Pittsburgh, PA—City of Asylum Pittsburgh announces the 18th annual Jazz Poetry Month (JPM), consisting of eight concerts throughout May, occupying a new season on the calendar. The festival features 30+ artists from more than 15 countries.
The performances will kick off live from Alphabet City on Sunday, May 8 at 6:00 PM with the Uri Gurvich Quartet—musicians from Israel, Argentina, and Bulgaria—all performing in Pittsburgh for the first time. They are performing original work from their 2021 album Kinship, celebrating tribal and familial connections between different cultures and individuals, sharing messages of global unity. This performance also features poetry collaborations with Vasyl Makhno (Ukraine), Gazmend Kapplani (Albania), and poets from the University of Iowa International Writing Program.
“At its core, Jazz Poetry demonstrates that bringing musicians and poets together to experiment, to collaborate, and to express themselves freely yields performances greater than the sum of their parts. The 8 performances of Jazz Poetry 2022 allow artists to transcend differences in genre, style, and even language, and allow them to connect with audiences in Pittsburgh and around the globe,” said Andrés Franco, Executive Director of City of Asylum.
“Throughout the month, Jazz Poetry 2022 will host musicians and poets from Ukraine, as well as a dissident Russian poet and artists from Eastern Europe,” added Abby Lembersky, Director of Programming. “It is our goal to uplift the power of the arts to fight against the forces bent on fear and oppression and to provide a consistent platform for free expression and human rights around the world.”
JPM also highlights readings from several artists in City of Asylum’s exiled writer-in-residence program including Jorge Olivera Castillo (Cuba) in his first Jazz Poetry performance and Tuhin Das (Bangladesh) who will read from his newly published collection Exile Poems.
Additionally, a reading from the newest writer at the Ithaca City of Asylum, Dmitry Bykov (Russia), will be featured. He arrived in Ithaca, NY in February 2022 after persecution from the Russian government.
The remaining programs feature work from national and international musicians and poets, including the return of Oliver Lake, who performed at the very first JPM with Chinese poet Huang Xiang. This year, Oliver is paired with Italian master jazz pianist Claudio Cojaniz. Both musicians are staff and audience favorites and share the stage for the first time to play Oliver’s original compositions written for his renowned Trio 3. Closing the month on May 25, James Brandon Lewis returns to City of Asylum following two crowd-favorite evenings in Jazz Poetry 2021. This time, James brings his trio, whose music is gritty, funky, and explosive and seeks to combine jazz with other big energy genres, everything from hip-hop to punk rock. This celebratory evening is the perfect spirit to close out Jazz Poetry 2022.
Jazz Poetry Month is made possible by the generous support from the Allegheny Health Network, Allegheny Regional Asset District, First National Bank, Henry L. Hillman Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and UPMC Health Plan. Media sponsorship courtesy of WZUM.
Registration and more details are located at cityofasylum.org/jazz-poetry-
About City of Asylum: City of Asylum builds a just community by protecting and celebrating creative free expression. We provide sanctuary to endangered literary writers, so that the writers can continue to write, and their voices are not silenced. We offer a broad range of free literary, arts, and humanities programs in a community setting to build social equity through cultural exchange. And by transforming blighted properties into homes for our programs, we anchor neighborhood economic development.
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