The multigenerational “Afro-Folk-Futurism” outfit Black Earth SWAY is the latest expression of the creative flutist, composer, conceptualist, bandleader and educator Nicole Mitchell, in collaboration with “sister friends” JoVia Armstrong, Coco Elysses, and Alexis Lombre. Joined by creative connections to Chicago, and envisioned by Mitchell as a “platform [for] new mythologies in Black American storytelling in a liquid melding of funk, blues, [and] experimental jazz,” BES is at once an expression of the group’s collective musical preoccupations—”realness, joy and honesty,” in Mitchell’s words—and a laboratory for Black feminist liberation in music. 

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Comprising four remarkable artists, each well-known for her own performance projects, the band showcases the storytelling of Coco Elysses on the diddley bow; percussionist JoVia Armstrong on an original cajon set (a box drum with cymbals); Alexis Lombre handling dual roles on a Nord keyboard and acoustic piano; and Nicole’s otherworldly electronics and processed flute. 

Black Earth SWAY’s accessible yet changeable grooves glimmer with the sci-fi Afrofuturism that characterizes Nicole’s other projects, but the band’s grounded sense of individuated experimentation springs from a group devotion: to a space for four supremely talented and continually-evolving musicians to, in Alexis’ words, “just play free.”