns, a flute out of his nose at the same time. He just turned me on to so much. I'd say to him 'I'm listening to you' and he was always saying 'no, I'm listening to YOU!' (laughs). He just turned me onto so many possibilities with the music. Even in retrospective, some of the things I did earlier in the music by having that as a vehicle that I could also use, it just opens up so many possibilities.
Like the piece "SII Examples." When I did that twenty years ago, I didn't do circular breathing. The version that's on the record is fine, I like it but I was breathing. I thought 'I can do that same thing and don't have to breath.' So that opens up more possibilities. In retrospect, I like that advantage.
I think the multiphonic thing is in keeping with the way that I study, with all these different sounds that fascinate me. I would say that kind of relates to what I was saying about nature where all these different things are coming out at you. I've also been fortunate to work with musicians who have been helpful in developing this vocabulary. One person has been a woodwind player named Gerald Oshita, who was in Space (a trio that Mitchell formed). I just consider myself a student, trying to learn more about it. I hear a lot of different things and I like it as an extension. I always try to think of a vocabulary to match different musical situations. Like when you're playing with an electrical situation or a computer situation. To me, it's a challenge.
PSF: You once said 'when I was just playing alto saxophone, everything was great. No problem. Then I started to add all these other instruments and everything fell apart.' What did you mean?
That was true. I only had one instrument to worry about. I'm glad that I struggled through! (laughs) I do know that there's a lot of things going on there but if you always give it 100% when you're there, you'll always go back to where you left off. That's a good feeling- you can always feel as if you're improving. I feel like now, just recently, that I'm just beginning to get a real tenor sound. But it paid off to hang in there and do that. I'm certainly getting a better understanding of the flute. It really works. It takes that kind of time on each instrument. Musicians are living longer today so you do have a little more time to do these things.
PSF: When you play solo as opposed to playing in an ensemble, what kind of effect does that have on you and your music?
Solo is the opposite end of playing in an ensemble. I think that good improvisers should be able to play solo as well as master all the problems that happen within a group improvisation. Solo playing for me has really given me that feeling of independence, where I know that I can function independently when in a group improvisation. For me, it's just that I'm studying in terms of performance. I'm thinking of starting a whole new series of solo pieces. I'm working on this one for the "Fallen Heros" because there is a part at the end for improvisation for the voice, where the alto saxophone joins the voice.
PSF: You've done some workshops in high schools. What kind of things were you trying to impart to the students? I've done several types of programs at schools. If you have a longer period of time, you have time to work with the students. If it's a shorter period, a day or so, I'm usually doing a lecture/demonstration type of thing. I did also teach here at the University of Wisconsin for a while where I did actually have ensembles that I was working with. At Cal Arts, I was there for two semesters where I taught four classes. Those were much more involved. You want to leave people with SOMETHING when you go in there for an hour. It's been a challenge to put things like that together.
The last thing I did was Upstate where I took along video tapes and did some lecture/demonstrations, Q & A's. I almost want to have a Q & A after every concert. We had them when we played in Chicago recently. I would have had them in New York but we were a little pressed for time.
What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibily can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music. Basically, the same kind of thing that I was taught- inspire the individual to really study music in a sincere way and to try to bring out the creative side in a person.
PSF: I've heard that you're interested in probing parts of your earlier work now.
That's the good thing about having all of this. I was just listening to an Art Ensemble record. It sounded very fresh. Some of the styles I was writing in at the time I might go back to. For me, this period here, I'm not lacking in ideas. The problem is having the time to get to all of these things.
PSF: Since you brought up the Art Ensemble, how do you see the work you've done with the group differing from your own ensembles that you lead? I think that we set a philosophy, even before the Art Ensemble, in AACM. A way of working. That just kind of follows through with most of my groups. I've been fortunate to get guys that have been interested in music for a long time. With the Note Factory, you're looking at guys that have been with me for twenty years. Some of them are newer than others so it's really a long experience of making music together.
PSF: You've called the Art Ensemble 'a ceremony with certain people enacting certain roles.' What do you think your role has been?
If I view the Art Ensemble, I see it as five individuals. Each person all has their strong individual lifestyles and they were able to come together and blend these things into a cohesive ensemble. That's the way I would view the Art Ensemble.
PSF: Joseph Jarman characterized the individual interests of each member of the AEC. He said that your interest is 'polytonal.' Would you agree?
I guess that's one aspect. But I also have music for... whatever would be the opposite for that! (laughs) I always think that if there's one thing, then there's the other. The middle will kind of present itself to you then. The thing is to have control over both ends of the spectrum. Then you're able to get to the things in the middle.
PSF: Being from Chicago, growing up there and evolving as musician there, what kind of effect did the area have on you?
There's a lot of history there. Just doing this piece now and having the same people there like Chuck Nessa, who recorded those works 20 years ago and now recording them again. Today, it's different out there but there's still people out there like Chuck Nessa who had a vision and stuck to that vision. My college music professor was there too, Richard Wang, and old friends from 30 years ago, other musicians. Chicago has a special thing. I always liked the pace of Chicago because you could get more done there. In New York, a lot of musicians are involved in many things. A lot of people who go there don't end up being their own self. In Chicago, you have that kind of opportunity to do that.
PSF: What about being in Wisconsin now? How does that effect your work?
What's most interesting to me right now is time to study. I could be anywhere right now. I like Madison because you really don't have the hustle and bustle that you have in the big cities, getting around and so forth.
PSF: What do you think about the evolution of the AACM and some of the great things it's achieved?
I think it's still evolving. There was a slogan once 'a power stronger than itself.' It's kind of like that. For me, I feel like we're on a revival. I'm just looking forward to doing a lot more with different people in the AACM and just in general, music-wise. The AACM has been an influence on so many different factors throughout the evolution of the music of the '60's to now. PSF: What are some of your current goals as a composer and an improviser?
I don't really have any except to get better. I would like to continue to study and to write more compositions. To me, music is my life's work.
THE MUSIC OF ROSCOE MITCHELL: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. MITCHELL:
Roscoe Mitchell - Sound / 1966 - Full Album
https://www.flickr.com/photos/planate... 1. Ornette 2. The Little Suite, 5:27 3. Sound, 15:52 Roscoe Mitchell, as. cl. Lester Bowie, tp. flh. harm. Lester Lashley, tb. ce. Maurice McIntyre, ts. Malachi Favors, b. Alvin Fielder, dr Rec. Sound Studios Inc. Chicago, 1966
L-R-G (Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, Wadada Leo Smith)
L-R-G,
a composition by Roscoe Mitchell, performed by Roscoe Mitchell (reeds),
George Lewis (trombone) and Wadada Leo Smith (trupmet) as part of the
National Black Arts Festival (Re)soundings festival. Concert recorded
July 18, 1998 at Cannon Chapel, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.
Roscoe Mitchell - "Leola"
from Mitchell's 'Nine To Get Ready' CD [1999]
Roscoe Mitchell - "Ericka"
From the album "NONAAH" released in 1977 & 2008, by Nessa Records.
Roscoe Mitchell - solo alto saxophone:
ROSCOE MITCHELL and the Sound Ensemble - "Sing/Song":
Alto Saxophone, Composed By – Roscoe Mitchell Artwork – Jürgen Pankarz Bass – Wes Brown Drums, Percussion – Pheeroan Ak Laff Photography By – Alex Dutilh Piano – Marilyn Crispell Producer – Burkhard Hennen Recorded By, Mixed By – Jef Gilson Reeds – Anthony Braxton, Douglas Ewart, Dwight Andrews, Marty Ehrlich, Wallace McMillan Trombone – Alfred Patterson, George Lewis, Ray Anderson Trumpet – Hugh Ragin, Kenny Wheeler, Leo Smith, Mike Mossman*, Rob Howard Tuba – Pinguin Moschner Vibraphone – Bobby Naughton
Roscoe MITCHELL (with Anthony BRAXTON) - Duets (1978) full album
DUETS - Roscoe Mitchell (with Anthony Braxton) Full Album (Vinile, 33 giri e 1/3 -rpm-, 12”; A4) Sackville Recordings — 3016, Canada720p:
Tracklist:
00:00 . . . A1 Five Twenty One Equals Eight (Roscoe Mitchell) 04:55 . . . A2 Line Fine Lyon Seven (Mitchell) 06:25 . . . A3 Seven Behind Nine Ninety-Seven Sixteen Or Seven (Mitchell) 09:16 . . . A4 Cards - Three And Open (Mitchell) 19:56 . . . End Side a) 20:12 . . . B1 Composition One [40Q] (Anthony Braxton) 27:10 . . . B2 Composition Two [74B] (Braxton) 33:55 . . . B3 Composition Three [74A] (Braxton) 42:10 . . . End Side b)
Recorded at Thunder Sound in Toronto, Canada on December 13, 1977
Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton (Reeds)
Roscoe Mitchell Solo
5 febbraio 2013 Cankarjev Dom Lljbljana
Roscoe Mitchell Interview (1 of 3) - Biography:
Roscoe Mitchell Interview (2 of 3) - The Evolution of "Nonaah":
New-Music
record label Table & Chairs is proud to present a performance
dedicated to Roscoe Mitchell's renowned composition, "Nonaah"
[noh-NAY-uh], at Benaroya Hall's Nordstrom Recital Hall on June 7th at
8:00 PM. The performance will feature Mitchell giving a rare, extended
solo saxophone performance and the world premier of a new arrangement of
"Nonaah" for the Table & Chairs group, Lawson. Bad Luck will also
present a contemporary piece rooted in the melodic themes of "Nonaah."
The rest of the program will comprise of different arrangements of
"Nonaah."
Benaroya's Nordstrom Recital Hall; Friday, June 7th;
Pre-concert talk at 7:15 pm; Concert begins at 8:00 pm. $30 general; $20
students. For more info and tickets visit http://www.nonaah.com/
New-Music
record label Table & Chairs is proud to present a performance
dedicated to Roscoe Mitchell's renowned composition, "Nonaah"
[noh-NAY-uh], at Benaroya Hall's Nordstrom Recital Hall on June 7th at
8:00 PM. The performance will feature Mitchell giving a rare, extended
solo saxophone performance and the world premier of a new arrangement of
"Nonaah" for the Table & Chairs group, Lawson. Bad Luck will also
present a contemporary piece rooted in the melodic themes of "Nonaah."
The rest of the program will comprise of different arrangements of
"Nonaah."
Benaroya's Nordstrom Recital Hall; Friday, June 7th;
Pre-concert talk at 7:15 pm; Concert begins at 8:00 pm. $30 general; $20
students. For more info and tickets visit http://www.nonaah.com/
http://www.nonaah.com/ New-Music
record label Table & Chairs is proud to present a performance
dedicated to Roscoe Mitchell's renowned composition, "Nonaah"
[noh-NAY-uh], at Benaroya Hall's Nordstrom Recital Hall on June 7th at
8:00 PM. The performance will feature Mitchell giving a rare, extended
solo saxophone performance and the world premier of a new arrangement of
"Nonaah" for the Table & Chairs group, Lawson. Bad Luck will also
present a contemporary piece rooted in the melodic themes of "Nonaah."
The rest of the program will comprise of different arrangements of
"Nonaah."
Benaroya's Nordstrom Recital Hall; Friday, June 7th;
Pre-concert talk at 7:15 pm; Concert begins at 8:00 pm. $30 general; $20
students. For more info and tickets visit http://www.nonaah.com/
Roscoe Mitchell (born August 3, 1940 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American composer, jazz instrumentalist and educator, mostly known for being "a technically superb – if idiosyncratic – saxophonist."[1]The Penguin Guide to Jazz described him as "one of the key figures" in avant-garde jazz;[2] All About Jazz states that he has been "at the forefront of modern music" for the past 35 years.[3]The New York Times has mentioned that he "qualifies as an iconoclast."[4]
Mitchell grew up in the Chicago, Illinois area where he played
saxophone and clarinet at around age twelve. His family was always
involved in music with many different styles playing in the house when
he was a child as well as having a secular music background. His brother, Norman, in particular was the one who introduced Mitchell to jazz.[5] While attending Englewood High School in Chicago, he furthered his study of the clarinet.[6] In the 1950s, he joined the United States Army, during which time he was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany and played in a band with fellow saxophonists Albert Ayler and Rubin Cooper, the latter of which Mitchell commented "took me under his wing and taught me a lot of stuff."[5] He also studied under the first clarinetist of the Heidelberg Symphony while in Germany.[5]
Mitchell returned to the United States in the early 1960s, relocated to
the Chicago area, and performed in a band with Wilson Junior College
undergraduates Malachi Favors (bass), Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Braxton (all saxophonists). Mitchell also studied with Muhal Richard Abrams and played in his band, the Muhal Richard Abrams' Experimental Band, starting in 1961.
From 1967 Mitchell, Bowie, Favors and, on occasion, Jarman performed
as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, then the Art Ensemble, and finally
in 1969 were billed as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The group included Phillip Wilson on drums for short span before he joined Paul Butterfield's
band. The group lived and performed in Europe from 1969 to 1971, though
they arrived without any percussionist after Wilson left. To fill the
void, Mitchell commented that they "evolved into doing percussion
ourselves."[5] The band did eventually get a percussionist, Don Moye,
who Mitchell had played with before and was living in Europe at that
time. For performances, the band often wore brilliant African costumes
and painted their faces.[7]
The Art Ensemble of Chicago have been described as becoming "possibly
the most highly acclaimed jazz band" in the 1970s and 1980s.[1]
Creative Arts Collective and beyond
Mitchell and the others returned to the States in 1971. After having
been back in Chicago for three years, Mitchell then established the Creative Arts Collective (CAC) in 1974 that had a similar musical aesthetic to the AACM.[8] The group was based in East Lansing, Michigan and frequently used the facilities at Michigan State University. Mitchell also formed the Sound Ensemble in the early 1970s, an "outgrowth of the CAC" in his words, that consisted mainly of Mitchell, Hugh Ragin, Jaribu Shahid, Tani Tabbal, and Spencer Barefield.[8]
In the 1990s, Mitchell started to experiment in classical music with such composers/artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Thomas Buckner, and Borah Bergman, the latter two of which formed a trio with Mitchell called Trio Space. Buckner was also part of another group with Mitchell and Gerald Oshita called Space in the late 1990s. He then conceived the Note Factory in 1992 with various old and new collaborators as another evolution of the Sound Ensemble.
He lived in the area of Madison, Wisconsin[9]
and performed with a re-assembled Art Ensemble of Chicago. In 1999, the
band was hit hard with the death of Bowie, but Mitchell fought off the
urge to recast his position in the group, stating simply "You can't do
that" in an interview with Allaboutjazz.com editor-in-chief Fred Jung.[5] The band continued on despite the loss.
Mitchell has made a point of working with younger musicians in
various ensembles and combinations, many of whom were not yet born when
the first Art Ensemble recordings were made. Mainly from Chicago, these
players include trumpeter Corey Wilkes, bassist Karl E. H. Seigfried, and drummer Isaiah Spencer.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
The New Thing embodied by Roscoe Mitchell's 1966 album Sound is new again
In
1965, Mitchell helped found the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM). His 1966 album Sound (Delmark) is heralded by
many as a milestone that helped usher in "The New Thing." Along with
Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and others,
Mitchell became a founding member of The Art Ensemble of Chicago in the
late 1960s. He's since continued to explore the fringes of avant-garde
jazz, noise, classical, folk, and world music to create hybrid
compositions that mesmerize and provoke.
The
idea that American music never fully explored "The New Thing" when it
emerged nearly 50 years ago is slowly coming to light, thanks to Soul
Jazz's 2004 compilation New Thing! and a recent resurgence of interest
in — and reissuing of — works by Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, and George
Lewis. It leaves me to wonder: is the old "New Thing" just the new "New
Thing" we've been waiting for?
The New Thing embodied by Roscoe Mitchell's 1966 album Sound is new again
In
1965, Mitchell helped found the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM). His 1966 album Sound (Delmark) is heralded by
many as a milestone that helped usher in "The New Thing." Along with
Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and others,
Mitchell became a founding member of The Art Ensemble of Chicago in the
late 1960s. He's since continued to explore the fringes of avant-garde
jazz, noise, classical, folk, and world music to create hybrid
compositions that mesmerize and provoke.
The
idea that American music never fully explored "The New Thing" when it
emerged nearly 50 years ago is slowly coming to light, thanks to Soul
Jazz's 2004 compilation New Thing! and a recent resurgence of interest
in — and reissuing of — works by Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, and George
Lewis. It leaves me to wonder: is the old "New Thing" just the new "New
Thing" we've been waiting for?
