As part of the fifteenth annual Jazz Poetry Festival, this will be an evening of jazz and poetry collaborations. Myra Melford and Nicole Mitchell will be the featured jazz performers.

Poets Alison Rollins, Celeste Gainey, Cameron Barnett, and Ellen McGrath Smith wil also perform.

Myra Melford, Nicole Mitchell, Alison C Rollins

The pianist, composer, bandleader and professor Myra Melford—whom the New Yorker called “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement”—has spent the last three decades making brilliant original music that is equally challenging and engaging. The Other Side of Air, the most recent release by her quintet Snowy Egret, was named one of the best jazz recordings of 2018 by the New York Times and one of NPR Music’s 50 Best Albums of 2018. “This is music with an endless capacity for elasticity and surprise,” NPR wrote, “along with an affirming spirit of coherence.”

Nicole Mitchell is an award-winning flutist, composer, conceptualist, bandleader, and educator. A Doris Duke Artist (2012) and recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2011). Her album, Mandorla Awakening (FPE, 2017), combined Afrofuturism with intercultural collaboration and was selected by the New York Times as the #1 jazz album of 2017.  Nicole Mitchell is the William S. Dietrich II Chair for Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where she works to continue the visionary legacies of her predecessors Geri Allen and Nathan Davis.