Jazz Articles about Nicole Mitchell

About Nicole Mitchell

Album Review

Nicole Mitchell's Sonic Projections: The Secret Escapades of Velvet Anderson

Read "The Secret Escapades of Velvet Anderson" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
November 4, 2014

Sonic Projections must be flautist Nicole Mitchell's hardest blowing band. For their second outing after Emerald Hills (Rogue Art, 2010) she draws inspiration from another hard blowing source in Chicago legend Fred Anderson. Not only a mentor to many young musicians in the Windy City, the saxophonist also ran the renowned Velvet Lounge tavern. That required a whole different order of skills to keep it going for so long: negotiation, organization, graft and resourcefulness in the face of gangsters and ...

Album Review

Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble: Intergalactic Beings

Read "Intergalactic Beings" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
August 13, 2014

Intergalactic Beings forms the second chapter in flutist Nicole Mitchell's science fiction derived discographical strand. Like the first, Xenogenesis Suite (Firehouse 12, 2008), it showcases Mitchell the composer, again drawing her inspiration from the Afrofuturist novels of Octavia Butler, in which survivors of nuclear holocaust are plucked from earth by aliens who believe that interbreeding is the only way to save the humans from themselves. Commissioned by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the recording documents the premier at the ...

Album Review

Nicole Mitchell: Engraved In The Wind

Read "Engraved In The Wind" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
January 21, 2014

As a musician, flutist Nicole Mitchell brooks no constraints to her artistry. Not content with large scale orchestral works, such as Arc of O (Rogue Art, 2012), small group interaction with her Indigo Trio and mid-sized ensembles exemplified by her Black Earth Ensemble on Three Compositions (Rogue Art, 2013), she now takes on the ultimate challenge for the single line instrumentalist: the solo album. Of course, it's a misnomer to suggest that Mitchell can only follow one tack at once, ...

Album Review

Harris Eisenstadt: Golden State

by AAJ Italy Staff
November 1, 2013

Già l'organico, con una front line forte di flauto e fagotto, ci dice quali tinte cameristiche avvolgano questo CD del batterista canadese (tutti suoi i brani), inciso nel novembre 2012 a San Diego, dove vive e insegna Mark Dresser. In verità la componente jazzistica è tutt'altro che elusa, il che si avverte con chiarezza già nel secondo brano, “It Is Never Safe to Be," e ancora in svariati altri momenti del disco. Il fagotto, fortemente caratterizzante sul piano timbrico, risulta ...

Album Review

Nicole Mitchell: Engraved in the Wind

Read "Engraved in the Wind" reviewed by AAJ Italy Staff

by AAJ Italy Staff
September 19, 2013

Nuovo lavoro per la quarantaseienne flautista di Syracuse (ma com'è noto chicagoana d'adozione, e dal 2011 docente alla California University di Irvine) per la Rogue Art, stavolta senza accompagnamento alcuno. Vi aleggia un incedere generalmente limpido, netto, timbricamente prezioso, che ora sposa la causa del solo puro e altrove opta invece per la sovraincisione. Il canonico flauto traverso in do lascia qua e là il posto al contralto in sol (con le temperature che tendono fisiologicamente a farsi più quiete, ...

Album Review

Nicole Mitchell’s Ice Crystal: Aquarius

by AAJ Italy Staff
June 25, 2013

Dei tanti progetti della flautista Nicole Mitchell - oggi tornata in quella California in cui è cresciuta, ma sempre legata a doppio filo con la scena di Chicago - il quartetto Ice Crystal mi sembra tra quelli più immediati e stimolanti. La formazione, specialmente per l'abbinamento di flauto e vibrafono, non può che evocare riferimenti precisi, sonorità liriche e taglienti al tempo stesso, che rimandano a Eric Dolphy e Bobby Hutcherson e in generale a tutto quell'ambito di ricerca tra ...

Extended Analysis

Nicole Mitchell: Arc Of O

by John Sharpe
November 16, 2012

Nicole MitchellArc Of ORogue Art2012Subtitled “for improvisers, chamber orchestra and electronics," flutist Nicole Mitchell's genre-busting Arc Of O resonates a little with the almost forgotten Third Stream. Coined by composer/educator Gunther Schuller as a term for a synthesis of classical music and jazz at the end of the 1950s, the label has been subsumed within the jazz world's ever increasing eclecticism which sees all cultures as fair game. Some of the first ...