IN·FLO·RES·CENCE
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Jazz tenor saxophonist and composer J.D. Allen was born in Detroit, Michigan and is a member of the third wave of Young Lion mainstream jazz players. Allen’s apprenticeship was largely been in New York, where he performed, recorded, and toured with legends from Lester Bowie and Lawrence D. ‘Butch’ Morris to contemporaries Cindy Blackman and Meshell Ndegeocello. Since making a strong impression during his early years in New York, serving an invaluable tenure with Betty Carter, Allen now performs regularly with his own trio and quartet and releases a new album every year.
He has appeared on WNYC’S Leonard Lopate Show, Jazz Perspectives, Soundcheck and festivals and has headlined worldwide stages including the Village Vanguard, Newport, Saratoga and Summerstage/Charlie Parker Jazz Festivals. Allen has also been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, in THE ATLANTIC, The New York Times (on the blues) and hailed by Ben Ratliff as, ‘a tenor saxophonist with an enigmatic, elegant and hard-driving style’.
Photo: Bart Babinski
Dyer is a South African pianist, composer and producer. Born in 1986 in Gaborone, Botswana – where many artists from South Africa, including his father, musician Steve Dyer, were living in exile during apartheid – Dyer moved to South Africa as a child in 1993. He is a part of The Bokani Dyer Trio – Bokani Dyer (piano), Romy Brauteseth (bass) and Sphelelo Mazibuko (drums). Bokani has recorded three jazz albums to critical acclaim.
Alongside his jazz career, he also explores various other genres including electronic music, classical piano, and salsa. These various influences have made him aware of the versatility of the piano as an instrument. ‘In my own compositions, I have consciously allowed all of the music which I have encountered to flow into my music to create a new idea of “world music” where there is music with no borders,’ he explains. This led to an interest in exploring traditional styles of music from Africa, particularly percussion rhythms.
Sarathy Korwar is a US-born, Indian-raised, London-based drummer, producer, composer and bandleader. His music is predominantly based in jazz and indian classical music but also incorporates elements of hip-hop and electronic music. Having been mentored by the likes of Gilles Peterson, Fourtet, Floating Points and Emanative through the Steve Reid Foundation he has established himself as one of the most original and compelling voices in the UK jazz scene.
He has released music on the record labels Ninja Tune, The Leaf Label and Gearbox Records to critical reception and has collaborated/ toured with the likes of Anoushka Shankar, Shabaka Hutchings, Yussef Kamal and Moses Boyd.
Photo: Elisabetta Colaleo
Nduduzo Makhathini is an award-winning pianist, improvisor and scholar from South Africa. He’s a recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, South African Music Award (SAMA) and AFRIMA, and has nine albums including his most recent Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds on Blue Note Records. Makhathini heads University of Fort Hare’s music department while completing his PhD at Stellenbosch University. His performs as both headline and sideman at international festivals and club concerts. Makhathini recently collaborated with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis touring the US, South Africa and Vienna. He also has collaborated with alternative artists like DJs Black Coffee and Dacapo, and produced albums for singer-songwriters Msaki and Thandiswa Mazwai.
Makhathini was scheduled for a huge US and EU tour to promote his new album, but due to COVID-19 was unable to travel. Ironically, he’s now trending on social media performing from home as part of online international festivals such as Worldwide Music for Our Cultures, Act for Music and NPR Music. He recently received a Jazz Coalition Commission.
Siya Makuzeni is a professional South African trombone player, vocalist, lyricist and songwriter known for her extensive musical range, vocal dexterity, experimental creativity, and passion for symbiotic cross-genre influences. She is Johnnie Walker brand ambassador 2019, Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz 2016 recIpient, and band leader of rock band IppYFuzE and Siya Makuzeni Sextet, who fuse traditional jazz instrumentation with modern electronic elements and harmonized vocal effects.
Makuzeni picked up the trombone in 1997 while attending Stirling High School in East London and studied BMus/BMusJazz at Rhodes University & the Pretoria Technikon Music School. She has since toured, performed around the globe, and collaborates in special projects such as contributing as co-composer and lyric interpreter for the soundtrack of Forse Dio e Malato (Maybe God is Ill) and performing with William Kentridge and Phillip Miller in Dancing with Dada - featuring Dada Masilo (2011). When not performing live Makuzeni is a music producer, session musician, arranger, songwriter, and voice-over artist.
Photo: Olafemi Chauke
Born and raised in East London of Jamaican heritage Elaine Mitchener is a contemporary vocalist, movement artist and composer, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary/experimental music theatre and dance. She has performed and collaborated with numerous leading artists including Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), Mark Padmore, George E. Lewis, The Otolith Group, Sonia Boyce, Tansy Davies, Hamid Drake, Van Huynh Company, Apartment House, David Toop, London Sinfonietta, Christian Marclay, Ensemble Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik, William Parker. She is founder of collective electroacoustic trio The Rolling Calf with saxophonist Jason Yarde and bassist Neil Charles. Her sound works are held in a curated collection by George E Lewis at Darmstadt Festival.
Photo: Guido Mencari.
Dr. Corey Mwamba is a musician, promoter, arts advocate, and researcher from Derby committed to jazz and improvised music in Britain and Ireland. Mwamba predominantly plays vibraphone; he also plays dulcimer and uses audio processing software. He is recognised as a highly creative improviser and composer working across a wide range of jazz and contemporary music with a distinctive approach and tone: a potent blend of pure sound, highly melodic phrases and ethereal textures; barely whispered chords and ear-piercing robotic screams.
Mwamba is the current presenter of Freeness, a weekly show on BBC Radio 3 that plays adventurous jazz and improvised music from across the globe. Mwamba was granted an AHRC studentship for a Master of Research degree in Music at Keele University in 2014, and was recently awarded a doctorate in Jazz Research at Birmingham City University. He is also an active advocate of the arts and adventurous programmer of new music in Derby.
Photo: Agata Urbaniak.
South African multi-award winning jazz pianist and vocalist, Thandi Ntuli, hails from a lineage of rich musical heritage. Since the release of her debut album The Offering (2014) and her sophomore release Exiled (2018), she’s made an imprint on the global jazz community as one of the leading voices of modern South African jazz. Her many collaborations include work with Steve Dyer, Neo Muyanga, Thandiswa Mazwai, Shabaka & The Ancestors, Marcus Wyatt, DjKenzhero, LA-based Hip-Hop duo Harriett, and most recently, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra.
Her live project, Thandi Ntuli ‘Live at Jazzwerkstatt’ released in March 2020 displays her capabilities as not only a composer and performer, but also an arranger with the remarkable facility to weave the imagery of her stories with each note. Notable accolades include a Metro FM Award nomination (2015), Mbokodo Award (2015), Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Jazz (2018), and a South African Music Award (SAMA) nomination (2019).
Photo: Vicki Sikhakhane
Panamanian saxophonist and composer Luis Carlos Peréz was born in 1978, started playing organ at 9, and took up the saxophone as his main instrument at 13. He studied at the Panama Conservatory of Music and received a Masters in Jazz Composition at New England Conservatory in Boston. Perez was awarded as an outstanding scholarship and enterprise student by the NEC Alumni Tourjee Award, and awarded an international scholarship from Danilo Perez Foundation. He has performed at the Panama Jazz Festival, and festivals in Cuba, Chile, USA and Europe.
Peréz has produced 16 editions of the christmas concert “Jazz en Belen” (Jazz at Bethlehem). He has accompanied artists such as Celia Cruz, Ruben Blades, Willie Colon, Gilberto and Santarosa and performed with Danilo Perez, Phil Ranelin, Luisito Quintero, and the Global Jazz Big Band. He’s part of the Salsa Big Band project of Ruben Blades and Roberto Delgado, teaches at the Danilo Perez Foundation, and is a BG France artist.
Cuban pianist Leyanis Valdés Reyes has an academic training in classical music. She graduated from classical music in Italy and then in 2006 began to venture into jazz and Cuban music. At this stage was was collaborating with several projects, Gala Major Band, among others. She has worked as a solo pianist in the Cayman Islands, Italy, France, Qatar, and exchanges music with artists from those countries.
Upon returning to Cuba she decided to create her own music, continuing collaborations leading to an album with Adriano Clemente, ‘Blue Habana’; the ‘Arturo Ofarril’ album including three generations; and her album ‘Valdés Bothers’ including her brother Jessie Valdés on drums. Valdés won the Cuerda Viva 2016 award in Cuba for best jazz song for ‘Gente de Hielo’, and a nomination for the cubadisco 2016 for the album ‘Valdés Brothers’. She is the daughter of Chucho Valdés, Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger.
Photo: Rose Marie Cromwell. Courtesy of The New Yorker.
Peter Adjaye is a contemporary conceptual sound artist, specialising in cross-disciplinary collaborations. He is a musicologist, composer, DJ-producer and musician. His work has culminated in the publication, Dialogues on MusicforArchitecture Records in association with Vinyl Factory Records. Dialogues is available as a gatefold limited edition vinyl record. Adjaye was recently commissioned to compose and produce a sound installation Ceremonies Within for the exhibition A Countervailing Theory, in collaboration with celebrated Nigerian American Artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, for the unique 90 metre Barbican Curve Gallery. Adjaye’s work is also currently exhibiting at Greenwich Maritime Museum in a new sound installation A Proposal for Radical Hospitality.
He has also exhibited his unique sound art installations in many other prestigious locations, including, The Tate Modern, Design Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Somerset House, Studio Museum Harlem, Whitechapel Gallery, Albion Gallery, The Science Museum, Nobel Institute and given talks at places such as Maaxi National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, The Architecture Foundation, Design Miami, Rough Trade to St Martins Art College.
Phoebe Boswell (Kenya/UK) describes her work as a navigation of the space between, anchored to what she refers to as a ‘restless state of diasporic consciousness,’ owing to a personal history rooted in colonial traces, contradictory legacies, and patterns of migration. Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, she creates immersive installations and bodies of work which layer drawing, animation, sound, video, and interactivity in an effort to find language robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre and celebrate complex communities, voices, hearts, and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised, simplified, passified, homogenised, or sidelined as ‘other’.
Boswell currently lives/works in London, and her work has been exhibited globally, including Autograph; Tiwani Contemporary; Sundance Film Festivals, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2015, and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016. She received the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017 and recently unveiled a large-scale public moving image work ‘PLATFORM’ as part of the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain in Geneva. Boswell is a recent recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and her upcoming solo exhibition HERE at New Art Exchange, Nottingham (opening TBA).
Photo: Emile Holba
Elvira Dyangani Ose is Director of The Showroom, London. She is currently affiliated to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada and Tate Modern Advisory Council. Until November 2018, she served as Creative Time Senior Curator, where she most recently curated their 11th edition of their Summit. She is currently curating the publications of 34th Bienal De São Paulo and is the Curator for the PHotoESPAÑA, International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts.
Dyangani Ose was Curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary art, (GIBCA 2015) and Curator International Art at Tate Modern (2011 – 2014). Ose has published and lectured on modern and contemporary African art and has contributed to art journals such as Nka and Atlántica. She studied a Doctoral Degree in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York; has a MAS in Theory and History of Architecture from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona; and a BA in Art History from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Photo: Christina Ebenezer
Kodwo Eshun is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of The Otolith Group. He is co-editor of The Fisher Function, 2017, Post Punk Then and Now, 2016, The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text Vol 25 Issue, 2011, Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom, 2010 and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998, 2007 and author of Dan Graham: Rock My Religion, 2012, and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, 1998.
His recently published book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction is part manifesto for a militant posthumanism, part journey through the unacknowledged traditions of diasporic science fiction. It finds the future shock in Afrofuturist sounds from jazz, dub and techno to funk, hip hop and jungle. Theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun opens the possibilities of sonic fiction: the hitherto unexplored intersections between science fiction and organised sound. Situated between electronic music history, media theory, science fiction and Afrodiasporic studies, this book is one of the key works to stake a claim for the generative possibilities of Afrofuturism.
Photo: Daniel Brooke
Reece Ewing initially imagined IN·FLO·RES·CENCE as an art initiative whereby jazz could be shared and discovered in a context focusing on gathering, communion, critical discussion, provocation, and joy. He is a Filmmaker and Emmy nominated and award-winning Producer working in Visual Effects and Post Production across television, film and advertising. Ewing’s work as a filmmaker is a response to large-scale production that can require upwards of hundreds to people to produce. In contrast, his filmmaking is a studio practice focused on working in isolation and one-on-one collaborations.
Ewing has been greatly informed by his music studies. His continued practice of listening to jazz consists of challenging himself to expand what he is listening to and how he listens. His decision-making, problem-solving and activism are all defined by how he thinks musically.
Christine Eyene is a Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire where she is part of Making Histories Visible, an interdisciplinary visual arts research project led by the artist and Professor of Contemporary Art Lubaina Himid CBE RA. She is the Artistic Director of the Biennale Internationale de Casablanca (BIC) and her current academic research is focused on the practice of South African photographer George Hallett (1942-2020) with a particular interest in its links with African literature and South African jazz music. Her other research interests include: feminist art practices, digital media, design, music, urban culture, and socially-engaged initiatives.
Sound art projects include Sounds Like Her: Gender, Sound Art and Sonic Cultures, a New Art Exchange UK touring exhibition (2017-2020) and publication; Résonances: Second Mouvement, Espace Croix-Baragnon, Toulouse, as part of Printemps de Septembre (2016); Curators’ Series # 8: All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2015). She is currently developing Belgian sound art festival OORtreders’ first Curating Lab (23-25 October 2020), in the framework of Sounds Now, a Creative Europe project.
Katherine Finerty is currently Curator & Communications Manager at The Showroom, London. She is also an independent curator and writer focusing on research-based and socially-engaged practices, translocal identity politics, and contemporary arts of the African diaspora. Finerty works collaboratively to develop alternative cultural discourses and multi-disciplinary art experiences that encourage progressive exchanges and participation. Her curatorial practice embraces sound as a powerful tool for storytelling and brings together artists, musicians, poets, DJs, and more to create collective interdisciplinary platforms.
In 2019 Finerty co-curated Collective Intimacy (180 The Strand and The Showroom, London) and The Showroom Mural Commission - Simnikiwe Buhlungu: Notes to Self (Intimate 1) (The Showroom) with Elvira Dyangani Ose. She has a Masters in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London; a BA in History of Art and Africana Studies from Cornell University, New York; and has studied History of Art at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.
Photo: Charlotte Speechley
Andrea Giunta is a Buenos Aires based curator, writer and researcher, specialising in Latin American and International Art of XX and XXI centuries. She co-curated the exhibition Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, 2017-2018) and was the Chief Curator of the Bienal 12. Porto Alegre, Brasil, Feminine(s): Visualities, Actions, and Affects (2020). She is the author of several books, like Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (2007); Feminism and Latin American Art (2018); and Against the Canon. Art in a World Without a Center (2020).
Giunta is a Former Chair Professor of Latin American Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and she is currently a Professor at Buenos Aires University. She is a recipient of fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and her research and writings are focussed on the relationships between art and power and the concept of “simultaneous avant-gardes”. From the latter perspective she analysed Nasreen Mohamedi’s works in relation with Latin American abstraction in the catalogue of Mohamedi’s retrospective at Reina Sofía Museum and Met Breuer (2015-2016).
Andrew Pierre Hart is a London-based artist whose practice is inter-disciplinary focussed on painting. His work explores the symbiotic relationship between sound and painting His practice is an ongoing rhythmic research and play of improvised and spontaneous generative processes, through various mediums including sound, video, performance, found object and image, language, and installation. Andrews’s current work explores themes of spatiality, visualisation, synchronisation, and re-interpretations of DJ technology.
Hart is an ArtAngel ‘Thinking Time ‘Awardee 2020, A 2019 Tiffany and Co Outset studio prize winner. He performed alongside Larry Amponsah at ‘Collective Intimacy’ at 180 The Strand in 2019. He is currently exhibiting at Tiwani Contemporary in a two-person show with Charmaine Watkiss in The Abstract Truth of Things – The lockdown in the UK made for an opportunity for the artists to meet and engage on social media platforms where they conducted a series of discussions to develop the meeting point of their collaboration: the colour blue and the sound of Jazz - markers of innovation and invention in American, African and Caribbean diaspora histories.
Evan Ifekoya is an artist and energy worker who through sound, text, video and performance places demands on existing systems and institutions of power, to recentre and prioritise the experience and voice of those previously marginalised. Through archival and sonic investigations, they speculate on blackness in abundance; the body of the ocean a watery embodied presence in the work.
*They established the collectively run and QTIBPOC (queer, trans, intersex, black and people of colour) led Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) in 2018. They have presented exhibitions and performances in the UK and Internationally including: Liverpool Biennial (2021); De Appel Netherlands (2019); Gasworks London (2018) Contemporary Arts Centre New Orleans as part of Prospect 4 (2017); Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2016); Studio Voltaire London (2015) and Castlefield Gallery Manchester (2014).**
Photo: Kevin Osepa
Grammy-nominated composer-pianist Vijay Iyer was named Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year for 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2018 and Artist of the Year in Jazz Times’ Critics’ Poll and Readers’ Poll for 2017. He received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and a 2011 Grammy nomination. Iyer’s sextet album, Far From Over (ECM, 2017), topped numerous year-end polls and was cited by Rolling Stone as “2017’s jazz album to beat.” Vijay Iyer is the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University. Iyer’s previous ECM releases include A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (2016), a collaboration with Iyer’s hero, friend and teacher Wadada Leo Smith.
A polymath whose career has spanned the sciences, the humanities, and the arts, Iyer received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the cognitive science of music from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his permanent appointment at Harvard in 2014, Iyer taught at Manhattan School of Music, New York University, and the New School. He has been featured as Artist-in-Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Wigmore Hall (London), the Molde Jazz Festival (Molde, Norway), SF Jazz, and Jazz Middelheim (Antwerp, Belgium), and served as Music Director for the 2017 Ojai Music Festival in southern California.
Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle is a musician and scholar that teaches and researches in the areas of African American music and gender and music. She has worked closely with a number of educational programs including National Museum of African American History and Culture, NPR, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the BBC. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, and anthologies. Kernodle is the author of biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, served as Associate Editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of African American Music and the Editorial team for the revision of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. She is currently Professor of Musicology at Miami University in Oxford, OH and the President of the Society for American Music.
Brinda Kumar is an Assistant Curator in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She worked on Nasreen Mohamedi (2016), one of the inaugural exhibitions at The Met Breuer, and was also part of the team working on Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016). Other exhibitions she has worked on include Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, 1300-Now (2018) and Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context (2019).
Most recently she co-curated the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (2020) and wrote for its catalogue. She completed her BFA at the College of Art, New Delhi; MA at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and received an MA and PhD from Cornell University.
Kevin Le Gendre is a journalist and broadcaster with an interest in black music, literature and culture. Since the late ‘90s he has written about soul, jazz, African and Caribbean musicians and authors for many publications, including Echoes, Jazzwise, and Times Literary Supplement Online. He contributes to Radio 4’s Front Row and also presents Radio 3’s J To Z. His latest book is Don’t Stop The Carnival; Black Music In Britain. It won the 2019 ARSC award for Best Historical Research In Roots And World Music.
‘I made it my mission to identify the first black musicians in Britain and chart their development… I wanted to give an insight into the lives of these singers and players in order to convey a sense of how they were perceived by the ‘natives’, and what kind of options were open to them in terms of employment…The image of a human being holding a microphone, trumpet or saxophone against the fire and fury of conflict in which the ultimate sacrifice is made many times over is tremendously poignant. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then I hope and pray that the guitar will one day silence the gun.’
Jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran was born in Houston, TX in 1975. This boundary-bursting artist grounds his practice in the composition of jazz, bridging the visual and performing arts through spellbinding stagecraft. Heralded as one of the country’s leading jazz innovators, Moran transmutes his personal experience of the world into dynamic musical compositions that challenge the formal conventions of the medium. His experimental approach to art-making embraces the intersection of objects and sound, pushing beyond the traditional in ways that are inherently theatrical.
His activity stretches beyond the 15 critically acclaimed solo recordings and collaborations with artists from Cassandra Wilson to Kara Walker to Ava Duvernay showcase his reach. His 21 year relationship with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records and Yes Records, a label he co-owns with his wife, singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran. He is Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center and teaches at New England Conservatory.
Photo: Clay Patrick McBride
Ever since letting a cow loose on Ipanema Beach in the mid 1990s, Laura Lima has put forth a body of work composed of what she sometimes describes as ‘images.’ Continually escaping easy classification, Laura Lima’s ‘images’ are attempts to visually articulate, in concrete reality, a personal glossary of concepts that the artist has worked and reworked during the course of her over 20 year career.
Born in 1971, the artist received a BA in Philosophy from the State University of Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s and also studied art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. In 1999, she founded the Organism RhR (Representative hyphen Representative), served as its first bureaucratic administrator, and created a glossary and archive of ideas including a philosophy of nothing, the non-functional, emptiness, and failure. Lima was the 2014 recipient of BACA, Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Arts, and is co-founder and adviser with Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner of A Gentil Carioca, an artist-run gallery in Rio de Janeiro.
Charmaine Watkiss is a London based artist who comes from a background in film and design. Her current practice is focussed around drawing, creating life sized figures which allows her to work in a layered and non linear way. She has recently started to explore African ancestral traditions which have survived the transatlantic; stories, rituals and customs which have become a part of Caribbean culture and have now adapted again as the diaspora move beyond the Americas into the western world. She creates memory stories which shift between the archeological, the cosmological and the historical spaces – always looking back in order to create a new projection in the present.
Charmaine completed an MA in Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art in 2018. She was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, 2019. This year she was a shortlisted Awardee of the 198 Gallery Women of Colour Award and is currently in a two-person show with Andrew Pierre Hart at Tiwani Contemporary Gallery.
Dr. Temi Odumosu is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Malmö University in Sweden. Her international research and cultural practice is concerned with the visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, colonial archives and archiving, Afro-Diaspora aesthetics, and more broadly exploring how art mediates social transformation and healing.
Between 2014 and 2017 Temi worked collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team of researchers for the Living Archives Research Project, at Malmö University, which addressed the challenges of producing and working with archival material in an increasingly digitized and networked environment. Under the project’s ‘Performing Memory’ enquiry strand she developed alternative approaches to the representation of colonial archival material, by combining augmented reality (AR), sound, media projection, and varying kinds of performance to develop more affective public experiences with this contested past. She is currently a member of the research project The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories.
Photo: Louise Haywood
NOW LIVE: Composer Performances & Interviews:
Elio Villafranca (Artist-in-Residence) – Cuban New York-based Pianist
Leyanis Valdés Reyes – Cuban Pianist
Nduduzo Makhathini – South African Pianist, Scholar & Healer
J.D. Allen – American Jazz Tenor Saxophonist
Luis Carlos Peréz – Panamanian Saxophonist
Bokani Dyer – South African Pianist & Producer
Elaine Mitchener – London-based Vocalist & Movement Artist
Siya Makuzeni – South African Trombonist, Vocalist, Lyricist & Songwriter
Sarathy Korwar – US-born, Indian-raised, London-based Drummer
Corey Mwamba – Derby-based Musician, Arts Advocate & Researcher
Thandi Ntuli – South African Pianist & Vocalist
In-Conversations:
The Long Form: Jazz Musicians Jason Moran & Elio Villafranca with The Showroom Director Elvira Dyangani Ose and IN·FLO·RES·CENCE Commissioner Reece Ewing
Interdisciplinary Transcendence of Sound: Artists Andrew Pierre Hart & Charmaine Watkiss and Pianist Composer Nduduzo Makhathini with IN·FLO·RES·CENCE co-curator Katherine Finerty
A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke: Jazz Musician Vijay Iyer and Art Historians Andrea Giunta and Brinda Kumar with Journalist Kevin LeGendre
Experimental Vocals & Social Transformation: Artist Elaine Mitchener, Filmmaker Theorist Kodwo Eshun and Art historian Curator Dr. Temi Odumosu with Elvira Dyangani Ose
Ritual & Communion: Artists Phoebe Boswell & Laura Lima and Pianist Nduduzo Makhathini with Elvira Dyangani Ose
A Rejection of Sonic Femininity: Musician Scholar Dr. Tammy Kernodle with Artist Elaine Mitchener, Trombonist Siya Makuzeni & Pianist Thandi Ntuli
Sonic Cultures: Curator and critic Christine Eyene , multimedia artist Evan Ifekoya, and IN·FLO·RES·CENCE composer, vibraphonist and researcher Corey Mwabma with Elvira Dyangani Ose
The Showroom, London and Filmmaker Producer Reece Ewing are honoured to host IN·FLO·RES·CENCE – a new interdisciplinary platform for audiences to encounter compositions and conversations where sound and art can cross-pollinate and regenerate. Championing the power of jazz, this project fosters freedom, experimentation, improvisation, rhythm, polyrhythm, collaboration, dialogue, and sophistication – hard work fuelled by epiphanies, a call and response. Social power.
Sonic power.
In its introductory digital stage, IN·FLO·RES·CENCE exists as an unfolding social media platform across Instagram, Vimeo, and The Showroom website whereby audiences can discover music compositions, interdisciplinary conversations, listening sessions, and behind-the-scenes creative inspirations. In order to create opportunities to commission music, share personal experiences, and foster collective conversations, IN·FLO·RES·CENCE brings together 10 Composers, 1 Solo Pianist, a diverse mix of music and art professionals, and an ever-growing global audience. Each of the participating composing musicians (J.D. Allen, Bokani Dyer, Sarathy Korwar, Nduduzo Makhathini, Siya Makuzeni, Elaine Mitchener, Corey Mwamba, Thandi Ntuli, Luis Carlos Pérez, and Leyanis Valdés Reyes) were invited to create a piece for solo piano around 1 minute in length responding to the changes to daily life during the global coronavirus outbreak. These individual pieces will all be interpreted and performed by the project’s first Artist-in-Residence, Cuban New York-based Pianist, Composer, and Band Leader Elio Villafranca, throughout the duration of the project.
These musical offerings will be activated by the commissioned musicians through recorded conversations between each other, Journalist Kevin Le Gendre (Broadcaster and Writer of Don’t Stop the Carnival: Black British Music, 2019), and a group of creative professionals whose practices are deeply informed by sound, including The Showroom Director and Curator Elvira Dyangani Ose; Jazz Musician Jason Moran; Composer Pianist Vijay Iyer; Theorist and Filmmaker Kodwo Eshun; Sound Artist Peter Adjaye; Curators Christine Eyene, Katherine Finerty, Andrea Giunta, Brinda Kumar, and Temi Odumosu; multimedia Artists including Phoebe Boswell, Andrew Pierre Hart, Evan Ifekoya, Laura Lima and Charmaine Watkiss; and more. The community created will flower into multiple, growing conversations serving as a living archive for expanding jazz within personal, collective, and creative contexts.
The structure of multiple voices at the core of this project is inspired by an inflorescence: a cluster of flowers arranged on a stem, comprising a complicated arrangement of branches, further referencing the budding of blossoms – the process of flowering, a moment of unfolding, the stage of development full of possibility and production. This anatomical concept is also eponymous with the 1989 avant-garde album by American Pianist and Poet Cecil Taylor (1929–2018), whose practice has fused sound and art since the 1950s free jazz and New York loft scene through till this decade with his Open Plan exhibition at The Whitney Museum in 2016. As reflected in the meaning of this word, Taylor’s experimental ethos, and the political agency of jazz, this project aims to activate the global history of creative cross-pollination between musical and visual art communities through a gathering of voices reflecting upon the conditions of this unique historical moment. Through these participatory and expansive modes of connection, IN·FLO·RES·CENCE will create a constellation – an inflorescent cluster – filled with multiple voices, active listening, a poetic source of knowledge, and a resonant echo of call and response. A space to breathe, listen, create, and connect.
This project is conceived by Reece Ewing and curated with Curator Katherine Finerty, in collaboration with The Showroom, London, directed by Elvira Dyangani Ose.
Filmmaker and Producer Reece Ewing initially imagined IN·FLO·RES·CENCE as an art initiative whereby jazz could be shared and discovered in a context focusing on gathering, communion, critical discussion, provocation, and joy. ‘I want to invite composers and musicians into an important discussion around culture and identity and representation – to discuss their individual practices and how they interact with the local and global creative and non-creative communities. Music is very much an epicentre of all of the world’s cultures. Moreover, this project explores music as a way to communicate ideas. It covers music as inspiration. Music as ritual. Music as communication, codes. Music as cultural connection and exchange. Music as healing. Music as activism. Music as I see you.’ Moreover, it is essential to Ewing that this project be centred in an interdisciplinary art context, rather than an exclusively auditory or performative one: ‘The art space is a space for gathering, communion, sharing, critical discussion, scholarly discourse, joy, provocation, and the love of art,’ he shares, ‘all ideas which music makers and storytellers have always been at the core of.’
The inspiration for this project is a call and response to the Alone / Together performances that American violinist Jennifer Koh has commissioned for her Instagram page @jenniferkohmusic – now further extended to a global diaspora of jazz composition, collaboration, and communication using solo piano as a jumping off point. Through the different cultures, DNAs, rituals, and articulations of each participating composer and the diverse group of creative professionals in conversation, IN·FLO·RES·CENCE seeks to provide a space where family histories, collective memories, and contemporary storytellings may gather. It functions as an echo across the globe – a healing expression of activism across Transatlantic histories. And finally, through the voice of a piano solo – rich in its own modern jazz tradition intersecting every music crossroad: a percussion instrument capable of creating a triad of rhythm, melody, and harmony that defies definition and represents freedom – it dreams of giving these musical offerings the opportunity to find resonance in an arts context, take new shape in performances, and create an endless possibility of new connections.
Upon looking back to the New York City loft jazz scene activated by pianist Cecil Taylor and his peers in the 1950s to early 80s, we find a rich history of music collaboration and experimentation in both domestic and arts spaces. In this current moment of self-isolation and social distancing, how can we continue to collaborate, voice our fears, express our joys, ask hard questions, and create solace – together? The COVID-19 pandemic and anti-racist movement have further exposed many pre-existing struggles that freelance musicians and arts professionals suffer from. With an additional threat to opportunities for support, work spaces, commissions, and collaborations, how can we continue to provide resources to not just survive, but thrive? And moreover, how may we embrace this moment as a chance to open up ideas about how certain creative fields are defined, challenging the languages, identifications, and agencies of contemporary musicians not just in performance contexts, but also personal, collective, and creative ones? This project seeks to address these questions, and bring together an inflorescence of voices asking many more.
Related
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Fortnightly Highlight 9: IN·FLO·RES·CENCE
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Introducing Composer Corey Mwamba
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Introducing Composer Sarathy Korwar
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In conversation: Jason Moran, Elio Villafranca & Project Co-Curators
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Introducing Composer Siya Makuzeni
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Introducing Composer Bokani Dyer
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In conversation: Dr. Tammy Kernodle with Elaine Mitchener, Siya Makuzeni & Thandi Ntuli
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Introducing Composer Leyanis Valdés Reyes
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In conversation: Phoebe Boswell, Laura Lima, Nduduzo Makhathini & Elvira Dyangani Ose
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In conversation: Elaine Mitchener, Kodwo Eshun, Temi Odumosu & Elvira Dyangani Ose
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Introducing Nduduzo Makhathini
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In conversation: Vijay Iyer, Andrea Giunta, Brinda Kumar & Kevin LeGendre
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Introducing J.D. Allen
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Introducing Luis Carlos Pérez
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In conversation: Andrew Pierre Hart, Charmaine Watkiss, Nduduzo Makhathini & Katherine Finerty
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Introducing Composer Thandi Ntuli
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Introducing Composer Elaine Mitchener
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Introducing Artist-in-Residence Elio Villafranca
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