BREATH: A Steadying Exhalation

May
11:00pm
BREATH: A Steadying Exhalation

By City of Asylum
The final week of Jazz Poetry Month begins with a deep breath, a respite ushered in by the Dyer Rosenbloom Kitamura Trio. They share the stage with acclaimed poets Sumita Chakraborty, Rosebud Ben-Oni, and Poet Laureate of Allegheny County, Doralee Brooks. Amid the liveliness and bustling energy of this month, this program offers a pause, a moment to inhale and consider the power of breath. The careful blending of these artists’ odes and bows and piano keys creates a space for introspection before the bustle and entropy of the world returns.
About the Musicians:
The Dyer Rosenbloom Kitamura trio presents original improvised works that evince a deep connection and expansive dialogue between three skilled musicians.
Melanie Dyer(viola) is the leader of the ensemble WeFreeStrings. She has performed with Sun Ra Arkestra under Marshall Allen, William Parker, James Brandon Lewis, Gwen Laster’s New Muse 4tet, Henry Grimes, Tulivu Donna Cumberbatch, Nona Hendryx, Joe Bonner, Reggie Workman, Howard Johnson, David Haney, and many other notable musicians in Europe, South Africa, and the U.S.
Mara Rosenbloom (piano) leads both The Mara Rosenbloom Trio (feat: Sean Conly & Chad Taylor) and Flyways, a trio featuring Anais Mavïel & Rashaan Carter. In 2020, The Mara Rosenbloom Trio received The Chamber Music America Performance Plus Grant, with support from The New York Community Trust & The Doris Duke Foundation. Mara is also a member of William Hooker's Quartet MOON, The Katie Bull Project, and Dawn Drake's global funk ensemble ZapOte, and continues to perform with a variety of musicians across genres, including William Parker, Cooper-Moore, Sam Newsome, Ras Moshe Burnett, and many others. Her mentors at the piano include the incomparable Cooper-Moore and the late improvising pianist and life force Connie Crothers.
Kyoko Kitamura (bass) is a vocal improviser, bandleader, composer, and educator based in Brooklyn. She leads her ensemble Tidepool Fauna (featuring saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Dayeon Seok), co-leads Geometry (with Taylor Ho Bynum, Joe Morris, Tomeka Reid) and is an active side person with recent appearances on albums by William Parker, Cory Smythe, and Russ Lossing for which she has garnered stellar reviews. Kyoto is also known for her decade-long association with legendary musician, composer, and thinker Anthony Braxton and is featured on many of his releases including GTM (Syntax) 2017, the 12-hour recording of his vocal works performed by the Tri-Centric Vocal Ensemble which she directed and co-produced.
About the Poets:
Sumita Chakraborty (she/her) is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Arrow, was praised in the New York Times as an “allusive and witty debut.” Her first scholarly book, tentatively titled Grave Dangers: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene, is in progress. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, and elsewhere. Her essays most recently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation; in 2018, her poem “And death demands a labor” was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation (UK); and in 2020, she became a Kundiman Fellow (deferred to 2021 due to COVID-19). She is a graduate of Wellesley College, where she received her BA, and she received her doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.
Rosebud Ben-Oni (she/her) is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery, which won the Alice James Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and City Artists Corps, among others. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Society of America (PSA), and Electric Literature, to name a few. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark'' was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace" for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appeared on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel, VH1 and many others. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day as part of “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust.”
Doralee Brooks (she/her) is a professor emerita at the Community College of Allegheny County in Developmental Studies and a Madwoman in the Attic instructor for Carlow University. She is a fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project (‘95) and Cave Canem (‘97 and ‘99). She holds an MEd from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Carlow University. Her poems have appeared in Voices from the Attic, Paterson Literary Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Dos Passos Review, among others. Doralee’s chapbook, When I Hold You Up to the Light, won the 2019 Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Contest published by Main Street Rag. She is City of Asylum’s Poet Laureate of Allegheny County 2022–2024.
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