Sara Serpa/Matt Mitchell Duo

Sara Serpa (voice), Matt Mitchell (piano)

Sara Serpa and Matt Mitchell are long-time collaborators. The duo appears on Ingrid Laubrock’s new release, Purposing the Air, featuring the poetry of Erica Hunt.

“Serpa possesses a preternatural cool, injecting weightless sophistication and melodic grace into everything she touches.”
– Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader

A native from Lisboa, Portuguese Sara Serpa is a singer, composer, improviser, who through her practice and performance, explores the use of the voice as an instrument. Serpa has been working in the field of jazz, improvised and experimental music, since moving to New York in 2008. Literature, film, visual arts, nature and history inspire Serpa in the creative process and development of her music. Described by the New York Times as “a singer of silvery poise and cosmopolitan outlook,” and by the JazzTimes magazine as “a master of wordless landscapes,” Serpa started her recording and performing career with jazz luminaries such as Grammy-nominated pianists, Danilo Perez and Ran Blake, and saxophonist Greg Osby.

As a leader, she has produced and released over ten albums, including Recognition (2021), a multi-disciplinary work that traces the historical legacy of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, and Intimate Strangers (2021), a collaboration with Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma. Her latest recording, Encounters and Collisions (2024), features Erik Friedlander, Ingrid Laubrock and Angelica Sanchez.

Serpa has been active in gender equity in music and is the co-founder (along with fellow musician Jen Shyu) of Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³), an organization created to empower and elevate women and non-binary musicians.

“A pianist of burrowing focus and an indispensable fixture of the contemporary vanguard”
– Nate Chinen, The New York Times

Matt Mitchell is a pianist, composer, and electronic musician interested in the intersections of various strains of acoustic, electric, composed, and improvised new music. He has released several forward-thinking, critically acclaimed, and influential albums as a leader on Pi Recordings, Screwgun Records, and Out of Your Head Records, and together with Kate Gentile he runs Obliquity Records. He leads the ensemble Phalanx Ambassadors and co-leads Snark Horse with Kate Gentile, These and other bands he regularly presents feature many of the current foremost musicians and improvisers, including Patricia Brennan, Kim Cass, Kate Gentile, Jon Irabagon, Ava Mendoza, Miles Okazaki, Mariel Roberts, Sara Serpa, Sara Schoenbeck, Brandon Seabrook, Ches Smith, Chris Tordini, Anna Webber, Dan Weiss, and Miguel Zenon.

He is an member of several significant and acclaimed creative music ensembles, including Dan Weiss’s Starebaby, Miles Okazaki’s Trickster, Ches Smith’s We All Break, Kate Gentile’s Find Letter X, Anna Webber’s Simple Trio, Jon Irabagon’s Outright!, Sara Serpa’s IntimateStrangers, and Yuhan Su’s Liberated Gesture. He has a longstanding association with Tim Berne, and he has played extensively in the ensembles of many major figures in improvised music, including Dave Douglas, Steve Coleman, David Binney, John Hollenbeck, Miguel Zenon, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Linda May Han Oh, Jonathan Finlayson, Mario Pavone, and Darius Jones.

He has taught extensively with the Brooklyn-based School for Improvisational Music, as well as at the New School, NYU, and the Siena Jazz Workshop. He is a 2015 receipient of a Doris Duke Impact Award and a 2012 recipient of a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.