With this extremely moody album, Roscoe Mitchell, reed player and co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago shows that his avant-garde jazz still sounds relevant. The Art Ensemble of Chicago was created in the late 1960s in the city of the same name, from the musicians pool of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago organized
… an exhibition about the 50th anniversary of AACM, with the motto: The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now. Exhibited included the exotic arsenal of percussion instruments that the group uses for their theatrical shows. Bells For The South Side is a reflection of the multiple concerts that Mitchell gave here in various trio line-ups. With musical freedom as always of paramount importance, excesses. The whole has an enchanting and ritual effect, like the best work of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. (MR)more
