Jazzwise Magazine – 10 January 2019
Mitchener And Yarde Break Blues Boundaries As Black Avant-Garde Comes To Cafe OTO
Kevin Le Gendre
“This gig is a potent, provocative event that underlines the blues as a foundation for progressive black culture”
Review
Financial Time – 8 January 2019
Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde, Café Oto, London — a taste of the age of experimentalism
The band captured the genre-bending energy of the 1960s and 70s
Mike Hobart
“The band captured the genre-bending energy of those times without imitation and added emotional force to the songs presented. (…) Mitchener was a syllable-stretching, sound-crunching force of nature throughout.”
The Sunday Times – 23 December 2018
Classical review: London Contemporary Music Festival
Paul Driver
“b r e a d t h b r e a t h had a genuine vitality”
The Guardian – 22 December 2018
The week in classical: LCMF review
Fiona Maddocks
“Elaine Mitchener’s b r e a d t h b r e a t h (2018, world premiere LCMF commission) had an improvisatory mystery, arriving and departing slowly and delicately.”
Jazzwise Magazine – 23 February 2018
Elaine Mitchener delivers dramas of defiance at St. George’s, London
Kevin Le Gendre
“SWEET TOOTH is a vital black British addition to those seminal creative statements of resistance and defiance from the African Diaspora.”
The Blue Moment – 23 February 2018
Elaine Mitchener’s SWEET TOOTH
Richard Williams
“Last night Elaine Mitchener made Hawksmoor’s old stones shake.”
London Jazz News – 14 January 2018
Alexander Hawkins – Elaine Mitchener Quartet – Uproot album launch at Kings Place
Dan Bergsagel
“Flipping between moments of clean organisation, swallowed sounds and run together fingers; UpRoot is composed as an epic struggle; a constant tension between clutter and clarity, wrought with emotion. Yet another unique feather in the cap of the diverse careers of Mitchener and Hawkins.”
Jazzwise Magazine – 16 January 2018
Alexander Hawkins/Elaine Mitchener Quartet captivate at Kings Place
Kevin Le Gendre
“Rhythmic turbulence, focussed harmonic distortion and dynamic interplay all bear down on Uproot but Hawkins and Mitchener also understand that the so-called avant-garde is nothing if not melodic and that beauty can occur when serenity dovetails ferocity.”
The Times – 12 December 2017
New Intimacy III at Ambika P3
Anna Picard
“The vocalist Elaine Mitchener, the poet Dante Micheaux, the saxophonist Jason Yarde, the trumpeter and flautist Byron Wallen, the pianist Robert Mitchell, the drummer Mark Sanders and the bassist Neil Charles delivered their set of Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde with brilliance, discipline and daring; a body of work as substantial, poetic and exciting as Hans Werner Henze’s Voices.”