Roscoe Mitchell Sextet "Sound" 1966

“Sound” is one of those rare recordings that announces itself like Chtcheglov's “I come from the other land” - a self-contained, self-sustaining something else from somewhere else. Its audacity continues to astonish, even close to a half-century later. Audacity on the part of the creators – making something very distinct from even the cutting edge records of the time, audacity on the part of Delmark Records, who could not have listened to the sessions with a mindset of Return on Capital.

Even now, when the field that “Sound” set out has been plowed for many years, the challenge to norms of music-making are breathtaking. If one can hear fragments of Ornette Coleman (partly bidden by the explicit name-check), if one can hear fragments of the Albert Ayler group of 1965, it still remains out on its own. In a 1996 interview, Chuck Nessa, who recorded this and other important Chicago music, talked of self-reliance, and that shines through here.

“The Little Suite” shows a looseness that would not have been possible in jazz just a couple of years previously – and still wasn't. It also shows a group music coming together, in a way that would be continued the following year in “Old / Quartet” and evolve into the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

But it is the quality of silence that is most disturbing on the present album. Sun Ra had deployed silence-as-emptiness on “Heliocentic Worlds” the previous year, but in a programmatic way, within the context of an overall structure and forward impulse. In “Sound” what is deployed is not always silence as complete absence of sound, but silence as the loss, omission or destruction of forward rhythmic impulse. A decomposition into moments of indifference, where what – if anything – happens next involves decision / will and might as likely be nothing.

The wilfulness extends beyond that, particularly on “Sound” itself. If the main theme statement has some recognisable relationship to free jazz, the piece then moves into a feeling of radical challenge to pre-existing norms of musicality, a feeling that received wisdom of solo space and of thematic material are being conscious put in question and avoided.