Zachary Mowitz & Juantio Becenti
2025
This summer Juantio Becenti will complete a new work for viola, cello, and soprano engaging with water rights, water history, and the Navajo. This is part of a series of works that LA Phil cellist Zachary Mowitz is commissioning as part of Nodality Music’s Climate Commissioning Initiative, a project prompting composers around the world to create music that emboldens listeners to process the realities of climate change and examine their own relationship with the natural world. The world premiere will take place this September at Western University in London, ON, performed by Mowitz, violist Sharon Wei, and soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon.
Morayo
2025
A Hundred Miles” is an Afro-Eclectic single that blends Afrobeat and folk influences to tell a story of longing, memory, and liberation. The project aims to amplify cultural storytelling through rich acoustic textures and ancestral rhythms.
William Roper
2025
The Scalene Triangle project brings together three improvising artists (William Roper, Randal Fisher, Devin Daniels), of different generations, forming a performing unit adept in several styles of improvisation. Through a collaborative process, Roper will create three graphic scores that reflect the similarities and differences of their coming of age as African Americans in South Central Los Angeles, in different eras.
Rahsaan Barber
2025
"Flowers for Maceo" is a jazz/funk recording project led by saxophonist/composer Rahsaan Barber in celebration of legendary saxophonist Maceo Parker. The project will feature performances by upcoming musicians who, like Parker, hail from or reside in North Carolina.
Nick Finzer
2025
The Jazz Soloist with String Orchestra concept, pioneered by Charlie Parker, has been embraced by many jazz artists, yet the trombone is rarely featured in this context. Notable exceptions include Jack Teagarden's "Think Well of Me" and Curtis Fuller's "Cabin in the Sky." My new project, “Threads,” aims to collaborate with GRAMMY-Winning Producer/Composer Ryan Truesdell to compose a piece for Trombone and String Orchestra that transcends traditional jazz arrangements, inspired by adventurous projects like Stan Getz/Eddie Sauter’s “Focus” album.
Monica Shriver
2025
“Jazz Influences and V.I.C.E. V.E.R.S.A.” is a three-part immersive series featuring experimental jazz and projected abstract art designed to explore how playing jazz influences (and values) Vulnerability, Improvisation, Collaboration, Exploration, Versatility, Experimentation, Representation, Space, Authenticity and how those values influence playing jazz, historically and currently.
Mina Choi
2025
"Home" is the second studio album by the MINA CHOI Orchestra, featuring renowned artists, Terell Stafford and Jon Cowherd. This project presents a diverse collection of music and narratives composed for a 19-piece big band. It reflects Mina Choi’s personal journey as a Korean immigrant, capturing profound themes of struggle, longing, and self-discovery. Through her music, Mina aspires to connect with others and to share messages of hope and love.
Kayla Verse
2025
Kayla Verse’s upcoming project: Telensia, City of AI is a cyberpunk visual album centered around the tensions between humans, AI, and otherworldly beings in a sci-fi fantasy story world. Listeners will hear themes of Pop, Alternative, Techno, Trip hop, and more in this immersive concept album full of danceable tracks and dark dramatic ballads.
Micheal J. Hall
2025
Red Clay 2 is the soulful second installment of Micheal J. Hall's community-themed album series. A collaborative project, this new work illuminates the beautiful struggle of community by exploring themes of pride, joy, and anguish; it highlights artists with deep connections to the singer/songwriter's home state of Mississippi.
Michael Gancz
2025
'this latent space' is the first project from multimedia collaborative trio Answer in Spades (Michael Gancz — composer and engineer, Aloïs Tirard — visual artist, and Chi S Tsu — writer). A new composition in the guise of a point-and-click video game, this piece employs nonlinear storytelling, real-time composition, and a blurred sense of agency in order to explore the emotional nuance of a society governed by machine intelligence.
Melvis Santa
2025
“Vinho e Mel” is a poetic wordplay that gives name to a duet by composer/performer collaborators Melvis Santa (singer/multi instrumentalist. Cuba) and Vinicius Gomes (guitarist/arranger. Brazil). Through a selection of new compositions and reimagined classics the artists will record an album that explore indigenous and alien sonic spaces, drawing inspiration from each other’s cultural roots, and reflecting on their journey as immigrant independent musicians based in Brooklyn NY - the inspiring as well as challenging landscape that brought them together.
Melanie DeMore
2025
Melanie DeMore, vocal activist, is creating music using the stories of the folks who live and thrive in the Tenderloin despite all the odds.
Matthew Holmes
2025
This is a new interdisciplinary work combining interviews from fringe ecologists and improvisational compositions by experimental musicians in four movements entitled “Ecological Thinking”. This is a collaboration with Andre Raiah, a sound creator known as Brown Calvin, and with Grammy-winning trombonist Denzel Mendoza of Illegal Son.
Majid Khaliq
2025
Collaborator: No Looking Back. The King Zodiac Project is a transformative sonic journey, merging jazz, classical, electronic, and rock to tell the story of an early Martin Luther King Jr.'s spiritual awakening. Composed by Majid Khaliq, the project explores his growth from birth to young manhood, guided by mysticism and ancestral wisdom. The first, "The Genesis of Michael King Jr.," portrays his early life as the son of a sharecropper, burdened by a prophecy that will shape history. The second, The Quickening of Amun – Martin’s Violin, highlights the development of Martin’s musical talents and intellectual growth, laying the foundation for his future. The final movement, Luther’s Moonwalk into the House of Moors, represents his evolution at Morehouse College, where he embraces his purpose and vision for justice, stepping into his legacy as a leader.
Lucas Tahiruzzaman Syed & Ms. Zilbert
2025
What do Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Pride, and 4/20 all have in common? They are all celebrated with original songs by Ms. Zilbert and Lucas Tahiruzzaman Syed in their debut EP, “The High Holy Days.”
Lea Bertucci
2025
"The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity" is a new composition for early flutes and multichannel sound. Featuring medieval flutist, Norbert Rodenkirchen, the piece catapults ancient music into a mesmeric present.
Layale Chaker
2025
Enheduanna, Layale Chaker's forthcoming second opera, is conceived like an experiment in feminist utopia - a reimagination of a world anew - through birth, and rebirth, of text. This piece unearths the life of Enheduanna, a Sumerian priestess and the first named poet in history, transposing her into a modern unnamed landscape where young women are rising against the state of the world.
Kiazi Malonga
2025
EPA to DRC, an original chamber music piece by composer Kiazi Malonga, sheds light on the parallels between Silicon Valley’s exploitation of the Black community of East Palo Alto for its cheap property and labor, just as in the Democratic Republic of Congo for its cheap cobalt and labor.
Kelly Schenk
2025
"Seagulls" is a recording project by Kelly Schenk, created in collaboration with producer Sahil Ansari, aiming to capture themes of control, queer acceptance, and making peace with change. Inspired by the natural imagery of Kelly's Pacific Northwest upbringing, the project embraces an organic and contemporary folk soundscape, brought to life with exceptional local musicians.
Karen Joyce
2025
Take Kare is a project by Northeast LA-based Filipinx-Chinese artist, Karen Joyce and aims to remind listeners of the validity of their own feelings and the power of our interconnected existence. Blending dream pop, jazz, and indie rock soundscapes, Take Kare's music transmits an emotive intensity, which is tempered with self-awareness, and a sincere hope for healing.
Justine F. Chen
2025
SISTERS OF THE STORM is a chamber opera that centers queer identity, dementia, euthanasia, and inter-generational trauma while decolonizing Shakespeare’s King Lear through an all-female Asian American family.
Julia Rocha-Nava
2025
Julia Rocha-Nava, who leads the collaborative music project Chispa, is a vocalist, producer, educator, and land steward. Their debut album "Somos Medicina" tells stories of composting systems of oppression, reconnecting with the land, and channeling the transformative power of queer love. Drawing on music traditions from Latin American and the Caribbean—including Cumbia, Bolero, Bomba, and Son Jarocho—the album offers love songs for the land and the people who tend it.
SHE MONSTER
2025
SHE MONSTER is a new music-theater collaboration between composer Juhi Bansal, performer Laura Bohn, and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann that explores the archetype of the mythic monstrous female and asks: What happens when we embrace the strange, empowering ourselves to harness ferocity in order to grapple with trauma and loss, and catalyze transformation?
Josiah Tayag Catalan
2025
This composition project in collaboration with the Del Sol String Quartet will be centered around the Filipino Immigration experience, specifically centered around California and the San Francisco Bay Area. Through researching and investigating documentation of these experiences along with interviews conducted with members of the community, I will use these materials to create a new multimedia experience that will be premiered at the Angel Island Immigration Station.
Joseph Bohigian
2025
I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment is an evening-length work for live electronics, voice, and projections about the life of Georgian-born Soviet-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov. It is a collaboration between composer Joseph Bohigian, vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian, and Ensemble Decipher.
Jeong Lim Yang
2025
With a background rooted in native South Korean culture, bassist and composer Jeong Lim Yang infuses her music with a distinctive traditional Korean folk theme and ambiance echoing the nuances of colloquial language. The ensemble looks to breakout of the classic jazz piano trio format, they aim to explore each instrument both technically and creatively, by incorporating innovative improvisational techniques that capture an Eastern sensibility.
J.R. Rhodes
2025
Free Folk is a dynamic collaboration between Melanie Dyer, Gwendolyn Laster, and J.R. Rhodes, three African American women artists who blend folk traditions with improvisational music to explore musical traditions alongside personal and collective narratives. Their work honors the creative legacies of people of color—highlighting the voices, stories, and artistry of women—through a resonant sound rooted in storytelling, healing, and cultural expression.
Jane Ira Bloom
2025
Nothing Stands Still Jazz soprano saxophonist/ composer Jane Ira Bloom collaborates with immersive audio engineer Ulrike Schwarz to find new directions in recorded music for improvising musicians that heightens the impact of high fidelity surround sound. Bloom captures the poetry she imagines of soaring in space and Schwarz expands the sensory event with ground breaking recording technology.
