Roscoe Village is a cushty neighborhood on Chicago’s north aspect the place you’ll be able to drop a couple of dollars on brunch. It’s additionally extremely like that vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz has had an omelet there at time or one other. However the locale that this album explores is a extra expansive and spiritually nourishing zone. It incorporates interpretations of tunes composed by Roscoe Mitchell, the multi-instrumentalist, conceptualist, composer, improviser and painter who was a constitution member of the Affiliation For The Development Of Inventive Musicians and is the only surviving founding member of the Artwork Ensemble Of Chicago.

Mitchell’s music transcends time, area and magnificence; it may be lyrical or summary, droll or drily scrutinizing, spontaneous or rigorously labored or reworked. He began making it within the Nineteen Sixties, and he’s nonetheless at it now. Earlier this 12 months, Adasiewicz discovered just a few classic Mitchell tunes to play for his or her composer as a part of a celebration thrown after the opening of Mitchell exhibit Keeper Of The Code: Work 1963–2022. Mitchell, who now not performs his previous music, gave the efficiency a standing ovation; after such an endorsement, Adasiewicz had no alternative however to maintain going. None of Mitchell’s compositions has ever been organized for solo vibraphone earlier than, so there was loads of room for Adasiewicz to rethink them. He focused on items that Mitchell wrote within the Nineteen Sixties, which he slowed down and partially disassembled, all the higher to understand chosen particulars.

As initially performed by the Artwork Ensemble, these tunes bristled with ungentle humor. Adasiewicz’s tackle “Previous” swaps the unique’s sardonic illustration of antiquity for uncluttered, lucid exploration of its rhythmic implications. In its preliminary kind, “The Waltz” was a fragmented, comedic flip so wobbly that you just’d pull it over and provides it a breathalyzer check in the event you noticed it on the highway. Adasiewicz has turned it right into a sober fanfare, with thrives which can be completely timed to unleash waves of reverberant sound. On “A Jackson In The Home,” his bowing floats elongated pulses over a remedy of the melody so stretched out, it’s barely recognizable. You observed that it’s Adasiewicz’s knack for inventive transformation, which is on show all through Roscoe Village, that received Mitchell up on his ft that night time.

—Invoice Meyer