2012 · Album
Three Compositions: Live at Sant’Anna Arresi
Recorded Live, Sant'Anna Arresi Jazz Festival 2009 · RogueArt · Ensemble: Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble
Questions Asked in Open Air
Mitchell's writing has tremendous bite and authority but with an open, questioning quality throughout.
Three Compositions puts you in a festival tent with flutes cutting through ensemble voices, spaces opening up between phrases. The Black Earth Ensemble — Nicole Mitchell's group — plays Roscoe Mitchell's scores as if discovering them in real time, which is partly what's happening. These aren't tight studio arrangements. They breathe, they ask for answers that never fully come.
Recorded live at Sant'Anna Arresi in 2009, the album captures Mitchell in late career, writing for an ensemble he didn't lead but trusted deeply. The flutes dominate the sound — that's the first thing you notice. Nicole Mitchell's flute writing keeps the pieces from settling into comfort, keeps them mobile. The charts shift focus between instruments, between small groups within the larger ensemble, so nothing ever locks into place. It's austere without being cold.
This is not where to start if you want classic Roscoe Mitchell — the Chicago Art Ensemble recordings from the 1960s do that better. But if you already know his restlessness, his refusal to let sound become decoration, you'll recognize it here. Brian Morton in Point of Departure heard the work as an interrogation of silence, and that's accurate. Mitchell and the ensemble don't fill space; they leave questions hanging. The album works because that uncertainty is the point.
