For People in Sorrow (Cryptogramophone)
Alex Cline
Released March 19, 2013
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2013
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=nRDQRuO6eJo&list=OLAK5uy_kdaurDMQCWpdAlfyXrX2jD811WipaSdFs
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About:
For People in Sorrow is a 2013 double-disc album by American percussionist and composer Alex Cline, consisting of a live reinterpretation of Roscoe Mitchell’s 1969 composition from the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s album People in Sorrow. Recorded at the 2011 Angel City Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, the 67-minute performance features an 11-piece ensemble including reedist Vinny Golia, saxophonist Oliver Lake, guitarist G.E. Stinson, vocalist Dwight Trible, and pianist Myra Melford, alongside Cline on drums, percussion, and timpani. The work incorporates guided improvisations, recurring thematic motifs, and a pre-recorded Vietnamese chant by Buddhist nun Sister Dang Nghiem, expanding the original’s meditative free-jazz lament into a broader commentary on human spiritual suffering.
Released on the Cryptogramophone label, the album arrives with a companion DVD that captures the full visual staging of the event, including projected footage of Sister Dang Nghiem chanting a Buddhist consecration song, enhancing the piece’s ritualistic and immersive quality. Critics have praised its reverent yet innovative approach, blending fiery collective improvisation with elements of blues, orchestral textures from harp and cello, and dynamic shifts that evoke both the somber introspection of the source material and contemporary jazz vitality.[1] As the twin brother of guitarist Nels Cline, Alex Cline draws on influences from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) while assembling a diverse West Coast ensemble to honor and evolve the avant-garde jazz tradition.
Inspiration and development
Alex Cline, a Los Angeles-based percussionist and composer with over four decades in the jazz and experimental music scenes, drew significant influence from his twin brother, guitarist Nels Cline, whose explorations in avant-garde and free jazz shaped Alex’s early interests in improvisation and unconventional sound palettes. Growing up in the 1970s, the brothers immersed themselves in the works of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), including frequent listening sessions that fostered Alex’s appreciation for collective creativity and expanded instrumental possibilities.
The primary inspiration for For People in Sorrow came from the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s 1969 album People in Sorrow, composed by Roscoe Mitchell, which Cline first encountered as a teenager and described as a transformative force amid personal bitterness and confusion. The original piece’s themes of grief, subtle improvisation, and collective mourning—evoking the era’s social upheavals like civil rights struggles and the Vietnam War—resonated deeply, offering Cline consolation and a model for addressing suffering through music, aligned with his Buddhist practice. Cline attended Art Ensemble performances in Los Angeles around 1979, further solidifying his admiration for their meditative intensity and emotional depth.
Cline’s personal experiences with emotional loss in the 1970s, during a period of profound misery, prompted him to view the piece as life-affirming, ultimately inspiring the homage project as a way to honor its capacity for transformation. Initial sketches emerged in the late 2000s, evolving from long-held ideas discussed with collaborators like Vinny Golia dating back to the mid-1970s. By 2009, Cline pitched the concept to the Angel City Jazz Festival organizers, securing Roscoe Mitchell’s blessing after a personal letter outlining its significance; this led to assembling an 11-piece ensemble of AACM-influenced musicians for a live premiere. The project expanded into a multimedia format, incorporating chants and poetry, and culminated in a 2011 performance at REDCAT Theater, later released in 2013 as a CD/DVD set capturing the event.
Conceptual framework
For People in Sorrow presents grief as a communal experience, rooted in jazz traditions of collective improvisation that facilitate emotional catharsis among performers and listeners alike. This theme emerges through the ensemble’s interactive dialogues, where musicians respond to a central mournful motif, transforming individual sorrow into a shared ritual of expression and resolution. Drawing from the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s original 1969 composition, the album adapts these elements to emphasize ensemble unity over solitary lament, echoing broader jazz practices of spontaneous group interplay to process collective pain.
The album’s structure revolves around extended pieces that prioritize spontaneous interplay, allowing the 11-piece ensemble to build dynamically from restrained openings to intense peaks. Comprising two tracks—”A Wild Thing” and “People in Sorrow”—the recording captures a live performance of 67:42 minutes, with the core reinterpretation unfolding as a continuous exploration rather than rigid divisions. This format enables phases of raw emotional release through fiery collective improvisation, contrasted with moments of resolution via thematic anchors and meditative interludes, fostering a narrative arc of sorrow’s progression without explicit disc separation.
Philosophically, the work is influenced by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which championed principles of freedom, cultural expression, and innovative blending of composition with improvisation. Alex Cline adapts these ideals to honor Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, incorporating AACM’s emphasis on disciplined openness to create a contemporary homage that extends the organization’s legacy of boundary-pushing ensemble music.
Unique to this realization are the strategic uses of silence and minimalism, which heighten the evocation of mourning by creating spacious backdrops for emergent improvisation and subtle thematic echoes. These elements, including sparse woodwind lines and deliberate pauses, nod to the Art Ensemble’s original without direct replication, instead integrating additions like Buddhist chanting to deepen the ritualistic quality of grief’s communal navigation.
Musical style
For People in Sorrow is a reimagining of Roscoe Mitchell’s composition from the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s 1969 album, blending free jazz traditions with contemporary new music and meditative elements inspired by spiritual practices. The work fuses the raw, collective improvisation characteristic of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) with orchestral textures and ambient spaciousness, creating a somber, elegiac soundscape that evokes both historical civil rights commentary and universal themes of compassion.
The album’s sonic palette draws on avant-garde percussion and experimental instrumentation, featuring an 11-piece ensemble that includes drums, gongs, harp, cello, electric violin, tuning forks, and diverse woodwinds and reeds for textural layering and emotional depth. Key techniques emphasize extended group improvisations and conduction, where leader Alex Cline guides spontaneous interactions around recurring mournful themes, shifting from restrained dialogues to roaring climaxes with wailing horns and roiling rhythms. Unconventional elements, such as a pre-recorded Vietnamese Buddhist nun’s consecration chant projected via video, integrate spiritual ambiance, enhancing the piece’s immersive quality without disrupting its jazz core.
The first disc captures the performance’s dynamic arc, beginning with elegant, spacious arrangements that build through intense, chaotic free-jazz passages—highlighted by gritty slide guitar solos over timpani and splintered piano eruptions—before transitioning to contemplative sparsity. In contrast, the second disc’s DVD accompaniment reveals a more immersive, visually guided experience, underscoring the work’s real-time compositional innovations through live video of the ensemble and chant projection, heightening the thematic immersion in sorrow. This structure amplifies the album’s evolution from fiery, post-bop-inflected energy to ambient reflection, paying homage to the original while expanding its expressive scope.
Production process
The production of For People in Sorrow centered on a single live performance captured on October 2, 2011, at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles during the Angel City Jazz Festival, featuring an 11-piece ensemble led by conductor Will Salmon. The event was audio-recorded by engineer Wayne Peet, who also co-handled live sound duties with Ian Burch, ensuring high-quality capture of the ensemble’s improvisational dynamics amid the venue’s acoustics. Video documentation involved multiple camera operators, including Adam Levine, Carole Kim, and Donovan Vim Crony, with JC Earle managing both video and sound engineering, while pre-recorded elements—such as Sister Dang Nghiem’s Vietnamese chants and bell tolls—were integrated via onstage projection to enhance the meditative atmosphere.
Post-performance, Peet mixed and mastered the audio at NewZone Studios in Los Angeles, preserving the raw energy of the 67-minute suite while refining its emotional contrasts through careful balancing of the diverse instrumentation, including reeds, brass, strings, and percussion. Alex Cline served as producer, with executive production by Jeff Gauthier and Nels Cline, emphasizing minimal intervention to maintain the authenticity of the live improvisation inspired by Roscoe Mitchell’s original composition. The video was edited by Carole Kim, resulting in a companion DVD that mirrors the CD audio for a fully immersive experience. Final mastering occurred in late 2012, culminating in the album’s release on March 19, 2013, via Cryptogramophone Records. This process highlighted the logistical demands of coordinating a large ensemble for a one-time rendition, from rehearsal coordination to seamless integration of projected visuals, without reported overdubs to honor the performance’s spontaneity.
Track Listing:
1. A Wild Thing 03:55
2. People in Sorrow (Roscoe Mitchell) 01:03:47
Personnel:
Oliver Lake: saxophones, flute
Vinny Golia: woodwinds
Dan Clucas: cornet, flutes
Dwight Trible: voice
Jeff Gauthier: violin
Maggie Parkins: cello
Mark Dresser: bass
Myra Melford: piano, harmonium
Zeena Parkins: harp
G.E. Stinson: electric guitars, electronics
Alex Cline: percussion
Sister Dang Nghiem: chant
Larry Ward: opening poem
Will Salmon: conductor
Recorded live October 2, 2011, at the Angel City Jazz Festival, Los Angeles, CA
Producer: Alex Cline
Live sound: Ian Burch and Wayne Peet
Mixed and Mastered by Wayne Peet
Photography: Monica Andriacchi
Cover Design: Kio Griffith
Executive Producer: Nels Cline and Jeff Gauthier
Review:
In October of 2011, drummer Alex Cline and a large ensemble performed his reimagining of Roscoe Mitchell’s iconic composition, People in Sorrow, at the Angel City Jazz Festival. In the liner essay, he explains that he heard the work while in high school on an Art Ensemble of Chicago album of the same name, and that it quite literally had a profound influence on the development of his musical thought. He also states that while he had the notion of undertaking this endeavor years ago, he initially resisted in order to examine his motivation in wanting to pay tribute to the work, its composer, AEC, and the group’s fostering organization, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Thank goodness he followed through. Cline’s ensemble performed just before Mitchell’s own group, making the tribute complete. The band includes Oliver Lake and Vinny Golia on saxophone and woodwinds, Dan Clucas on cornet, Zeena and Maggie Parkins on harp and cello respectively, Jeff Gauthier on electric violin, guitarist G.E. Stinson, bassist Mark Dresser, pianist Myra Melford, vocalist Dwight Trible, and conductor Will Salmon. Cline retains the work’s mournful, elegant theme as a recurring anchor. He drafts many new spaces for dialogue and free improvisation yet notates and re-creates many of the instances that appeared on the original recording — this is remarkable since much of it was freely improvised. The inherent compassion and dignity of People in Sorrow proves the real inspiration for this re-imagining. Groups of players dialogue off the theme, and individuals take solos in relation to it and one another. The pace is restrained and spacious until half-an-hour in. The dynamic intensifies with Stinson’s gritty slide guitar solo, backed only by Golia on an instrument resembling a melodica. From here, the ensemble begins to build the work to near fever pitch, yet remains grounded in the backdrop by a sung chant from Sister Dang Nghiem, a Vietnamese Buddhist nun, via a video projection behind the band — this can be readily heard, and also seen on the accompanying DVD. No matter how deep and wide the ensemble ranges in its exploration, People in Sorrow is ever present, not only as a guiding force in the moment, but also as an enduring influence that continues to inform possibilities for interaction between formal composition and free improvisation. The playing by this ensemble is canny, engaged, and wildly creative; at times their playing borders on the awe-inspiring, both in restraint and free blowing. For People in Sorrow is not only a fitting tribute to Mitchell, the work, the AEC, and AACM, but proves a new high-water mark for Cline in terms of discipline, openness, and vision.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)
