Other Minds Festival 25: Concert 2

Roscoe Mitchell is an internationally renowned musican, composer and innovator serving until recently as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College. His virtuosic resurrection of overlooked woodwind instruments spanning extreme registers, visionary solo performances, and assertion of a hybrid compositional/improvisational paradigm have placed him at the forefront of contemporary music. Mr. Mitchell is a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the Trio Space. His oeuvre boasts hundreds of albums and original works, ranging from passionate, forceful improvisations to ornate orchestral music, and his honors include distinction as an NEA Jazz Master, the United States Artist Award (2019), the Doris Duke Artist Award and Audience Development Fund (2014), a CMA Presenting Jazz grant (2010), the Shifting Foundation Grant, and grants from The National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer.

In his own words, Ambrose Akinmusire “aspires to create richly textured emotional landscapes that tell the stories of the community, record the time, and change the standard.” Born and raised in Oakland, California, Akinmusire’s command of the trumpet as a limitless sonic focus has led him to “reach beyond” conventions of genre and idiom, as he seeks to radically expand the scope of musicianship as we understand it. He is among creative music’s most soaring young talents, receiving honors from the Doris Duke Foundation, the MAP Fund, the Kennedy Center, and the Thelenoius Monk International Jazz Competition (which he won in 2007). His collaborators include Vijay Iyer, Aaron Parks, Esperanzsa Spalding, and Jason Moran and his music has graced the stages of both the Montery and Berlin Jazz Festivals.

Chicago born and raised, Junius Paul has quickly established himself as one of the world’s most impressive rising talents, contributing his expertise on both upright and electric basses to the music of history’s most recognized acts, including Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell, Roy Hargrove, Curtis Fuller, Donald Byrd and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He performs regularly in a wide variety of genres, “ranging from jazz to hip-hop, house, funk, classical, and gospel” and is a fixture of the international touring scene, with notable appearances at the Southport Weekender Festival in England, the Sons d’hiver Festival in Paris, and the Ghana Jazz Festival. His exciting debut album as a bandleader releases in November of 2019 on the International Anthem label.

Vincent Davis traces his passion for music back to his childhood: growing up in a home constantly filled with music, he felt compelled to study drums and percussion at the Milwaukee Conservatory of Music under the tutelage of teacher and mentor Manty Ellis. His adoration of sound in all its intricacies is immediately apparent in the music he’s made with artists as diverse as Roscoe Mitchell, Marilyn Crispell, Arthur Blythe, Matthew Shipp, Hamid Drake, Jodie Christian, and Scott Fields. He is the founder of the ensemble Laws of Motion, percussionist on more than 30 recording sessions, and a member of the AACM.

“Intensity” is the first word to come to mind when considering the aerophonic firebrand Mats Gustafsson. Sweden-born and Austria-based, Gustafsson’s saxophone playing as both a solo-artist and collaborator with Sonic Youth, Merzbow, Joe McPhee, Barry Guy, Otomo Yoshihide, Peter Brotzmann, and Christian Marclay (to name a few) has graced stages and sound-systems throughout six continents over the course of a career spanning more than 2000 concerts and 250 record productions. He’s also worked in numerous cross-disciplinary pursuits with dancers, artists, and poets while producing international festivals and devoting time to his own record labels Slottet, OlofBright Editions, Crazy Wisdom and Blue Tower Records.

In his own apt words, Joe McPhee is a “multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, conceptualist, and theoretician.” Inspired by the florid improvisational voice of saxophonist Albert Ayler, McPhee’s gorgeous tone intones in conjunction with what he calls “sideways thinking” or a “a process of provocation” to resolve queries presented by fellow improvisers in ways that only he ever could. He can be heard playing members of the saxophone and trumpet families alongside Ken Vandermark, Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson, Dominic Duval, and Jay Rosen. Over the course of 50 years, his enduring ambition has been to “reach for music’s outer limits.”

A starfire polymath and font of artistic ingenuity, Jen Shyu‘s performance practice is literally unclassifiable on account of the sheer breadth of her expertise. Her spellbinding creations incorporate her award-winning vocal talents, virtuosity on multiple instruments, expression through movement, and visionary stage-design to inspire and exhilarate audiences world-wide. Her solo performances and work as a vocalist and instrumentalist with the likes of Nicole Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Steve Coleman, and Chris Potter have brought her to the most highly-esteemed stages in the world, including Carnegie Hall, The Lincoln Center, the Ojai Festival, the National Gugak Center, and the National Theater of Korea. Her multiplex talents have earned the Guggenheim Fellowship, The USA Fellowship, and the Doris Duke Artist Award. At present, one can anticipate her performances to feature some combination of piano, violin, Taiwanese moon lute, Chinese er hu, Japanese biwa, Korean gayageum, Korean soribuk, and Korean ggwaenggwari.