Corey Wilkes is an award-winning trumpeter, composer, producer, actor, and electro-acoustic soul artist rooted in the lineage of Chicago’s Great Black Music tradition. Emerging from the creative legacy of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Wilkes has worked alongside visionary artists and ensembles including the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago, Kahil El’Zabar, and Ernest Dawkins, carrying forward a tradition rooted in innovation, improvisation, spirituality, and fearless artistic expression.

His collaborators span multiple generations and genres, from legendary artists such as Roy Ayers, Roy Hargrove, James Moody, and Clark Terry to contemporary innovators including Makaya McCraven, Disclosure, Jennifer Hudson, Ledisi, Nicole Mitchell, and James Carter. Wilkes’ work bridges spiritual jazz, improvisation, electronic music, film, and multidisciplinary performance.

For this special performance, Wilkes presents a new collaboration with Jimetta Rose, the Los Angeles-based vocalist, composer, and founder of Voices of Creation, whose spiritually rooted work blends soul, jazz, gospel, and community-centered healing through music. Rose has collaborated with artists including Georgia Anne Muldrow, Anderson .Paak, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Shafiq Husayn, and Madlib.

While touring and recording together within Isaiah Collier’s Parallel Universe, Wilkes and Rose developed a deep creative connection that now expands into a new collaborative space, exploring expansive improvisation, cosmic soul, ambient textures, and the evolving language of Great Black Music through a contemporary Chicago and Los Angeles lens.