Event
Improvisations Now
Experience music imagined and created in real-time. This series runs from September 2024 to May 2025. Check out the full schedule here!
September 22 Performance:
Nicole Mitchell
Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader, and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s. She started with Maia and Shanta Nurullah in Samana (the AACM’s first all-woman ensemble) and as a member of the David Boykin EXPANSE. Her music celebrates contemporary African American culture. She is the founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections, and Ice Crystal, and she composes contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size while incorporating improvisation and a broad aesthetic expression. The former first woman president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Mitchell, celebrates endless possibility by “creating visionary worlds through music that bridge the familiar with the unknown.” Some of her newest work with Black Earth Ensemble explores intercultural collaborations: Bamako*Chicago, featuring Malian kora master, Ballake Sissoko and Mandorla Awakening with Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and Tatsu Aoki (taiko, bass, shamisen). As a composer, Mitchell has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stone, the French American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America (New Works), the Chicago Jazz Festival, ICE, and the Chicago Sinfonietta. Mitchell has performed with creative music luminaries, including Craig Taborn, Roscoe Mitchell, Joelle Leandre, Anthony Braxton, Geri Allen, George Lewis, Mark Dresser, Steve Coleman, Anthony Davis, Myra Melford, Bill Dixon, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ed Wilkerson, Rob Mazurek, and Billy Childs, and Hamid Drake. She is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2011), the Chicago 3Arts Award (2011), the Doris Duke Artist Award (2012) and the United States Artist Award (2020). Mitchell is a Professor of Music at the University of Virginia and previously taught at the University of California Irvine and the University of Pittsburgh.
Joe Morris
“The preeminent free music guitarist of his generation.” – Downbeat Magazine
“One of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.” – WIRE Magazine
“The guitar revolutionary to pay attention to.” – The Boston Phoenix
Joe Morris was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1955. He began playing guitar at the age of 14, first playing rock music, progressing to blues, then to jazz, free jazz, and free improvisation. He released his first record, Wraparound (riti), in 1983. He has composed over 200 original pieces of music. Joe Morris and Real Art Ways have a longstanding creative relationship. Joe has performed multiple times since the 1980s and has organized concert series of improvisational music for years.
