Sara Serpa & Emmanuel Iduma
Jazz Poetry Month - Sara Serpa & Emmanuel Iduma's "Intimate Strangers" at Alphabet City / City of Asylum, North Side
Sara Serpa and her band along with poet Emmanuel Iduma will perform the collaborative project Intimate Strangers.
Featured Musicians:
Sera Serpa (composition & voice); Emmanuel Iduma (text & spoken word); Aubrey Johnson; Sofia Eugenia Koutsovitis; Judith Berkson; Matthew Tily Mitchell
A partnership between Portuguese vocalist-composer Sara Serpa and Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma, this performance will bring a unique blend of travelogue, musings, and poetry. In a combination of music, text, image, and field recordings collected by Iduma during his travels throughout Nigeria, Intimate Strangers explores themes of movement, home, grief, absence, and desire in what Iduma calls “an atlas of a borderless world.
Sara Serpa is a singer, composer, improviser who implements a unique instrumental approach to her vocal style. Recognized for her distinctive wordless singing, Serpa has been immersed in the field of jazz, improvised and experimental music since first arriving in New York in 2008. Described by JazzTimes magazine as “a master of wordless landscapes” and by the New York Times as “a singer of silvery poise and cosmopolitan outlook,” Serpa started her recording and performing career with jazz luminaries such as Grammy-nominated pianist, Danilo Perez, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow pianist, Ran Blake, and Greg Osby.
Featured Poet:
Emmanuel Iduma is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Born and raised in Nigeria, he has contributed essays and stories to journals, magazines, artists’ books, and exhibition catalogues. He is the author of The Sound of Things to Come (first published as Farad in Nigeria), and received a 2017 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant in arts writing, for his blog A Sum of Encounters. He is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, where he obtained an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing. In 2017, he was associate curator of the Nigerian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He is the author, most recently, of A Stranger’s Pose