Roscoe’s Big Picture

“I don’t wait on anybody to do anything for me,” Roscoe Mitchell says over the phone from his home in Madison, Wisconsin.  

 Such was the sentiment among the Mitchell and his colleagues in Chicago in 1965, when the saxophonist and composer became an inaugural member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organization that is now an engine of inspiration and outreach touching nearly all corners of modern music. Mitchell’s sextet, the first AACM group to record, soon evolved into the Art Ensemble of Chicago, including trumpeter Lester Bowie, bassist Malachi Favors, saxophonist Jarman and, a bit later, percussionist Famoudou Don Moye. It stands as the most successful and enduring band to emerge from the AACM, and the most consistently daring. 

 The critic Whitney Balliett once quoted an unidentified AACM member: “If you take all the sounds of all the AACM musicians and put them together, that’s the AACM sound, but I don’t think anyone’s heard that yet.” Yet if any “big bang” announced the AACM’s ethos, it was Mitchell’s 1966 album Sound, which featured standard jazz instrumentation alongside the pan-cultural sounds of toys, bells, gongs, and an array of “little instruments.” 

 “We made up our own conclusions about how our destiny would work out,” Mitchell says of those formative days in Chicago, where he grew up. His destiny, at 84, turns out to be a world of seemingly nonstop, self-directed creativity. On the 2023’s The Sixth Decade: From Paris to Paris, The Art Ensemble is a 19-piece group that still introduces its members onstage to the strains of “Odwalla,” the bluesy theme Mitchell composed a half-century ago. 

 During our interview, Mitchell had me switch to FaceTime, to show me a painting he’d worked on that morning. This led to a tour of his sunlit studio—dozens of canvasses full of bold, brightly colored motifs. Soon, Mitchell—who once designed a “percussion cage” of instruments from around the world—leads me, virtually, into his basement, which is sort of an underground bespoke gamelan, full of drums, cymbals and found objects fastened to wood.  

 “I’ve got a take on everything,” he tells me. Indeed, Mitchell’s several-dozen recordings and more than 250 compositions range from classical to contemporary, from free improvisation to chamber and early music. His instrumental expertise spans the saxophone and recorder families, from sopranino to bass, and includes flute, piccolo, clarinet, and the transverse flute. Through the decades, he’s formed several ensembles and, during his tenure as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Music Composition at Mills College, he created his own 36-piece chamber orchestra.  

The Art Ensemble’s motto is “Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.” Mitchell extends the idea of spanning past and present through all his music, which now includes a steady stream of chamber and orchestral commissions. Case in point, Metropolis Trilogy, which he composed for the combination of flutist Emi Ferguson, alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s quartet, and the baroque ensemble Ruckus. The piece will have its premiere at Houston’s DACAMERA on February 14, with a discussion earlier that day at CMA’s annual conference.

“I still am focused on learning,” Mitchell tells me. “Because music never stops and there’s always more to explore. You’ve never going to run out of things to do.”