RoCM Playlist: 03 August 2024

Lot’s of live recordings this week as we also celebrate the birthdays of both Hamid Drake and Roscoe Mitchell – both of whom were born on August 3rd and are still producing music. A little funny piece of trivia regarding Hamid Drake and the RoCM – while I haven’t done an official count, he’s likely the most featured artist on the show – either as a front person or as a part of an ensemble of another musician. I abuse the word ‘prolific’ a bit but it absolutely applies to him.

With regards to the Roscoe Mitchell piece, ‘Nonaah’, which was a live performance at the Willisau Jazz Festival in 197. It is a pretty famous performance for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that the audience was expecting a piece by Anthony Braxton and, if you listen closely, you can hear the audience’s hostility to the beginning of Mitchell’s performance. And yet, he was able to slowly win them over during the course of his solo performance with a fairly sizable ovation at the end.

There is a pretty great paper written by Paul Steinbeck, Associate Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis, on this performance which I suggest reading. You can find it here at Music Theory Online (MTO): Talking Back: Performer-Audience Interaction in Roscoe Mitchell’s “Nonaah”

Anyway, here is the playlist. Don’t forget that you can listen online at KCSB-FM’s website and there’s an online archive available for two weeks after the show airs.