I’m going to try to make this brief. I’m in the middle of a month-long writing project overviewing the music of 2025 (if you haven’t been following along on my blog, feel free to start doing so!), and a combination of illness and job commitments have made pulling words out of my head and onto the screen more difficult than it otherwise would be, so apologies if you wanted to roll around in my prose at length, not that I think anyone did.

Back in February, right after attending Bodies of Matter (and before attending Angela Bat Dawid’s The Souls of Black Folk Suite at the same venue a few days later with my friend Josh, which I didn’t write up here but was overwhelming and uncomfortable, in a good way), I bought a ticket for another dance performance at the Harris Theater on March 7th, Still I Rise, featuring music by contemporary Black female composers. Unfortunately, I caught a bad chest cold in the back half of February and was still not feeling quite recovered enough to go out on the 7th, so I ate the cost of the ticket and began vaguely looking about for something else to attend instead.

It was only last Thursday, scrolling Bluesky and idly reading a conversation between music writers about the importance of seeing live music, that I took Ann Powers’ advice in the thread of checking out Songkick for local listings. I was impressed by its completeness and ease of use, and didn’t scroll far before I saw a show I wanted to see, happening the very next day.

So I bought a ticket and on Friday after work I grabbed dinner and then spent some time walking down to the lakeshore and listening to a podcast to kill time before heading back to the Symphony Center to see a double bill of contemporary jazz performers Somi and Nubya Garcia.

I hadn’t heard of either before — I am very out of the loop on contemporary jazz — but the promo images and potted bios on the CSO’s website were enough to intrigue me, and better to strike while the iron was hot than to hesitate and miss the chance to see anything at all.

Somi Kakoma, who declared herself an “Illinois girl” (she grew up between Champaign, where her father was a student and later a professor, and Zambia), is of Rwandan and Ugandan descent but has made her home in Harlem for twenty years. Her crisp, richly-textured performances, with complex, fiery accompaniment from a crack band of first-rate jazz performers (I was especially taken with Toru Dodo’s energetic, rhythmically dense piano solos), ranged from charming to awe-inspiring: comparisons to Nina Simone, Angélique Kidjo, or Ella Fitzgerald would not be inapt. The daughter of immigrants, she was careful to tie the emotions of the evening into the broader political context of the present moment, and her use of breath as rhythm and shouted encouragements (and unrestrained dancing) during the instrumental solos made her African identity and training clear as an irreducible element of her transnational, transcultural, transoceanic art.

If I had been programming the evening, I would have reversed the order of appearance: British saxophonist Nubya Garcia’s technically accomplished and wide-ranging, but unchallenging, vaguely spiritual, and generally extremely polite, compositions felt more like a pleasant cool-down after Somi’s emotionally fervid set than a headliner giving the evening a crescendo. (Though I may be outing myself as a philistine who has trouble emotionally connecting to non-vocal music here.) Garcia chatted a bit nervously between numbers, with typically British diffidence; her backing band of London jazz/electronic musicians (also a piano/bass/drums trio) were polished and energetic, although I couldn’t quite shake a nagging impression of the Weather Report with breakbeats.

Okay, so I didn’t actually make it brief. I’m very glad I went — the venue was new to me, and I quite enjoyed the space — and I’m particularly glad to have been introduced to Somi’s rich, sonorous voice and expressive capacities. I’ll be catching up to some of her recorded output, although I don’t expect it to live up to what I heard on Friday.

For example, this rendition of an American classic is so much slower, simpler, and more reverent than it was at Symphony Center, but it’s what I can share with you:

All right, I’ll talk to you next month. I bought April’s ticket while I was writing this, and I’m extremely excited. I hope to be capable of expressing why when I get there.