2020 · Album
Flow States
Recorded April 21, 2015, ScienSonic Laboratories, Teaneck, New Jersey · ScienSonic · Produced by Not specified
Five Masters Meeting in One Day
The first time Mitchell played with either Allen or Graves, captured in real time.
Flow States documents something rare: Roscoe Mitchell in the studio for the first time alongside both Marshall Allen and Milford Graves, two towering figures from different eras of African American improvisation. The session happened on April 21, 2015, at ScienSonic Laboratories in Teaneck, New Jersey—one day after another ensemble had used the same space, and the timing mattered. These musicians had never collaborated before. There were no charts, no rehearsals, just five improvisers (Mitchell, Allen, Graves, Scott Robinson, Jason Alanis, and Ian Randolph) responding to each other in real time.
What emerged was a set of extended improvisations that move between forceful, angular explorations and quieter passages where space becomes as important as sound. Robinson and Allen handle the reed work with different vocabularies—Robinson pushing toward textural abstraction, Allen grounded in the Sun Ra tradition. Graves' drums anchor and destabilize simultaneously, never settling. DownBeat reviewer Ivana Ng heard the album as a piece that weaves bebop, funk, and avant-garde concepts while keeping each voice audible and distinct. The musicians sound like they're listening hard, making room for each other.
This is not a peak moment in any of these careers—it's a moment where different paths intersected by circumstance and produced something that wouldn't exist otherwise. The album matters because it happened at all, because these particular five people made music together on that day, and because the recording preserved it unedited and unvarnished.
