A rare, intimate afternoon honoring one of America’s most visionary musical voices. NEA Jazz Master and Jazz Foundation Fellow Amina Claudine Myers invites audiences into a forty-year auditory odyssey through her remarkable discography—an evolving soundscape that merges gospel’s sanctified fervor, the improvisational spirit of jazz, and the radical experimentation born of the Black Arts Movement. This is not a concert in the traditional sense but an immersive listening salon—part oral history, part ritual. Myers herself will guide the audience through recordings, stories, and memories that trace her journey from Chicago’s AACM to international stages. Listeners are encouraged to move freely through the space, letting the music, conversation, food, and drink create a living, breathing continuum of celebration and reflection. Amina Claudine Myers has long been a singular presence in contemporary music—a composer, pianist, and vocalist who redefined the relationship between sacred and avant-garde traditions. Her voice and piano speak in tongues of ancestry and invention; her compositions are sonic sermons, meditations on liberation, and acts of Black feminist imagination. This celebration is both retrospective and living testimony: a communal act of listening to one of the great architects of modern sound tell her own story—in rhythm, in memory, and in grace

 


ABOUT THE ARTIST

Amina Claudine Myers is a pioneering figure in American music whose work bridges the spiritual traditions of gospel, the improvisational power of jazz, and the avant-garde experimentation of the Black Arts Movement. Emerging from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, Myers developed a sound rooted in both the sanctified church and radical innovation, using voice and piano as instruments of deep emotional and cultural expression. Her compositions—whether sacred works, theatrical collaborations, or free improvisations—carry an ancestral resonance that reclaims Black womanhood as a site of divine creativity and political strength. Through her fearless blending of genres and her mentorship of younger artists, Myers has expanded the vocabulary of jazz, proving that music can be both a testimony and a revolution, a prayer and a performance of liberation.