Roscoe Mitchell, saxophones; Famoudou Don Moye, drums, percussion; 18 others
RogueArt ROG-0123 (LP). 2023. Sons d’hiver, prod.; Olivier Gascion, eng.
It’s often said that you can never go home again. documented their return home after a two-year stay in Paris, during which the quartet gained a drummer and honed its sound into something completely new. Fluent in what trumpeter Lester Bowie termed “Great Black Music,” the band was practiced enough and exploratory enough to switch among open improvisation, Dixieland jazz, African rhythms, field songs, and military marches in the space of a breath. In 2020, they returned to their French home away from home—a revived and rejuvenated 20-piece orchestra—to play the Sons d’hiver festival. Saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, the group’s founder, and Famoudou Don Moye, the Afrocentric percussionist enlisted for that European sojourn, are the only members left of the original lineup, but the combo has become an orchestra, an umbrella for its founders’ ever-expanding interests.
