Both Taborn and Mitchell in 6/25 NY Times

[GA Russell]

This Sunday’s NY Times will feature articles about two towering musicians with new recordings out on ECM:

 

Craig Taborn is profiled in the New York Times Magazine in a long and superb article by Adam Shatz:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/magazine/the-ethereal-genius-of-craig-taborn.html?_r=0

 

Roscoe Mitchell did a great Q&A with Seth Colter Walls for the Sunday ARTS section:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/arts/music/a-pioneering-black-composer-roscoe-mitchell-keeps-pushing.html?_r=0

[JSngry]

The droning tones in that track remind me of an earlier piece of yours, “S II Examples.” But your playing is always developing. When Mr. Fei’s electronics get intense midway through, you respond with some ferocious timbres. It sounds like you’re searching for a new articulation, on every single note.

Absolutely. I was once in the car, listening to this radio show, and then all of a sudden this saxophone player came on and I was thinking, like: Wait, every note is different. Every articulation is different. And then at the end they said: “That was [the saxophone great] Benny Carter.” I was so relieved, I didn’t know what to do.

With the “S II Examples,” I had that curved soprano saxophone. I went through all the different possible fingering patterns, and then put together multiphonics, quarter tones, and so on and so forth. I can take that to another place, now that I’ve learned how to circular-breathe.

 

[JSngry]

A quiet yet very determined academic who also served as a captain in the Navy Reserve, he specialized in the study of institutional racism and instructed his children, Taborn told me, not to be “dominated by anyone’s attempts to limit your identity based on their own crises or failures of imagination.”

...............................................................................................................................................

His final form of preparation was listening to his iPod in the rental car he drove to Cambridge. It contains about 45,000 tracks, and Taborn prefers to listen to it on shuffle. “Moving from Xenakis to some metal thing creates a space where you don’t know what you’re listening to anymore,” he told me in his dressing room. “You’re making inferences and connections, and that’s really what composition is. So I don’t worry what I’m listening to. I just like the experience, the change in moods, the feeling of going from a 20-minute composed track to a 30-second blast of metal. Even the discontinuity creates its own logic.”

[paul secor]

Great to see a major newspaper giving coverage to musicians like these two. I hope that the article on Roscoe Mitchell will help him keep his position at Mills. It certainly can't hurt.

[uli]

 

[Larry Kart]

On 6/25/2017 at 3:12 PM, paul secor said:

Great to see a major newspaper giving coverage to musicians like these two. I hope that the article on Roscoe Mitchell will help him keep his position at Mills. It certainly can't hurt.

Glad that they let Roscoe speak for himself. A heck of a lot more information and context in what he said than there would have been in almost any "profile."