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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: CHARLIE KOHLHASE
Alto, tenor and baritone saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase has been a mainstay of Boston’s jazz scene for over twenty years. Whether leading his two newest bands, performing in a dozen others or writing over 50 compositions, his music spans a broad range of styles with an emphasis on the contemporary and the improvised. In addition, he co-led groups with the great Danish/Congolese saxophonist John Tchicai for New England tours in 1997, 1998 and 2003. Charlie was also a member of Either/Orchestra from 1987 to 2001, playing throughout North America, Europe and Russia. His recordings with Tchicai and Roswell Rudd have received critical acclaim.
Roscoe Mitchell's 2 LP "Nonaah" set really kind of scared the crap out of with when I first heard it. It had a similar impact to my first hearing of Ornette's "Dancing In Your Head" which was probably a year earlier, although the two albums are ineluctably linked for me. My reaction to both was something along the lines of "What the hell is happening to music?" along with "How can I get involved in this music?" I was already familiar with Roscoe's composition 'Nonaah' from its initial recording on the Art Ensemble's "Fanfare For The Warriors" album but, particularly the extended solo rendition from the Pori Festival, here it was stretched out into the elements of sound, silence, repetition and intensity. A 3-note introductory motif and Roscoe's subsequent tonal shadings and smears, a reflective quiet interlude and ultimately a return to the opening material and a virtuosic saxophone meltdown. This performance has a similar shape to another masterpiece from that era, the performance of 'Chant' from Studio Rivbea in 1976 that was issued on the Wildflowers anthology. I actually had the temerity to request 'Nonaah' when I heard Roscoe play a solo concert at Lulu White's in Boston circa 1979. He very graciously played it as a short encore: what a nice fellow! My eternal thanks to the master Mr. Mitchell for changing the way I think about composing, shaping and organizing music.
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: CHUCK NESSA
It was Chuck Nessa who, after moving to Chicago in 1966 to manage the Jazz Record Mart, was responsible for bringing the AACM into recorded history. As a member of a group of jazz fans and JRM regulars including Terry Martin, John Litweiler and Jerry Figi, Chuck Nessa convinced Jazz Record Mart and Delmark Records owner Koester to record members of the AACM, then still a fledgling free jazz organization. Nessa Records was started in 1967 at the urging of Roscoe Mitchell and Lester Bowie.
My relationship with Roscoe began in the Summer of 1966 and continues to this day. It is so personal to me, I have trouble putting it in words.
His music grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go. I didn’t understand it at first and had a crash course at rehearsals. Within a month we were in a studio recording Sound for Delmark.
About a year later Roscoe and Lester Bowie convinced me to start a record company to record their music.
These events have set the course of my professional life.
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 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.
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Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: JOSEPH KUBERA
Hailed by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as one of “new music’s most valued performers,” JOSEPH KUBERA has been recognized as a leading interpreter of contemporary music for the past 30 years. Mr. Kubera has had a long and committed relationship to John Cage and his music since the early 1970s. One of the few pianists performing the difficult chance-based, post-1950 works, he has recorded the complete Music of Changes and the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and has toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Cage’s invitation. Composers who have written for Mr. Kubera include Larry Austin, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Howard Riley, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny, among others.
I can’t exactly recall the first time I heard Roscoe Mitchell’s music. I was introduced to him by our mutual longtime friend and collaborator, Thomas Buckner.
Roscoe’s music-making was astonishing to hear the first time, and it has amazed me every time since. It is not simply a matter of his astounding virtuosity, but of his sense of space, poise, and then the genesis, development and transformation of materials as they present themselves in performance, both in solo and ensemble contexts. Often I get the impression that it’s Roscoe’s instrument itself that is offering ideas, in real time.
Then, beyond his musicianship and creativity, there was the pleasure of getting to know this kind and generous soul on a personal level and as a collaborating performer. For a number of years, I was honored to be part of his New Chamber Ensemble, and particularly honored that Roscoe wrote a piano piece (8-8-88) for me.
A profound insight that I learned through working with Roscoe was a sense, new to me at the time, of allowing new musical ideas to take their own space within an improvising ensemble, and introducing them at the right time.
Roscoe has been a real inspiration to me, and I treasure our longtime friendship.
-- Joseph Kubera
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: 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.
More Info — Buy Tickets — RSVP on Facebook
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.
More Info — Buy Tickets — RSVP on Facebook