Roscoe Mitchell, The Note Factory

Far Side is a concert recording by Roscoe Mitchell and The Note Factory, taped at the Burghausen jazz festival in southern Germany in March 2007 and released by ECM in 2010. Mitchell, a co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, built this band of paired instruments around an old ambition. He described it as "putting together an ensemble of improvising musicians with an orchestral range". It is the group's second ECM album after Nine To Get Ready (1999), and its four long pieces move between tightly controlled writing and wide-open improvisation.

The front line is Mitchell on saxophones and flutes with Corey Wilkes, a younger AACM trumpeter who also plays flugelhorn. Behind them sit two pianists, Craig Taborn and Vijay Iyer, two double bassists (one doubling on cello) and two drummers. ECM's notes place Iyer with one bassist and one drummer on the left of the stereo picture, and Taborn with the other pair on the right. The concert was recorded on 17 March 2007 in the Stadtsaal by Bayerischer Rundfunk and mixed at Artesuono Studio in Udine. Steve Lake produced the album. Taborn told Nate Chinen that this band teaches you to hear the whole group as one space of textures rather than follow a single line.

The opening suite, Far Side / Cards / Far Side, runs for almost 31 minutes. Writing for Blogcritics in 2010, Greg Barbrick described its first section as a slow build of tension around a subdued theme. Then the piano moves to the centre and the music grows more frenzied toward Mitchell's solo. Trio Four For Eight begins very quietly, with bass and drums held back until midway, when the two drummers take over. Ex Flover Five works like a smaller version of the suite, as muted, tentative lines break into open free playing. In DownBeat, Alain Drouot pointed to Mitchell's circular breathing, his interest in texture and his use of very sparse notes.

John Fordham, in The Guardian in October 2010, warned that a Mitchell session can be austere at times. He also heard the collective maelstroms set against "passages of a kind of rough-surfaced tranquillity" and inventive flights from both pianists. In The New York Times, Chinen called it a "grave and imposing album, thick with intrigue". John Garratt of PopMatters found it far less jazzy than the Note Factory's earlier records and admitted it may stay impenetrable to some listeners.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2087, first released on 5 November 2010 and produced in collaboration with Bayerischer Rundfunk.