Big Ears Festival | Knoxville, TN

Ingrid Laubrock Grammy Season + DoYeon Kim

DATE, TIME & VENUE DETAILS TBD

Ingrid Laubrock is an experimental saxophonist and composer whose work explores the boundaries between musical realms, creating multilayered, dense, and often evocative sound worlds. A prolific composer, Laubrock has been described as a “true visionary” by pianist and former Kennedy Center Artistic Director Jason Moran, and as a “fully committed saxophonist and visionary” by The New Yorker. Her composition Vogelfrei was named one of The New York Times’ “25 Best Classical Tracks of 2018.”

Laubrock has performed with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jason Moran, Kris Davis, Nels Cline, Tyshawn Sorey, Tomeka Reid, Mary Halvorson, Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins, Tom Rainey, Wet Ink Ensemble, and many others. As a composer, she has written for ensembles ranging from solo performers to chamber orchestras.

Her awards and honors include a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2025 German Jazz Prize, the 2019 Herb Alpert/Ragdale Prize in Music Composition, the 2022 Herb Alpert/Ucross Prize in Music Composition, the 2021 Berklee Institute of Gender Justice Women Composers Collection Grant, the Fellowship in Jazz Composition from the Arts Foundation, the BBC Jazz Award for Innovation, the SWR German Radio Jazz Prize, and the German Record Critics’ Quarterly Award. She has also been named a DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star on soprano saxophone (2015), tenor saxophone (2018), and in composition and large ensemble (2025).

Laubrock has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Yarn/Wire, Grossman Ensemble, The Shifting Foundation, the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, the Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, the Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, jazzahead!, the Wet Ink Ensemble, The Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, the New York State Council on the Arts, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning
Series, and the EOS Orchestra, among others. She was an Artist-in-Residence with the Wet Ink Ensemble in 2022–23.

Laubrock is part-time faculty at Columbia University and The New School. She holds an MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

BIG EARS
April 1 – 4, 2027
Knoxville, TN · USA

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