Ellen Priest

For her multi-year project, Priest chose Ryan Cohan’s hour-long Jazz suite The River for its beauty, intellect, emotional range and panoramic scale. She writes, “In it I hear voices of Latin and Afro-Cuban Jazz, African drumming with its layered rhythms, Aaron Copland’s uplifting compositions, call-and-response forms from Africa and the African-American South, and the gritty Chicago Blues and Jazz tradition Cohan grew up in. The River offers me rich musical spaces and emotional content to work with.”

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