Nicole Mitchell has sown the seeds of inventive music across the country through time in Chicago’s jazz scene, teaching in southern California and Pittsburgh, and now as a member of the University of Virginia’s music faculty.
She splits time between Charlottesville and rural North Carolina, but harbors a desire to enliven central Virginia’s creative music and arts scene.
“We can get stuck in these big-city cultures and the idea that you have to be where it’s already happening, versus, ‘Let’s plant some seeds. Let’s spread things out and allow other people the opportunity to experience something new,’” says Mitchell. “I think it’s exciting.”
Mitchell’s work—both leading her own ensembles, as well as performing in others’ groups—can take on facets of free improvisation or sit squarely in the pocket, leaning into a groove as deeply as any bop player. She’s led a loose cadre of players as the Black Earth Ensemble for more than 25 years, exploring compositional ideas, history, and Black thought.
The troupe’s most recent recording—a collaboration with Ballaké Sissoko called Bamako*Chicago Sound System—collects Malian performers, a few Chicago-scene stalwarts and JoVia Armstrong, a percussionist who’s also a part of UVA’s music faculty. It’s a boundless look at disparate traditions, indulging in the knotty roots of each musical culture.
Among her musical pursuits, Mitchell also performs in the Artifacts trio, where she investigates and expands on ideas pulled from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a storied Chicago institution founded in 1965 that the composer previously led as president.
Regardless of the project, Mitchell is perpetually engaged in an additive process, drawing on concepts from literature and pulling from Afrofuturism in its various forms—a term, she points out, that didn’t exist when she began writing and performing.
But part of Mitchell’s openness, or her “bridging what I call the familiar and the unknown” comes from having parents she describes as a Trekkie and a self-taught artist, who early on showed her that creativity should stubbornly refuse to recognize boundaries.
“As a child, there was all of that space exploration that was going on, even before I was born,” she says. “It was still permeating the ’60s, and so was the idea of going out into the unknown. I think that whole thing started with me very young, and then I latched on to Octavia Butler and her books. … Both my parents were big sci-fi fans and my mom made paintings of women basically birthing planets. I was kind of born into this idea of endless possibility.”
A new suite of music, Portraits of Sonic Freedom, which Mitchell composed as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship, spans her multidisciplinary interests while celebrating music’s “role in the Black intellectual legacy and human consciousness,” she says.
She’ll be joined by a litany of talent from across the country to debut the suite at Unity Charlottesville on Friday. In addition to Armstrong on percussion, the group’s set to include pianist Angelica Sanchez, electronicist/percussionist Val Jeanty, altoist Caroline Davis, tenorist James Brandon Lewis, trumpeter Chris Williams, vocalist/harpist Maia, and bassist Devon Gates.
Sanchez, who teaches at Bard and has worked with Mitchell, as well as a raft of other Chicago talent, says she hasn’t seen the new piece yet, but describes the bandleader’s work as “expansive.”
The pianist encouraged folks to let the music work on them, not attempt to categorize it.
“See how it makes you feel; that initial feeling you get might be scary, because it’s something you may have never heard before,” Sanchez says. “People move really fast these days, especially with technology. … And we’re really good at judging things, including ourselves, and we all need to be a little kinder to each other and ourselves. That’s all I ask people to do when they come to a concert.”
On “Listening Embrace,” a tune from 2017’s Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds, Mitchell leads her troupe through shifts in tempo and tone on flute, dropping in some electronic squiggles that function like a bridge. The album also features shamisen, oud, and shakuhachi, as well as sturdy grooves. The recording and its companion piece, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is a good distillation of Mitchell’s practice: The music might not be instantly recognizable as what some perceive as jazz, but Mitchell likely won’t ever let format be subservient to what she aims to express.
Projects like that—and recordings made for free jazz labels like Eremite, Firehouse 12, and RogueArt—explain why her work’s generally been contextualized as sprouting from the jazz genre’s avant-garde wing. But the composer is adamant about the benefits of delving into every aspect of the music’s prismatic history.
“I think it’s important that we understand that it’s bigger than that,” she says. “These stylistic aspects within jazz, they contribute something to American culture, and how we see and view things. We as human beings have the power to redesign how we look at the world, at any moment we can shift our lens. That’s the beauty of being human, and creative music definitely has had a role in that.”
