US composer and jazz saxophonist born August 3, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois.
Roscoe Mitchell
US composer and jazz saxophonist born August 3, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois.
Hommage To Africa
Promotional copy of the original Japanese edition of the 1970 album on BYG's "Actuel" series featuring Roscoe Mitchell, Alan Silva, Clifford Thornton, Dave Burrell, Archie Shepp, Grachan Moncur III, Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors.
Ride The Wind
On Ride The Wind, Roscoe Mitchell scales up the chamber‑like intensity of his Conversations work, setting it inside a 20‑piece Montreal–Toronto ensemble that treats his textures as weather systems to move through, reshape and suddenly ignite.
Four Ways
On Four Ways, Roscoe Mitchell joins Stephen Rush’s shape-shifting Yuganaut trio for an electrically unstable encounter, where reeds, synths and oddball acoustics melt into one long, multi-hued improvising organism.
Celebrating Fred Anderson
On Celebrating Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell honors a fellow Chicago giant with a live quartet that turns remembrance into motion, weaving Fred’s themes and Mitchell’s originals into long, tensile arcs of chant, swing and open-form ritual.
Before There Was Sound
On Before There Was Sound, Roscoe Mitchell’s 1965 quartet with Fred Berry, Malachi Favors and Alvin Fielder captures the AACM language in embryo: sharp themes, free rhythm and a restless sense of form already pushing past hard‑bop borders.
Old / Quartet Sessions
On Old/Quartet Sessions, Roscoe Mitchell’s 1967 Art Ensemble - with Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and Phillip Wilson - appears in raw formation, sketching the grammar that would soon detonate as one of free music’s most inventive bands.
Snurdy McGurdy And Her Dancin' Shoes
On Snurdy McGur dy and Her Dancin’ Shoes, Roscoe Mitchell launches the Sound Ensemble with a volatile mix of abstraction and groove, folding AACM rigor into slyly funky frameworks that keep tilting from tight forms into open risk.
L-R-G / The Maze / S II Examples
On LRG/The Maze/S II Examples, Roscoe Mitchell frames three radically different constructions - a lucid brass-and-reeds trio, a labyrinthine percussion octet and a stark soprano solo - as parallel studies in space, timbre and compositional intelligence.
Nonaah
On Nonaah, Roscoe Mitchell turns the alto saxophone into a fault line, setting stark solos, prickly duets and dense small‑group pieces against one another to test how far a single composition and a single sound can be stretched.
Congliptious
On Congliptious, Roscoe Mitchell strips the Art Ensemble idea to its bones, pairing stark solo showcases with a fierce quartet blowout that makes freedom feel both methodical and combustible.
Numbers 1&2
On Numbers 1 & 2, Lester Bowie joins Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell in a pre‑Art Ensemble crucible where AACM discipline, raw timbral play and open‑form swing coalesce into a blueprint for the Chicago future.
In 2
Roscoe Mitchell and Michele Rabbia are made for each other, because they've always made everything audible in their respective music and improvisations. The materials their instruments are made of; the bodies, gestures and movements that breathe life into them; the ideas and visions that guide them or lead them astray; the systems of play and thought they freely use; their imaginations. You can hear everything on the percussion of one, the slightest contact, the slightest clash, the slightest im…
Full Spectrum Voice
1991 release ** Works by six composers from new music's acclaimed baritone, Thomas Buckner who's been called "the voice of the new". Works written by: Robert Ashley, Jon Gibson, Nils Vigeland, Peter Gena, Annea Lockwood, and Roscoe Mitchell.
A Railroad Spike Forms The Voice
*2023 stock* "Don’t follow.” That’s the admonition saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) was known to give his students at Oakland’s Mills College in one-on-one sessions. In musical communication and creation, not following or directly responding to others is central to Mitchell’s philosophy and approach. As he said to me in a recent conversation, “I just let things develop with my intent, with my work, and I’ve never been a person that went around looking for people to play with. I…
Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963–2022 (Book)
Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963–2022 is Roscoe Mitchell's first exhibit with Corbett Vs. Dempsey. The exhibit is accompanied by an in-depth 140-page full-color catalog reproducing over 100 of Mitchell’s paintings, with an interview by John Corbett.
Roscoe Mitchell is an American composer, jazz instrumentalist, and educator. The Penguin Guide to Jazz described him as "one of the key figures" in avant-garde jazz; All About Jazz stated in 2004 that he had been "at the forefront of modern music" …
Sound American no. 29 - The Roscoe Mitchell Issue (Book)
The Roscoe Mitchell Issue, celebrating Art Ensemble of Chicago founder and American iconoclast, Roscoe Mitchell. This very special issue is an appreciation of Mitchell’s career as an improvisor, instrumentalist, composer, painter, and educator as told by the musicians whom he has affected and through his own words. The issue starts with a rigorously researched and beautifully written overview of the saxophonist’s career by Brooklyn-based saxophonist Sam Weinberg. As the reader continues, they wi…
Four Compositions
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
Shadowgraph, 5 (Sextet)
This album, originally released in 1978, was re-mastered and repackaged in Digifile cardboard format. It includes the original full-color booklet. "Shadowgraph and the duos with Douglas Ewart are characteristic of the free abstract jazz that emerged out of AACM's explorations in the '60s and early '70s. Listening to them, one is aware how little this music has been assimilated into the mainstream of either jazz or improvisation."
Pilgrimage
** 2021 Stock ** Legendary avant-garde jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell is best known for his role as a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This group is recognized for incorporating, and none-too-subtly ridiculing, the long-bearded tradition of Western art music. Mitchell, nonetheless, has something to say that is within the tradition himself, apart from, but related to his work in the field of jazz. Usually the sort of classical music piece produced by a "jazz cat" is formulated wi…
![Solo [3]](https://cdn.soundohm.com/data/products/013/hyperrealism-electroacous.jpg.500.jpg)
Solo [3]
** 2021 Stock ** Solo is a solo album by American jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell which was recorded in 2003 and released on Mutable Music as a three CD set. Disc one, titled "Tech Ritter and the Megabytes," is the most varied and interesting of the set. Released by itself, it would have a claim as Mitchell's best solo effort ... This CD offers a compelling balance between composition and improvisation, long and short, abstract and melodic. The second disc, titled "Solar Flares," is entirely de…