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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: JOHN INGLE
Saxophonist/composer/improviser John Ingle is originally from Memphis, TN and now resides and works in San Francisco. His music is informed and influenced by contemporary concert music, improvised music, electronic music, jazz, various Asian folk music traditions, and the blues and gospel of his native Southeast US. He collaborates with electronics innovator Laetitia Sonami, and in duo with NYC-based composer/dulcimerist Dan Joseph and is a founding member of the sfSoundGroup. John’s solo saxophone music emphasizes multiphonics, vocal harmonics and subtle control of extended saxophone techniques, while his chamber music explores such musical parameters as spiral time, linear pulse, and non-linear harmony, and indulges in both simple resonance as well as complex timbre and auditory sleights-of-hand.
It was such a pleasure to be asked to write about why Roscoe Mitchell is important, as the question has brought me back to my earliest days as a musician, before I had any experience beside being in school band. I learned the saxophone in Junior High Band back when all public schools had music programs. So my musical experience was marching band in the fall and spring and “concert” band in the winter, plus micro-poly-pan tonal (out of tune) a cappella hymns at church, and, thankfully, songbirds and the general soundscape of woods and farmland.
I had just become serious about practicing and was hungry to hear jazz, or classical music, or anything but the country and saccharine pop that was available over the radio. I remember getting my hands on a magazine called “Musician” and inside was an interview with Roscoe Mitchell. I’m sure that I understood little about what he was talking about musically at the time, but I read that he was somebody who was playing the saxophone his own way and I just had to find someway to hear what this sounded like.
The nearest record store was forty miles away, but I drove to Jackson and went looking for Roscoe Mitchell. The store was both a record and “head shop”. That scared me a little, but I thought that they were more likely to have a small jazz section. They didn’t have any solo albums, but I found a copy of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Nice Guys and bought it, along with a Charlie Parker record and probably some David Sanborn or something much worse like a Jon Klemmer cassette (really…yuck). I was going to finally hear some jazz, or so I thought! The guy at the counter actually knew a little about the music, and he warned me that it wasn’t the “jazz” that I was expecting, like, “that doesn’t sound like Charlie Parker.” I didn’t care and I rushed home to listen. When I put the AEC LP on, I couldn’t believe my ears. That was the strangest music that I had ever heard. I didn’t know what the hell it was, it was so foreign to my young ears. But I listened. And again. And again… The tune with the lyrics seemed like a song at least, but I didn’t “get” it. SO I listened some more.
Eventually, some time later, I put the record back on and got distracted with something else. With the music in the background. I remember the moment when I was grooving to the music internally and then was compelled to really “listen.” I realized that I really liked the music! It was an epiphany. It sounded good to me even though it was strange, cacophonous, and not always pretty. I remember thinking that it was more like nature sounds that l did really like, more like birds than BIRD even (it would be many more years before I “got” Charlie Parker; ironically his music was more impenetrable to me at the time). I liked this weird stuff. It sounded good. It moved me, somehow. I was excited about sound. That was a long time ago and in later years I would hear a lot more of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and later Roscoe Mitchell. Eventually I got to hear him perform live both solo and in a performance of his alto saxophone Quartet “Noonah,” and Doulas Ewart introduced us.
His music is important to me because of that personal story I just told, and because in Roscoe’s music there is always a reverence for sound and the spaces around the sound. That is essential, and Roscoe goes right to the heart of it. He only sounds like himself. In his ensemble music and the Art Ensemble, the music is a combination of the personal sounds and narratives of the individuals combined with a group sound that is larger that the sum of its parts. This is important. I love how interested he is in the micro qualities of tone and how this focus on sound informs his music formally as well, with repetition and development. He makes music by himself, for himself, sounding like himself. He makes music with others and everyone’s own personal sound adds to the whole–it isn’t subsumed by it. That is why Roscoe Mitchell is important. Thanks Roscoe Mitchell!
Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.
