Nicole Mitchell

Lara Pellegrinelli is a scholar and a journalist, who contributes to NPR and The New York Times. She has been the commissioned writer for Miller Theatre’s Composer Portraits series since 2018.

Dear hopeful n curious ones,

Sum of u r on erth, n some might b from other dimensions, having left erth long ago. May-b u joined this conversation from places I don’t kno the names of. We r all connected. We may each have a finger touchn tha one mind that intersects our core. N that non-physical space, when asking similar questions, perhaps we can all access related discoveries n insights. N Ma-land, we say there’s nuthin new under erth’s sun or any other. I just wanted u 2 kno that it’s from here, tha mindlake, tha maroon cloud, that we share this mandorla project stitched wi dream fragments intertwined wi tha nightmare challenges life has given us. Tha thread tyin it iz tha gift of breathing. Since erth iz a school, we wan 2 share our puzzle pieces wi yours, so we can all find our way thru this conundrum of suffering 2 tha happiness we all seek.

—Liansee 2
From Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful

Picture a troubled Earth ravaged by climate change, a global pandemic, and war—only it is under the rule of a World Union in the year 2099. A couple named Mon and Dorla awake in unfamiliar surroundings, dense with trees and living buildings. They are attended to by small, technologically sophisticated beings whose skin color is shades of bluish red; the Mandorlians can communicate with each other telepathically but respond to the humans in song. As the visitors heal from their trauma, they learn that Mandorla Island, the mythical place in which they have found themselves, remains hidden from the government, an alternate planetary existence where the inhabitants have learned to live in cooperation with nature and each other.

These imagined, twin realities—one dystopic, the other utopic—have emerged gradually in the music and writing of flutist, composer, improvisor, bandleader, and educator Nicole Mitchell. A mandorla is the shape created where two circles overlap; Mitchell uses the figure to symbolize a shared space in the union of two opposing worlds, where the potential for disruption awakens new possibilities.

A mandorla is the shape created where two circles overlap; Mitchell uses the figure to symbolize a shared space in the union of two opposing worlds, where the potential for disruption awakens new possibilities.

Mandorla began to surface nearly a decade ago in Mitchell’s experiments with the Black Earth Ensemble (BEE), her primary compositional vehicle and its own kind of utopic, global entity; it is named not only in celebration of Blackness but also the dark soil on which we depend for life. The project eventually coalesced into the suite Mandorla Awakenings II: Emerging Worlds, which premiered at the celebrations for the 50^th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 2015 and was released on FPE Records two years later. The eight-member version of BEE that it features—with flute, shakuhachi, violin, cello, electric guitar, banjo, oud, shamisen, bass, taiko, percussion, electronics, and spoken word—come together as a collective of individual voices, multilingual and surprising in their effervescent power.

Mitchell’s richly textured book, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful (Green Lantern Press, 2022), enlarges the world she has created through autographical writings, journal entries, letters, poems, photographs, programs, scores, and artwork in a multivalent collection described on its cover as “part memoir, part manifesto, [and] part Black speculative fiction.” (The publication appears under Mitchell’s married name Mitchell Gantt, which she uses in her academic roles.)

Through her writing, Mitchell makes it clear that the Mandorla projects are expressive vehicles that allow her to pursue ideological questions through an Afro-futurist lens. What does a society look like that is more egalitarian and has technological advancements that are cultivated in cooperation with nature? she asks. Can an artistic performance incite us to imagine a transformation of human consciousness towards restoring balance between the Earth and people? And, Can music catalyze a reawakening of human spirituality?

This framework not only would seem to guarantee that there will be future developments on Mandorla Island, but it reverberates through Mitchell’s current body of work and never seems to be far from her mind. Last month, Mitchell was finishing a six-week residency at the University of Paris 8, Vincennes-Saint-Denis into which she had squeezed a two-week-long European tour. The work she had composed for a group of 20 students on a Saturday morning and they performed three days later on a Tuesday evening was all about investigating new paradigms for human progress.

“We’re not treating each other any better than we have been for thousands of years,” Mitchell explained after the concert finished at nearly midnight, visible through a Zoom window on a darkened city street. “How can we say that we have made progress? Because the most important things are actually not progressing. When I’m walking around here in Paris, I see homeless people, many of whom are mentally ill and need support. It’s the same in California, Chicago, or wherever. People are suffering, and they’re being discarded. We’ll say our relationship with the earth is problematic, but most people are just sleepwalking around. Like, it’s February. Is this winter?”

The pieces on this Composer Portrait program are invested in Mitchell’s ideals, working to bring us together as a community and encouraging us to envision ways that the arts can be used for the betterment of society.

The projects currently on Mitchell’s docket are rooted in a sense of community, hinge on her vision of social justice, and offer the hope of transformation. She anchors them with storytelling. Designated an Arts and Letters Awardee in 2023, and newly appointed as a Professor at the University of Virginia, Mitchell has increasingly been touring solo performances since the pandemic, working on a project with flute and electronics titled Free Bodies that is “looking at my experience in this body, which has been very complex because of the way things are in relation to race and gender,” she says. “I’m thinking about how slavery hasn’t ended. We all know about the prison industrial complex.”

Mitchell, who found her musical direction on the Chicago jazz scene in the 1990s, has received a Fromm commission to write Southside Love Letter for the Dal Niente Ensemble, a tribute to this important neighborhood scheduled to premiere in Chicago in fall 2023. A new recording titled Bamako*Chicago Sound System (FPE Records), which brings together Malian and Chicagoan improvisors, will document her collaborations with the kora player Ballaké Sissoko, with whom she has worked since 2014. Mitchell also continues to perform with BEE in various configurations, the latest being Black Earth SWAY, an all-women’s ensemble with her UVA colleague percussionist JoVia Armstrong, pianist Alexis Lombre, and percussionist and spoken word artist Coco Elysses.

“With SWAY, I’m inviting everyone to bring their compositions,” she says. “It’s not about impressing people. It’s not about being clever and, Ooh, look how smart this composition is. It’s about how real you can be in terms of honesty with yourself. How can you challenge yourself to be more fully you, and for us to hold space for each other to do that. For example, I sing in the group, and I’m not comfortable doing that at all. Everyone’s doing something that’s challenging them to express themselves more fully. Also, we’re just having a good time. It’s really about friendship and having fun.”

The pieces on this Composer Portrait program are similarly invested in Mitchell’s ideals, working to bring us together as a community and encouraging us to envision ways that the arts can be used for the betterment of society. Whispering Flame, a movement from Mitchell and Lisa E. Harris’s EarthSeed suite, engages with the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler, in particular, Parable of the Sower. Procession Time, composed for a quartet of mixed instruments, makes a potent inquiry into human gatherings as forms of ritual, using the lens of Black experience to cast them in a different light. Transitions Beyond explores the mystical process of dying.

Mitchell will join the performance on flute for Building Stuff, a movement from a larger suite titled Moments of Fatherhood, inspired by a collection of photographs by W.E.B. Du Bois. Lastly, Inescapable Spiral refers to the unstoppable rotation of the heavens. It is a collection of miniatures that can be rearranged any time it is performed.

Mitchell (b. 1967), whose parents selected the name Nicole in tribute to Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek, was born in Syracuse, New York. When she was eight, the family moved to Anaheim, California, where she faced frequent harassment in the nearly all-white community.

Her father Michael, an electronics engineer, believed he saw a UFO as a boy. Her mother Joan Beard Mitchell, a self-taught painter and novelist, loved science fiction; she created canvases featuring Black mothers in interstellar landscapes. She took her own life when Nicole was a teenager, and the girl vowed to be an artist in the wake of this sudden tragedy.

Mitchell began playing music on the piano and viola in elementary school, but switched to flute as soon as she could get her hands on an instrument. “As soon as I heard it, that was it,” she remembers. “That’s all it took. I didn’t feel that kind of passion for the other instruments I had been learning.”

Her high school had a jazz band, but the director wasn’t interested in making space for a flute among the more powerful horns. As a freshman at UCSD, she played in the orchestra and was the only undergraduate allowed to study with John Fonville, the principal flute teacher and a respected contemporary music specialist. “If anyone randomly asked me to play like Mozart’s Concerto in D, I could still do it now,”
she says.

A class in jazz improvisation taught by trombonist Jimmy Cheatham offered Mitchell’s first real exposure to creative music; he was also the one who introduced Mitchell to the flute recordings of legendary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy and West Coast flutist James Newton. She got her feet wet improvising in an Afrobeat band under the leadership of Najite Agindotan with musicians from all over West Africa and busking on the streets of San Diego. But it wasn’t enough to keep her there.

“I was looking for community,” Mitchell explains. “I couldn’t find it in California, and then I went to Oberlin, where I studied with bell hooks and made lifelong friends, but my music teacher kept telling me I would never make it with jazz flute, so I left.”

Mitchell had always dreamt of going to Chicago, where she’d spent summers with her grandparents. She made the move in 1990. “It was like, Finally! That’s where I fit,” she says. “I was very damaged from being in white environments, where people literally just didn’t like me or ignored me. Being able to place myself in Black environments, I actually felt supported and some love and also that people were acknowledging my talent and giving me opportunities.”

More busking led to encounters with local musicians from the AACM, a welcoming, intergenerational collective that eschewed musical boundaries with a simple mandate: create original music. Before long, Mitchell was invited to join AACM membership and co-founded Samana, a trio with the flutist Maia and sitarist, bassist, and storyteller Shanta Nurullah; they became the AACM’s first all-female ensemble. (Eventually, Mitchell would serve as the AACM’s first female president from 2009-10). She worked closely with drummer Hamid Drake in a trio called Soundscapes, and with saxophonist David Boykin, both of whom encouraged her to start her own group. BEE was founded in 1998, the same year Mitchell finished her B.A. from Chicago State University. She completed a master’s degree in flute performance at Northern Illinois University in 2000.

Mitchell had been composing for years, but BEE finally gave her an outlet for those creative works. She made a series of impressive recordings with the ensemble, beginning with Vision Quest in 2001. Pete Margasak of the Chicago Reader perhaps offers the best concise description of them: “In her dazzling compositions [Mitchell] draws on variants of jazz from across much of the genre’s history, not to mention reggae, African grooves, and Latin rhythms, but the music that results is more like an alloy than a patchwork—there are no seams showing. It’s avant-garde but swings ferociously, and though the tunes are complex and tightly arranged, they leave plenty of space for improvisation. The first thing you’re likely to notice, though, is how upbeat and ebullient Mitchell’s music is.”

Since her arrival in Chicago, Mitchell had also been working in the offices of Third World Press, the oldest African American publishing house in the United States. She calls herself a cultural apprentice of founder Haki Madhubuti; the two made the recording Liberation Narratives featuring his poetry with BEE in 2017. Afro-futurism as an aesthetic was already firmly ensconced in the jazz tradition through the music of Sun Ra and others. Being part of a literary community of color must have primed the pump for Mitchell to engage with Black speculative fiction in her music, a significant shift in her compositional direction. In 2005, she met Octavia Butler, the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and one of her mother’s favorites. Mitchell’s Xenogenesis Suite, inspired by Dawn, the first book in Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, was commissioned by Chamber Music America in 2007; the alien abduction story acts as a parable for slavery. Intergalactic Beings, a second Butler-inspired work, appeared six years later.

Mitchell’s compositions range from fully improvised to fully composed. How does she define the word?

“For me, composition is really about concepts. Just like language. We’re sharing concepts when we’re talking, and the music can do that. There’s an energy that’s transmitted and shared because we’re actually creating the sound with our ears when we’re listening. It is a collaboration.

“A composition is a vehicle for the music, but it doesn’t really control the music. It facilitates the music, just as the music facilitates the connection between people. The music is what brought everybody together in that room. And, the composition, I would say—it’s not secondary, but it’s flexible. I like it to be flexible because the people playing the composition are bringing different energies to the music.”

Whispering Flame (2017) is the second movement of the EarthSeed suite, a project commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago and co-written by Mitchell and Harris, an interdisciplinary artist who was the 2021 recipient of the Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever co-composed with anyone, and we really clicked,” Mitchell says. “It’s nice because Lisa will get to show her amazing power on stage as the vocalist for the performance, and also shine as the composer.”

EarthSeed’s texts were inspired by Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), speculative fiction that has grown in popularity and power along with our awareness of climate change. Set in the year 2024, Lauren Oya Olamina, an African American teen gifted with hyper-empathy, an ability to feel the emotions of others, attempts to survive post-apocalyptic California. She founds a religion she calls EarthSeed, collecting its holy texts into her Books of the Living.

In their suite, Mitchell and Harris have engaged in a kind of fan fiction, authoring Lauren’s holy book which does not exist as such in Butler’s novel. The dramatic fire and brimstone preaching captured in Whispering Flame, is about “transformation to truth,” Mitchell explains. “To really know yourself, there’s a fire that burns. You have to let go of parts of yourself that are holding you back and lies that you believe in or secrets that you’ve hidden. You have to burn them away to get to your true self.”

Procession Time (2017), for alto flute, bass clarinet, cello, and piano, is written in four movements, two of which will be performed this evening. It was inspired by the paintings of Norman Lewis (1909-79), in particular “Ritual,” which features a semicircle of flame-like, vertical figures against a deep blue background.

Mitchell was introduced to Lewis’s paintings by her godmother Jean Ann Durades. “She leads tours of the Black artists in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and her home is wall-to-wall paintings, including some by Norman Lewis,” Mitchell says. “She told me that my mom really liked his paintings and this one in particular. I saw a retrospective of Lewis’s work at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2016. He is one of the earliest African Americans celebrated as an abstract expressionist.”

A native of Harlem, Lewis learned to paint through industrial art courses in high school and regular visits to the Museum of Modern Art. His early works depict Black life, but these figurative scenes gradually loosened and dissolved into abstraction, like the canvases of his contemporaries Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning. Curator Ruth Fine of the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts describes Lewis’s post war years as “a very calligraphic period, where the use of line in fairly abstract terms for me reflects his interest in music.” Although his later paintings like “Ritual” are non-representational, they amass figures in assemblies full of movement and light.

“I was most interested in his fixation on the timelessness of ritual and procession, which we often see as ancient, but is actually a collective human activity that has continually expressed itself in a cyclic spectrum from celebratory to horrific,” writes Mitchell in her composer’s note. “These rituals have manifested throughout the ages as carnival, parade, protest, funeral march, dance party, birth ceremony, riot, lynch mob, and even witch-hunt. Procession Time is informed by Lewis’s ability to intricately articulate human movement and the emotions of jubilation and rage through texture, color and geometric form.”

The music, Mitchell says, possesses a “joyous, yet off-the-mark” quality. Asked how this manifests itself, Mitchell responds, “This piece is very composed. There’s not really any improvisation. Because it tries so hard, it seems like an ongoing struggle. And that’s not what life should be.”

Transitions Beyond was commissioned by Kamratōn and premiered at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh in 2021. Written as a combination of through-composed movements and graphic scoring, the work is dedicated to Interfaith minister and spoken word artist Calvin Bernard Gantt (1949-2021), Mitchell’s late husband.

In the album Who We Are (Black Earth Music, 2022), which the couple made together shortly before Gantt’s death, he offers an introduction of himself as a recent retiree who had worked for the Ford Motor Company, a teacher with the Chicago Public Schools system, and the Director of the Light House Youth Center. Unlike one of his contemporaries, who answered a question about his future plans by saying, “I ain’t gonna do nothin’. And I ain’t gonna do that ‘til 12 o’clock,” Gantt was ambitious. He was an organic farmer, a radio show host and self-published the book, As I Write, Right Now, all in the effort to inspire Oneness.

“The piece expresses the process of his transition as I witnessed it,” Mitchell explains, attributing a rawness to Transitions Beyond. It was the first piece she wrote after his death. “When someone we love is in that process of moving into the next realm—it’s the experience of what it is like for the person who’s left behind.

“My husband was extremely communicative,” she continues. “He talked for the whole last week before he died. He never went to sleep. I started writing down and recording the things he was saying, but I couldn’t make out what it meant. It was like he was trying to tell us what he was seeing, and also what he felt was important for us to do after he left. It was a mixture of vision and envisioning a future that he might not be a part of—or at least not a part of physically.”

Building Stuff (2015, rev. 2023), for an improvising ensemble, was recorded as part of a suite titled Moments of Fatherhood by Mitchell’s BEE with the French contemporary music group Ensemble Laborintus (Rogue Art, 2016). Commissioned by the French-American Jazz Exchange, the project’s point of departure was an exhibit put together by African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

At that historical moment, photography was being marshalled in a quest to undervalue Black Americans. In order to counter stereotypes prevalent in the media—pictures of African Americans as servants, sharecroppers living in poverty, and broken bodies in the so-called souvenir postcards from lynchings—Du Bois organized a display of over 300 pictures and data visualizations that demonstrated Black excellence. The pictures do not explicitly feature fathers and children, but union members, classes of college graduates, owners of businesses, companies of soldiers, sports teams, and church groups. They “bore urgent messages about Black American achievement, agency, and subjectivity,” write Jacqueline Francis and Stephen G. Hall in Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition (2019).

Mitchell calls the resulting collection of music a “cultural exchange and musical celebration of fathers that interweaves creative music with contemporary music. It’s very playful in its celebration. I put together an accompanying photo exhibit of slides of Black men as fathers to disrupt the stereotype of Black men not being present in their families.”

Inescapable Spiral (2017, rev. 2023), for a variable ensemble and open instrumentation, was originally written as an educational piece to be performed by a hybrid group with both student musicians and professionals. Commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble and performed by its members in a new version, it can contain up to as many as 20 sections of accessible miniatures, varying from thirty seconds to a minute a piece. Some are fully notated, while others use graphic notation, or leave spaces for the performers to freely improvise.

“Each one is a color,” Mitchell explains. “You can start with whichever one you want. You can rearrange them. You can repeat them. You never have to play it the same way twice. I made it so they overlap on top of each other. They’re not meant to be played end-to-end, but should seamlessly segue into each other, so they’re always in a state of transition.”

Mitchell’s color palette includes “Abalone,” “Aqua,” “Auburn,” “Charcoal,” “Cobalt,” “Gold,” “Indigo,” “Lavender,” “Magenta,” “Rust,” “Silver,” “Smoke,” “Sunburst,” and “Teal.” Inescapable Spiral refers to the inevitability that different stellar beings, pulled by gravity, will spiral into each other’s orbits.

For Mitchell, whose work is generous and open-ended, the music is in and of itself another dimension—an imagined location, a safe space, a place for liberation. It is a way to re-envision the world, to raise consciousness and reimagine our collective future. As she writes in the Mandorla Letters, “Visionary art does not appear practical, but it can help us fly.”

Mitchell says, “I believe that we can actually get somewhere. And I believe that we’re all looking for the same thing. We’re looking for peace, for belonging. We’re looking to feel a part of something—to feel in a sense that we matter.”

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