Park Nights 2022: Roscoe Mitchell, featuring Dudù Kouate and Simon Sieger

For Park Nights 2022, Serpentine presented an evening of music from legendary composer and musician Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940, Chicago, Illinois).

This performance was presented in partnership with the London Contemporary Music Festival and Wigmore Hall. For over six decades, Mitchell has been placed at the forefront of contemporary music and avant-garde jazz by his virtuosic resurrection of overlooked woodwind instruments that span extreme registers, his visionary solo performances, and his hybrid paradigm of composition and improvisation.

Mitchell performed with musicians Dudù Kouate and Simon Sieger. Kouate is a percussionist and multi-instrumentalist who plays across Afro-jazz, modern, traditional and contemporary music styles. Sieger plays several instruments – including piano, trombone, accordion, tuba – and arranges and composes music for ensembles.

Roscoe Mitchell is an internationally celebrated musician, composer and innovator, as well as a founding member of the world-renowned Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and the Trio Space. He has recorded 87 albums and has written over 250 compositions. Mitchell’s instrumental expertise includes the saxophone family, from the sopranino to the bass saxophone; the recorder family, from sopranino to great bass recorder; flute, piccolo, clarinet, and the transverse flute. His numerous honours and awards include an American Music Centre Letter of Distinction (2004), the National Association of Jazz Educators Outstanding Service to Jazz Education Award (1998), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Image Award (1982), and a Smithsonian Institution Certificate of Appreciation (1979), among many others.