NEC Jazz Composers' Workshop Orchestra + Nicole Mitchell

Frank Carlberg and the NEC Jazz Composers' Workshop Orchestra perform with flutist and Artist-in-residence, Nicole Mitchell.  Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). 
 

More about Nicole Mitchell

With an impressive 14 year run as “Top Flutist of the Year” named by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association from 2010 to 2023 for her development of a unique improvisational language, Nicole Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader, educator. Mitchell emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s, having started as a co-founder of the all-woman group Samana, and a member of the David Boykin Expanse. She was also the first woman to serve as president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
     Born in Syracuse, NY, Nicole was influenced by her mother’s community work as an artist and music teacher at the Black Folk Art Gallery of Syracuse, founded by Herb Williams. After moving to Chicago in her early twenties, these early experiences influenced her to become a member of the AACM and to become a cultural daughter of Haki R. Madhubuti while working at Third World Press. Mitchell’s music celebrates contemporary African American culture with a creative process informed by literature, narrative and a special interest in science fiction. For over 20 years, Nicole has utilized her art to create alternative worlds that “bridge the familiar with the unknown,” with her Black Earth Ensemble. She composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression.
     As a soloist, bandleader and improviser, she has repeatedly performed throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S. since the early 2000s. Some of her newest work with Black Earth Ensemble explores intercultural collaborations; Bamako*Chicago, featuring Malian kora master, Ballake Sissoko and Mandorla Awakening with Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and Tatsu Aoki (taiko, bass, shamisen). Her album, Mandorla Awakening, combines Afrofuturism with intercultural collaboration and was selected by the New York Times as the #1 jazz album of 2017, and led to the writing of her first book, The Mandorla Letters, which was published in 2022 by Green Lantern and the University of Minnesota Press.
     As a composer, Mitchell has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Newport Jazz Festival, the French American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America, and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). She is a recipient of several awards, including Doris Duke Artist Award, the United States Artist Award, the Herb Alpert Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award. She is a professor of music composition at University of Virginia since 2022, having previously taught University of California Irvine (2011-2019) and the University of Pittsburgh (2019-2022). 

This is an in-person event with a private stream available to the NEC community here: https://necmusic.edu/live.