Bells for the South Side (ECM)
Roscoe Mitchell
Released June 16, 2017
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2017
New York Times Best Jazz Albums of 2017
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/3M0DVx8XsGamfWt2AGs4Cq?si=9uTLsDqYQzuNTubqAOM5HA
About:
Multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser Roscoe Mitchell contrasts and – for the first time – combines the sounds and distinctive characters of his four trios in a very special recording made at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Mitchell had been invited to premiere new music at the museum, in the context of the exhibition The Freedom Principle, which celebrated the directions in music and art set in motion by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians on Chicago’s South Side.
In this recording, Roscoe Mitchell offers what amounts to a composer self-portrait in continually changing colours and textures, reflecting on his own history while looking toward the future. Two pieces – including the title composition – draw upon the full percussion instrumentarium of the Art Ensemble of Chicago – a panorama of gongs, bells, rattles, sirens, hand drums and more. Recorded in 2015 on the occasion of the AACM’s 50th anniversary, Bells for the South Side is released half a century after the founding of the Art Ensemble – the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, as it was originally called.
The double album opens with “Spatial Aspects of the Sound”, the inventiveness of Mitchell’s writing immediately striking. Craig Taborn and Tyshawn Sorey are both on pianos here and William Winant on tubular bells, the austere character of the music counterbalanced by Kikanju Baku’s sprite-like entry with ankle bells and sleigh bells. The piece is capped by Mitchell’s melody for piccolo. After this anything can happen – and there are many highlights along the way to “Odwalla”, the famous Mitchell-composed theme song of the Art Ensemble, played here by all nine musicians, which concludes the programme. These highlights include Roscoe’s own performances on his many woodwinds, from sopranino to bass saxophone.
In the trio music Mitchell is heard with Hugh Ragin and Tyshawn Sorey on “Prelude to a Rose”, with Craig Taborn and Kikanju Baku on the freely improvised “Dancing in the Canyon”, with Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal on “Prelude to the Card Game”, “Cards for Drums” (with an outstanding performance by Tabbal), and “The Final Hand”, and with James Fei and William Winant on “Six Gongs and Two Woodblocks” and “R509A Twenty B”. It’s a highly gifted cast of players. Craig Taborn, Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal have appeared on previous Mitchell recordings including Nine to Get Ready, Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 and 3, and Far Side, while Tyshawn Sorey, William Winant, James Fei and Kikanju Baku, all significant voices in creative music, make ECM debuts here. Fei and Winant are fellow professors, with Mitchell, at Mills College in Oakland, California. Winant has collaborated with composers including Cage, Xenakis, Boulez and Terry Riley as well as improvisers across the genres. Fei, also active as a composer and known for his association with Anthony Braxton, explores extreme regions of sound on woodwinds and electronics; his electronics playing, together with Taborn, on “Red Moon In The Sky” provides some exhilarating moments. Kikanju Baku, youngest of the musicians here, was invited by Mitchell to join him for a set at London’s Café Oto: this has led to spirited work in an ongoing trio with Roscoe and Craig Taborn. Tyshawn Sorey’s remarkable threefold accomplishment as drummer, pianist and trombonist is well displayed throughout the project, and on the title track he plays inside the ‘percussion cage’ originally created by Roscoe Mitchell for Art Ensemble performances.
The music was recorded both in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s theatre and in the exhibition space itself, where the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s percussion instruments were on display and artworks by AACM members hung on the walls – including Roscoe Mitchell’s painting Panoply (reproduced in the CD booklet). The compositions “EP7849” and “Bells for the South Side” were recorded in the exhibition space. The dramaturgy of “EP7849” includes features for Taborn’s electronics and Jaribu Shahid’s bass guitar. On “Bells for the South Side”, James Fei offers subterranean tones on contra-alto clarinet, and Hugh Ragin – a Mitchell collaborator since the 1970s (and currently a member of the revamped Art Ensemble of Chicago) – builds a vaulting piccolo trumpet solo from pitches suggested by the pealing of multiple bells.
Track Listing:
CD 1
1. Spatial Aspects of the Sound (Roscoe Mitchell) 12:14
2. Panoply (Roscoe Mitchell) 07:36
3. Prelude to a Rose (Roscoe Mitchell) 12:44
4. Dancing in the Canyon (Craig Taborn, Kikanju Baku, Roscoe Mitchell) 10:23
5. EP 7849 (Roscoe Mitchell) 08:13
6. Bells for the South Side (Roscoe Mitchell) 12:35
CD 2
1. Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand (Roscoe Mitchell) 16:03
2. The Last Chord (Roscoe Mitchell) 12:26
3. Six Gongs and Two Woodblocks (Roscoe Mitchell) 07:50
4. R509A Twenty B (Roscoe Mitchell) 01:34
5. Red Moon in the Sky / Odwalla (Roscoe Mitchell) 25:49
Personnel:
Roscoe Mitchell: sopranino, soprano, alto and bass saxophone, flute, piccolo, bass recorder, percussion
James Fei: sopranino and alto saxophone, contra alto clarinet, electronics
Hugh Ragin: trumpet, piccolo trumpet
Tyshawn Sorey: trombone, piano, drums, percussion
Craig Taborn: ppiano, Organ, electronics
Jaribu Shahid: double bass, bass guitar, percussion
Tani Tabbal: drums, percussion
Kikanju Baku: drums, percussion
William Winant: percussion, tubular bells, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, roto toms, cymbals, bass drum, woodblocks, timpani
Review:
For more than 50 years, Roscoe Mitchell has blurred relationships between sound and silence, scripted composition and improvisation, jazz, classical, and even R&B musics as a soloist, bandleader, member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and composer. In 2015, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art presented a 50th anniversary exhibition devoted to the Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), an organization Mitchell co-founded, in an exhibit called The Freedom Principle. The music on the double-length Bells for the South Side was recorded during the exhibit with four of Mitchell’s trios — James Fei and William Winant; Hugh Ragin and Tyshawn Sorey; Craig Taborn and Kikanju Baku; Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal — playing separately and in combinations.
The music here glances back to the many places Mitchell has visited, but this is no mere retrospective: most of this is bracing new music that looks forward to further exploratory musical landscapes. The set opens with “Spatial Aspects of the Sound,” a chamber piece with Baku using wrist bells, Winant’s various percussion instruments, and Taborn’s and Sorey’s pianos. At 12-plus minutes, it unhurriedly allows tones and clusters, movement and stillness, to articulate a range of carefully controlled articulations. On “Panoply,” sputtering sopranino, squawking tenor, kit drums, and various percussion instruments engage in aggressive, inspired free interplay. “Prelude to a Rose” contrasts Sorey’s trombone, Ragin’s trumpets, and Mitchell’s reeds in elongated, dovetailing tones through a slowly unfolding melody. “EP 7849” is another combinatory exercise with electronics, electric guitar, cowbell, hand drums, and bowed double bass that offers futurist dissonance and complex, fascinating engagement. “Dancing in the Canyon” is a canny, propulsive, and extremely active free-for-all with Taborn and Baku. On the title track, disc one’s closer, the Art Ensemble’s army of percussion instruments is utilized. Sorey plays Mitchell’s percussion cage, and Tabbal and Baku the percussion instruments of Don Moye and Malachi Favors, with Winant on Lester Bowie’s bass drum. Ragin’s trumpet offers sounds in all registers, while Mitchell digs extremely low-end sounds from his bass sax. It’s certainly mysterious, but also utterly lovely. Disc two’s “Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand” features Mitchell, Tabbal, and Shahid in an intuitive, equaniminous improvisation one would expect from players whose relationship dates back 40 years. Likewise, the extended smearing and droning of Mitchell’s and Fei’s reeds on “Six Gongs and Two Woodblocks” amid Winant’s percussion and Fei’s electronics are simultaneously spectral and inquisitive. The closing medley, “Red Moon in the Sky/Odwalla,” juxtaposes a new work (the former) with a reading of an Art Ensemble staple, with all players in open, bleating improvisation before a tight, bluesy, modal post-bop sums it all up, displaying the myriad faces of Mitchell’s approach to both function and extension in the relentless creation of a poetics in sound. Bells for the South Side is indeed massive, but its depth, breadth, and inspired performances border on the profound.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)
