Roscoe Mitchell recommendations

[Chuck Nessa]

Roscoe Mitchell plays on another new album, Eric Hartz's "Antelopes", which was released March 22 on the Shortwave label. Personnel also includes Corey Wilkes, Bernie Worrell and Richard Davis.

It appears that the album is released under the artist name "Voltress", after checking out the label's website.

Has anyone heard this project?

[robviti]

no, but read this:

Musicians: Roscoe Mitchell, Richard Davis, Bernie Worrell, Brendan McCarty, Mark Sinnott, Matt Rodgers, Jeff Muendel, Corey Wilkes.

All of the musicians were given certain tracks to listen to and no one played at the same time. The concept was similar to the classical baroque style of performing. The phone messages are real messages from 2005-2006 during that time of my life.

[Hot Ptah]

Roscoe Mitchell plays on another new album, Eric Hartz's "Antelopes", which was released March 22 on the Shortwave label. Personnel also includes Corey Wilkes, Bernie Worrell and Richard Davis.

It appears that the album is released under the artist name "Voltress", after checking out the label's website.

Has anyone heard this project?

Not yet, but I have ordered it. A full report will follow.

I recall that Smart Studios is the site of recordings by Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Killdozer and other 1990s rock bands. This is the first time I have read of jazz musicians recording there.

Edited April 13, 2007 by Hot Ptah

[Hot Ptah]

Roscoe Mitchell plays on another new album, Eric Hartz's "Antelopes", which was released March 22 on the Shortwave label. Personnel also includes Corey Wilkes, Bernie Worrell and Richard Davis.

It appears that the album is released under the artist name "Voltress", after checking out the label's website.

Has anyone heard this project?

I have now heard it. I may be missing its place in the contemporary music scene. To me, it sounds not all that different from some of the music that was around in the early to mid-1970s, such as Pink Floyd before "Dark Side of the Moon", Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells"---long instrumental works comprised of pleasant sounds, all composed and somewhat complicated. I hope that Mr. Hartz would not take that comparison as an insult. There may be a much more contemporary tradition for this type of music, which he fits into, and which I am not aware of.

I received a vinyl LP and a CD of the music. There are two songs, each one side of an LP long.

As the composed sounds go by, you definitely hear the sounds of Corey Wilkes (especially) and Roscoe Mitchell playing some of the parts. There are no improvised solos. The music is not dissonant or "free". There is a steady drumming beat to support the composed parts, many of them played on synthesizers. There are not hummable melodies per se, but the music is not atonal or dissonant. It is pleasant to listen to as background music.

I had mentioned to Mr. Hartz that I have been a Richard Davis fan, in my email ordering this album. He was good enough to include a handwritten note with my album, telling me that Richard can be heard on the left channel, and that one of Richard's students plays bass on the right channel. Again, one can make out Richard's bass sound in the playing of some of the composed parts.

What is notable about the album is that as the music plays on, one hears many recorded voice mail messages very distinctly. These sound like real life voice mail messages, probably from Mr. Hartz's phone. There are many profanity laced, mundane conversations about making arrangements to go places, to receive items, to meet up with someone. A neighbor woman calls and in an ethnic accent (probably Eastern European) begs him to not be so loud, so that her children can have some peace and quiet. These voice mail messages are at the same volume as the music, and are heard for most of the album. As the messages contain much everyday cussing, the album should not be played around children if you are a parent concerned about things like that.

I couldn't help but wonder what Richard Davis and Roscoe Mitchell think when they hear their contributions competing with voice mail messages in which young men talk about meeting up at some location later on, using foul language. I wonder if the musicians wonder what they got themselves into.

I have seriously thought of asking Mr. Hartz if he could mix a voice-mail free version of the album and sell it to me. It would be enjoyable on a certain level without the extensive phone messages. I know that there is a tradition of using spoken word parts in experimental music, including "found" or real life speech. However, to hear almost non-stop voice mail messages over two sides of an album, which compete with the music throughout, is a bit much for my taste.

Edited April 20, 2007 by Hot Ptah

[ep1str0phy]

Thanks for the report, Ptah.

Upped to mention my recent acquisition of More Cutouts, which is a fine outing. There's a sort of quiet, playful psychology to the whole affair, personal and without many explosive moments. Albums like this one get across just how revolutionary Roscoe and the AACM were/are in terms of dynamics--there are moments when the ensemble does everything but play loud.

These Cecmas are a sleeper treat...

[Antelope]

Thanks for the feedback about the album. The messages were actually the core of "Antelopes" without the messages, the rest of the album would not be able to exist, if I receive enough requests for an alternative mix without messages, I would entertain the idea. I am currently working on another Voltress record with Roscoe and a bigger cast of classic Jazz greats and it should be done and out by next fall (I hope!) The new one does not feature any phone messages, but has another interesting concept in their( the messages) place.

As for the language, all of the musicians heard the album and understood the concept before they recorded. Although harsh at times, there is a specific story link to each side which I felt was nessesary to present un-edited.

I truely appreciate the attention and your feedback dedicated to this project. I certainly don't expect everyone to dig it, but hopefully it pushes some of the bonderies of music structure and the current trends.

cheers,

Eric

I have seriously thought of asking Mr. Hartz if he could mix a voice-mail free version of the album and sell it to me. It would be enjoyable on a certain level without the extensive phone messages. I know that there is a tradition of using spoken word parts in experimental music, including "found" or real life speech. However, to hear almost non-stop voice mail messages over two sides of an album, which compete with the music throughout, is a bit much for my taste.

[ep1str0phy]

Thanks for chiming in, Eric. I'll be looking forward to hearing the album...

Excited to hear that more is in store--any chance you'll be assembling some ensemble pieces?

[Hot Ptah]

Antelope/Eric, I wanted to comment again on the telephone messages. I have heard the album over 25 times. I would only say that for me, hearing the messages did not wear well after about the seventh or so listen. I was pretty much tired of them in listens eight through 25+. That's just me.

I have heard spoken word passages on albums and enjoyed them to varying degrees. Frank Zappa's "Lumpy Gravy" is an example of one that I like. Those were not real messages on that album though.

After about listen #7, I was straining hard to hear all of the instrumental parts and trying to block out the messages. That's just me, of course. Others may love the messages always.

I would definitely buy a mix of the album without the messages, if you were so inclined to make one available.

[Alexander Hawkins]

A great clip of Mitchell here!

[Alexander Hawkins]

Edited March 26, 2008 by Red

[paul secor]

:tup Very, very fine stuff, Red! Many thanks for posting those.

[Alexander Hawkins]

Not at all! Actually, there's a ton of great AEC stuff on there. Search for 'Cecil Taylor' and 'Art Ensemble' and there's a real gem!

[paul secor]

Just listened to Roscoe Mitchell New Chamber Ensemble: Pilgrimage - once last evening and once this morning. My first exposure to Mr. Mitchell's chamber/more notated music - though in some ways I hear all of his music as parts of each other. A lot of very wonderful music on this recording - "Sound Pictures, No. 3", "Alternate Express", "To Styles Holloway and Bubba Barnes", ""Sound Pictures No. 4", and "Spirits Among Stones" - all .

Interesting to listen to how "Alternate Express" played out with this group and with the Art Ensemble.

[paul secor]

Listened to the first disc of Sound Songs (Delmark) this afternoon & thought I'd put in a mention of it. Some of the most fascinating Roscoe Mitchell music I've heard. "Full Frontal Saxophone" is a masterful & powerful performance.

[jeffcrom]

Listened to the first disc of Sound Songs (Delmark) this afternoon & thought I'd put in a mention of it. Some of the most fascinating Roscoe Mitchell music I've heard. "Full Frontal Saxophone" is a masterful & powerful performance.

I'll second that. Sound Songs is probably my favorite Mitchell after the Nessa Nonaah album.

[Uncle Skid]

The recently reissued "Congliptious" is absolutely stunning.

I was familiar with this music from the AEC 1967/68 box set, but this CD has opened up many new discoveries.

[John L]

The recently reissued "Congliptious" is absolutely stunning.

I was familiar with this music from the AEC 1967/68 box set, but this CD has opened up many new discoveries.

How so? What is different about the CD than the same music on the AEC box? Are there additional tracks?

[Uncle Skid]

The recently reissued "Congliptious" is absolutely stunning.

I was familiar with this music from the AEC 1967/68 box set, but this CD has opened up many new discoveries.

How so? What is different about the CD than the same music on the AEC box? Are there additional tracks?

No additional tracks -- but "Tatas-Matoes" and the three takes of "Care Free" that first appeared in the box set are included.

This is most definitely not just a re-release. Hopefully Chuck will fill us in on the details, but it's my understanding that this is a completely new mastering.

And (especially after listening on good headphones), I'll say it again: stunning!

[Uncle Skid]

More info on this thread:

ncd-2 Roscoe Mitchell Congliptious. New 24 bit remastering of material from the Art Ensemble 1967/68 box. All takes from the sessions in question.

[Clunky]

Prompted by admiring some fantastic photos on the Nessa FB page I pulled out Roscoe's L-R-G etc. disc. I've admired Roscoe's music for 20 years (at least that's when I first bought Sound and Space Ensembles) but I do wonder how much I really understand what is happening in his music. Assuming I don't understand , does that matter or cani just enjoy it.

The L-R-G disc is pretty challenging but repeatedly draws me back in to listen again and try once more to understand. For some reason I appear to be hearing more on tonight's listening than usual. Perhaps the photos have helped me. Good value music in that it bears repeated listening and still is full of surprises.

[Clunky]

Playing "Sound" over the past few days following the discussions in another thread. I'm only familiar with the CD issue so I'm not clear what editing was involved in the creation of the composite take of the title track. My only thought other sheer astonishment (all over again) at the sheer audacity and beauty of the music is how it was perceived at the time of initial release. How was it received by the jazz press and public. In particular " Ornette"seems backward looking in a way that " Sound" is completely different from any thing before ( correct?). Was "Ornette" perceived as a "safety" piece connecting the music firmly to the "tradition" and "Sound" the track where all bets were off. "Sound" has to my ears all sorts of references to earlier music but it's overall trajectory was surely alien to most in 1966.

So my curiosity is as much as how it was received by others and what the musicians thought they were doing. Chuck?

[Larry Kart]

Prompted by admiring some fantastic photos on the Nessa FB page I pulled out Roscoe's L-R-G etc. disc. I've admired Roscoe's music for 20 years (at least that's when I first bought Sound and Space Ensembles) but I do wonder how much I really understand what is happening in his music. Assuming I don't understand , does that matter or cani just enjoy it.

The L-R-G disc is pretty challenging but repeatedly draws me back in to listen again and try once more to understand. For some reason I appear to be hearing more on tonight's listening than usual. Perhaps the photos have helped me. Good value music in that it bears repeated listening and still is full of surprises.

Here (from my book) is what I wrote about the L-R-G disc back in 1979:

Roscoe Mitchell’s L-R-G/The Maze/SII Examples may well change the musical future. Best known today as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Mitchell has been a key figure in the jazz avant garde ever since he recorded Sound for the Delmark label in 1966. His days with the Art Ensemble began soon afterwards, and he still helps that band function with some intensity. But, it has become obvious that his musical needs are leading him elsewhere, away from collective, free-association drama and into more adamantly controlled forms of creation.

The fruits of his new endeavors became visible last year with the release of his two-record Nessa album, Nonaah, which was highlighted by an exhaustive and exhausting solo alto saxophone performance of the title piece and another version of “Nonaah” scored for four altos. Characteristically, each of these performances began at one musical pole and traveled to an opposite position--the solo, “Nonaah” imposing a stern order on seemingly ecstatic material, the quartet “Nonaah” insisting on strict repetition until the musical machine melted into calm or exploded into its component parts.

Those performances were startling enough. But the added weight of the works on Mitchell’s new double album makes it clear that he is in the vanguard of all music that rewards contemplation. “SII Examples” may be the best place to start, a seventeen-minute piece for soprano saxophone that explores the myriad tones that fall between the notes of the standard scale –“quarter tones, semi-quarter tones, the same note with different timbres, that sort of thing,” according to the composer. Timbre is the key element here, as Mitchell oscillates slowly through a closely bunched group of notes, creating variations that sharpen our awareness of one particular building block of music. Absorbing in detail, the piece almost becomes hallucinatory; but “SII Examples” is not “trance music,” like the work of such minimalist composers as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Instead, as with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, one is always aware of the materials involved and the process that shapes them; no attempt is being made to seduce the listener into transcendence by shifting his attention from the matter at hand.

The next place to go is “The Maze,” a twenty-two-minute percussion piece for eight players (Mitchell, Thurman Barker, Anthony Braxton, Douglas Ewart, Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, Don Moye, and Henry Threadgill) who perform on approximately 230 instruments --from standard drum kits to a cornucopia of bells, gongs, marimbas, and vibraphones. That layout may suggest cacophony, but “The Maze” is the calmest, most lucid percussion piece I’ve ever heard--a series of linked events (thirty in all) in which clearly defined percussive textures are interwoven to create a design of dense, extravagant lushness. Especially intriguing is the way “The Maze” makes one aware simultaneously of minute details and overall form, as though one were watching the creation of a Persian carpet. First, each colored thread of sound is apparent, then the middle-distance designs come into view, and finally, the completed maze solves and resolves itself.

“L-R-G” should be approached last, because it combines the timbral variations of “SII Examples” and the structural techniques of “The Maze.” A thirty-six-minute trio for woodwinds, high brass, and low brass, “L-R-G” is performed by the men whose initials give the work its title--Leo Smith (trumpet, pocket trumpet, and flugelhorn), Mitchell (piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, and soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass saxophones), and George Lewis (sousaphone, tuba, and alto and tenor trombones). The musical events of “L-R-G” (forty- four in all if my count is accurate) are more clearly separated than the events of “The Maze.” And each of these events, which range in length from about twenty to ninety seconds, is a complete multilevel structure in itself.

The degree of activity in each event is determined by how many instruments come into play, how widely separated they are in pitch, and how quickly the phrases of each instrument change shape. Functional harmony is nonexistent, as are melody and rhythm in the sense of variations from any norm outside the world of the piece. Instead, we hear timbre and the shape of phrases in space, with the space between each shape always clearly defined.

That may sound forbidding, and in a sense it is--one almost has to learn again how to listen, how to take in sounds that occur simultaneously but refuse to be integrated. But this is not the first time that music has asked that much from its audience, a fact that became apparent when I began to search through the past, hoping to come across some music that sounded like these seemingly unprecedented works. Analogies to “The Maze” were not to be found among other twentieth-century percussion pieces; by comparison Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Zyklus” seems as simple as a Gene Krupa solo. But the glacial calm of “SII Examples” pointed in the right direction, to the slowly unfolding but infinitely complex masses of the fifteenth century French master Guillaume Dufay.

And in the fourteenth century, in the music of such composers as Grimace, Solage, and Matheus de Perusio, one can find works that resemble “L-R-G” more than any other music composed during the intervening 600 years. Listen, for example, to de Perusio’s “Le greygnour bien,” which can be heard on David Munrow’s recording The Art of Courtly Love. In the words of annotator/conductor Munrow, the composition’s “three parts often appear totally unrelated,” and even ears attuned to polyphonic textures are forced to hear each part as a separate entity. Such an extreme disassociation of parts was a primary goal for these fourteenth-century composers, who were working at a time when the very idea of polyphony was new and harmony was still a naked babe. Their musical world was one in which the component parts of Western music were still vigorously independent. And that independence was a quality that their music was trying to elaborate on and preserve. Because Roscoe Mitchell’s music, too, is homing in on first principles, it is natural that his work should resemble compositions that were created when Western music was taking shape. And in the process, he is discovering anew that when music is truly broken down into its component parts, a new order can emerge.

What effect the discoveries of “L-R-G,” “The Maze,” and “SII Examples” will have on the future of music and how quickly those discoveries will take hold are questions for the future to decide. For now, all that can be said is that a different beauty has entered our world, one that demands much from us and gives much more in return.

[Larry Kart]

Playing "Sound" over the past few days following the discussions in another thread. I'm only familiar with the CD issue so I'm not clear what editing was involved in the creation of the composite take of the title track. My only thought other sheer astonishment (all over again) at the sheer audacity and beauty of the music is how it was perceived at the time of initial release. How was it received by the jazz press and public. In particular " Ornette"seems backward looking in a way that " Sound" is completely different from any thing before ( correct?). Was "Ornette" perceived as a "safety" piece connecting the music firmly to the "tradition" and "Sound" the track where all bets were off. "Sound" has to my ears all sorts of references to earlier music but it's overall trajectory was surely alien to most in 1966.

So my curiosity is as much as how it was received by others and what the musicians thought they were doing. Chuck?

IIRC, it got a five-star review in Down Beat from Bill Mathieu. It certainly blew me away (for sure I wasn't the only one), though I was pretty much prepared for what was on "Sound" by live performances from Roscoe and the other players. Chuck probably can answer your questions about what the musicians thought they were doing.

I can see your point about "Ornette" being a kind of calling card, but that performance is at once on fire and totally (and somewhat ironically) under control (which was a new feeling IIRC), and akin in its abrupt shifts to "The Little Suite." Surprised you didn't mention "The Little Suite." To me a whole lot of what Roscoe et al. would go on to do in terms of shape-shifting, multi-level ironic/dramatic musical play was right there, and that, unless I'm mistaken, was an important new strain in the '60s avant garde, though it does have links to aspects of Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and, to some degree, Rollins.

[AllenLowe]

has anyone ever seen the scores of these pieces?

[Larry Kart]

has anyone ever seen the scores of these pieces?

Not in a position to say for sure, but "Sound" I would guess was not/did not need to be scored per se, other perhaps in an initial minimal determination of starting point and mood. Given that, the players involved all would have known what/what they wanted to do, how to modify and expand upon the initial premises. By contrast, "The Little Suite" and "Ornette" are quite detailed, but I would guess that virtually all that detail was hammered out and incorporated by Roscoe et al. in give-and-take rehearsals in much the same way that Mingus and his associates did, though I'm certain that in this Roscoe was not as imperious as Mingus apparently was. Further, it's hard to convey the deep familiarity/closeness that all the these musicians shared. Hearing them in person under circumstances where at times little or no preparation was possible, one typically encountered a seemingly spontaneous compositional wholeness that apparently sprang from something akin to mind-reading.