Master saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell (born in Chicago in 1940) is one of the great innovators in creative music of the post-Coltrane, post-Ayler era. He has for over 40 years been a restless explorer of new forms, ideas and concepts. In 1967 he founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago (originally the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble). Its motto – “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future” – is vividly demonstrated on their ECM legacy, including the widely praised albums Nice Guys, Full Force, Urban Bushmen and Tribute To Lester. More recently Mitchell co-led the Transatlantic Art Ensemble with fellow saxophonist Evan Parker, which can be heard on Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3, and collaborated with Jack DeJohnette on Made In Chicago, celebrating the early days and continued relevance of the AACM.
Mitchell’s instrumental expertise extends through the full range of the saxophone and recorder families, as well as the flute, piccolo and clarinet. He has also been an innovator in percussion instrument design.
In 1997, fifteen years after the Art Ensemble of Chicago's The Third Decade, Mitchell returned to ECM with his Note Factory group, an ensemble brimming over with improvising soloists of the highest calibre. Mitchell described their first ECM outing, Nine To Get Ready, as “the coming together of a dream I had many years ago of putting together an ensemble of improvising musicians with an orchestral range".
The Note Factory dream continued with Far Side, as Mitchell continued to blur the demarcation between composition and improvisation.
In autumn 2015 ECM recorded Roscoe Mitchell’s concerts at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. An album is in preparation.
