RESIDENCY NARRATIVE & OVERVIEW

The primary goals to achieve through this residency:

In Journeywoman: Mentoring the Next Jazz Generation, emerging artists and jazz students are partnered with jazz musician/educators who provide training, mentorship and professional development over an academic year. Lenora and a subset of her band, Tribe Jazz Orchestra, perform and compose with students from the College of Music/Jazz Studies at MSU, through several virtual workshops and an in-person week-long residency.

A primary goal of the residency is to train participants to identify gaps in intercultural maturity (knowing how to engage with different others) to work, thrive and sustain arts careers. Over the 40+ years of Lenora's career she has developed teaching artists residencies for large corporate and government funders, including an online certificate program in teaching artistry at her home institution.

To this residency with MSU she shares this knowledge and curricula to guide the participants in learning how to articulate and build a stream of income as teaching artists, a very lucrative field, but underrepresented by BIPOC artists. A vehicle for inculcating intercultural maturity, another goal of workshop is to idenitify themes about inclusivity of women artists and women's contributions in Jazz to develop an idea from concept-to-concert.

The participants will develop compositions, under the guidance of Lenora and The Tribe Jazz Orchestra, using her work, Journeywoman as a template, and culminating in a performance, a documentation audio and/or visual recording, and a community event.