Roscoe Mitchell
Roscoe Mitchell is an internationally renowned musician, and composer. His virtuosic resurrection of overlooked woodwind instruments spanning extreme registers, visionary solo performances, and assertion of a hybrid compositional/improvisational paradigm have placed him at the forefront of contemporary music. Mitchell is a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the Trio Space. He is also distinguished as the founder of the Creative Arts Collective, The Roscoe Mitchell Sextet & Quartet, The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, The Sound Ensemble, The New Chamber Ensemble, and the Note Factory.
His instrumental expertise includes the gamut of the saxophone and recorder families, clarinets, flute, piccolo, and the transverse flute in addition to his elaborate invention, the Percussion Cage. His oeuvre boasts hundreds of albums. His vast discography includes Sound (1966, 5-star review in DownBeat Magazine), People in Sorrow (1969, with the AEOC), Nonaah (1977, DownBeat Magazine Record of the Year), Bells for the South Side (2017, featured as one of the NYTimes’s best jazz albums of the year) and Discussions (distinguished on the NYTimes’s list of 2017’s best classical albums).
Mitchell’s honors include the 2020 NEA Jazz Master Fellowship, the United States Artist Award (2019), ASCAP Founders Award (2018), Multiple Reeds Player of the Year: Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards (2023 & 2018), Doris Duke Artist Award and Audience Development Fund (2014), a CMA Presenting Jazz grant (2010), Golden Ear Award, Deep Listening Institute (2009),The Shifting Foundation Grant, Meet the Composer, and the John Cage Award for Music-Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc. Most recently, He has completed several commissions including CARDS In 3D Colors (2020) for violin & piano (Kate Stenberg & Sarah Cahill commission); Mutable Music commissions: Sustain and Run (2020) for orchestra and solo improvisors, two pieces of a three-song cycle of Bob Kaufman poems: To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room (2020) and WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND? (2020) for baritone and piano (the third piece will be based on the Kaufman poem Scene in a Third Eye); Creative Arts Collective commissions funded by New Music USA: CARDS: The Detroit Deck (2020), CARDS: 11-11-2020 (2020) and CARDS: The Maple just turned Red (2020); Commissions for the Metropolis Ensemble (combined ensembles of Immanuel Wilkins Quartet and The Ruckus Ensemble): LADY MOON (2021) for the Ruckus Ensemble on baroque instruments, O’CAYZ CORRAL Part Two (2020) for the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet on modern instruments, Metropolis At 440 Oakwood Drive (2020) for the combined Metropolis Ensemble. Additionally, he celebrated two 50-year anniversaries this decade: the AACM’s in 2015, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s in 2019.
Active as a visual artist since 1963, with a hiatus in the 1970’s and 1980’s when he concentrated on musical composition, Mitchell was afforded time off-road during the pandemic, in which he began painting very avidly, resulting in a large body of intricately composed, jubilantly colorful, playful works. His recent canvases – including a series of compositionally complex four-by-four foot works – as well as the earliest of his paintings were featured in The Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963–2022, a retrospective exhibition mounted early in 2023 at Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in Chicago. This was Mitchell’s first solo show, and it was accompanied by a 140-page catalog.
