Why Roscoe Mitchell is Important: TOM DJLL
Tom Djll is a composer, improviser, and occasional writer on music. He is the recipient of a Masters degree from Mills College in Electronic Music as well as a Deeploma from the Deep Listening Organization, and was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition at Mills. Djll’s group improvisation project Grosse Abfahrt enters its 10th year with recordings and performances with MKM, Frank Gratkowski, Lê Quan Ninh, Frederic Blondy, John Butcher, Fred Frith, Annette Krebs, Boris Baltschun, Serge Baghdassarians, Matthieu Werchowski and David Chiesa alongside core members Gino Robair, Tim Perkis, John Shiurba and Matt Ingalls. Djll’s reminiscences about studying under Roscoe Mitchell can be seen in the film Noisy People, released in 2007.
I first encountered Roscoe Mitchell at Karl and Ingrid Berger’s Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, at the 1978-79 New Year’s Intensive with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and again, the next summer, where he led a Composer’s Intensive that lasted five weeks and brought in other AACM artists such as Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, and George Lewis. Every other day, he’d lead the student orchestra through his composition Nonaah, which I already knew from the Nessa recording. The version we played was scored for ‘cello quartet, but Roscoe took the players through it, reassigning parts and re-orchestrating it. On alternate days, the thirty-odd of us would freely improvise under his direction.
Those were challenging sessions. Roscoe placed himself behind a red table with just a stopwatch, the student players seated in a semicircle around him. He was a tiny figure, but his presence filled us with awe and respect. He’d bring his hand up and give a downbeat. At first, everyone jumped in. He stopped us after a few seconds, then waved another downbeat. The soundscape would again quickly devolve into a free-for-all, and he’d stop us again. The message soon made itself clear: You don’t all have to start playing when the space for creating sound is opened. Listen first. And if you don’t offer anything that builds, extends or complements what’s happening, lay out.
Slowing the process of improvisation down to something more like the pace of scribbling notes on paper revealed immense lessons for Roscoe’s students. First, that improvisation is composition (or, as Schoenberg said, composition is improvisation slowed down). Further, improvisation is fundamentally about listening. It’s a reflective process before it is an expressive process. Roscoe put forward the grounding lesson that making music is very serious stuff, and demands a microscopic level of attendance to the moment. As I look back, I see in his manner of pedagogy that Roscoe embodied another fundamental teaching that reaches across those thirty-four years with a resonance: Simplify your materials and methods, and let complexity arise out of the interactions that naturally follow.
Finally, group improvisation is a process owned and stewarded by community. Roscoe cared deeply about the ensemble as a functioning unit of people engaged in a common cause. Out of that naturally arises a sonic ecosystem that feeds and inspires everyone within. He taught us how to listen to the entire soundscape and how to place our sounds in a way that kept it alive and meaningful for everyone, not just as a backdrop for one person’s heroic solo. In this way the act of making group music can be a kind of perfect place, a utopia on Earth, if only for a little while. It’s enough for a lifetime.
Thank you, Roscoe Mitchell.
Table & Chairs Presents: Roscoe Mitchell Performs Nonaah on June 7th, 2013 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.
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