Roscoe Mitchell

Featuring: Malachi Favors, Alvin Fielder

Before There Was Sound opens a door onto a moment that had, until recently, existed only in memories and footnotes. In 1965, a year before the sessions that produced his landmark Delmark debut Sound, Roscoe Mitchell led a quartet with trumpeter Fred Berry, bassist Malachi Favors and drummer Alvin Fielder into a Chicago studio - likely late summer or early autumn - to document a rapidly evolving music that had just begun to crystallise around the newly formed AACM. Long unreleased and now issued by Nessa as a stand-alone album, these tapes constitute the earliest available recordings of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, captured only months after its first meeting in May 1965.

The line‑up is both historically resonant and musically combustible. Mitchell and Favors would soon be central pillars of the Art Ensemble of Chicago; Berry and Fielder bring their own angles on the emerging language, with Berry’s trumpet cutting through in crisp, lean lines and Fielder’s drums already loosening the grip of fixed meter. The program consists of seven pieces: five Mitchell originals and one composition each by Berry and Favors, a clear sign that this was already a collective project in spirit as well as sound. Even at this early stage, Mitchell’s writing favours concise themes and distinctive intervallic shapes over tune‑book harmonies, providing tight heads that open onto spacious, unpredictable improvisations.

What you hear, across the session, is a band edging away from Ornette-derived freebop towards something more structurally self‑conscious. Lines can swing, but they often swing on tilted axes; tempo is suggested, then subverted; bursts of high energy give way to suddenly thinned textures and strategic silences that foreshadow the space‑aware dramaturgy of Sound. Berry and Mitchell frequently phrase in parallel or close counterpoint before splitting apart, while Favors acts as both anchor and instigator, shifting between walking pulse, pedal points and abstract commentary. Fielder’s drumming, meanwhile, alternates crisp ride patterns with splashes of colour and broken-time accents, giving the quartet a sense of forward motion even when the bar lines dissolve.

In historical terms, Before There Was Sound documents a crucial hinge: the AACM moving from informal experimentation and Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band into recordings under its own members’ names. But the album is more than a missing archival link. It stands on its own as vivid, frontline music, full of risk and curiosity, with the tension and excitement of ideas still being tested rather than codified. Heard next to Sound, it highlights just how quickly Mitchell’s conception was evolving; heard on its own terms, it reveals that, even “before” the classic debut, the elements were already in play - compositional focus, timbral range, collective responsibility and a determination to carve out a new kind of small‑group jazz from the ground