Roscoe Mitchell Info

Mr. Mitchell turned 65 this year, and plays dates throughout the midwest as time permits (I believe he is still on faculty at University of Wisconsin) from his base in suburban Madison, WI.

He played a set around Thanksgiving (mid-October, really) at a new performance space in Madison, with a jam session afterwards that he barely stayed at, given the lateness of the hour and having little left to prove.

https://idischidiangelica.bandcamp.com/album/splatter

some good stuff on this live recording from Italy a couple of years back, some improvised orchestral stuff and an epic sax/organ duo performance.

My admiration knows no bounds.

Like his latest thing of orchestrating the improvisations he did with Craig Taborn and Kikanju Banju is just creating an immensely rich body of work.

that Varese-like opening track is excellent as well, hopefully more of this material will get a release unless it already has and I've missed it. The sax-organ duo with Francesco Filidei is amazing as well!

when you listen to live improvisation by Roscoe, even at this late stage of his career, it sort of underlines the difference between him and a lot of pretenders in this game, he is an absolute force .. still.

otm all around but god, what horrible album cover art

It's a cool photo but terrible type/placement.

one of the first gigs I saw him do when he moved to the Bay for the Mills gig was a quartet with Frith, Oliveros, Brown, sort of a faculty getting to know each other thing, big hall but totally unadvertised what the hell this even going to be sort of thing, and definitely things stayed a bit on the tentative / polite side for the first thirty minutes or so, nobody overstepping, everyone sounding good but inside your head you can’t shout down your expectations for a meeting like this. 50 minutes in, Mitchell’s been playing it almost shockingly low key, ornaments details quiet partials, almost totally motionless, and you hear the group kind of settle in for an ambient landing and the second they all find the center of it, absolutely perfectly out of.nowhere Roscoe cuts loose six times louder than any other sound of the night, as strong as anything and then slowly starts getting louder, and even better, the other three kept it mostly restrained, taking it up just a notch to support it but not going for the predictable freak out, just letting him carry the whole moment

That CD ‘Nessuno’ with Oliveros / Leo Smith / Tilbury has hints of that gig, but with balance

Art Ensemble & Muharraq Richard Abrams been a lot of the soundtrack for the last four months

/Muhal! now that is some autocorrect