Roscoe Mitchell
b. 3 August 1940, Chicago, Illinois, USA. As a child Mitchell enjoyed listening to Nat King Cole, Lester Young and Charlie Parker. He studied clarinet and baritone saxophone in high school, taking up alto saxophone in his senior year and continuing with it while in the army. He went to Europe with an army band, where he heard Albert Ayler, who was also playing in a military band. After demobilization, he played bop in an outfit with Henry Threadgill, but Ayler's music had been a revelation to him. Back in Chicago, he jammed with Threadgill, Malachi Favors, Jack DeJohnette, and Muhal Richard Abrams. Abrams was even more of an influence than Ayler. In 1965 Mitchell, was a charter member of the AACM, having played in the Experimental Band (organised by Abrams, the AACM President, inspirer and prime mover) since 1961. His debut SOUND was the first and one of the most famous recordings to come out of the AACM, characterizing the Chicagoan's new emphasis on sound-as-texture and the importance of the relationship between sound and silence. On these tracks, wrote critic John Litweiller, ‘Music is the tension of sounds in the free space of silence’. For a while Mitchell led his own groups, and it was from one of these (a quartet including Lester Bowie, Favors and Phillip Wilson) that the Art Ensemble Of Chicago grew. He once explained: ‘It was my band, but I couldn't afford to pay those guys what they deserved, so everybody was shouldering an equal amount of responsibility. We became a co-operative unit in order to remain committed to one another and in order to survive.’ Since co-founding the Art Ensemble in 1969, most of his work has been accomplished with them, but he has continued to lead bands of his own, including Space (a trio with saxophonist Gerald Oshita and vocalist Tom Buckner) and Sound (a quintet with trumpet, guitar, bass and percussion). He has also worked with Byron Austin, Scotty Holt and DeJohnette; and has assembled an impressive body of solo saxophone music. Like his partners in the Art Ensemble, Mitchell plays a dazzling number of instruments, the primary ones being soprano, alto, tenor and bass saxophones, oboe, flute, piccolo and clarinet as well as various percussion and ‘little instruments’. He and Joseph Jarman represent the two poles of the Ensemble's art: Jarman brings the bulk of the theatrical impulse, while Mitchell—the one member of the group who does not habitually wear facepaint or costume—is the musical structuralist who, despite the apparent freedom of the Ensemble's music, worries about how true an improviser will be to the composer's intention. As a composer he has been an influence on Anthony Braxton and Leo Smith. There is an ascetic streak to his art, and it is not insignificant that as soon as he was able, he went to live on a 365-acre farm in Wisconsin, dissatisfied with the life-style necessitated by constant touring. Recent projects have included SONGS IN THE WIND, which features Steve Sylvester on ‘bull roarers and wind wands’; a meeting with the Stockholm-based Brus Trio ( AFTER FALLEN LEAVES); and FOUR COMPOSITIONS, which shows Mitchell evolving into an impressive writer of classical chamber music.