Two-day residency from the transatlantic trio of Nicole Mitchell (flute), Tomeka Reid (cello) and Alexander Hawkins (piano) – operating in and around the worlds of free-jazz, composition, improvisation and experimental music.

Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader and educator. Initiallyemerging from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s, she currently leads a number of celebrated groups, including her Black Earth Ensemble. She has also regularly appeared alongside luminaries such as Ballake Sissoko,Bill Dixon,Geri Allen and performs with Art Ensemble of Chicago. She is a former president of the AACM.

Cellist and composer Tomeka Reid is one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians to have emerged from Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music scene over the last decade. Now based in New York, her distinctive melodic sensibility, usually braided to a strong sense of groove, has been featured in many distinguished ensembles over the years. Alongside her busy profile as a bandleader (the Tomeka Reid Quartet, Hear in Now), this versatility has seen her greatly in demand as a collaborator not only amongst her peers, but also an older generation, including figures such as Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell with whom she currently works in the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The Guardian newspaper has written that pianist/composer Alexander Hawkins’ work sounds like ‘all the future jazz you might imagine without ever being about to conceive of the details’, representing a ‘fundamental reassertion of composition within improvised music’. Alongside his profile as a soloist and bandleader, he can be heard live and on record collaborating with a vast array of crucial figures of all generations, ranging fromEvan Parker, John Surman, Wadada Leo Smith, Mulatu Astatke, and Han Bennink, to the likes of Rob Mazurek, Matana Roberts, and Shabaka Hutchings. Particularly notable is his decade-long relationship with the legendary South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo.