Jamie Baum Septet+ with Guest Vocalist Aubrey Johnson at Chelsea Table + Stage

This new project by composer/flutist Jamie Baum, composed for her critically-acclaimed Jamie Baum Septet+ and guest vocalists utilizes texts by women poets (i.e., Marge Piercy, Tracy K. Smith, Naomi Shihab Nye, etc.) in a modern jazz setting to illustrate the palpable, personal and communal experience of living in the time of Covid-19 (and simultaneous socio-political movement) and its abrupt transformation of our world. From her Hell’s Kitchen, NYC perspective (initially the US “epicenter” of Covid-19), Baum looked to other artistic platforms for hope, solace and inspiration. One such example was Bill Moyers’ website series, “A Poet a Day”, introducing poets and their chosen pandemic/socially relevant poems offered in written and video form, spoken by the poets themselves...

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This new project by composer/flutist Jamie Baum, composed for her critically-acclaimed Jamie Baum Septet+ and guest vocalists utilizes texts by women poets (i.e., Marge Piercy, Tracy K. Smith, Naomi Shihab Nye, etc.) in a modern jazz setting to illustrate the palpable, personal and communal experience of living in the time of Covid-19 (and simultaneous socio-political movement) and its abrupt transformation of our world. From her Hell’s Kitchen, NYC perspective (initially the US “epicenter” of Covid-19), Baum looked to other artistic platforms for hope, solace and inspiration. One such example was Bill Moyers’ website series, “A Poet a Day”, introducing poets and their chosen pandemic/socially relevant poems offered in written and video form, spoken by the poets themselves. From that platform she decided to focus on women poets of various ages and ethnicity, and utilized those poems in some cases as inspiration, and in others as “spoken word,” lyrics, or transformed into effects for each composition. Examples include: "What Kind of Times Are These" and "In Those Years,” by Adrienne Rich, 'My Grandmother in the Stars' by Naomi Shihab Nye, etc. These poems reflect and suggest, both symbolically and vividly, how we’d arrived at this moment in time, how we might manage during this time, and how we might hope to learn and emerge from the experience.

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