Event Details:
Saturday 4/25/26
8PM Showtime
$25 Cover
1224 Williamson Street Madison, WI 53703
About the Artist:
Roscoe Mitchell is an internationally renowned musician, and composer. 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. He is also distinguished as the founder of the Creative Arts
Collective, The Roscoe Mitchell Sextet & Quartet, The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, The Sound Ensemble,
The New Chamber Ensemble, and the Note Factory. He is also Emeritus Darius Milhaud Distinguished Chair
of Composition at Mills College (California) where he taught from 2007 to 2018.
In 2024 he was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Department of Music. In 2025
received the inaugural Vanguard Award from Chamber Music America. Additionally in 2025, he was honored
by the Jazz Foundation of America in the inaugural cohort of the Jazz Legacies Fellowship.
His instrumental expertise includes the gamut of the saxophone and recorder families, clarinets, flute, piccolo,
and the transverse flute in addition to his elaborate invention, the Percussion Cage. His oeuvre boasts hundreds
of albums. His vast discography includes “Sound” (1966, 5-star review in DownBeat Magazine), “People in
Sorrow” (1969, with the AEOC), “Nonaah” (1977, DownBeat Magazine Record of the Year), “Bells for the
South Side” (2017, featured as one of the NYTimes's best jazz albums of the year) and “Discussions”
(distinguished on the NYTimes's list of 2017's best classical albums).
Mitchell’s honors include the 2020 NEA Jazz Master Fellowship, the United States Artist Award (2019),
ASCAP Founders Award (2018), Multiple Reeds Player of the Year: Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards
(2023 & 2018), Album Art of the Year: Jazz Journalists Association (2024), Doris Duke Artist Award and
Audience Development Fund (2014), a CMA Presenting Jazz grant (2010), Golden Ear Award, Deep Listening
Institute (2009), The Shifting Foundation Grant, Meet the Composer, and the John Cage Award for Music-
Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc.
Mitchell’s works are frequently presented by orchestras and ensembles worldwide. Most recently, He has
completed several commissions including “CARDS In 3D Colors” for Violin & Piano (Kate Stenberg & Sarah
Cahill commission) 2020; Mutable Music commissions: “Sustain and Run” for Orchestra and Solo
Improvisors 2020, two pieces of a three-song cycle of Bob Kaufman poems: “To My Son Parker, Asleep in
the Next Room” 2020 and “WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND?” 2020 For Baritone and Piano (the third piece will
be based on the Kaufman poem “Scene in a Third Eye”); Creative Arts Collective commissions funded by
New Music USA: “CARDS: The Detroit Deck” 2020, “CARDS: 11-11-2020” 2020 and “CARDS: The Maple
just turned Red”2020; Commissions for the Metropolis Ensemble (combined ensembles of Immanuel Wilkins
Quartet and The Ruckus Ensemble): “LADY MOON” 2021 for the Ruckus Ensemble on Baroque Instruments,
“O’CAYZ CORRAL Part Two” 2020 for the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet on modern instruments, “Metropolis
At 440 Oakwood Drive” 2020 for the combined Metropolis Ensemble. Additionally, he celebrated two
anniversaries this decade: the AACM's 60 years in 2025, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago's fifty years in
2019.
Active as a visual artist since 1963, with a hiatus in the 1970s and '80s when he concentrated on musical
composition, Mitchell was afforded time off-road during the pandemic, in which he began painting very
avidly, resulting in a large body of intricately composed, jubilantly colorful, playful works. His recent
canvases—including a series of compositionally complex four-by-four foot works—as well as the earliest of
his paintings were featured in The Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963-2022, a retrospective exhibition
mounted early in 2023 at Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in Chicago, Illinois. This was Mitchell's first solo show,
and it was accompanied by a 140-page catalog. Mitchell had his second solo exhibition from June 15 to July
27, 2024 at The Pit gallery in Los Angeles, California. His most recent solo exhibition opened during Chinati
Weekend in Marfa Texas (October 2025), and ran until March 2026 at Maintenant Gallery.
