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Internationally renowned Chicago flutist Nicole Mitchell
Nicole Mitchell, the prodigious Chicago flutist and composer, has mesmerized the jazz world, which has showered her in plaudits from critics in this country and Europe (not to mention her fellow musicians). Using her Black Earth Ensemble as a foundation for several offshoot projects, she has garnered impressive commissions; these, along with her muscular musicianship, have helped land her in every major jazz magazine throughout the world.
Friday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art (220 E. Chicago Ave.), Mitchell will present the eagerly anticipated Intergalactic Beings, the second of her compositions based on novels by the remarkable science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. The concert will feature the full complement of the Black Earth Ensemble, including (among others) reedist David Boykin, trumpeter David Young, and guitarist Jeff Parker (known to rock fans for his work in Tortoise).
Butler, who died in 2006, stood out like a badly disguised Tholian in the overwhelmingly white male ranks of science-fiction writers: an African-American, self-avowed lesbian, she nonetheless remains the only s-f writer to have received a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”). Her novels, particularly the Xenogenesis trilogy, are revered for their invention, focus, and refusal to compromise her vision for the sake of sentiment or false optimism.
Mitchell first tackled Butler’s work on her 2008 album Xenogenesis Suite, based on Dawn, the opening chapter of Xenogenesis. In it, Butler writes of non-humanoid extraterrestrials who save the earth and its surviving inhabitants from post-nuclear devastation, but must alter the human race in order to preserve it. Seen through the eyes of a human woman, the book overflows with bleak imagery and true terror. It starts with hell on earth and transfers it to hell in space.
“It’s one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read.” Mitchell explained. “The overall feeling is one of fear – fear and despair. And I wanted to be able to go through that process and face my own demons, through the music. It was a real challenge for me to make music in that direction, because I’m a fairly positive, optimistic person. For me . . . the awareness of suffering should bring empathy, and also should allow us to reflect on our lives as humans.”
Octavia Butler, author and muse
Chicago jazz history offers an obvious precedent for this intersection of music and science fiction. That, of course, would be Sun Ra, the mid-50s Chicago pianist and bandleader who claimed Saturn as his birthplace and famously “traveled the spaceways” in one of his signature songs.
And Mitchell has a somewhat mystical connection with Butler and her writing. “I met her in the fall of 2005 at a conference where she was speaking; I was familiar with her work because my mother had all her books. Her whole presence, her physical being – she was a very, very unusual person, and I could see how she could write the way she did. So I came up with the idea to do this project, and I applied for a grant from Chamber Music America; and the day after I put the application in the mail, she died. It was a real shock. And then I thought, ‘Now I have to do this project.’”
The MCA program should be a little brighter than the dark, dense, enveloping music Mitchell recorded on Xenogenesis Suite. This prediction stems from Mitchell’s fealty to the specific aspects of each novel in Butler’s trilogy; the new Intergalactic Beings focuses on the second book in the series, Adulthood Rites, and as Mitchell cheerfully points out, “That one’s a little less bleak.”
Even when depicting difficult emotions, Mitchell’s music shines with strong colors, Afrocentric rhythms, and a powerful but uncompromising lyricism, drawn from a deep reserve of training in both jazz and classical idioms. I for one can’t wait to hear what she’s come up with.
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