Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble

(USA)

German premiere

[A look back into the future of African-American music] | [Focus: Chicago]

This concert is part of “GRAND OPENING: Haus of Jazz”

With her musical prolificacy, flutist Nicole Mitchell holds an at once outstanding and challenging position in US-American jazz. Her work “Mandorla Awakening”, commissioned in 2015 by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), will celebrate its German premiere at Jazzfest Berlin.

In this piece, Mitchell draws on crucial issues of our times and imagines stages of social development as science fiction for the year 2099. In this, she not only outlines productive social transformations, but allows them to take form as a tangible reality, a concrete working situation in an open musical exchange among musicians of different cultures and orientations, genders and ages. Mitchell develops a kind of spiritual futurism that creates a counterbalance, an Afro-futurism emerging from the work of the African-American writer Octavia Butler and the sediment and impetus of the AACM in Chicago, whose president Mitchell was between 2009 and 2011 before taking on a professorship in California.

“Mandorla Awakening” by Nicole Mitchell / Black Earth Ensemble on Soundcloud
Nicole Mitchell on Bandcamp
“Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds” by Nicole Mitchell / Black Earth Ensemble on Bandcamp
“Meadow Sunlight in the Swinging Fields” by Nicole Mitchell / Black Earth Ensemble on YouTube
Website of Nicole Mitchell