For more than 50 years, Roscoe Mitchell has blurred relationships between sound and silence, scripted composition and improvisation, jazz, classical, and even R&B musics as a soloist, bandleader, member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and composer. In 2015, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art presented a 50th anniversary exhibition devoted to the Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), an organization Mitchell co-founded, in an exhibit called The Freedom Principle. The music on the double-length Bells for the South Side was recorded during the exhibit with four of Mitchell's trios -- James Fei and William Winant; Hugh Ragin and Tyshawn Sorey; Craig Taborn and Kikanju Baku; Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal -- playing separately and in combinations.
The music here glances back to the many places Mitchell has visited, but this is no mere retrospective: most of this is bracing new music that looks forward to further exploratory musical landscapes. The set opens with "Spatial Aspects of the Sound," a chamber piece with Baku using wrist bells, Winant's various percussion instruments, and Taborn's and Sorey's pianos. At 12-plus minutes, it unhurriedly allows tones and clusters, movement and stillness, to articulate a range of carefully controlled articulations. On "Panoply," sputtering sopranino, squawking tenor, kit drums, and various percussion instruments engage in aggressive, inspired free interplay. "Prelude to a Rose" contrasts Sorey's trombone, Ragin's trumpets, and Mitchell's reeds in elongated, dovetailing tones through a slowly unfolding melody. "EP 7849" is another combinatory exercise with electronics, electric guitar, cowbell, hand drums, and bowed double bass that offers futurist dissonance and complex, fascinating engagement. "Dancing in the Canyon" is a canny, propulsive, and extremely active free-for-all with Taborn and Baku. On the title track, disc one's closer, the Art Ensemble's army of percussion instruments is utilized. Sorey plays Mitchell’s percussion cage, and Tabbal and Baku the percussion instruments of Don Moye and Malachi Favors, with Winant on Lester Bowie's bass drum. Ragin’s trumpet offers sounds in all registers, while Mitchell digs extremely low-end sounds from his bass sax. It's certainly mysterious, but also utterly lovely. Disc two's "Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand" features Mitchell, Tabbal, and Shahid in an intuitive, equaniminous improvisation one would expect from players whose relationship dates back 40 years. Likewise, the extended smearing and droning of Mitchell's and Fei's reeds on "Six Gongs and Two Woodblocks" amid Winant's percussion and Fei's electronics are simultaneously spectral and inquisitive. The closing medley, "Red Moon in the Sky/Odwalla," juxtaposes a new work (the former) with a reading of an Art Ensemble staple, with all players in open, bleating improvisation before a tight, bluesy, modal post-bop sums it all up, displaying the myriad faces of Mitchell's approach to both function and extension in the relentless creation of a poetics in sound. Bells for the South Side is indeed massive, but its depth, breadth, and inspired performances border on the profound.
(This comment is posted on Allmusic by Thom Jurek, follower of our blog 'O Púbis da Rosa')
Tracklist 1 :
1 Spatial Aspects of the Sound 12:14
Roscoe Mitchell
2 Panoply 7:36
Roscoe Mitchell
3 Prelude to a Rose 12:44
Roscoe Mitchell
4 Dancing in the Canyon 10:23
Kikanju Baku / Roscoe Mitchell / Craig Taborn
5 EP 7849 8:13
Roscoe Mitchell
6 Bells for the South Side 12:35
Roscoe Mitchell
Tracklist 2 :
6 Bells for the South Side 12:35
Roscoe Mitchell
Tracklist 2 :
1 Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand 16:03
Roscoe Mitchell
2 The Last Chord 12:26
3 Six Gongs & Two Woodblocks 7:50
Roscoe Mitchell
4 R509A Twenty B 1:34
Roscoe Mitchell
5 Red Moon in the Sky/Odwalla 25:49
Roscoe Mitchell
Credits:
Roscoe Mitchell : Sopranino, Soprano, Alto and Bass Saxophone, Flute, Piccolo, Bass Recorder, Percussion
James Fei : Sopranino and Alto Saxophone, Contra Alto Clarinet, Electronics
Hugh Ragin: Trumpet, Piccolo Trumpet
Tyshawn Sorey : Trombone, Piano, Drums, Percussion
Craig Taborn : Piano, Organ, Electronics
Jaribu Shahid: Double Bass, Bass Guitar, Percussion
Tani Tabbal : Drums, Percussion
Kikanju Baku : Drums, Percussion
William Winant : Percussion, Tubular Bells, Glockenspiel, Vibraphone, Marimba, Roto Toms, Cymbals, Bass Drum, Woodblocks, Timpani 
"Composition N. 247" (which makes up the whole duration of this CD) is
part of Anthony Braxton's Ghost Trance Music series. An untypical
gesture, this one is scored for a specific instrumentation of two reeds
and bagpipes. The latter, performed by Matthew Welch, gives the piece a
highly unusual sound (the place of bagpipes in creative music is close
to nil). Another difference from most of the other GTM compositions
resides in the fact that the string of eighth notes serving as the
looped motif also includes occasional rhythmically complex figures (such
as 16th notes quintuplets), which disrupt the steady march of the
piece. One final novelty: The piece uses only nine notes -- the ones
available on the bagpipes. All this being said, the resulting piece
makes one huge hour-long marathon involving constant circular breathing
and a complex system of cues, shifts, and bouncing between pages. It
leaves the listener, who does not have the score to follow its intricate
subtleties, exhausted and perplexed. The drone of the bagpipes opens
interesting polyphonies and the cycling repeated motifs create an
hallucinogenic state of mind, but most listeners will prefer to push the
stop button before they reach the end. And one can hardly blame them.
James Fei's liner notes bring shed some light on the piece. François Couture 
