Review: Roscoe Mitchell, Bells for the South Side

Roscoe Mitchell. Bells for the South Side. 2 CDs. ECM Records. 2017. Total playing time: 2:07.31.

Here are five pieces for trio performances, with the composer and multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell joined by James Fei and William Winant, Hugh Ragin and Tyshawn Sorey, Kikanju Baku and Craig Taborn, and Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal. And another six pieces, with the musicians (all multi-instrumentalists) regrouped in “new configurations,” as the liner notes put it, leaving the listener to make educated guesses as to who’s playing what and when. The music that results, notated and improvised, is sometimes spare, sometimes dense, with a special emphasis on bells, drums, and gongs.

A few highlights: “Spatial Aspects of the Sound” begins with bells and pianos (keys dampened or struck sharply, strings plucked) and ends with the delicate interplay of glockenspiel, piano, and piccolo. “Prelude to a Rose” (whose title recalls Duke Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss”) begins and ends with sinuous horn ensembles, with free-ranging communication among saxophones, trumpet, and trombone (Mitchell, Ragin, Sorey) in between. “Bells for the South Side” begins with sleighbells, a ringing telephone, and a siren; Ragin’s piercing piccolo trumpet enters against a ghostly thicket of percussion, suggesting a lament for those lost to violence on Chicago’s streets. “Red Moon in the Sky” evokes the Art Ensemble of Chicago in high gear, with horns and percussion blazing. And “Odwalla,” the Art Ensemble’s closing theme, is a final surprise: a slow groove, with Mitchell introducing each musician for a brief solo. These two hours of music travel by in what feels like much less time.

I have heard Roscoe Mitchell in performance with the Art Ensemble of Chicago (five times); with Thomas Buckner, Harrison Bankhead, and Jerome Cooper; with Muhal Richard Abrams and George Lewis; and with Jack DeJohnette’s Special Legends Edition Chicago. And on dozens of recordings. I’m grateful for the chance to open my ears once again.

These performances were recorded in September 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in conjunction with The Freedom Principle, an exhibit marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. As it’s an ECM recording, the sound is impeccable. Full personnel details, samples, and a video clip at the ECM website.

The program:

Spatial Aspects of the Sound : Panoply : Prelude to a Rose : Dancing in the Canyon (Taborn-Baku-Mitchell) : EP 7849 : Bells for the South Side : Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and The Final Hand : The Last Chord : Six Gongs and Two Woodblocks : R509A Twenty B : Red Moon in the Sky/Odwalla. All compositions by Roscoe Mitchell except as noted.

Abrams, Lewis, Mitchell: The Trio

The Trio at the Petrillo Bandshell, Grant Park
Chicago Jazz Festival
September 4, 2009

Muhal Richard Abrams, piano
George Lewis, trombone, laptop
Roscoe Mitchell, soprano and alto saxophones, flute


[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

It is unusual to hear musicians in their fifties and sixties and seventies introduced as “the cutting edge,” but the description is indeed accurate. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, of which Muhal Richard Abrams (b. 1930) is a co-founder and of which George Lewis (b. 1952) and Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) are distinguished members, represents still, at least to my ears, the last giant step (or two or three steps) forward in jazz composition and performance practice.

At a time when the word “jazz” is for many people synonymous with, say, Diana Krall or Wynton Marsalis, terms like “cutting edge” and “experimental” can serve to enforce artistic marginalization. I remember being told, only a few years ago, that Charles Olson was an inappropriate choice for a student of postwar American poetry: “He's not mainstream!” Well, that depends on where you’re standing. I doubt that the radio personality who introduced Messrs. Abrams, Lewis, and Mitchell as “cutting edge” last night has played their music on the air. But I’m happy that the Chicago Jazz Festival brought the trio to Grant Park and honored Abrams as the festival’s artist-in-residence this year.

The Trio played one nearly hour-long spontaneous improvisation last night. It might be more appropriate to think of these musicians as a quartet, with Lewis’s MacBook Pro as the fourth voice. The group’s performance was a matter of uncompromised concentration — no grooves, no riffs, no tunes, nothing to fall back upon beyond a resourceful attention to the moment, developed through years of practice. The performance began with a lacy piano figure. A duet for alto and piano followed, with foghorn-like accompaniment from Lewis’s Mac. A muted trombone statement followed, while Mitchell sustained notes via circular breathing. Then a open-faced trombone solo, with traffic-like sounds from the Mac. Sometime later, Mitchell repeated a single long tone on flute as Abrams and Lewis raced around him. An Abrams solo passage suggested an atonal, swirling version of boogie-woogie piano. Later still, an alto solo against jungle noises. Not long after that, a slightly raucous balladic interlude for alto, trombone, and piano. Near the end, a strange and wonderful moment in which it was impossible to tell whether faint engine and exhaust noises were the work of Lewis’s Mac or Chicago. The close was unexpectedly beautiful and apt, with the Mac producing a repeated percussion figure and what sounded like train engines, while the three musicians sat as an audience at their own performance. And then Abrams plucked a repeated high note on a piano string. The train had left the station.

A coda: on our way back to the underground municipal parking garage, we heard on Michigan Avenue the beginning of a performance by a chorus of young people representing Mennonite Innercity Evangelism. I wonder whether they too had come up to Chicago from downstate Illinois.











[Photographs by Michael Leddy.]

Further reading

About Streaming, a 2006 Abrams-Lewis-Mitchell recording (Pi Recordings)

Interpreting Avant-Garde Music (Elaine’s thoughts on the interpreter for the deaf at the side of the stage)

Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell (Wikipedia articles)

George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) tells the story of the AACM.

Roscoe Mitchell at Mills

The composer and multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell is one of eleven Mills College faculty members slated for dismissal. Mitchell is the Darius Milhaud Professor of Music at Mills. The firing of faculty is part of Mills’s camel-cased “vision” for the future, MillsNext.

*

June 30: Mitchell’s position is safe. From a statement posted to Facebook:

Mills College has decided not to terminate my current three-year contract. . . .

I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had the support of teachers, students, musicians, music lovers, and all others who spoke out to defend the value of creative music and the arts at-large. That said, I would like to acknowledge those of my fellow professors who Mills chose to let go, in spite of the outpouring of support for them and alternate plans proposed by dedicated individuals seeking a more favorable outcome.

Related reading
Other OCA Roscoe Mitchell posts

Roscoe Mitchell in TNYT

Roscoe Mitchell, talking to The New York Times. A sample:

“I was once in the car, listening to this radio show, and then all of a sudden this saxophone player came on and I was thinking, like: Wait, every note is different. Every articulation is different. And then at the end they said: ‘That was Benny Carter.’ I was so relieved, I didn’t know what to do.”

Related reading
Other OCA Roscoe Mitchell posts (Pinboard)

[Mitchell’s position as the Darius Milhaud Professor of Music at Mills College is still slated for elimination, along with ten other faculty positions.]

Jack DeJohnette in Chicago

Jack DeJohnette
Special Legends Edition Chicago
Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park
Chicago Jazz Festival
August 29, 2013

Roscoe Mitchell, soprano and sopranino
    saxophones, baroque flute, bass recorder
Henry Threadgill, alto saxophone, bass flute
Muhal Richard Abrams, piano
Larry Gray, bass and cello
Jack DeJohnette, percussion

“Chant” (Mitchell)
“Jack Five” (Abrams)
[Unidentified composition]
“The Museum of Time” (DeJohnette)
“Leave, Don’t Go Away” (Threadgill)
[Unidentified composition]

Jack DeJohnette has long been leading groups under the Special Edition name. For this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, he assembled an Edition with an AACM slant: Muhal Richard Abrams is a co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, established in Chicago in 1965; Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill are both founding members of the group, which might be described as an effort in musical self-determination and self-sufficiency. Last night’s performance was far from what a tradition-minded listener might call “jazz”: the music was often atonal; solos were almost non-existent. The music might be better understood as a set of dialogues and interludes: piano accompanying drums; saxophone accompanying saxophone; one instrument giving way to another. Where was the beat? It was everywhere, pulsing and shifting and changing colors.

The most compelling moments in last night’s music, for me: the two-saxophone intensity and swirling piano of “Chant,” whose repeated scalar figures sounded like calls to prayer or dark omens; the bass flute/bass recorder/cello chamber music of the third, unannounced composition; the Ellington and Mingus overtones and exotica in “The Museum of Time”; and the raucous encore, with Mitchell lifting his soprano almost straight above his head. DeJohnette was endlessly responsive to his fellow musicians. To use an Ellington phrase, he put the pots and pans on, all of them, coloring and commenting with sticks and mallets and even a microphone (held above and below cymbals to produce a raspy hum). But the secret hero of the night was Larry Gray, the one musician without an AACM connection, who is as capable on cello as on bass, and who locked eyes and minds with DeJohnette to create the most solid of foundations. Gray’s authority made me think of Malachi Favors, bassist for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and that’s as great a compliment as I can offer.

A note on production values: A video screen behind and above musicians evidently makes it impossible for me to pay attention to musicians. I felt like an idiot watching them on the screen, yet there I was, watching the screen. The sad part: one couldn’t not watch the screen, which overpowered the human beings on the stage. It was impossible to look at them without seeing it.

Icing on the last night’s cake — or, really, a second cake: Elaine and I met up with the owner and sole proprietor of Music Clip of the Day for conversation and coffee and tea. He’s added some music to many of my days.

*

January 20, 2015: Made in Chicago, a recording of this perfomance, is scheduled for March 10 release on ECM.

Related reading and viewing
Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams
Jumbotron Jam (Elaine’s take)
Photographs of last night’s concert, by Robert Loerzel

4:17?

It was a late-afternoon class, the first after a long break, perhaps for Thanksgiving, so long a break that I wasn’t sure of the room number. 311? 310? 309? I looked through the doors and saw my class in 309. I was teaching Gilgamesh and wasn’t sure where we were picking up, but I figured out that we must have had two classes on the work to go. I wanted to say something about an American Experience episode about Erroll Garner that was airing that night on PBS, but I thought I should save that for the end of the class.

I assigned the last sections of Gilgamesh for the next class and began to do a little recapping when I noticed that the clock in the room was off. And everyone’s phone told a different time. The Daylight to Standard Time change must have kicked in, or Standard to Daylight. Anyway, the class was underway. “I am doing what is called lecturing,” I said, and I was doing quite well, talking about Gilgamesh, Humbaba, Eve and Adam, and divine rage. I noticed Roscoe Mitchell sitting in on the class. Wow. He was wearing a tie, as he often does when performing. I recognized him immediately, of course.

All at once, everyone streamed out. The clock on the wall said 4:17, but in fact the time was 4:50. Class over.

This is the twenty-fourth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. In all but one, something has gone wrong.

*

Perhaps the strangest thing about this dream: it happened earlier this morning. Roscoe Mitchell was born on August 3, 1940.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[In waking life, the change from Daylight to Standard or back often left classroom clocks all awry for days — off not by an hour but by some random stretch of minutes. Call Building Services!]

Joseph Jarman (1937–2019)

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Buddhist teacher: Joseph Jarman has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary.

I was fortunate to see the Art Ensemble of Chicago five times between 1980 and 1985. I remember Joseph Jarman tossing confetti into the air, waving tiny semaphore flags, reciting poetry, and serving as emcee. And playing a battery of saxophones and ”little instruments.”

Here, via YouTube, is a small sample of the Art Ensemble in performance, with Jarman on tenor, alto, and soprano saxophones, conch shell, and little instruments. And with Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie (d.1999), Malachi Favors Maghostut (d. 2004), and Famoudou Don Moye.

[The Times obituary misidentifies the musicians in the 1978 photograph. From left to right, they are Mitchell, Jarman, Moye, and Favors. Now fixed.]

Recently updated

Roscoe Mitchell at Mills Not fired. His colleagues aren’t as fortunate.

Bye, Odwalla

I saw the news that Coca-Cola is discontinuing Odwalla, among other brands.

Did you know that the juice company took its name from the work of the Art Ensemble of Chicago? Odwalla, teacher to “the people of the sun,” is a character in a “myth poem” by Joseph Jarman, recited in the Malachi Favors composition “Illistrum,” on the Art Ensemble album Fanfare for the Warriors (Atlantic, 1973). Wikipedia has the story, with inaccuracies.

More famously, Roscoe Mitchell’s composition “Odwalla” was long the Art Ensemble’s closing theme in performance. Here are four versions, from 1972, 1981, 1991, and 1998. For a good idea of the Art Ensemble in performance, choose 1991. For the best sound, choose the 1998 studio recording (minus Jarman, who had left the group in 1993).

Some AEC posts
The AEC in Boston : The AEC in Cambridge : Joseph Jarman (1937–2019) : Joseph Jarman again : Lester Bowie on Fresh Air

[The Wikipedia inaccuracies have already been pointed out on a Talk page. I have the LP right here as I’m typing, but it hardly qualifies as a Wikipedia source.]

Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams

Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams:

“He was always telling us, ‘Go to the library.’ Practicing every day wasn’t enough; he wanted us to be serious. ‘Go get books — you don’t need a lot of money,’ he told us. He’d already taught himself orchestration and how to play clarinet; he had studied all the piano players. And yet he still has the child-like attitude toward things — he was full of wonder. Around the piano, even today, you get the sense that he’s still a kid.”

Quoted in the liner notes for the ECM disc Made in Chicago, the recording of an August 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert by DeJohnette’s Special Legends Edition Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I wrote about the concert in 2013. The recording was released this week, and it’s a killer.

Here, from ECM, is a short film about Made in Chicago.

[“Still a kid”: In August 2013, Muhal Richard Abrams was almost eighty-three.]

Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago

Coming in January on ECM, Made in Chicago, a recording of a 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert with Jack DeJohnette, Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I’m excited to hear this music again: I’ve never before attended a performance that made it to disc.

Correction: I don’t know that I’ve ever attended a performance that made it to disc. I may have been in the audience for one or more of the tracks on Miles Davis’s We Want Miles. Not remembering which night of Miles’s three-night Boston 1981 run I was there for, I’ve never been able to figure it out. And besides, there were two shows each night —

But I know I was at the Jack DeJohnette concert.

How about you? Have you ever attended a performance that ended up on disc?

*

January 13, 2015: The release date has been reset as March 10.

A related post
Jack DeJohnette in Chicago

The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Boston

[The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Front: Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman. Back: Famoudou Don Moye (behind a cymbal), Malachi Favors Maghostut. Lulu White’s, Boston. Probably 1981. Photographer unknown. Click for a larger view.]

I found this newspaper clipping in a file folder that I rediscovered earlier this week. If you look carefully, you can see the tape that held this clipping to an apartment wall long long ago. The photograph most likely appeared in Boston’s Real Paper, an alternative newspaper. Remember alternative newspapers?

I was fortunate to see the Art Ensemble five times between 1980 and 1985: at a midnight concert at New York’s Town Hall, at Lulu White’s in the South End (twice), at Jonathan Swift’s off Harvard Square, and at the Berklee School of Music. Every performance but the last was staggeringly great, some of the most exciting and inspiring music I’ve ever heard. And talk about intimacy: at the club dates an early bird could end up sitting less than ten — or five? — feet from the bandstand.

I remember being admitted to the band’s dressing room in Town Hall and noticing the mix of cigar smoke and pot. I remember standing in the street at three o’clock in the morning talking with Malachi Favors as instruments went onto a truck. Other moments of conversation too, before a show at Lulu White’s, after a show at Jonathan Swift’s. As I said: fortunate.

To the best of my knowledge, this photograph is unavailable elsewhere online.

Related reading
Lulu White, the woman (Wikipedia)
Lulu White, the club (On Troy Street)
Some have gone and some remain (on revisiting Jonathan Swift’s)

Also from this file folder
Jim Doyle on education
A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tile-pilfering questionnaire

[Lester Bowie died in 1999; Malachi Favors in 2004. The Art Ensemble has continued to perform, at least intermittently, as a trio, as a quartet, and as a quintet with trumpeter Corey Wilkes and bassist Jaribu Shahid. For an introduction to the group, I’d recommend Nice Guys (ECM, 1978) or Full Force (ECM, 1980). If you have a little patience, People in Sorrow (Nessa, 1969). There are hours of filmed performances at YouTube. Here’s a good sample.]

Some have gone and some remain

I wrote a few weeks ago about the consolation of knowing that places from one's past are still as they were. On vacation with my family last week, I was happy to see the schoolyard fence at P.S. 131, same as it ever was. But other things were different.

On my old block in Brooklyn, the two-family house where my grandparents lived has been torn down, replaced by a brick multi-family fortress. On the other side of the street, rowhouses are being torn down to make way for further behemoths.

In my parents' town in New Jersey, tidy one-family houses are being replaced by enormous villas. As in Brooklyn, the plots are small, so the new structures look ridiculously out of place. Think of an outsized SUV, barely wedged within the yellow lines of its parking space, making life miserable for anyone parked on either side.

And on Cambridge's John F. Kennedy Street (formerly Boylston Street), the great basement nightclub Jonathan Swift's is gone, replaced (at least for now) by a non-profit thrift store called Planet Aid. Looking through Planet Aid's open door and down the stairs, I thought that I must have hit upon the location of Jonathan Swift's (which I only vaguely remembered). The twentyish employee wasn't familiar with the club, which apparently folded some years back. But he pointed out that there was still a stage at one end of the room. And as I turned to look, the shape of the place came back to me--the low ceiling, the bar along one wall, the small step up to the stage, the door to the backstage area off to one side.

The stage now holds racks of coats and dresses and a sofa. I stepped up and thought of the musicians I'd seen at Jonathan Swift's, almost twenty-five years ago, and where they'd stood. Koko Taylor, front and center, her lead guitarist to her right, just behind her. Son Seals (now dead) singing "How Blue Can You Get" and bringing down the house by adding twenty to the familiar seven: "I gave you twenty-seven children, and now you wanna give 'em back!" And two or three times, the Art Ensemble of Chicago: Famoudou Don Moye in one corner, surrounded by his "sun percussion." Bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut (now dead) in the other corner, a tray of the AEC's "little instruments" next to him. Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell at opposite ends of the stage, vibes and whole saxophone families to their sides. And Lester Bowie (now dead) sitting in the center, trumpet in hand, head tilted, Perrier on the floor within easy reach.

Related posts
P.S. 131
P.S. 131, 44th Street, Brooklyn

P.S. 131 class photographs
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967