Roscoe Mitchell: One Head Four People

"I'm always trying to take what's there and, in the end, make it sound like nothing's missing from it," Roscoe Mitchell relates in a 2016 interview, in relation to his string of European solo concerts, yet the statement is just as relevant to the jazz giant's newest studio release, One Head Four People, as any other. The recording comes just as Mitchell's 2014 performance (released on ugEXPLODE, 2021) A Railroad Spike Forms the Voice celebrates its ten year anniversary, and fittingly features the same cast, with Damon Smith on double bass, Weasel Walter on percussion and Sandy Ewen's electric guitar. Where Railroad Spike endeavored into thorny, intense and notably saxcentric improvisations, the quartet following Mitchell's elusive horn down passages rhythmic and abrasive, One Head Four People allows the bandleader to step aside.

The opening track pins Mitchell's baritone singing as intermediary between the brutal percussive Smith and Walter's multiphonic percussion, complete with bells, glasses, blunt instruments and some truly unclassifiable claps and abrasions. Ewen, though you would have to wait for track three to hear her really shred, forms a celestial accompaniment of otherworldly effects and vibrant string work. Mitchell steals the show in "Shiver" with an equal parts knotty and meditative headliner. For the remainder of the record, Mitchell is uniquely absent. He relegates himself mostly to stabilizing Walter's experiments, while also deepening Smith's pizzicato in later sections.

Four tracks titled "Sustain and Ring" act as an oblique ambient coda for the record, featuring poignant effects work from Walter and Ewen, before capping off with another demanding Smith-Walter-led jungle of a song. It might be easy to characterize Mitchell's decision to hang back for most of the record as simple humility, but Mitchell has always been keenly concerned with moments of great silence (Dots, Wide Hive Records, 2021 is a great example), especially in his most recent recordings. The tracks where he allows his colleagues to build rather lengthy complex environments, with only occasional licks from his reed, not only allow these breakthrough musicians a framework from which to propel their most outlandish sonic whims, but also challenge notions of what constitutes the 'framework' versus the precipitating experiments. Mitchell's horn acts almost as a foreign element, like a train going by or a barking dog, introducing some outside force that the rest of the band must consider before moving forward. As he says, it must sound like "nothing's missing from it," not even silence.