The Interpretations Series 35th season continues Thursday March 6, 2025, 8:00 PM with the legendary improv trio SPACE, featuring Roscoe Mitchell (percussion and winds), Thomas Buckner (baritone), Scott Robinson (winds), and special guest Robert Dick (flutes). Formed in 1979, the original trio featured Mitchell, Buckner, and the late Gerald Oshita. Active through the 1980s, the trio released two acclaimed LPs on Buckner’s then label 1750 Arch Records, Music For Woodwinds And Voice (1981), and Improvisations – An Interesting Breakfast Conversation (1984). In 2017, SPACE reconvened for the first time since Oshita’s passing in 1992, with multi-instrumentalist Robinson for a performance at Roulette. Since that time the group has appeared several times in New York and Chicago. For this performance they will be joined by master flautist Robert Dick.
The concert will take place at 8:00 PM at Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, NY. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for students & seniors, available at Roulette.org and Interpretations.info.
About the artists:
Roscoe Mitchell is an internationally renowned musician and composer. His virtuosic resurrection of overlooked woodwind instruments spanning extreme registers, visionary solo performances, and assertion of a hybrid compositional/improvisational paradigm have placed him at the forefront of contemporary music. Mr. Mitchell is a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the Trio Space. He is also distinguished as the founder of the Creative Arts Collective, The Roscoe Mitchell Sextet & Quartet, The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, The Sound Ensemble, The New Chamber Ensemble, and the Note Factory.
His instrumental expertise includes the gamut of the saxophone and recorder families, clarinets, flute, piccolo, and the transverse flute in addition to his elaborate invention, the Percussion Cage. His oeuvre boasts hundreds of albums. His vast discography includes Sound (1966, 5-star review in DownBeat Magazine), People in Sorrow (1969, with the AEOC), Nonaah (1977, DownBeat Magazine Record of the Year), Bells for the South Side (2017, featured as one of the NYTimes’s best jazz albums of the year) and Discussions (distinguished on the NYTimes’s list of 2017’s best classical albums).
Mitchell’s honors include the 2020 NEA Jazz Master Fellowship, the United States Artist Award (2019), ASCAP Founders Award (2018), Multiple Reeds Player of the Year: Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards (2018), Doris Duke Artist Award and Audience Development Fund (2014), a CMA Presenting Jazz grant (2010), Golden Ear Award, Deep Listening Institute (2009),The Shifting Foundation Grant, Meet the Composer, the John Cage Award for Music-Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc., and numerous commissions from Mutable Music (1995- 2020). From 2019 to 2021 he has completed several commissions for small ensembles and up to full orchestra. Additionally, he celebrated two 50-year anniversaries this decade: the AACM’s in 2015, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s in 2019.
For decades, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the promotion and performance of new and improvised music, collaborating with a host of new music luminaries including: Robert Ashley, Noah Cre- shevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff, and many others.
Buckner has appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Herbst Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin Spring Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Angelica Festival of Bologna. He is featured on over 50 recordings, including 6 solo albums, the most recent being Spontaneous Musical Invention (Recital, 2023), a double album of rarely heard Robert Ashley compositions.
For the past 32 years Thomas Buckner has curated the Interpretations series in New York City, and continues to produce recordings on the Mutable Music label, introducing current artists and repertoire, as well as presenting important historic material, previously unavailable in CD format.
One of today’s most wide-ranging instrumentalists, Scott Robinson has been heard on tenor sax with Chet Baker, on trumpet with Lionel Hampton’s quintet, on alto clarinet with Paquito D’Rivera’s clarinet quartet, and on bass sax with the New York City Opera. On these and other instruments including theremin and ophicleide, he has been heard with a cross-section of jazz’s greats representing nearly every imaginable style of the music, from Braff to Braxton.
Primarily a tenor saxophonist, his discography includes more than 275 recordings with collaborators such as Frank Wess, Hank Jones, Joe Lovano, Ron Carter, and Bob Brookmeyer. He has performed in some 60 nations in such diverse and prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, the Village Vanguard, the Library of Congress and the Vienna Opera House. His performances for dignitaries worldwide have included a U.S. Presidential Inauguration and a performance honoring the birthday of the king of Thailand. He was selected by the US State Department to be a Jazz Ambassador for 2001, completing an eight-week, eleven-country tour of West Africa performing his arrangements of the compositions of Louis Armstrong. Scott has served as Artist-in-Residence at jazz festivals in Ancona, Italy and Aarhus, Denmark, and as Musical Host at the Louis Armstrong Festival in Hungary.
Since moving to New York in 1984, Scott has been awarded four fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, and participated in a number of Grammy-nominated and Grammy-winning recordings. He has been profiled in the Encyclopedia of Jazz and Grove’s Dictionary of Jazz, along with books by Royal Stokes, Nat Hentoff and others. In 1997, a 4-minute CNN program featured Scott and the giant contrabass saxophone which he used on his CD, Thinking Big. Scott has been the winner of a number DownBeat Critics Polls and Jazz Journalists Association awards in recent years.
Robert Dick was born and raised in New York City. He began playing the flute as a child, having heard it (well, the piccolo actually) on the radio in the Top 40 hit Rockin’ Robin. HIs parent’s responded to his incessant campaigning for a flute by surprising him with a flute and flute teacher after school in fourth grade. Robert gave his first concert that very day! Setting up chairs for his parents as soon as his father came home from work, he excitedly playing page 1 of the Rubank Elementary Flute Method — and he’s never looked back.
Robert’s main flute teachers were Henry Zlotnik, James Pappoutsakis, Julius Baker and Thomas Nyfenger. As a teenager, Robert thought that he’d become an orchestral flutist and he worked maniacally towards that goal, playing first flute in the Senior Orchestra at the High School of Music and Art and also the New York All-City High School Orchestra. But a summer at Tanglewood, playing in America’s finest student orchestra, showed him that he was not suited to the orchestral life and that he needed to develop himself as a soloist and musical creator.
Robert attended Yale College, where he received a B.A. degree. At Yale, he met Robert Morris, composer and theorist, who was to be a most important mentor. Robert wrote his first compositions and had his first experiences improvising while a Yale undergraduate. He began his first book THE OTHER FLUTE: A Performance Manual of Contemporary Techniques as an undergraduate senior project, completing the book in his first year of graduate study at the Yale School of Music where he received a Masters degree in composition, studying composition with Robert Morris and electronic music with Bulant Arel and Jacob Druckman. (Robert does not have a degree in flute playing.) THE OTHER FLUTE was originally published by Oxford University Press in 1975. While in graduate school, Robert composed his ground-breaking Afterlight, for flute alone, the first flute piece to use multiphonics as the primary building blocks of its musical language. Afterlight received a BMI Oliver Daniel Prize and has become a staple in the flute repertoire.
After leaving school, Robert embarked on his career as a concert soloist devoted to contemporary repertoire. His musical evolution lead him to devote himself to exclusively performing his original works and improvisations for many years. At present, Robert likes to invite “guest composers” to in his recital programming, most notably Paul Hindemith, Georg-Philip Telemann and Jimi Hendrix.
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Founded by baritone Thomas Buckner, The Interpretations series is a New York-based concert series focusing on the relationship between contemporary composers and their interpreters. Sometimes the interpreters are the composers themselves; more often, the series features performers who specialize in the interpretation of new music. Since its inception in 1989, Interpretations has featured leading figures in contemporary music and multimedia, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Thomas Buckner, FLUX Quartet, Joseph Kubera, Annea Lockwood, and Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Ursula Oppens, and Morton Subotnick.
Interpretations began as a collaboration with Robert and Helene Browning and the World Music Institute, presenting concerts at Merkin Concert Hall, then at Roulette, at its Greene Street location in Soho. When Roulette moved to the current space in Brooklyn, Interpretations moved with it. Interpretations is thrilled to co-produce at Roulette, which has developed into a premiere venue for new and innovative music, with excellent acoustics and world-class technical facilities.
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ROULETTE:
509 Atlantic Ave. Downtown Brooklyn
2, 3, 4, 5, C, G, D, M, N, R, B & Q trains & LIRR.
Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for students & seniors, available at Roulette.org and Interpretations.info.
All concerts begin at 8pm unless otherwise noted.
