7. Roscoe MitchellConversations II
This is an album that I’ve just been listening to very recently, actually a lot of the albums on this list are just what I have been listening to on my phone at the moment. Here we have veteran improviser Roscoe Mitchell playing with a drummer much younger than him, Kikanju Baku I think his name is. They play in a conceptually similar way but their genres clash. He [Baku] is actually from London; I was playing with him around eight to ten years ago. Crazy guy. He was obsessed with Roscoe Mitchell. I remember him saying, ‘I just really want to meet Roscoe Mitchell, I really want to play with him’. He’d listened to all the albums, but his playing was this up-tempo, jungle, drum & bass style. It was really frantic, but very musical. Each musician on this record is doing their own thing, but with such sensitivity to the group that it just works. In some ways, it’s like an anarchist perspective on music. It’s saying that it’s possible for each person to be able to operate autonomously and still respect the fact that they’re trying to produce a common result. What inspires me is seeing how three individuals can work together not by adjusting their perspectives, but by just having an element of empathy for what the group is doing.
