Keep Your Mind Free features performances by Damon Locks, Tomeka Reid, Nicole Mitchell and Jeff Parker, with videos by Nzingha Kendall, Foolish Mortal and Lucie Romero.
Join ESS for our summer gala! With performances by Tortoise, Helen Gillet with Kim Alpert, TALsounds, and Jeff Parker/Ben LaMar Gay/Tomeka Reid, this is a line up you do not want to miss. All proceeds go directly back into our programs, supporting the artists we work with and helping ESS continue to make space for creative experimentation.
Celebrate cellist-composer-educator TOMEKA REID, the 2017 "Jazz Hero" of Chicago as organized by the Jazz Journalists Association and local contacts — one of 20 celebrations of Jazz Heroes throughout the U.S.
In collaboration with the Rebuild Foundation's Black Cinema House and Chicago Film Archives, ESS is proud to present a pilot project of live music/sound performances with cinema.In two mini-residencies, two pairs of collaborating sound/music artists will each spend 4 to 6 weeks studying and working with several short films selected from CFA’s extensive vault.
In collaboration with the Rebuild Foundation's Black Cinema House and Chicago Film Archives, ESS is proud to present a pilot project of live music/sound performances with cinema.In two mini-residencies, two pairs of collaborating sound/music artists will each spend 4 to 6 weeks studying and working with several short films selected from CFA’s extensive vault.
HEAR in NOW is a collaborative trio performing primarily original jazz-tinged avant-classical compositions. Originally brought together in the winter of 2009 by an Italian concert promoter for the WomaJazz festival in Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy, the trio, feeling a great sense of musical chemistry, have since kept the momentum going. Residing in three separate locales, the women of Hear in Now bring together elements from their indivIdual regions for a unique sound experience by exploring free improvisation along with through-composed pieces.
Rather than using the Sun Ra/El Saturn Commission to comment on the life and work of Sun Ra, drummer Mike Reed decided to focus on one particular tape in the Archive (labeled "NY 1961"), more interested in using someone's discarded musical ideas as source material for entirely new music—regardless of whose ideas they happen to be.
