Howl! Arts welcomes the ACO for an evening with Mazz Swift, a violinist, singer, composer, and conductor, weaving improvisation, classic African American musics, electronica, and mindfulness into their work.

During this evening, we will hear excerpts from Mazz’s ACO-commissioned work, “Memory FIVE: Freedom Initiate,” developed via the EarShot CoLABoratory program. Mazz will be premiering this work with ACO at Carnegie Hall on 10/29/25 in our program titled “New Virtuoso: For Art’s Sake.”

Free! RSVP here

The American Composers Orchestra (ACO) is a national discovery and development pipeline for new orchestral music, focused on bringing the full spectrum of American music to orchestral stages, providing a gateway to the orchestral composition and performance process, and amplifying the expressive power of orchestral music to enable a vibrant future for all Americans.

Mazz Swift has composed for The Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Kronos Quartet, The International Contemporary Ensemble, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Silkroad Ensemble, and the PUBLIQuartet, among others.

Aside from enjoying a robust career as a performer, Swift is an educator. They have performed and taught free-improvisation workshops on six continents, most notably having traveled to Suriname, Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal, Albania and Siberia as “cultural diplomat” for the U.S. Department of State.

Mazz is also a performing member and teaching artist with the acclaimed Silkroad Ensemble. As part of that group, they spearheaded and developed Project MUSIC (Music, Uniting Strangers Into Community), through which they seek to develop abolitionist-minded and anti-racist programming alongside incarcerated people, designing our own liberation through presence and creativity.

Mazz is a 2021 United States Artist, and 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, continually creating orchestral compositions that involve Conduction, small ensemble works, and solo works that are centered around protest and freedom songs, spirituals, and the Ghanaian concept of ‘Sankofa’: looking back to learn how to move forward. Their newest album “The 10000 Things; Praise Songs for the iRiligious” is out now on New Amsterdam Records.