Nicole Mitchell & Craig Taborn Duo

Nicole Mitchell, flute; Craig Taborn, piano

Nicole Mitchell is a musician of astonishing artistic breadth – a virtuoso flutist, celebrated bandleader, respected educator, and the first female president of Chicago’s eminent Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Craig Taborn’s music possesses a similarly mysterious, elusive aura, marked by atmospheric, sonically rich textures and a refusal to cater to expectations about what jazz, or even music, should be.
Both artists have appeared at the Jazz Festival Ljubljana multiple times, but now these two exceptional improvisers make their Ljubljana debut as a duo, engaging in an intimate yet vibrant, dynamic, and imaginatively charged dialogue.

Nicole Mitchell established herself on Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 1990s. She began her career with Samana (the first all women ensemble under the aegis of the AACM), and has since formed several ensembles – Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections, and Ice Crystal – for which she writes music that, through improvisation, expresses her sentiments on contemporary socio political issues. Mitchell’s stage collaborations include many prominent musical explorers, most notably Roscoe Mitchell, Joëlle Léandre, Anthony Braxton, Geri Allen, Steve Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Rob Mazurek, Hamid Drake, and others.

Craig Taborn’s career as a pianist and composer in jazz, improvisation and experimental music spans more than twenty five years. His compositional and performing output traverses a broad range of genres – from jazz, new music and electronic music to rock, noise and the avant-garde. Last year, he received one of the highest honours in the arts, the MacArthur Fellowship – a recognition that comes with a cash prize of more than half a million dollars. As a young pianist, Taborn was utterly captivated by the wonderfully strange clusters of sound in Cecil Taylor’s playing and the screams of Peter Brötzmann, which inspired him to begin exploring the expressive limits of his instrument.

The performers, who thrilled audiences at the Eric Dolphy memorial event in New York, will now offer us the transcendental experience of two master improvisers unfolding a dialogue that gives rise to exciting new compositions.