Jazz saxophonist, drummer and composer Howard Wiley will create and record a full suite for an original jazz theater work, “Mattie Mae’s.” Set in Richmond’s massive WWII shipyards and a legendary African-American juke joint as the city leaps from 22,000 immigrant fishermen, railroad and refinery workers, to an industrial powerhouse of 100,000, Wiley’s composition will embody and extend the church, blues and jazz traditions that anchored Richmond’s Black workers and families then and today. As Richmond imagines a post pandemic world so, too, we need to hold to our roots and journey. The full recording will be completed in Spring 2022 with the musical theater premiere in Fall of 2023.

eastbaycenter.org

Dewa Berata’s Sudamala is a musical prayer for healing. In this global age of sickness, Balinese traditional artists are faced with an existential challenge- to create, in isolation, music that has always depended on community and closeness. In the summer of 2021, Pak Dewa will begin working with multidisciplinary collaborators on this suite of nine musical vignettes to be premiered at a Bay Area outdoor venue in the Spring of 2022. Each vignette will focus on an aspect of the Balinese spiritual concept, Tri Harta Karana (divinity, humanity, nature), emphasizing the commonalities and discontinuities of creating and performing with local artists as a Balinese composer in the Bay Area.

gsj.org

The Electronic Lover, an original opera by Berkeley composer Lisa Mezzacappa with a libretto by Beth Lisick. The work explores the naïve moment when we first invited computers into the most intimate aspects of our lives. The digital opera, set in chatrooms in the early 1980s, features a versatile and diverse cast of Bay Area vocalists and instrumentalists. The work will be released as a serial podcast - a pilot episode plus eight-season episodes - over the course of 2021.

dresherensemble.org

PORTER explores the rich history of intergenerational mentorship and oral tradition in the Bay Area, through interviews and archival footage of jazz greats and local legends. Featuring the Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet backed by a 30-piece orchestra, PORTER will premiere a new jazz and orchestral composition, set to the voices, images, and stories of jazz mentors. This work will premiere Spring 2022.

sfjazz.org

Ellen Fullman’s composition Heart Wire for her installation, The Long String Instrument, will be performed with The Living Earth Show. Set in an enormous industrial sized space filled with delicate shimmering thread-like music wires, “Heart Wire” will take the listener on a journey through intricately woven texture and spacious expanse, producing sounds like a chamber orchestra, at times phantom horns rising up, or reed organs and strummed guitars. Fullman’s “Heart Wire”, will synthesize components into a startling new form that might seem to have physical mass or to even be turning inside out. This work will premiere Winter 2021.

thelivingearthshow.com

This project supports the production/presentation of Lalin St. Juste’s debut work, Siren Song: From Silence to Resilience, her first major solo project, which blends R&B, Haitian folkloric influences, experimental acoustic/electronic elements, dance/choreography, and video. St. Juste is best known as the frontwoman of the critically acclaimed Bay Area ensemble, The Seshen. Siren Song will tell St. Juste’s story of growing up as a first-generation Haitian-American girl trapped by societal expectations of her race, gender, and sexuality, coming out as queer and coming into her blackness/identity, in a story of healing and growing into one’s own power, authenticity, and truth. This work will premiere in Spring 2022.

womensaudiomission.org