Paul Steinbeck, assistant professor of music theory in Arts & Sciences
Roscoe Mitchell began painting at a young age. By the early 1960s, he was an accomplished visual artist, as were two other Chicago musicians in his circle, fellow saxophonist Joseph Jarman and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams.
Mitchell and Jarman studied painting with Abrams in between rehearsals of his Experimental Band, the ensemble from which the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians emerged. In addition to playing with Abrams’s Experimental Band, Mitchell and Jarman led their own groups, and around 1967, the two finally joined forces, partnering with bassist Malachi Favors and trumpeter Lester Bowie to form The Art Ensemble Of Chicago.
Numbers 1 & 2 became the quartet’s first album in 1967, and the first to feature on its cover one of Mitchell’s paintings, an astonishing AfroCubist portrait of three musicians renderedin bright yellows, whites and reds.
In 1969, The Art Ensemble left Chicago and set sail for France. During two highly successful years in Europe, the musicians pursued extramusical interests: Jarman joined a Paris theatre company and Mitchell had time to finish the painting shown above – a richly textured image on canvas, fabric, wood and fringe entitled The Third Decade.
Read the full piece in The Wire.