When Nicole Mitchell fell in love with jazz, she fell hard. It was 1986, and she was in her second year of college. She’d been studying classical flute since age 15 and played in two different youth orchestras. But then she took a class in jazz improvisation from the great trombonist Jimmy Cheatham, and within months she was spending most of her free time on the streets of San Diego, improvising for spare change.
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After high school Mitchell wanted to get as far away from California as possible, but her father was protective of her–her mother had died when she was 16–and insisted that she go no further than the University of California in San Diego. He supported her pursuit of music–she’d started on piano and viola in fourth grade–but he’d also encouraged her aptitude for math, and she initially declared as a math major. Nevertheless she spent most of her spare hours playing her flute in the university’s practice rooms, and in a few months she switched her major to music.
Still, she grew increasingly focused on jazz. Cheatham introduced her to the recordings of Eric Dolphy, who played flute as well as saxophone and clarinet, and a visit to his class by jazz flutist James Newton blew her away. “I didn’t think there was anything else possible on the flute after hearing him,” she says.
Among them were reedist Douglas Ewart and flutist Maia, both members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an influential Chicago collective founded in the early 60s that emphasizes artistic and financial autonomy and has launched the likes of Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Within the year Mitchell and Maia were playing together in Samana, the first all-female group in the AACM’s history.
“We got together and played, just the two of us,” Boykin says of their first rehearsal. “On very few occasions when you’re playing with someone you literally feel afraid, frightened. And the other thing you can feel is amazement, just standing around in awe. What I felt was kind of a combination of the two. What it meant for me was how much I was going to have to improve. I thought I was working hard before, but now I had to work that much harder. I asked her to sit in with me right after that. I knew right off the bat that we were going to be working together.”
Parker is part of a pool of about 30 musicians Mitchell draws from for the Black Earth groups, many of whom–notably violinist Savoir Faire, trombonist Tony Herrera, and cellist Tomeka Reid–have developed significantly under her tutelage. And her teaching isn’t confined to her bands: Since last fall she’s been a part-time instructor at Wheaton College and UIC, and over the past six years she’s held similar posts at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State, and Northern Illinois University, where she earned her master’s in 2000. For the past two years she’s been copresident of the AACM–the first woman to hold the position–and in 2006 she founded the AACM Creative Youth Ensemble. She also does outreach work in three public elementary schools through a program organized by Ravinia.
