Nicole Mitchell – Past Concerts

A vital breath within the most urgent movements in jazz from this century, Nicole Mitchell is a flutist, composer, poet and educator whose trajectory gained traction in the fertile Chicago scene of the 90s. The first woman president of the legendary and valuable AACM, she planted the seeds for strong relationships with musicians like Anthony Braxton, Ed Wilkerson Jr, Avreeayl Ra, Maia, and Hamid Drake, allowing her to carve her own vision. Encompassing philosophy, mysticism, radical politics and a strong debt to the sci-fi writings of Octavia E. Butler, Mitchell’s work has been deconstructing and articulating problematics of race, gender, technology, and spiritualism in a communal approach to music that dreams of possible futures, conveying in its ascension the freedom of jazz, funk's eternal groove, gospel, modern composition, instruments from all over the world and a number of legacies of devotional and ecstatic music. Assembling different configurations like her Black Earth Ensemble, Sonic Projections or Ice Crystal as vehicles for speculation on alternative realities beside a number of collaborations – Moor Mother, Hamid Drake, Rob Mazurek, Artifacts or Matthew Shipp—Mitchell's compositions create an honorable and inspiring body of work through records like the expansive astral travelings of Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds (2017) or the piercing restraint of the chamber-like maroon cloud (2018). Nicole Mitchell is a Professor of Music at University of Virginia and is the author of The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful (Green Lantern Press and University of Minnesota Press).