Jazz Poetry 2024: Milena Casado Quartet, Rae Armantrout, and more!

Alphabet City 40 W. North Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15212

Jazz Poetry 2024: Milena Casado Quartet, Rae Armantrout, Yahya Ashour, Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko, & Richard Hamilton

May 16 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT

Free in-person and free livestream available.

City of Asylum’s International Jazz Poetry Month welcomes artists from all over the world, bringing new friends sharing new works to the stage every year. This Jazz Poetry month we are delighted to welcome Milena Casado, an amazing Spanish composer, flugelhorn player, and trumpeter who is no stranger to mixing poetry with her compositions. Milena and her quartet will be sharing newly composed work, joined by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout, Palestinian poet Yahya Ashour, whose work has been translated and published in eight languages, current fellow at Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry & Poetics program Richard Hamilton, and Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko, multi-disciplinary Ukrainian artist and City of Asylum writer-in-residence.

Each Jazz Poetry program begins with a 40-minute performance by the band, followed by 30 minutes of collaborative performance with the featured poets. In these collaborations, poets share their work while the musicians interpret and accompany their poetry with jazz, adding a unique, improvisational dimension to each performance.

Featured Poets:

Rae Armantrout

Yahya Ashour

Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko

Richard Hamilton (he/they)

 

Featured Musicians:

Milena Casado: flugelhorn/trumpet

JK Kim: drums

Kanoa Mendenhall: bass

Lex Korten: piano

 

For free tickets and more information, please visit City of Asylum’s event page here.

 

Check out the latest book by Rae Armantrout, Notice

earthy green abstract cover with the title "Notice" in a yellow-orange block text towards the top third of the cover, and author's name, Rae Armantrout in white text towards bottom right of cover.