Nicole Mitchell, Next Jazz Legacy Showcase, Billy Mohler Quartet, and TC3 with Bennie Maupin

Angel City Jazz Festival

The Angel City Jazz Festival —  LA’s most adventurous jazz festival — was conceived in 2008 as a vehicle to present the best contemporary West Coast jazz and beyond.

Since then the festival has grown into an essential multi-day celebration of creative jazz from around the world, at some of the most exciting and prestigious venues in LA, such as, LACMA, the World Stage, REDCAT at Disney Hall, 2220 Arts, the Moss Theater, and Zebulon.

The festival is presented by Angel City Arts, a nonprofit organization committed to cultivating and revitalizing jazz culture in Los Angeles by producing concerts by established and emerging music innovators who have brought forward a significant contribution to the evolution of jazz and improvised music.  

The Angel City Jazz Festival consistently features the most innovative and original musicians working today, balancing established artists with emerging talent and focusing on West Coast creative jazz, past, present, and future.

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Next Jazz Legacy

Focused on increasing opportunities for musicians who are most underrepresented in the art form, Next Jazz Legacy, the three-year, national program launched by New Music USA and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice — with major funding from the Mellon Foundation — invests in awardees through personalized apprenticeships, financial support, and a mission to inspire waves of lasting change.

Combining individual and group learning opportunities with a comprehensive support package designed to deliver deep impacts on every candidate’s career, awardees receive $10,000, performance opportunities with master bandleaders, two-way mentorship, a learning cohort, and professional promotional support.

With gender and racial justice as guiding principles, Next Jazz Legacy awardees are chosen through an open call process and a meticulous months-long review by a distinguished and diverse panel of jazz luminaries, chaired by NEA Jazz Master and Next Jazz Legacy’s Artistic Director Terri Lyne Carrington. Once the seven awardees are selected, Carrington and the Next Jazz Legacy team work closely with each of the seven musicians to match them with a pair of master bandleaders for a yearlong performance apprenticeship, as well as an additional creative mentorship, both aligned with the awardees’ unique interests.

Alongside Terri Lyne Carrington, the selection committee for the 2023 Next Jazz Legacy cohort included JD Allen, Tanya Darby, Caroline Davis, Carlos Henriquez, Brian Lynch, Allison Miller, Rufus Reid, Matthew Stevens, Camille Thurman, and more. Over the next three years, Next Jazz Legacy will be guided by an advisory board that includes artists Gerald Clayton and Kris Davis as well as representatives from institutions, such as Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, NPR, WBGO, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, New York Winter Jazz Festival, and beyond.

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Nicole Mitchell

Nicole Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader, and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by DownBeat Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late ’90s. She started with Maia and Shanta Nurullah in Samana (the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians’ first all-woman ensemble) and as a member of the David Boykin Expanse. Her music celebrates contemporary African American culture. She is the founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections, and Ice Crystal.And she composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression.

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Billy Mohler

Billy Mohler is an exploratory jazz bassist who has also amassed wide-ranging credits in the pop world as a Grammy-nominated writer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and session player, working with Dolly Parton, Macy Gray, Lady Gaga, Nile Rogers, Sia, Awolnation, Mavis Staples, Kelly Clarkson, Steven Tyler, Jon Brion, and a host of others. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Mohler attended the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz as one of only five students, studying with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and other luminaries. His 2019 debut Focus, hailed by Nextbop.com as “an incredibly free, unconstrained, and inventive record filled with exciting twists and turns and constant detours,” marked the auspicious start of his quartet, featuring tenor saxophonist Chris Speed and Kneebody members Shane Endsley (trumpet) and Mohler’s childhood friend, Nate Wood (drums). The group has followed up with its 2022 sophomore release Anatomy, a sonically inventive effort that highlights the players’ loose, raw, indeterminate chemistry as well as Mohler’s rough-hewn, insistently rhythmic compositions.

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Todd Cochran

Growing up, Todd Cochran found a middle ground between the dimensions of the intellectual and spiritual when he discovered jazz music. His parents and grandparents were highly educated and motivated him to become the same. That led to his serious investment in classical piano study; performing and entering competitions when he was just 8 years old. His cousin introduced him to jazz at 13, and Cochran found a parallel, magnetizing pulse. He began to revisit his parents’ collection of Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, and Ahmad Jamal recordings, transcribing and analyzing them so he could apply their lessons to his own music. It wasn’t long before Cochran was reaching out to local jazz leaders.

A San Francisco native, with formative school days in the ’60s and college and coming of age in the ’70s, Cochran is a product of the dynamic convergence of attitudes and sociocultural revolution. His hometown was the frontline at a pivotal time in American music history, and the visionary principles of the era influenced his worldview and the trajectory of his pursuits. At just 17 years old, he found himself performing alongside jazz masters John Handy, Mike Nock, and later, Bobby Hutcherson, Woody Shaw, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Herbie Hancock, Julian Priester, and Eddie Henderson.

Though his own music would branch out dramatically from his earliest jazz grounding, Cochran always remained in touch with the blues element of the music. Now after a 10-year hiatus from recording while nurturing his son into adulthood, Cochran has returned to the music that has given him so much joy and that he feels is necessary to reinvest in for the betterment of society.

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Bennie Maupin

Bennie Maupin is an American jazz multireedist who performs on various saxophones, flute, and bass clarinet. Maupin was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States. He is known for his participation in Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet and Headhunters band, and for performing on Miles Davis’s seminal fusion record, Bitches Brew. Maupin has collaborated with Horace Silver, Roy Haynes, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan and many others. He is noted for having a harmonically-advanced, “out” improvisation style, while having a different sense of melodic direction than other “out” jazz musicians such as Eric Dolphy.

Next Jazz Legacy Showcase

Voice: Anais Maviel

Trumpet: Milena Casado

Saxophone: Neta Raanan

Keys: Anastassiya Petrova 

Trombone: Kalia Vandever

Guitar: Keyanna Hutchinson

Bass: Anna Butters

Drums: Ivanna Cuesta

Nicole Mitchell’s Images Beyond 

Artist and Poet: Joan Beard Mitchell

Performer: Maia

Music Composer: Nicole Mitchell

Flute: Nicole Mitchell 

Guitar: Jeff Parker 

Cello: Maggie Parkins 

Violin: Jeff Gauthier 

Bass: Anna Butters 

Percussion: Rajna Swaminathan 

Billy Mohler Quartet

Bass: Billy Mohler

Tenor Saxophone: Mark Turner

Trumpet: Shane Endlsey

Drums: Jonathan Pinson

TC3 with Hubert Laws

Piano: Todd Cohran

Bass: John Leftwich

Drums: Lyndon Rochelle

Flute: Hubert Laws