2013 · Album
Duets with Tyshawn Sorey and Special Guest Hugh Ragin
Recorded 2012 · Wide Hive · Produced by Not specified in available sources
Mitchell and Sorey in Conversation, With Ragin
Every track on this CD is full of ideas, arriving from somewhere listeners cannot quite locate.
Roscoe Mitchell has spent decades making music that refuses easy description, and Duets with Tyshawn Sorey and Special Guest Hugh Ragin continues that tradition without apology. Recorded in 2012, these sessions pair Mitchell's restless saxophone with Tyshawn Sorey's drumming—a musician who thinks rhythmically in ways that defy standard swing or bebop expectations—and Hugh Ragin on trumpet, brought in as guest voice. The record captures something immediate: two musicians listening closely to each other, responding in real time, finding odd angles and unexpected moments of clarity within abstract frameworks.
Mitchell's approach here is characteristically oblique. He doesn't play melody in any conventional sense; instead, his saxophone generates textures, queries, abstract shapes that Sorey answers with restless, unpredictable drumming. Ragin's trumpet appears when least expected, adding a third voice that complicates rather than resolves what's happening. This is not background music or mood-setting. It demands attention and offers no immediate payoff. All About Jazz heard it plainly: the mystery never changes, but the ideas keep coming, each track packed with small discoveries and wrong turns that feel purposeful.
For listeners new to Mitchell, this is deep territory—a better entry point exists elsewhere, perhaps in his work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But for those already attuned to his thinking, Duets shows him still asking the same unanswerable questions, still refusing to settle into comfort or repetition.
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