Roscoe Mitchell in Performance

Kim Kleinman, Contributing Writer

Roscoe Mitchell with K. Curtis Lyle, Damon Scott and Shuggie
Dissonant Works, St. Louis
March 29, 2026, 6 p.m. set

There were over 50 of us on folding chairs in a storefront on Jefferson Avenue to hear Roscoe Mitchell.  He is so central to the foundation of experimental music that, at its inception, the Art Ensemble of Chicago performed at the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble.  For this performance, instead of the robes and dashikis of 60 years ago, he wore a not quite coordinated coat, shirt, and tie with a maroon pork pie hat.  There were thick spectacles, not face paint.  But there was plenty of adventure in a seamless set of music that centered around “The Last Lama to Leave Chicago,” a whirl of words and images with fragments of jazz and blues lyrics intoned by poet K. Curtis Lyle, which celebrated Mitchell as that kind of religious leader.

One of the many friends I couldn’t persuade to join me aptly described this music as “holy noise;” it remains both bracing and deeply moving. Mitchell certainly forged the overall vision and plenty of mischief of his own. He started on a set of small percussion instruments — drum heads, cymbals, and chimes — not quite toys, but small and fragile, creating sound colors not rhythms. Bass saxophone was his primary instrument; he showed surprising agility but it is not a nimble instrument. He led his ensemble with it through commentary and rhythmic intervention as well as bursts of almost straight ahead soloing over almost walking bass. Almost. Damon Scott was the source of the expected chaos, not just with double stops, strums, and sliding up and down the fingerboard. He bowed a lot too, but not only above the bridge. He played below it and above it with drumsticks through the strings or with chains and rattles over the strings. Chaotic, yes, but with a distinct grammar. We held that logic in the room though it might well dissipate in a recording as it does in memory.

Delightfully random were the contributions of Shuggie, Mitchell’s dog, who howled and sang with his master’s horns, perhaps the sopranino sax even more than the bass. He was remarkably in tune (or they adjusted to make him in tune) and very much a part of the performance. In fact, I worried that a fan in the audience petting him as he lay in the aisle might have made him too comfortable to join in, limiting his wonderful contributions.
Lyle opened with a story about seeing a note on a store front that said “Charlie Parker is an electrician; he rewires brains.” This music helped tune up mine. Such adventures are not my regular fare, but I have appreciated Mitchell and other avant-gardists for enriching the syntax of the music. I recall someone saying about Braque and Picasso, that it took a second generation to make Cubism comprehensible. So it is with this music. Through such a storied and venerable career, he has rewired the brains of listeners like me to begin to grasp the profound conception of his music.

As I left I thanked Mr. Mitchell both for the night’s performance and his whole career. He was both gracious and admonishing: “Don’t count me out yet.”

I certainly won’t.