Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Roscoe Mitchell: Dots - Pieces For Percussion And Woodwinds

Roscoe Mitchell: Dots - Pieces For Percussion And Woodwinds

By Mark Corroto
October 31, 2021
View read count

Roscoe Mitchell: Dots - Pieces For Percussion And Woodwinds

While Dots, a solo recording by

Roscoe Mitchell

saxophone
b.1940

" data-original-title="" title="">Roscoe Mitchell, is divided into nineteen separate tracks, this entire hour plus recording might be best consumed as a single unit. Mitchell's use of silence here is as essential as the woodwind notes blown and the percussive objects struck. One track leading into the next might be marked by silence, but that soundlessness communicates the recurring themes of this outing.

Mitchell, active since the 1960s, has performed solo both alone and as part of The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble which later morphed into

Art Ensemble Of Chicago

band / ensemble / orchestra

" data-original-title="" title="">Art Ensemble Of Chicago. He introduced his invention, a percussion cage made up of cymbals, bells, toys, whistles and various found objects. The solo performances captured on Solo Saxophone Concerts (Sackville, 1974), Sound Songs (Delmark, 1997), Solo 3 (Mutable, 2003) and here are a kind of sound distillation. Mitchell is refining musical notes by purifying and extracting the essence of sound. Those sounds from his straight soprano saxophone are anything but brutish, they are bird song or whale soundings. The gongs and objects struck reverberate in the same way wind might impact on objects in the natural world. This is meditative music. It is spacious and imperturbable with Mitchell as merely the conduit for unadulterated sound.

Learn more about our star rating system

Track Listing

Slow Ride One; Slow Ride Two; Glide and Run; Skip; Hey; Oops; Light Green; Vast Horizons; Shimmer; Clang; Startle; Dots; Let��s Go There; Do The Dang Thing; Boom Ba; Click; Now The Color Blue; Moving Bell; Silence.

Personnel

Roscoe Mitchell

saxophone

Additional Instrumentation

Roscoe Mitchell: percussion.

Album information

Title: Dots - Pieces For Percussion And Woodwinds | Year Released: 2021 | Record Label: Wide Hive Records

PREVIOUS / NEXT

Terri Lynne Carrington, Michael Manr...
< Previous

Binaries in Cycle
Next >

Support All About Jazz

All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.