Jazz in the Square: Shirlette Ammons

Name: Jazz in the Square: Shirlette Ammons
Start: 2025-09-18T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-09-18T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Moore Square

Schedule

Thu Sep 18 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Moore Square | Raleigh, NC

This free concert series brings you live jazz performances by talented local musicians, right in the heart of Downtown Raleigh! 🎷
Concert-goers will enjoy food trucks on-site and wine & beer for sale, so grab your friends, blankets, and chairs for an evening of great music and community.
About the Artist:
Shirlette Ammons is a Black queer southern truth teller. She is a poet and musician who has also served as producer on Emmy and Peabody award-winning TV & film projects. She is also an identical twin who hails from a tiny, wonderfully-named pocket of eastern North Carolina earth called Beautancus.
– Grayson Currin, Music Writer
Given this wild set of identifiers, the thought of being someone else’s “spectacle” is not some theoretical consideration for Shirlette; she has been “othered” her entire life. Her new album Spectacles, co-produced with Phil Cook, is a captivating and electric 11-track examination of the duality between being objectified by the proverbial, patriarchal, white gaze and cultivating attention when rocking stages. The record is a poignant expression of her own multitudes (here as songwriter, MC, bassist, producer & poet) rendered by a modern wellspring of Black Southern brilliance and her wider creative community featuring contributions from musicians, filmmakers and writers including genre-and-gender-defying performance artist Mykki Blanco, MacArthur-winning poet Fred Moten, Nigerian writer and chef Tunde Wey, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, and radical feminist writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “the Beyoncé of yoga” Jessamyn Stanley, as well as her twin sister Shorlette Ammons and niece, Anansi Stephens. Ammons has always been a highly collaborative musician, whether making a record with the likes of soul-rock band The Dynamite Brothers or pairing The Indigo Girls, Hiss Golden Messenger and Meshell Ndegocello on the same LP, 2016’s Language Barrier.
🔗 downtownraleigh.org/jazzinthesquare