Roscoe Mitchell is an avant-garde jazz and contemporary music icon, currently serving as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College (CA). He is a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Trio Space, and founder of the Creative Arts Collective (MI). He also leads several ensembles. His oeuvre boasts hundreds of albums and compositions and the development of the Percussion Cage, consisting of instruments of worldwide origin and found objects. Mitchell’s honors include a John Cage Award (FOC), multiple grants from National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer and Mutable Music. Last year, Roscoe celebrated the AACM's 50th Anniversary with lectures, exhibitions, concerts and recordings at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, showcasing Mr. Mitchell and his peers. In 2016, Mitchell is redoubling his compositional efforts, beginning with the world premiere of “Conversations for Orchestra”, performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra with Ilan Volkov conducting.