2014 · Album
Conversations I
Recorded 2013 · Wide Hive · Personnel: Roscoe Mitchell (saxophone), Craig Taborn (piano), Kikanju Baku (drums)
Three Voices in Dialogue, Decades Deep
Mitchell's mid-60s ideas remain vital, riffed through fresh ears and patient listening.
Conversations I finds Roscoe Mitchell at a point where he no longer needs to prove anything. Recorded in 2013 with pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Kikanju Baku, the session captures three musicians who have earned the right to listen as much as they play. There's no rushing here, no need to fill space. Mitchell has spent fifty years refining the vocabulary he helped invent during his time with the Art Ensemble of Chicago — multiphonics, extended technique, silence as punctuation — and on this record those ideas move through conversation rather than declaration. Taborn and Baku don't accompany so much as respond, creating pockets of space around the saxophone and then filling them thoughtfully.
What's striking about Conversations I is its restraint. This could have been showy — three accomplished improvisers with nothing left to prove, throwing technique at each other. Instead, the music unfolds with the patience of people who have learned to trust pauses. The recording itself is clean and detailed without being clinical; you can hear the room, hear the breathing, hear the weight of decisions made and unmade in real time. Bill Meyer, writing in DownBeat, noted that both this album and its companion Conversations II maintain a consistency of invention where the engagement never flags, and the spacial clarity makes the music feel like it's happening all around you rather than at you.
This is late-career work, but it doesn't carry the weight of retrospection. Mitchell is simply asking questions and waiting for answers. For listeners new to his work, start with People in Sorrow (1969) to understand the foundation; Conversations I is where you hear what fifty years of asking those questions has built.
