Nicole Mitchell
*Nicole Mitchell was born on February 17, 1967. She is a Black jazz flutist, composer, and professor.
Mitchell was born in Syracuse, New York, and moved to Anaheim, California, at eight. Her first instruments were piano and viola, which she started playing in fourth grade. She was classically trained in flute and played in youth orchestras as a teenager. Though she intended to major in computer science in college, she took a class in improvisation from Jimmy Cheatham at the University of California, San Diego. After two years, she transferred to Oberlin College in 1987, then moved to Chicago in 1990.
In Chicago, Mitchell performed on the streets and worked for Third World Press, a publisher of Black culture. She also met drummer Maia, bassist, sitarist, and storyteller Shanta Nurullah, who formed the all-female ensemble Samana and eventually joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Mitchell returned to school in 1993 and 1996, completing her degree at Chicago State University in 1998; she earned a master's degree from Northern Illinois University in 2000. 1995 Mitchell worked with Hamid Drake throughout the second half of the 1990s. In 1997, she established the Black Earth Ensemble.
After earning her degrees, Mitchell began teaching at schools around Chicago, holding positions at Northern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Northeastern Illinois University, Wheaton College, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the early 2000s, she became a co-host for the Avant-Garde Jazz Jam Sessions in Chicago. She issued her debut album, Vision Quest, with Black Earth Ensemble in 2001 on her label, Dreamtime Records. Vision Quest was expanded into a theater piece in 2003. In 2006, Mitchell worked in the group Frequency, and in 2017, she toured and recorded with the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
The Artifacts trio consists of Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, and Mike Reed—who released albums in 2015 and 2019. As of 2022, she has continued to use the Black Earth and Black Earth Ensemble names for many of her projects, including recordings. For example, in 2022, she led performances by Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth SWAY quartet. Mitchell joined the music department at the University of California, Irvine, as a professor 2013 in the Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology graduate program.
In 2019, she moved to the University of Pittsburgh as the Williams S. Dietrich II Chair of Jazz Studies and Professor of Music. Mitchell published her first book in 2022, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful, under the name Nicole Mitchell Gantt. That same year, she took on a position as a professor of music at the University of Virginia.
To Become a musician or Singer
To Become a Conductor or Composer
