Top live show
Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble
Chicago Cultural Center; Fri 7
TimeOut Chicago by Matthew Lurie
Octavia Butler’s newest advocate isn’t a novelist, literary critic or gender-studies professor. The acclaimed science fiction author and MacArthur “genius” grant winner, who died a year ago, has found a champion in Chicago flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell. And the affinity between author and flutist isn’t all that hard to understand: Both are black women, raised in California, who have established significant voices in fields (science fiction, creative music) previously dominated by white men. And like Sun Ra before them, both are Afro-futurists.
In the specific Xenogenesis trilogy to which Mitchell pays tribute (reissued in 2000 as Lilith’s Brood), the alien Oankali race rescues Earth in the aftermath of nuclear war, resurrecting a black woman (Lilith) with the goal of populating the planet with human/Oankalihybrids. Drawing on the deep well of AACM-informed incidental percussion and sound art, Mitchell’s frontline of flute, sax, trumpet and cello should conjure some NASA-approved weirdness.
Tonight’s premiere of Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler caps a whirlwind summer for Mitchell, including Xenogenesis’ New York premiere at the avant-garde Vision Festival, the dazzling Many Paths to the Sea: A Tribute to Alice Coltrane at Millennium Park and a tribute to her father at Downtown Sound Gallery last month. Tonight also serves as a CD release for Black Earth Ensemble’s first live recording, Black Unstoppable (Delmark). Strong contributions from up-and-coming pianist Justin Dillard add new power to the group’s Afrobeat funk and pastoral space-outs. If only every high-achieving author had a champion this imaginative.
— Matthew Lurie