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Roscoe Mitchell brings jazz history to Mills


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Roscoe Mitchell brings jazz history to Mills

David Rubien, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, February 18, 2008

Roscoe Mitchell, a founding member of the Art Ensemble of...

The building that houses the music department at Mills College is undergoing rehabilitation, so Roscoe Mitchell, the saxophonist who was hired last fall as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition, has been given a temporary office in another hall down the road that winds through the leafy Oakland campus.

<<< Listen: Mp3s, from Roscoe Mitchell and the Transatlantic Art Ensemble: "II"| "V" | "VI" >>>

The room is large but barely furnished, with a scratched-up '60s-vintage desk, an empty bookshelf and two grand pianos abutting each other. The wooden chair Mitchell is sitting in seems incommensurate with his status as perhaps the most prestigious instructor at one of the most prestigious graduate music schools in the country. Not that this seems to bother him.

"Yes, it is prestigious," he acknowledges nonchalantly. "A lot of great people have been in this chair" - not meaning the one he's sitting on. Previous occupants of the position, named after the French composer who taught at Mills from 1941 to 1971, include Lou Harrison, Iannis Xenakis, Pauline Oliveros and Anthony Braxton.

Talking to Mitchell, you get the sense that sitting in an old wooden chair and being an exalted professor are about equivalent in the grand scheme of things - at least at this particular moment, when he is concentrating on an interviewer with that uncanny focus jazz musicians have when they're listening to each other on the bandstand.

In fact, a cheap chair and a fancy professorship represent the twin poles of what Mitchell, 67, could have become, as a budding jazz artist blazing trails in sonic realms neither understood nor respected by many people - unless they happened to observe the music being performed, in which case they'd likely be tweaked for life.

Mitchell, who teaches composition and improvisation at Mills, is best known as one of the founding members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a quintet that existed with its original personnel for 30 years, and continues with some fresh blood now that two of its members, trumpeter Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors, have passed away. One of the great groups in all of jazz history, the Art Ensemble had the misfortune of doing its key work from the late '60s through the early '80s, something of a lost era in jazz. You didn't hear much about this incredibly fruitful period in the otherwise excellent documentary "Jazz," a shameful omission on director Ken Burns' part.

"I was lucky to be around people who were so committed to what they were doing, and that's what kept us going for so long," Mitchell says.

The Art Ensemble of Chicago grew out of two bands Mitchell formed in the early '60s, the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet and the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. As did many important bands in jazz history - Charlie Parker's and John Coltrane's pioneering groups, for instance - the Art Ensemble embodied exactly the point that jazz had evolved to at the time of the band's existence. The Art Ensemble made and still makes astonishing, joyful, swinging, sometimes difficult music based not only on the revolutions of the '60s, but on bebop, big band swing, kitschy vaudeville, 20th century classical and African percussion.

When Mitchell's sextet released "Sound" on Delmark Records in 1966, it was the birth of a new approach to improvised music, one based on an examination of music almost at the level of wavelength, where the saxophonist set about dissecting individual notes in order to unlock their mysteries. In performance, Mitchell often showed off this approach in hypnotic solo saxophone playing with a remarkable circular breathing technique.

In the few dozen albums he's made as a leader outside the Art Ensemble, he's pursued this from-the-ground-up approach, erecting suites and sheets of sound with various combinations of musicians.

Larry Ochs, a founding member of the Rova Saxophone Quartet who organized the Improv: 21 "informance" series where Mitchell is talking Wednesday, says Mitchell has influenced countless musicians even if they don't realize it.

"When I was a young man, Roscoe's electrifying tenor solos on the Art Ensemble's live recording from a concert in Ann Arbor ("Bap-Tizum") was crucial to my own playing, and the band's recording 'Les Stances a Sophie,' which is probably still in my top 10 albums of all time, showed one critical way to combine forms and feelings that spoke to me," Ochs says. "And certainly the Art Ensemble pointed the way for Rova to see the value of keeping a band together for a long time."

The commitment factor emerged early on in Chicago when Mitchell, along with several other musicians who were rehearsing with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams' big band, decided to form an organization that would teach artists to become self-sufficient. That's when, in 1961, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music was born.

"We were able to establish a unit of people who gave us a foundation, where we really didn't have to be dependent on things that were outside of us," Mitchell says.

The association still exists today, and has spawned such artists as former Darius Milhaud Chair Braxton, reed player Henry Threadgill, trombonist George Lewis, keyboardist Amina Claudine Myers, violinist Leroy Jenkins, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and dozens more.

Mitchell says that when he was a kid, all kinds of music were everywhere in Chicago. "If you went to a movie, after the movie there'd be Count Basie's big band. Duke Ellington. Ella Fitzgerald. Lester Young. On and on like that."

Mitchell took up the clarinet while attending Inglewood High School on Chicago's South Side. "Back then, it was kind of a normal rule that if you wanted to play saxophone, you had to start with clarinet."

In the Army, he says, he started "functioning 24 hours a day as a musician." While stationed in Orleans, France, Mitchell first saw a performance by another Army player, tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler. "He had an enormous sound on his instrument. And though I didn't quite understand what it was that he was doing ... he made a big impression on me - but not enough to deter me from studying a more straight-ahead form.

"It wasn't until I got out of the Army and I heard Coltrane's record 'Coltrane,' when he was doing 'Inch Worm' and 'Out of This World,' that I thought, 'Oh my god, you can do that?' And then I thought, 'OK, I better go back and listen to Eric Dolphy a bit.' And then I said, 'Hmm, I better pull out these Ornette Coleman records.' And then it all started to make sense to me."

Mitchell is much too earnest and self-possessed to indulge in hero worship, but when recalling his early infatuation with the mighty 'Trane, his eyes fog up a bit.

"Man, I used to go around and think: Oh my god, what must it be like to be going down the street, and someone asks you, 'What's your name?' and the reply would be, 'John Coltrane.' I couldn't imagine what that would be like."

Mitchell got to sit in with Coltrane, too. Drummer Jack DeJohnette - who was a friend of Mitchell's when they both played in that nascent Abrams big band - had a brief gig with Coltrane after Elvin Jones left the group. The band came through Chicago, and "Jack told Coltrane you should ask this guy to play. And I was like, 'Wait a minute, Jack, man.' But Coltrane did ask me to come up and play. ... It was a remarkable experience for me. I mean (drummer) Roy Haynes came in that night and sat in, and it ended up with the club owner putting us out of the club because we played so late."

As a scientist of sound, Mitchell seems uniquely suited to teaching. One approach he uses involves a scored-improvisational system he developed decades ago that he calls the "card catalog." It's a series of cards that contain different kinds of cues to help students with improvisation.

"I noticed that when it came time to improvise, my students would often make mistakes. So I derived this system to help them discover some different options."

The big picture for Mitchell as a teacher, though, is to help his students figure out their own paths.

"I think the best thing you can teach a person is how to learn," he says. "And once they discover their own individual approach to that - which is inside all of us - then all of a sudden they've opened up a door of endless resources."

Roscoe Mitchell: "Informance" conversation with Derk Richardson. 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets: $10. Call (415) 826-5750 or go to themarsh.org/rising.html.

Roscoe Mitchell with the Stanford Jazz Orchestra: 8 p.m. Feb. 27. Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University. Tickets: $10 general public; $5 students; free for Stanford students. Call (650) 723-2720 or go to music.stanford.edu.

To hear music by Roscoe Mitchell, go to sfgate.com/eguide.To see a video of Mitchell performing, go to youtube.com/watch?v=Tbfd8_U4Ac.

E-mail David Rubien at drubien@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...8/DDC7V3H8S.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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I did hear Roscoe sit in at a jam session (at the Brown Shoe on Wells St. I think) that included Elvin -- stepping up on the stand from the audience in mid-tune as I recall (like a scene from a movie) -- on a weekend afternoon during what must have been a time that Coltrane was in town. First time I heard Roscoe, had to ask someone "Who was that masked man?" He sounded damn good -- Dolphy-esque, strong like bull.

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Any chance there's a tape of that performance he did with Coltrane??

From "The John Coltrane Reference", pp. 343-344. There doesn't appear to be a tape.

John Coltrane Group

PERSONNEL: John Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones; Pharoab Sanders, tenor saxophoane, flute; Roscoe Mitchell, alto saxophone (possibly Friday only); Alice Coltrane, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Rashied Ali, drums; Jack DeJobnette, drums

March 2-6, 1966 (Wednesday through Sunday, one week; Sunday matinee, 4:00-6:00 p.m.). Plugged Nickel, Chicago, IL (1321 N. Wells).

"PLUGGED NICKEL / opening Tonight) / Till Sun. Only / JOHN COLTRANE Sextet / Note: Sunday Matinee March 6, 4-6 p.m. / Everyone Welcome No Age Limit / Fri. March 11 Art Blakey / 1321 N. Wells" (advertisement, Chicago Sun-Times, Wednesday, Mar. 2, 1966, p. 51). Reviewed in Variety (Mar. 16, 1966, p. 65; reprinted in Simpkins, 1989, pp. 202-203). "The review mentions that Coltrane played very long sets during this gig, Some of them so long ("reportedly" over three hours) that the band played only one long set per night.

Reviewed by J. B. Figi (“Coltrane & Co. at the Plugged Nickel: March 2-6, 1966,” available at http://www.jazzinstituteofchicago.org/jour...figi_trane1.htm, accessed Oct. 9, 2004; original publication unknown):

Coltrane’s week here confiremed Ascension, mde it clear that John intends to extend himself into a spasm of "mystic" experience. Which explains the music, and why he, is digging into soul and pocket to enlist the young lions, aligning their powers with his.

Wednesday night sounded as though giant hands were breaking open the earth, great sounds and chunks of things coming loose. John was blowing against a wall, which tottered but wouldn't fall, then backing off into the stomach-lurching rollercoaster of his more familiar style. Two drummers are pertinent to the music, functioning in a way comparable to a guitar team; while DeJohnette played "rhythm", Rashid wove "melody", a steady pattern of rhythmic filigree similar to the flying carpet Ed Blackwell spreads. But the most urgent voice of the night was Pharoah Sanders, toes plugged into some personal wall-socket, screaming squealing honking, exploding echoes of encouragement among the audience. Pharoah was a mad wind screeching through the root-cellars of Hell.

Friday night. How do you review a cataclysm? Evaluate an earthquake? An apocalyptic juggernaut that rolled across an allusion to My Favorite Things into a soundtrack from an old Sabu movie-jungle-fire, animals rampaging in panic, trumpeting of bull elephants? You can only describe with impressions saved from the storm. DeJohnette walking away blanched and shaken from the demands of the music. Mrs. Coltrane sitting sedately by, occasion¬ally edging in with comment. Garrison plugging away, helping hold things together. Pharoah, a mongoose shak¬ing a snake. Roscoe Mitchell, sitting in on alto for the night, breaking loose with lashes of short-range lightning, some of the most exciting playing to come out of the mass. Saxophonists reaching for tambourine, claves, beaters, etc. whenever resting the horn. Rashid coming through undaunted near the end with a fresh new drum-dance. A locomotive of horns, Pharoah-Trane-Roscoe in a row blowing at once, spinning wheels, throwing cinders. Roscoe becoming "possessed" with revival-frenzy. And the big punch of Coltrane, somehow keeping his head in the melee, breaking through time after time with groaning lyricism. Like a convulsion they had induced but no longer seemed able to control, it ground on and on, beyond expected limits of endurance, past two hours, past closing time, until the management intervened and closed it clown.

The audience filed out into the morning, stunned and bludgeoned. The comfortable had been disturbed. The merely hip had been driven back to protests of cacophony, anarchy, disorder. And even the most open ears had become numbed by the continual barrage-one of the problems of the music. What do you carry away from an ava¬lanche besides awe? Another problem-the piano solos and Garrison's long masterful bass solos remain interludes, adjuncts unaccepted by the bulk of the music. But there were elements of order at work even if we were eventually deadened to them. A peripheral order that contained the inner disorder (pigs fighting in a gunny-sack, the sack enclos¬ing their thrashings). Order from the momentum of the rhythm which pulled things along with it. Maybe a second bassist, say Donald Garrett, would have added that much more. And order from the herding sweep of John's tenor,

Even at its best, the music never achieved the free flow of Ornette (the comings together and conversation of Free Jazz), or the arranged blossoms of sound-clusters of Sun Ra, or the paradox of complete control/freedom clarity of Albert Ayler (those open ringing bronze Bells, vibrating to their own self-shaping song and logic), but it does have excitement and immense raw power-an experience in itself. What they did prove was just how hard they could try. That they could beat themselves bloody pounding at the farthest reaches of experience and come back with only their effort as an answer. Perhaps that alone is their answer. [Reprinted by permission of the author's estate. All Rights Reserved.]

Roscoe Mitchell recalled sitting in (Down Beat, Apr. 6, 1967, p. 47): "I feel that I can go and play with anybody who's playing free. Trane was here in town at the Plugged Nickel. I went there and played with him. [...] It was just like we had been playing together for years. I felt everybody there was strong in what they were doing, and there was no problem for me to adjust."

Jack DeJohnette recalled this gig (Down Burt, Nov. 2, 1978, p. 52): "I even played again with Col¬trane

at the Plugged Nickel. [...] And I mean I worked that gig. We'd start around 9:30 and go until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and I'd be so wiped out from the gig that I'd go home and sleep until four the next afternoon. On the breaks Coltrane would go into the back and practice, and Rashied [Ali] and I were like at each other's throats at that time."

[Additional data from Chicago Sun-limes: 3/4/66, 49.]

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Jerry Figi's beautiful, wise piece (to get so much just right in a from-the-front-lines dispatch) was written for and appeared in a fat mimeographed magazine edited by poet-impresario John Sinclair (of MC5 fame) -- don't recall the name of it (John Litweiler might), but it was something hip or apocalypytic, or both. I used to have some or all of its several issues. As I recall, a good deal of the writing was fairly unhinged; Jerry wrote several other pieces for it, and they were all in this vein of ... I don't know, soothsaying. Jerry was maybe fifteen years older than most of the other contributors and probably had thirty-year's-worth more of life experience.

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Figi's review of Coltrane with Roscoe was printed in Change, edited by Sinclair and published at the Detroit Artists Workshop. Figi wrote for 2 big, fat issues of Change. When it evolved into an irregularly published newspaper with a different title Figi continued to write for it; Don Moye was part of the group there -- circulation manager, I believe.

Jamil Figi (1937-1999) had a wonderful knack for conveying the feeling and the sensations of events and their significance. A wise writer, as Larry suggests -- worldy wise and spiritually.

Ed, thanks for finding Jamil's review and the information about the tape recording. And Dan, thanks for spotting the article about Roscoe. It was good to see Larry Ochs' comments, I always suspected an influence there.

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I don't want to take any credit for finding anything. I reproduced the entry from the Coltrane Reference chronology pretty much verbatim. Chris DeVito did the chronology work for the book and I'll let him know about "Change". That's the kind of detail he's very much concerned with.

I initially thought about posting the entry to the revived Sun Ra/AEC thread...I have some comments but I'm recovering from surgery and didn't have the strength to jump in. Been laying up in bed with the book and this was the first entry that really grabbed me by the throat.

The comment of Roscoe seeing Ayler when he was in the service is news to me. I think it's very relevant to the other thread. The relationship of the AACM to Sun Ra to the NY "avant garde"...the complex web of connections and influences...warrants a lot more attention. There are a lot of people who position themselves as essentially self-realized, without any external influences. I tend to be suspicious of such claims but the devil is always in the details.

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