Uhuru Jazz Sessions: Georgia Anne Muldrow

It is fitting that in 2018 Muldrow should sign to Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder imprint – a record label deeply embedded in LA, with a ton of shared history and a united vision of the future – to release her stunning new album.

She first lit up the scene with her debut album “Olesi: Fragments Of An Earth” (2006) on cult LA imprint Stones Throw. It was there that Georgia met, befriended and collaborated with the likes of Madlib, Oh No, MED (fka Medaphor), Wildchild, DJ Romes and her future partner Dudley Perkins aka Declaime. She co-founded the SomeOthaShip Connect record label with Dudley in 2008, the platform and spring board for many of her musical travels that have expanded and extended down myriad pathways under numerous monikers including Ms. One, Pattie Blingh & The Akebulan 5, an electro fusion collaboration with DJ Romes called Blackhouse and astral jazz outings as Jyoti – a project that earned her the “Jazz Album Of The Year” honours at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards in 2011 for her album “Ocotea”.

It’s Georgia’s rich musical heritage and the sheer weight of her catalogue that has earned her the respect of peers such as Mos Def (“She’s incredible. She’s like [Roberta] Flack, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, she’s something else.”), Erykah Badu (with whom she collaborated on “New Amerykah Part Two” in 2010), Bilal and Robert Glasper who invited Georgia to perform on his “Miles Ahead” OST in 2016.

Named for the Swahili word that translates to “freedom,” the Uhuru Jazz Series pays homage to jazz as the embodiment of freedom, improvisation, discovery, liberation, and promise. Supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the series features monthly performances at the AWAACC. To celebrate the Uhuru Jazz Series and its powerful meaning, AWAACC commissioned Pittsburgh visual artist Makeba Rainey to create an original work of art to complement each concert.