This program presents a mid-album preview concert for Exetastes, an original jazz album from composer and vocalist, Laura Chu Wiens (AurallaurA). The album is a tour-de-force, showcasing Laura’s expansive global influences. Tracks on Exetastesspotlight the blues, Latin, funk, bembe, and even traditional folk music from Mexico, the Balkans, and China, which are unified by Laura’s distinctive narrative lyric-writing. The Exetastes album tour will bring together six storied jazz musicians from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Morgantown to introduce AurallaurA as a vibrant new voice in the jazz composition scene.

Laura Chu Wiens (she/her), also known as AurallaurA, is a jazz composer and vocalist. She grew up in a biracial Chinese-American household, and having lived extensively overseas, is proficient in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Chu Wiens has studied and performed folk music in Chiapas, Mexico, township jazz in Cape Town, South Africa, Roma music in Belgrade, Serbia and Lisu minority folk music in Yunnan, China. Laura studied vocal jazz at Williams College, but her skills as a performer have been refined as a regular performing musician in the DC and Pittsburgh area over the last 17 years. She performs regularly with the group RML Jazz at festivals, performance venues and restaurants, and has previously fronted the big band The Jazz Conspiracy, Speak Low Jazz in the Washington DC region, and Lora and the Belgrade Boys in Serbia. Laura has also composed and performed vocal music for three BBC Radio 4 Dramas produced by the Prix Italia and Sony Gold Radio Academy Award-winning audio artist, Gregory Whitehead. Those pieces were broadcast nationally across the UK and at the Glasgow Radio Festival “Radiophrenia.”

Ellen Perkins: guitar, violin, backup vocals

An Alluring Night of Jazz with AurallaurA