Rooted and Revolutionary Keyboardist/Composer/Beatmaker GEORGIA ANNE MULDROW to Perform as Part of the August Wilson African-American Cultural Center’s Uhuru Jazz Sessions on Thursday, June 22, 7:0

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When the Los Angeles native Georgia Anne Muldrow came on the scene in 2006, she was a best-kept secret – an underground superheroine of sound, who combined J Dilla's breathtaking beats, George Clinton's P-funk, Nina Simone's truth-telling and Sun Ra's interstellar Afrofuturism. Twenty albums and EP's later, the secret is out, and today Muldrow is one of this century's most prolific and pioneering artists. Her towering talents will be on display when she performs in the latest installment of the Uhuru Jazz Sessions at The August Wilson African American Cultural Center (AWAACC), 980 Liberty Ave., in Pittsburgh on Thursday, June 22, 2023, 7:00 pm.
Uhuru Jazz Sessions are made possible with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Named for the Swahili word that translates to "freedom, " the Uhuru Jazz Sessions pay homage to jazz as the embodiment of freedom, improvisation, discovery, liberation, and promise. Supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the series also featured vocalist Vanisha Gould in February, saxophonist Tia Fuller and violinist Regina Carter in November and December, respectively. To complement each concert, AWAACC commissioned Philadelphia based visual artist Makeba Rainey to create an original work of art in celebration of the Uhuru Jazz Series and its powerful meaning. Rainey's art centers on marginalized voices within the Black community to provide a fuller, more nuanced view of the whole community and empower individuals by giving them autonomy over how their stories are told thus providing alternative potentialities for Black Liberation.

On her recordings, Muldrow crosses stylistic boundaries as easily as one walks across the street, as evidenced by her LP, Early, which yielded the moving, mid-tempo radio-friendly selections "Sunset" and "Run Away, " Kings Ballad, which contains the anthemic instrumental "Chocolate Reign, " and her Grammy-nominated 2018 release Overload, which features "Blam, " her defiant ode to Black self-defense. Her latest project is Jyoti III, her third album in a series featuring mostly avant-garde, electronica-oriented tracks (Jyoti is a pseudonym Muldrow uses).

The source of Muldrow's artistry is ancestral. She was born in 1983 to guitarist Ronald Muldrow, who played with saxophonist Eddie Harris, and her mother Rickie Byars sang with Sir Roland Hanna's New York Jazz Quartet, Pharoah Sanders and in the local church where her daughter also honed her piano and vocal skills. Muldrow was taught West African drumming by the famed percussionist masters Leon "Ndugu" Chancler and Babatunde Olatunji. She started performing professionally at 15, attended The New School in New York City where she met keyboardist Robert Glasper and singer Bilal, and moved back to L.A. after 9/11.

Muldrow has collaborated with many musicians including producer Adrian Younge, trumpeter Keyon Harrold, rapper Mos Def, and vocalists Brittany Howard and Erykah Badu. In 2017, she performed with pianist/composer Jason Moran, the Kennedy Center's artistic director for jazz, in a concert that showcased their reimagining of jazz bassist/composer Charles Mingus' music, which was broadcast on NPR's Jazz Night in America.

What Muldrow brings to the Uhuru Jazz Sessions is a complete, artistic and cultural commitment to her people. "Black music is my superpower. It's the music of my ancestors, " Muldrow says in The Guardian newspaper. "It's my way of showing love, paying homage, keeping sounds alive that sometimes people think are dead. It's reviving dead forms of music, and [honoring] them. That's the functionality of art."

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