Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
Roscoe Mitchell
AACM co-founder and Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist; 2020 NEA Jazz Master with a longtime Fitchburg house
$25,000
Roscoe Mitchell is the Chicago-born saxophonist, composer, and painter who co-founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago and keeps a Fitchburg house where mornings start at four with news, then the sunroom, then paint until the windows stop being black. The NEA named him a Jazz Master in 2020 and listed Fitchburg; he is not Fitchburg-raised, but the Wisconsin residence is real and long. Born in Chicago on August 3, 1940, he grew up on brother Norman’s 78s of Parker and Miles, took clarinet at twelve because they would not hand him a saxophone yet, and found his professional decision in an Army band in Heidelberg, where he met Albert Ayler in parades and sessions and jammed at Cave 54. Back home he played Monday nights with Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band at the C&C Lounge. In 1965 he was an original AACM member; his sextet cut the first AACM record, Sound, and became the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Paris in 1969 brought face paint, toy percussion, and the motto “Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.” He taught a 500-student survey at Wisconsin, held the Darius Milhaud Chair at Mills College for twelve years while keeping the Fitchburg house the whole time, and was back in the sunroom by 2018. More than 85 recordings and more than 250 compositions sit beside circular breathing that took a year to learn and a first solo painting show at 82. Uncle Charles Commodore Carter used to draw neighborhood kids as people from outer space; Mitchell’s canvases pursue the same interruption of silence. The horn and the paint are one project.