Experience a one-of-a-kind sonic performance of spoken word, bass, and jazz improvisation with poet Fred Moten and acclaimed Puerto Rican bassist Brandon López! The duo presents the inimitable jazz aesthetic heard in their album the blacksmiths, the flowers and at their avant-garde public performances. López and Moten have collaborated on music albums and performance projects together since 2018 at venues such as the Silo City Reading Series (an immersive, multidisciplinary event at a complex of grain silos along the Buffalo River), and in 2022 they released their album with drummer Gerald Cleaver on Reading Group.

An American cultural theorist, poet, and spoken-word jazz performer considered to be one of the foremost theorists of his generation, Moten is a professor of performance studies at New York University and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside. His books include the groundbreaking In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and numerous poetry collections, and he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020. López is a bassist, composer, and improviser working at the fringes of contemporary music. His playing has led him to work with the luminaries of the contemporary avant-garde such as Moten, Gerald Cleaver, and John Zorn, and he was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic.

This event is in partnership with the Big Ears Festival and is hosted by the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts. See the BEF site here. The event is free and open to the public and to UT students, staff, and faculty as well as BEF festival-goers.