Roscoe Mitchell: Dots - Pieces For Percussion And Woodwinds

While Dots, a solo recording by 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. 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.

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