Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble, "Portraits of Sonic Freedom"

Grooves, avant guard, pop, classical, funk, blues — it’s all good music and Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble will explore the whole terrain to bring something familiar and something new.
Portraits of Sonic Freedom celebrates the historical journey of creative music and its contributions to jazz, the Black intellectual tradition, Afrofuturism and the expansion of human consciousness.
Since 2010, Nicole Mitchell has been named “Top Jazz Flutist” each year by the Jazz Journalists Association and Downbeat Magazine. As a former president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, her music celebrates contemporary African American culture as she builds alternative worlds that bridge the familiar with the unknown. She is a Guggenheim fellow and a professor of Music where she teaches composition, improvisation and sound studies at the University of Virginia.
Nicole Mitchell - flutes
Maya Kronfeld - piano
Rayah Thomas - bass
Jeremy “Bean” Clemons - drumset