Sara Serpa & Emmanuel Iduma's "Intimate Strangers"

As part of our fifteenth annual Jazz Poetry Festival, this will be an evening of jazz and poetry collaborations. Sara Serpa and her band along with poet Emmanuel Iduma will perform the collaborative project Intimate Strangers.

A collaboration between Portuguese vocalist-composer Sara Serpa and Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma, drawing inspiration from Iduma’s latest book, A Stranger’s Pose, a unique blend of travelogue, musings and poetry, with a foreword by Teju Cole. In a combination of music, text, image and field recordings collected by Iduma during his travels, Intimate Strangers explores such themes as of movement, home, grief, absence and desire in what Iduma calls “an atlas of a borderless world.”

Featured Musicians:

• Sera Serpa (composition & voice)
• Emmanuel Iduma (text & spoken word)
• Aubrey Johnson
• Sofia Eugenia Koutsovitis
• Judith Berkson
• Matthew Tily Mitchell

Sara Serpa is a singer, composer, improviser who implements a unique instrumental approach to her vocal style. Recognized for her distinctive wordless singing, Serpa has been immersed in the field of jazz, improvised and experimental music since first arriving in New York in 2008.  Described by JazzTimes magazine as “a master of wordless landscapes” and by the New York Times as “a singer of silvery poise and cosmopolitan outlook,” Serpa started her recording and performing career with jazz luminaries such as Grammy-nominated pianist, Danilo Perez, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow pianist, Ran Blake, and Greg Osby.

Featured Poet:

Emmanuel Iduma is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Born and raised in Nigeria, he has contributed essays and stories to journals, magazines, artists’ books, and exhibition catalogues. He is the author of The Sound of Things to Come (first published as Farad in Nigeria), and received a 2017 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant in arts writing, for his blog A Sum of Encounters. He is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, where he obtained an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing. In 2017, he was associate curator of the Nigerian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He is the author, most recently, of A Stranger’s Pose.