Nicole Mitchell

A vital breath within the most urgent movements in jazz from this century, Nicole Mitchell is a flutist, composer, poet and educator born in New York whose trajectory gained traction in the fertile Chicago scene of the 90s. The first woman president of the legendary and valuable Association for the Advancement of Chicago Musicians – AACM -, it was in this city that she planted the seeds for strong relationships with musicians like Anthony Braxton and Rob Mazurek, allowing her to carve her own vision, informed by the Afrofuturist energies of fellow travelers like Sun Ra, George Clinton or Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock. 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, besides a number of collaborations – Moor Mother, Hamid Drake or Matthew Shipp -, Mitchell's compositions create an honourable and inspiring body of work through records like the expansive astral travellings of Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds (2015) or the piercing restraint of the chamber-like maroon cloud from 2018. A queen, in a rare solo appearance, in the most pure and revelatory manner.