Nicole Mitchell and Joe Westerlund

Several years ago, Nicole Mitchell—an astounding improvisational flautist and bandleader with audacious concepts, and the first female president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—posted a players-wanted flyer. After being raised in California and based for a long and productive spell of music-making in Chicago, she had relocated to North Carolina’s Piedmont, hoping not only to participate in a sort of reverse Great Migration but also to find a plot of land where she and her husband might garden. But Chicago is known for its teeming improvisational landscape and, despite its rich music scene, North Carolina not so much. But Joe Westerlund saw her post. A drummer, percussionist and composer in North Carolina, Westerlund has played in a dozen different contexts over the years, from the folk-rock of Watchhouse to the warped worlds of Megafaun and Califone, from the coruscant drones of Setting to the wondrous percussive worlds of his own solo records. A former student of Milford Graves and intrepid improviser himself, Westerlund responded.

After six months of scheduling snafus, Mitchell and Westerlund finally rendezvoused at a local venue. Their chemistry was immediately apparent and, in the last two years, has only grown. Mitchell is an adventurous flautist, routing her instrument through an array of pedals and sometimes grabbing loops and muting them until just the right moment, when they seem to reappear as flashbacks. And Westerlund is a versatile percussionist, capable of heaviness that evokes the coco rhythms of Africa or rhythm-deconstructing expanses of free improvisation. Their pieces sometimes feel like sculpted dub, sitting in clouds of echo, with flute, drums, and even Micthell’s voice all hitting one another at odd angles. Mitchell and Westerlund have been working on mapping their improvisations in a studio, with more news expected on that front soon.