Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: RANDY MCKEAN

Saxophonist/clarinettist and composer Randy McKean leads or co-leads several bands, including the chamber jazz quartet Bristle, the improv trio Pluck Vim Vigour, the avant-folk duo Sawbones, the acoustic-electronics duos Wild Horsey Ride, Zap!, and The Gargantius Effect, and his latest project, the power trio Moch Mach I.  He has composed works for string quartet and symphony orchestra.  McKean’s releases include the CDs Wild Horsey Ride, Bristle’s Bulletproof (Edgetone), So Dig This Big Crux (Rastascan), the Great Circle Saxophone Quartet’s Child King Dictator Fool (New World), and the electronic release Gargantius Effect +1+2+3 (w/Han-earl Park, Gino Robair & Scott Looney).  He studied with trumpeter Paul Smoker and composers Anthony Braxton, David Rosenboom, and Maggi Payne.  He currently lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Grass Valley, CA.

Needle-drop moments—those instances when stylus hits spinning vinyl and your inner life is blown to smithereens, flies about your head, then reassembles itself within you, shiny new bits now insinuating themselves into your psyche for years and decades to come.  An NDM oftentimes is ultimately surpassed in one’s estimation by other works in that artist’s oeuvre, but it remains that white-hot entry point into their particular universe of sound that one never forgets.  My list of NDMs could serve as a shorthand sketch of my evolution as a musician, each NDM kicking me up the chain from a starting point of Midwestern-bred Beatles worship to a higher state of expanded saxophonics, extended composition, and attitude adjustment:  XTC’s Life Begins at the Hop, Sonny Rollins’ Hold ‘Em Joe, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Anthony Braxton’s Composition 23B (first cut on New York Fall 1974), Morton Feldman’s For Four Pianos, Fredric Rzewski’s Coming Together, Ornette’s Body Meta, Captain Beefheart’s Hot Head, Xenakis’s Metastasis.  Thing is, by the time I’d reached my late twenties, I thought I’d outgrown the gee whizziness of an NDM.  Then I heard Nonaah.

It was late Saturday afternoon, Summertime 1989, Berkeley, CA.  I was just out of grad school, Mills College, and feeling somewhat adrift.  The saxophone quartet I’d started while at Mills had just finished rehearsing at Dan Plonsey’s house.  With the recent defection of our tenor player, we were once again a trio.  Dan, Chris Jonas and I had tried out some new material but couldn’t seem to get a handle on anything.  I supposed the real reason for the malaise was the recent departure of Anthony Braxton from Mills for Connecticut, where he was to assume teaching chores at Wesleyan.  I’d been a devoted student of his, and talk turned to teachers and mentors.  Dan told us about his time at the Creative Music Studio and his two summers studying under Roscoe Mitchell.  Although I was a big fan of Mitchell’s work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago—I had seen them during the Third Decade tour—I admitted I was not as familiar with his solo work as I should have been.  Dan got out Mitchell’s album Nonaah and dropped the needle on the alto quartet cut.

NDMs—their sounds are always accompanied by the images they create in my mind’s eye.  Nonaah’s four-in-one line, with its jagged kinetics, shifting weights and balances, relentlessly repeating itself, was a perpetually-motoring whirligig.  Its extremes of range, its unity of ideas, its sheer ornery patience as its opening segment continually looped yet never occurred the same way twice.  Its unhurriedness, its intensity burned itself into me.  It spurred me on to new activity.

Not a month or two later, Mitchell delivered another NDM: Line Fine Lyon Seven, Side 1, Cut 3 of his duet record with Braxton.  Braxton’s on contrabass sax, pounding out a riff.  Mitchell on alto, playing with that singular, maxed-out sound of his, comes charging in over the top of the line—the syncopation, the angularity, the momentum of the melody caught hold of me.  The pendulum nature of this line, its bopping ebb and flow against the riff, I played it over and over again, stretching the original minute and 15 seconds into hours of repetition.

My first glimpse into the magic of Mitchell’s material, the art and science of his method, came when I was preparing an arrangement of Line Fine for my first recording. As I juxtaposed one micro-section against another, trying to preserve the sway and swing of the line, it yielded new trajectories, generated new rhythmic fields.  I was amazed at how much invention was contained in that seemingly straightforward duet.

Nonaah is another, perhaps greater font of material, and the program for the upcoming Seattle concert reads like my more recent experiences with Mitchell writ large:  the audience will first hear Mitchell playing solo, then extended/expanded versions of this masterpiece.  I got to see Mitchell play solo in 2011.  For the first part of his set, he played from the alto quartet score for Nonaah.  It was a dynamic, yet patient etching of sound as he stitched together elements from the spacious, sustained note section of the piece.  He followed it with an intensely boiling extended improvisation.  Just a few months later, I began rehearsing and ultimately performed Nonaah as part of James Fei’s alto quartet (along with Aram Shelton and Jacob Zimmerman) for a concert of Mitchell’s music at Mills in March 2012.

One might suppose that with this performance many mysteries were finally revealed to me.  Although insights were gained, the fascination and wonder deepened.  The music was scored in such a way that exactitude and spontaneous interaction were equal partners—the written and the improvised informed the other.  That opening section that had grabbed hold of me 20 years earlier, here I was in the midst of it and discovering it was far from static.  The intricate relationship among the parts ensured a living difference from one iteration to the next, generated an energy that drove the piece and brought our creative energies to the fore.  Here I was on the inside of an NDM, shiny bits, new and old, spinning and swirling. 

Thank you for this and other musical universes, Mr. Mitchell.  I can’t wait to hear what materializes on June 7.

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: VINNY GOLIA

As a composer Vinny Golia fuses the rich heritage of Jazz, contemporary classical and world music into his own unique compositions. A multi-woodwind performer, Vinny’s recordings have been consistently picked by critics and readers of music journals for their yearly “ten best” lists. Vinny has been a featured performer with Anthony Braxton, Henry Grimes, John Carter, Bobby Bradford, Joelle Leandre, Leo Smith, Horace Tapscott, John Zorn, Tim Berne, Bertram Turetzky, George Lewis, Barre Phillips, The Rova Saxophone Quartet, Patti Smith, Harry “the Hipster”  Gibson, Eugene Chadburne, Kevin Ayers, Peter Kowald, John Bergamo, George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennick, Lydia Lunch, Harry Sparrney and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra amongst many others. 

I have been enthralled with Roscoe’s music since the first time I heard it in the early 70’s, this was before I started to play music and was still concerned with visual arts, his compositions were totally different from almost all the music I had been exposed to at the time. Roscoe’s composition “Nonaah” opened many doors for the use of the saxophone without the traditional rhythm section. His attention to all the details of saxophone performance is evidenced in this composition and his solo and group improvisations.

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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CavityFang - Urban Problems (Debut release out July 2nd!)

Enjoy this little taste of magic from CavityFang, the newest addition to the T&C roster.

CavityFang was dreamed into creation by Bay Area keyboardist/composer Michael Coleman. While onstage at the Hollywood Bowl backing the experimental pop group tUnE-yArDs along with three exceptional drummers, Jordan Glenn, Hamir Atwal, and Sam Ospovat, Coleman had a revelation. He saw that by combining the musical power of these three he could create a truly demented jazz sound never before heard by human ears.

The CavityFang suite takes the listener on a sonic journey exploring the multifarious functions of the drumset and an array of musical traditions. If you listen carefully, you will hear the influence of Free Jazz, Captain Beefheart, Haitian carnival music, Jimi Hendrix, and Ligeti as well as Coleman’s own distinct musical language developed through work with his trio, Beep, and his quartet, Arts & Sciences. 

Along with Coleman (on vintage synthesizers and organs), Glenn, Atwal, and Ospovat (on vibraphone, drums, and percussion), the group is rounded out by virtuosic guitarist Ava Mendoza and the inimitable Cory Wright on baritone saxophone. Their debut album, “Urban Problems,” was recorded and mixed by Bay Area legend Eli Crews (tUnE-yArDs, Deerhoof, Ben Goldberg) at Tiny Telephone and New, Improved Recording.

Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: STUART DEMPSTER

Stuart Dempster, Sound Gatherer - composer/performer/author; University of Washington Professor Emeritus; various fellowships and grants including Fulbright and Guggenheim; numerous recordings including New Albion’s “Abbey”, “Cistern Chapel”; landmark book “The Modern Trombone: A Definition of Its Idioms” published 1979; Merce Cunningham Dance Company commission in 1995. Besides Cathedral Band performances, he is founding member of Deep Listening Band. Dempster soothes aches, pains, and psychic sores with his meditative and playful “Sound Massage Parlor”; “Golden Ears Deep Listening Certificate” awarded in 2006.

I first heard Roscoe Mitchell in an amazing Art Ensemble of Chicago event in Seattle sometime during the early- to mid-1970s. It was at one of the Tavs on NE 45th, either Blue Moon or Rainbow, and (in a a sense) I never recovered. It was a remarkable evening all around and it has stayed with me all these years. Roscoe Mitchell, a consummate Deep Listener, and I have shared the stage with Pauline Oliveros as well. He and I  also share something else very special:  from Deep Listening Institute we have both received a Golden Ear Award (Roscoe in 2009 and me in 2006) that includes an Honorary Deep Listening Certificate. 

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: NILS BULTMANN

Nils Bultmann is a violist, improviser, and composer based in the San Francisco bay area. Rooted in classical technique and tradition, he has developed his own voice within the context of a wide variety of musical styles and art forms. Active as a performer in the United States and Europe, he plays both classical repertoire as well as his own compositions. He is also an advocate for the works of other composers and is involved in collaborative projects of dance, video, and avant-garde improvised music. He was featured as a member of the Transatlantic Art Ensemble performing new works by jazz Saxophonists’ Roscoe Mitchell and Evan Parker released on ECM records. 

I probably first heard Roscoe’s music when I was around seven/eight years old. He moved two doors down from us on the East side of Madison, Wisconsin with his daughter Atala. We were over at his house a lot of the time. I heard him practicing quite a bit. He used to come over with his flute and read chamber music with us in the very early days.

He had given my parents a pretty hefty selection of his records, and Nonaah was one of them. I recall that track Nonaah specifically because of the humor, as a kid it always reminded me of a frenetically running ostrich, loved it!

The first time I remember seeing him live I was probably 9 and he was playing in Madison with the Art Ensemble, I just remember the intensity and raw energy on stage

Roscoe has been a great mentor and inspiration to me in my music. 

I remember driving to youth orchestra with him and we would be listening to the radio, and that meant listening to the radio. I recall the intensity in which he focuses in on sound.

I deeply admire his musicianship and approach to music making– a one foot in the front of the other attitude towards improving each day– you wake up in the morning, you find your sound, and you start exploring. 

I also appreciate his sense of community and discipline, never afraid of the 7am rehearsal! :)  —I feel grateful for having opportunity to work with him.

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: JOE MOFFETT

Trumpeter, improviser, and composer Joe Moffett approaches his work with a strong interest in the orchestration of sounds, the intersection of words and music, and the rendering of meaning out of the abstract.  Each project in which Joe invests himself has its own set of objectives, with the goal of extracting new music from a wide variety of sources.  He is founder and co-founder of a number of ensembles, including his microtonal free jazz quintet Ad Faunum, which released its eponymous debut in 2012 and received accolades in The New York City Jazz Record and the Free Jazz Collective blog; the art song duo Twins of El Dorado, with vocalist Kristin Slipp; and the experimental, sci-fi obsessed Bailly/Millevoi/Moffett Trio.  He has also performed with the Philadelphia-based group Inzinzac, the Johnny DeBlase Quartet (which released its debut, Composites, in 2012) and with saxophonist/improviser Jack Wright.

It was my senior year at New England Conservatory, in Allan Chase’s class on free jazz and the avant-garde, when I first heard a recording of “Nonaah.”  I believe it was the first section of the recording from Roscoe Mitchell’s performance at Willisau, Switzerland in 1976, which of course is known at least in part for Roscoe’s “crowd control” by music.  Roscoe, in response to a raucous and disrespectful audience, played this nine-note motif over and over again, biding his time until his audience was ready to listen.  This was not only appealing to me in the spirit of the thing - like, “Hey, this is not going to stop until you get with what I’m doing” - the courage required for that - but also, quite simply, because it sounded different from anything I’d heard before.  There was such a hypnotic quality to that performance, that sound he produced, that motif being repeated with such strange intervallic motion and variations in timbre.  What a great lesson to a young improviser, to understand that what you’re trying to do is not simply play for people, but create a sense of space and time that stands apart from the everyday.

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: CHRIS BROWN

Chris Brown, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. Collaboration and improvisation are consistent themes in his work, as well as the invention and performance of new electronic instruments. As a performer he has recorded music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, José Maceda, John Zorn, David Rosenboom, Larry Ochs, Glenn Spearman, and Wadada Leo Smith; as an improvisor he has recorded with Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Ikue Mori, Alvin Curran, William Winant, Biggi Vinkeloe, Don Robinson, and Frank Gratkowski, among many others. He is also a Professor of Music and Co-Director   of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College in Oakland, California. 

Regarding my inspiration/influence from Roscoe:  I knew him first as part of the Art Ensemble, of which I had several records in the late 1970s.  Sometime early in the 1980s the Art Ensemble came for a weekend or so of concerts at the Keystone Korner, a jazz club in North Beach in SF.  That’s where I first heard Roscoe live, and before I saw the band live I never really knew about what a unique role he played in the group.  Records are never adequate to understand the way the improvisation works.  Everyone else in the band was very extroverted and theatrical in performancel, but Roscoe had a more understated profile, but you could sense that his musicality formed a center around which the energy of the rest of the band circled.  Two things stood out for me about his sound – his use of flexible intonation, and the sense of space in his playing, even when he was playing very intensely.  That is an outcome for an improvisor that I’ve always been inspired by, and still hope to emulate in my own playing.  Since getting to know him at Mills, I’ve learned that much of the quality in his playing is related to his practice as a composer. His written music does complement, but also illuminates for the clarity of his playing.

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: GREG CAMPBELL

Greg Campbell, who plays drums and percussion as well as French horn and vibes, is known for his work as a jazz musician and improvisor. As well as having an extensive education in the field of percussion and having studied with the likes of Dave Holland, Cecil McBee, and Tom Collier, he has a performance resume that includes work with Wayne Horvitz, Stuart Dempster, Michael Bisio, and Wally Shoup to name just a few.

Occupational specialization has become the model in western civilization, something that, like capitalism, has been adopted by many in so-called developing nations (along with fast-food and high blood pressure).  The result is a narrowed set of choices within a career.  This is particularly true in some sectors of music, where a talented performer may feel compelled to leave behind his or her instrument in order to gain acceptance as a composer or conductor or producer, and then, for career viability, to narrow even further, staying within a particular set of idioms.  Performers, too, for similar reasons, often find themselves focused on a single instrument and a vast repertoire, the required mastery of which leaves little time for individual creativity.

The AACM generally, and Roscoe Mitchell in particular, present an alternative model, allowing for musical identities that are about more than being the “best” trumpet player, or “#1” in a critics’ poll.

Roscoe does this in many ways – by being a composer, performer, and organizer, and doing each of those in multiple ways.  What other “jazz” composer has written a quartet for four alto saxophones?  No “classical” composer I can think of has written a percussion ensemble piece (“The Maze”) for a group whose performers were mostly not even percussion specialists, and whose compositional building blocks were drawn not only from the composer’s mind, or a list of standard and non-traditional instruments, but from a comprehensive list of sounds for each instrument – personalized sounds created over decades by each performer.  As a French horn player and drummer, I doubt I would ever have thought of playing both instruments simultaneously had I not heard Roscoe’s 1968 recording “Solo,” or his solo on the Art Ensemble’s “The Ninth Room,” where his “instrument” is the saxophone combined with a wide-ranging percussion set-up.  Some listeners might respond by asking whether he couldn’t have just hired another percussionist – but of course the result wouldn’t have been the same: no percussionist could have shadowed or duplicated Mitchell’s saxophone lines in just the way that he does himself.  I haven’t even mentioned his performance on nearly any possible reed instrument, from the whole family of saxophones and clarinets to the bass recorder.  Or his range of intensities on any one of those instruments – from the wispy alternate-fingering fragments of “S-II Examples” on soprano, to turbulent full-volume, circular breathing tenor solos with the Art Ensemble or alone.  Or his interest in French composer Jacques Ibert, respect for classical saxophonist Marcel Mule, or his plans to record an album of classical flute music.

In these days of austerity – supposedly doing more with less – it’s important for musicians (and others, too) to have a model of someone who has been doing more with more for years.

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: JOHN SEMAN

John Seman is an active composer, producer, bassist, and archivist in Seattle, with a degree in Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and postgraduate work in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland. He has produced several CDs and numerous digital releases on the Monktail label, was an organizer of the Sounds Outside concert series for five years, and currently performs with many Monktail ensembles, as well as Ask the Ages and others.

As an organizer of sound and an organizer of sound-makers, Roscoe Mitchell invented what it means to be a 21st Century Musician. His music and its deeply personal inflection is of a universal language, drawing directly from heritage and legacy without sounding like anything that has come before it, and mapping new territory beyond any previously charted. A raw yet meticulously refined operation that sears a direct, momentary connection between creativity and execution, between invention and release. Something renewable rather than repeatable. Holy rather than sacred.

I discovered Roscoe Mitchell on the first two Art Ensemble records I had, Tutankhamun and Bap-Tizum. I was a young ethnomusicologist studying free jazz and here, it sounded to me, was the missing link. The Art Ensemble is an entire dimension of American music, ancient to the future, a time machine, a state of mind, global great black music. Here were musicians that explored the root to the fruit, the deadly serious and the deadly silly, with chops to spare, and spare them they did playing toys, whistles, whatever. And they were organizers, educators, activists, gentlemen, high priests. And there were a hundred other records. I was hooked!

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: JACOB REX ZIMMERMAN

Seattle-based alto saxophonist and composer Jacob Rex Zimmerman is an extremely versatile and integral part of the local creative-music community. Jacob studied music at the internationally renowned Garfield High School, the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and Mills College in Oakland. His teachers have included Roscoe Mitchell, Jerry Bergonzi, Joe Morris and Anthony Coleman. As a composer Jacob’s main outlets are his large chamber-ensemble project Lawson, and the collective modern jazz trio Anteater. Jacob is an active board member for the Seattle-based New-Music record label Table & Chairs.

After spending countless hours collecting and organizing so many amazing testimonials from such a diverse array of artists, the time has now come for me to share my own thoughts and feelings about my hero and mentor: Roscoe Mitchell.

I first met Roscoe in the Fall of 2006 as a jazz saxophone student at the New England Conservatory. I had been exposed to a little bit of the Art Ensemble’s music, but when word came around that Roscoe would be in residency, on the recommendation of professor Allan Chase, I quickly picked up a handful of Roscoe’s records as a leader: Flow of Things, L-R-G/The Maze, Nonaah, and Songs in the Wind. At the time I was thoroughly obsessed with the medium of unaccompanied solo saxophone, as well as the exploration of alternate fingerings/multi-phonics. Among his many achievements  Roscoe is one of the great pioneers within this area of study. I was particularly inspired by the meditative focus displayed in the solo soprano piece S-II Examples.

The concert at the end of his residency was thrilling. It featured a wide variety of compositions by Roscoe; pieces for jazz ensembles, as well as two extended pieces for chamber orchestra. To cap it all off, Roscoe played a jaw-dropping 10 minute solo piece that I still talk about with people that were there.

A couple years later I was getting ready to graduate from NEC when I heard from Fred Frith that Roscoe had just started teaching at Mills College in Oakland. I was feeling like my own artistic goals were just starting to come into focus, and I wasn’t ready to leave school yet. Studying composition and improvisation with Roscoe sounded like a dream; an opportunity I had to seize while I could. The whole period at Mills culminated in a masters thesis focused on my own original body of music for solo saxophone. Here are some of the memories I have from that time:

• Roscoe literally forced me to learn to circular breathe. I remember in one lesson he had me hold a note and would yell “BREATHE!” every time he wanted me to inhale.
• Having dinner with Roscoe and Muhal Richard Abrams and seeing how much admiration and respect Roscoe continues to have for Muhal. Their duo concert at Mills was perfect.
• Roscoe’s mantra: “Silence is perfect. So when you make a sound, it must be on the level of silence.”
• Performing Roscoe’s “Not Yet” for alto saxophone and piano at Mills and Yoshi’s, and seeing it come out on CD last Spring on Mutable Music.
• Roscoe’s insistence that he attend one of the first rehearsals of my band Lawson. He pointed out “I’m not going to let you leave me behind Jacob.”

Helping to organize this concert has been a whirlwind. I’m particularly proud of the three interview videos (1/2/3) that we’ve produced. The photo above was taken last February when I visited him in Oakland to conduct those interviews. I’m extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to study with and just simply exist in the same world as an artist like Roscoe. There certainly is a lot to do!

Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

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