Out of Blue        

Excerpt from Chelsea Music Festival

Artwork by Lorna Simpson

Panel 1

Current projects and releases

STOP LOOK LISTEN

Above: Couple samples from 2020 – 2021 output. Includes excerpts from piano suite, A Bee in the Hollow. Mays performing piano improv on the first clip. Pianist Sarah Bob featured on all subsequent videos. All visuals by Jessica Mays.

“For me, as a composer, creative, and human being, it’s been an overwhelmingly difficult (and painful) year to feel motivated, so I’ve been exploring new outlets for inspiration. I’m learning just how important it is to slow down and appreciate the moment …

I want this … to serve as a moment of stopping, a moment of rest.” — Jessica Mays 2020

Panel 2

looking back

ANTHEM FOR GO

Commissioned and performed by the National Symphony Orchestra

Anthem for GO in 2022 was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra Cartography Project and premiered at Kennedy Center in the spring of 2022.

“Within Anthem for GO is an expansion on a theme that for me has embodied the spirit of overcoming obstacles, listening to that burning desire for something more — something better. This piece is a tribute to both our heartbreak and resilience, our tears inspiring the conviction to move forward, and our desire to break down those systems that divide us. It’s about our blind determination to push for something better for ourselves, our communities, and our shared place on this miraculous planet. This is an anthem for that brilliant fire that lives in us all.”

bear

As I rise,
See the fall
In my stride Only grow
From the crawl In my hide.
With the teeth
Gagging back, Grimace wide
Little Bear
Bounding up,
With the whites In her eyes –
Bigger rock Up above:
“Gotta knack For the climb.”

— Jessica Mays

Commissioned by the Castle of Our Skins concert series and their 2018 program themed around black feminism and female empowerment.

elegy

Performed by the BlackBox Ensemble Leonard Bopp, Conductor

Dedicated to the memory of my grandmother.

Purchase the Blackbox Ensemble album Elegy HERE

Panel 4

bio

Jessica Mays is a composer, pianist and songwriter based in New York City and her hometown of Denver, Colorado. Her music pulls inspiration from the worlds of jazz, pop, contemporary classical and avant-garde, evoking a blended sound that is both visceral and distantly familiar. 

Mays’s music has been performed both locally and abroad, by a wide variety of soloists, ensembles and orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, Abeo String Quartet, the Playground Ensemble, Ensemble Paramirabo, Ensemble Lunatik, Blackbox Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, The Labo de musique contemporaine de Montréal and many others. She has been featured by a variety of festivals as composer and performer including the Chelsea Music Festival, Loon Lake Live, and the Cluster Music Festival. She has composed and arranged for a variety of projects with premieres by the Colorado Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall.