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The position was vacant since the unexpected death in 2017 of Geri Allen, a groundbreaking pianist and esteemed educator. In succeeding Allen, Mitchell takes up the William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies, a new position. She will be a tenured professor in the music department.
Though she is leaving a professorship at the University of California, Irvine, Mitchell received most of her training not through academia but amid the outsider-run creative economy of Chicago’s improvised music scene.
Mitchell’s work — particularly with her 2-decade-old Black Earth Ensemble — often brings together instruments and musicians from across the globe to create a sound that is as rooted as it is futuristic. In its simultaneous celebration of collectivity and compositional vision, it represents an extension of precepts espoused by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Ten years ago, Mitchell became the first female chair of that South Side-based collective, which has a 54-year history of activism, education and vanguard composing.
At Pittsburgh, she joins one of the nation’s oldest and most robust jazz studies programs. In a sense, her arrival only continues a trajectory: The program was founded in 1969 by saxophonist Nathan Davis, who aimed to help jazz define its place in academia without sacrificing a core Afrocentric ethic. Allen followed in that path, while integrating her own experiences on the experimental wing of New York’s jazz scene.
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In addition to a doctoral program in jazz, Mitchell will be in charge of the University of Pittsburgh-Sonny Rollins International Jazz Archives and an annual symposium, the Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.