The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Winter Music Production Grant to Jamie Baum for her new project “To Be of Use,” composed for her critically-acclaimed Jamie Baum Septet+ (of twenty years) and guest vocalists, which utilizes texts by women poets (i.e., Marge Piercy, Tracy K. Smith, Naomi Shihab Nye, etc.) in a modern jazz setting to illustrate the palpable, personal and communal experience of living in the time of Covid-19 (and simultaneous socio-political movement) and its abrupt transformation of our world. Though Baum’s initial plan was to compose music paying tribute to women activists working with issues related to gender, race, political strife, discrimination, who've effected the path forward for both themselves and others, through choosing these poems, Jamie's found a approach to express her intentions.

NYC jazz flutist/composer/bandleader and Sunnyside Records artist Jamie Baum has toured the US and 35 countries performing at major festivals and venues, and has worked with several renown artists as diverse as Paul Motian, Randy Brecker, Dave Douglas, Fred Hersch, Louis Cole, Roy Hargrove, Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith. Her several awards and honors include a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Jazz Journalists Association nominations (11 times) and annual listings in DownBeat Critics Polls (since ’98), in addition to being included in Huffington Post’s “Twenty-five Great Jazz Flute Performances” and JazzTimes’ 10: Essential Jazz Flute Albums. She’s received praise for 6 CDs as a leader, four with her Septet+ of 20 years, and has appeared on over 50 recordings as a sidewoman.

From Jamie’s Hell’s Kitchen, NYC perspective (initially the US “epicenter” of Covid-19), Baum looked to other artistic platforms for hope, solace and inspiration. One such example was Bill Moyers’ website series, “A Poet a Day”, introducing poets and their chosen pandemic/socially relevant poems offered in written and video form, spoken by the poets themselves. From that platform she focused on women poets of various ages and ethnicity, and utilized those poems in some cases as inspiration, and in others as “spoken word,” lyrics, or transformed into effects for each composition. Examples include: "What Kind of Times Are These" and "In Those Years,” by Adrienne Rich, 'My Grandmother in the Stars' by Naomi Shihab Nye, etc. These poems reflect and suggest, both symbolically and vividly, how we’d arrived at this moment in time, how we might manage during this time, and how we might hope to learn and emerge from the experience, each dedicated and reflective of the chosen activists. Plans are for this project to be recorded with a Fall 2022 release. 

Jamie toured as a US State Department - Kennedy Center Jazz Ambassador (’99-’03), and has since been sponsored frequently by the State Department while on her own overseas tours. Baum is on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music (since ’06), and a clinician for Altus Flutes/KHS America (since ’95).

Please visit Jamie’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube Channel for more information.