Internationally renowned musician and composer Roscoe Mitchell, since his debut with Sound in 1966, has defined his style through an innovative approach towards composition in what is traditionally an improvised music genre, pre-empting the development of jazz and its relationship with contemporary music in the following decades.
Splatter, drawn from two concerts held at the AngelicA festival in Bologna in 2017, presents the most recent developments of this research, with two examples from his cycle Conversations for large orchestra. Started in 2016, it is based on the transcription and subsequent orchestration of what originated as his improvisations with the trio including Craig Taborn and Kikanju Baku, for the album Conversations I and II which was released in 2014.
From the evening with the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna directed by Tonino Battista, the CD includes the Italian premiere of Splatter and the word premiere of Distant Radio Transmission, a work which further broadens the reflections on the relationship between composition and improvisation, incorporating the contribution of two improvisers (Thomas Buckner and Mitchell himself) in response to, and counterbalancing, the “improvised/transcribed/composed” material.
The lion’s share of the CD is represented by a duet, the fruit of a proposal by the Festival, a concert with a musician that Mitchell met for the first time on the same day: Francesco Filidei. Filidei, from Pisa, is an organist and former assistant of Jean Guillou at Saint-Eustache’s Church in Paris, as well as a composer whose music has been performed at the most significant contemporary music festivals by orchestras like Itinéraire, Nouvel Ensemble Modern, Ensemble intercontemporain, Percussions de Strasbourg, Quartetto Prometeo and Klangforum Wien.
Breath and Pipes, recorded at the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna, is a testament to this encounter: as Joshua Marshall writes in the CD liner notes, it is “an improvisatory tour de force, demonstrating the uncanny sort of electrokinetic thrill which emerges out of the capacity of two brilliant improvisers to truly surprise one another”.
Premiere recording
Roscoe Mitchell alto, soprano, sopranino saxophone
Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna
Tonino Battista conductor
Thomas Buckner baritone voice
Francesco Filidei organ
1 - SPLATTER for orchestra
Music by Roscoe Mitchell, Craig Taborn, Kikanju Baku
Transcription and orchestration by Christopher Mega Luna
2 - DISTANT RADIO TRANSMISSION for improvisers and orchestra
Music by Roscoe Mitchell, Craig Taborn, Kikanju Baku
Transcription by Stephen P. Harvey
Transcription and orchestration of air sounds for strings by John Ivers
Orchestration by Roscoe Mitchell
3 - BREATH AND PIPES
Music by Roscoe Mitchell, Francesco Filidei
