The ensemble’s instrumentation is crucial to the music’s character. Six woodwinds, piano, vibraphone, tuba, two trumpets, two trombones, two violas, two double basses and two drum sets create a flexible matrix that can sound like a chamber group, a percussion choir, a brass band or a murmuring string ensemble from one moment to the next. Rather than deploying this force as a blunt wall of sound, Mitchell’s writing and direction emphasise layered transparency: winds tracing fine lines above the grain of strings, brass swelling in and out of focus, vibraphone and piano flickering at the edges like refracted light. The result is a large ensemble that breathes like a small one, its internal balances constantly shifting as players listen and react.

Mitchell himself joins on sopranino saxophone for “They Rode For Them – part 2”, threading his acerbic, high‑register sound through the orchestral fabric. In keeping with the ethos of Conversations, his role is less that of a featured soloist than a catalytic presence, introducing motifs, timbral jolts or sudden flares of activity that the orchestra then absorbs, amplifies or counters. Throughout the album, composed material and open improvisation are tightly interlaced. Written cues set off particular combinations of instruments; pre‑planned textures become launchpads for collective invention; fully improvised passages are framed so that they feel like organic extensions of the score rather than digressions.

The four days of rehearsal and concerts in Montreal and Toronto preceding the studio date prove audible in the music’s poise. This is not a one‑off meet‑up, but a band that has already learned how to inhabit Mitchell’s language: how to sustain a low‑level rustle of activity without tipping into clutter, how to let a single colour - a tuba pedal, a brushed cymbal, a viola harmonic - hold the centre of gravity, how to move from near‑silence to full ensemble roar in graduated, breath‑like waves. At times the orchestra seems to hover in place, exploring the inner life of a particular chord or noise field; at others it surges forward in overlapping pulses, the drums and basses carving out momentum while upper voices dart and weave.

Ride The Wind stands as a significant entry in Mitchell’s late‑career catalogue, demonstrating how his long-standing interests in texture, orchestration and collective improvisation can be reimagined for a new generation of Canadian improvisers. It extends the conceptual threads of Conversations across a much broader canvas without losing the sense of intimate, moment‑to‑moment decision-making that makes that series so compelling. In doing so, it offers a vivid example of Mitchell’s continuing ability to rethink what a large improvising ensemble can be - not a fixed hierarchy of sections, but a living weather system in which ideas move, collide and transform as freely as the wind implied in the title.