Nicole Mitchell - The bridge builder

Christian Broecking Award for Arts Education 2024

 

This year, Enjoy Jazz is presenting the Christian Broecking Award for Arts Education, endowed with 10,000 euros, for the second time in cooperation with the Manfred Lautenschläger Foundation.  

An internationally renowned jury was appointed for the award: Aida Baghernejad (cultural journalist and blogger, Berlin), Maxi Broecking (cultural journalist and publisher, Berlin), Prof. Terri Lyne Carrington (Christian Broecking Award 2023; musician, composer and producer; founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, Boston, MA), Sarah Johnson (Director of the Weill Music Institute, Chief Education Officer of Carnegie Hall, NYC), Rainer Kern (founder and artistic director of the Enjoy Jazz Festival, Heidelberg), Prof. George Lewis (composer and Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Composition and Music History, Columbia University, NYC), Prof. Doris Sommer (Ira Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Director of the Graduate Program in Spanish, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA). Based on a shortlist drawn up by the jury itself, the seven jurors decided in a joint meeting to award the Christian Broecking Award for Arts Education 2024 to the flutist, composer, university lecturer and music functionary Nicole Mitchell.

Mitchell was not only the first woman to head the influential Chicago Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). She has also been involved in jazz education and outreach for many years and in a variety of ways.
-education and outreach. The award-winning artist is Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, previously taught at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Pittsburgh and was co-director of the Avant-Garde Jazz Jam Sessions in Chicago. Among other things, the flautist and composer co-founded the all-female band Samana and formed an influential duo with drummer Hamid Drake.

Nicole Mitchell's music is characterized in particular by the fact that she, as she herself puts it, "creates visionary worlds that build a bridge between the familiar and the unknown". She owes her ability to do this to her mother, who painted and wrote, allowing ideas from other worlds to take shape in front of little Nicole. "She showed me," Mitchell recalls, "how to create a combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar or the unprecedented out of emptiness or nothingness with the power of creativity - be it with music, visual art or by writing a story." Nicole Mitchell's favorite image, you guessed it, is that of the bridge. She keeps coming back to it in conversations. She explains this by saying that at first we always have a supposedly clear and secure point of view with our thoughts, our perception, our understanding of the world. But suddenly, through inspiration, but sometimes also through fears, something breaks open and we realize that there is literally another side, something new, something that questions our own point of view. Suddenly there is a gap that needs to be bridged.
"That's what I'm looking for when I improvise," says Mitchell: "That's why I love improvising. Because improvisation is a practice that allows you not to focus on the smallness of your own being and reality, but to actually experience the greatness of possibility, surprise and spontaneity." In her music, Nicole Mitchell is constantly building bridges to this other.

And when she talks about her work for the AACM, she also uses the image of building bridges as a personal signature. "For some years now, I have seen myself as a bridge between two generations. We have a core of members who are about fifteen to twenty years older than me, and then there are the new members who are in their twenties and thirties, so ten to fifteen years younger than me. I'm right in between! I've tried to help develop the connection between these two very different groups who have different ways of looking at themselves and the world."

Nicole Mitchell is also a passionate teacher with a highly developed feel for topics such as intersectionality and empowerment. She herself once described it this way: "In terms of empowering young women, I like to work with lyrics that speak to their concerns. There is simply no music for them! You know, I'm a mom and my daughter is a teenager. Half the music she listens to I want to turn off because it's all about things like 'going to the club' and all this stuff that has nothing to do with the natural reality of a 14-year-old's life." As a university professor, she also questions established structures: "I want to encourage my students to compose as much as possible, but also to explore themselves better through journaling and other forms of art, because all of that ends up being reflected in the accuracy of musical expression."

Incidentally, the Broecking Award closes a small circle. The award's namesake, the music sociologist Christian Broecking, who died in 2021 and was an unforgotten friend of our festival, himself conducted interviews with Nicole Mitchell, for example for his book "Jeder Ton eine Rettungsstation" (Every note a rescue station), which is unfortunately currently out of print. We are sure that he would have very much welcomed the choice of this extraordinary musician and music educator.

Nicole Mitchell can be experienced live at Enjoy Jazz as part of the magnificent Artifacts Trio: at the Alte Feuerwache on Tuesday, October 8, at 8 pm. Before the concert, the Broecking Award will be presented to the artist.