Nicole Mitchell & Joe Westerlund

Nicole Mitchell & Joe Westerlund pairs two players from different corners of improvised music. Mitchell came up in Chicago's creative music scene, led the Black Earth Ensemble and served as the first woman president of the AACM. Her large-scale work often draws on speculative fiction, most notably the Xenogenesis Suite, built around the writing of Octavia Butler. She has also spent years teaching, with posts at UC Irvine and the University of Pittsburgh.

Westerlund is a North Carolina drummer best known from the Durham band Megafaun, and before that DeYarmond Edison, the group he shared with Justin Vernon and the Cook brothers. His own project, Grandma Sparrow, leans toward the playful and theatrical. Together the two work without fixed charts, with flute lines and loose, textural percussion trading direction as the pieces unfold.