For Immediate Release
2025 Chicago Jazz String Summit
May 8, 9 & 10, 2026
Press Contact
chicagojazzstringsummit@gmail.com
Tomeka Reid's
Chicago Jazz String Summit
CHICAGO – On May 8th and 9th the Chicago Jazz String Summit (CJSS) returns to Constellation Chicago. Now in its twelfth year, CJSS showcases the contributions of phenomenal string players to jazz, improvised, and experimental music.
To conclude the summit, an improv session featuring past and present performers convenes at Hungry Brain on May 10th.
This year's Chicago Jazz String Summit was co-curated by cellists Tomeka Reid, Lester St. Louis and violinist Melanie Dyer.
The 2026 lineup features musicians who have helped shape modern string playing, introduces rising artists to wider audiences, and showcases the depth and variety of musicians pursuing unique takes on global music traditions.
Zosha Warpeha opens the summit on May 8th with her meditative, searching approach to the Hardanger d’amore, a variant on the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, alongside percussionist Carlo Costa. Equally at home playing folk melodies as they are improvising, the duo builds slow moving expansive figures to push their instruments’ sonic boundaries.
The trio of violinist Ayman Asfour, bassist Marwan Allam, and cellist Eric Allen pursue modern takes on Arabic maqam, using jazz and free improvisation to inject their personal styles into familiar traditions.
A solo performance by violinist Laura Ortman closes the first night. Known for using effects and amplification to create massive layered textures, Ortman also explores her Indigenous heritage on the ethereal one stringed Apache violin.
On May 9th, Theresa Wong performs solo cello, examining the instrument through a naturalist’s lens and exploding out its basic components of wood, string, and hair to develop new playing techniques.
Each year CJSS aims to highlight young musicians and is excited to welcome the Detroit based duo Ataraxia, featuring violist Indira Edwards and cellist King Sophia.
Carla Kihlstedt, the genre crossing songwriter and improviserperforms solo violin and voice to conclude the performances at Constellation.
CJSS dedicates this year’s program to cellist Tristan Honsinger, who helped develop the free improv scene in Amsterdam in the 1970s, and is known for his work with Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey, and the ICP Orchestra.
The Chicago Jazz String Summit is proud to help carry this legacy forward and continue to highlight the exciting advancements in string playing locally and beyond.
About the 2026 Chicago Jazz String Summit
A staple of Chicago’s cultural programming for the past decade, CJSS is known for “stunning sets showcasing artists seldom seen in the Midwest, plus an up-and-coming local aggregation, too” (Downbeat).
Founded and directed by cellist and composer Tomeka Reid, the Chicago Jazz String Summit is the only BIPOC-founded, curated and produced instrument summit of its kind.
A GoFundMe Campaign to help cover the rising costs of airfare, accommodations, instrument rentals, ground transportation, and fair compensation to the artists we showcase can be found at our website or https://gofund.me/57c8e010d.
Chicago Jazz String Summit thanks our sponsors and supporters Constellation Chicago, WDCB, and A440 Chicago Violin Shop.
Please contact chicagojazzstringsummit@gmail.com for more details.
For more information & tickets:
https://www.chicagojazzstringsummit.com/
OFFICIAL FLYERS & LOGOS
2026 ARTIST BIOS
Zosha Warpeha is a Brooklyn-based composer-performer working in a meditative space at the intersection of contemporary improvisation and folk traditions. Performing on Hardanger d'amore, a sympathetic-stringed relative of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, her durational performances are explorations of time, tonality, and resonant space; through deconstruction of idiomatic technique, she utilizes tradition as a point of departure. She was a 2025 artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room and her work has also been supported by the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Percussionist, drummer, and composer Carlo Costa was born and raised in Rome, Italy, and has been based in New York City since 2005. Initially drawn to jazz, he gradually began exploring forms of improvised music that are increasingly subtle, spacious, quiet, and slow-moving. Over the years he has developed a highly personal instrumental approach, employing unorthodox techniques and objects added to his setup to expand the timbral and textural possibilities of the drum set. Costa has collaborated with a wide range of musicians across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. As a composer, he writes primarily for improvisers, using a flexible language that combines traditional notation, graphic scores, and text to merge composed material with improvisation. In 2014 Carlo founded the experimental music label Neither/Nor Records.
https://zoshawarpeha.com/
Percussionist, drummer, and composer Carlo Costa was born and raised in Rome, Italy, and has been based in New York City since 2005. Initially drawn to jazz, he gradually began exploring forms of improvised music that are increasingly subtle, spacious, quiet, and slow-moving. Over the years he has developed a highly personal instrumental approach, employing unorthodox techniques and objects added to his setup to expand the timbral and textural possibilities of the drum set. Costa has collaborated with a wide range of musicians across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. As a composer, he writes primarily for improvisers, using a flexible language that combines traditional notation, graphic scores, and text to merge composed material with improvisation. In 2014 Carlo founded the experimental music label Neither/Nor Records.
http://www.carlocostamusic.com/
Ayman Asfour is an Egyptian violinist, composer, and improviser from Alexandria who is based in New York, performs a diverse musical repertoire ranging from Egyptian folk to free improvisation. He has worked with many musicians in the Arab world, Europe and the US, and plays many styles of music, including oriental Arabic music, Egyptian folk, Western classical music, and jazz. He has worked with such artists as Hazem Shaheen, Ali Eissa, Ghalia ben Ali, Maurice Louca, and Alan Bishop, as well as Irish fiddler Frankie Gavin, Finnish jazz drummer P.O. Jorgens, and German oud player Roman Bunka. In 2012, he founded the Oufuqy Music Festival, which took place for six years in Alexandria.
He is a founding member of The Handover, a trio with Aly Eissa (oud) and Jonas Cambien (keyboards) that plays hypnotic, trance-inducing music, inspired by the ritual rhythms of the Egyptian countryside. The trio released their debut album with Sublime Frequencies in 2024. He is also a founding member of Ampelos Trio, a NYC-based trio with Gabe Levin (oud) and John Murchison (double bass). Their playing highlights Arabic maqam not as a conventional framework but as a point of departure for exploring sonic possibilities, dissonance, and repetition. Ampelos released their album with Purplish Records in 2024.
His upcoming album, Sardi Fardi, will be released with support from the Arab Foundation for Arts and Culture (AFAC).
https://www.instagram.com/ayman.asfour.violinist/
Marwan Allam is a New York City–based bassist, composer, and bandleader originally from Tunisia. Rooted in jazz, improvisation, and Arabic musical traditions, he holds a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Performance from the Prins Claus Conservatory in the Netherlands and received advanced training in Belgium through the Arabic Mediterranean Music Centre.
Marwan has performed and recorded with artists including pianist Tarek Yammani, pianist Marc Cary, trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, drummer Ari Hoenig, and guitarist Freddie Bryant. His performance career spans tours across South Korea, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Qatar, and the United States, with appearances at the Carthage International Festival, Brooklyn Museum, and Joe’s Pub, where he held his 2024 album release show.
His work has been recognized with the NYFA City Artist Corps Grant, support from the Brooklyn Arts Council, and a Composer-in-Residence appointment at the Blue Mountain Center for 2025.
https://marwanallam.com/
Eric Allen is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger living in Brooklyn. Allen has created arrangements for Regina Spektor, Cynthia Erivo, Diana Ross, William Shatner, Ben Folds, Bun B, and many other professional artists. His arrangements have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Cincinnati Pops, and Oregon Symphony, and have been broadcast on ABC and PBS
Allen has performed in venues all over New York City, including Carnegie Hall, Dizzy’s Club, National Sawdust, Nederlander Theatre, and Brooks Atkinson Theatre. He has performed with Courtney Love, LCD Soundsystem, and many others. He can be seen in the orchestras of shows Mozart in the Jungle and Dickinson.
Allen was a member of both the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop and the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, where he received the Jean Banks Musical Theatre Award in 2016. Allen earned his master’s degree at Indiana University and his bachelor’s at Portland State University. He has studied Arabic music with oud and violin master Simon Shaheen and sarangi with the late Ramesh Mishra.
https://www.erictheallen.com/
A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kronos Quartet, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, Martin Bisi, and Demian DinéYazhi.
An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings.
Laura has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Venice Biennale, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival at the Hague, Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Stone, SF JAZZ, Gagosian, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, MoMA PS1, Toronto Biennial of Art, Borealis Festival, CBGB's, Skaņu Mežs in Latvia, Pioneer Works, Roulette Intermedium, DIA Foundation, Calder Foundation, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe.
In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast that premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in NYC and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to sold-out audiences.
Ortman has her Carnegie Hall premiere with the Kronos Quartet in April 2026 in New York City, featuring new music for Amplified violin, Apache violin, voice and string quartet.
Ortman is the recipient of the 2026 First Peoples Fund Native Performing Arts Fellow, 2025 Pioneer Works Music Residency, 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Fellowship, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
https://www.lauraortman.net/
Theresa Wong is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and intermedia artist active at the intersection of composition, improvisation, and the synergy of multiple disciplines. As a cellist and vocalist, Wong has forged a unique vocabulary on her instruments through extensive explorations in new playing techniques, alternative tunings, and the timbral merging of singing and playing together. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition, her works include Fluency of Trees for cello and voice, premiered at the Other Minds Festival, She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees, commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill, and Journey to the Cave of Guanyin, released on room40 and included in The Best Experimental Music of 2025 on Bandcamp. Her long-standing collaboration with Long String Instrument inventor Ellen Fullman includes Harbors, chosen as one of Wire’s top 50 releases of 2020, and Soundless, presented at the Volume Festival in Sidney and MOCA Los Angeles. Commissioned works include pieces for Del Sol Quartet, Splinter Reeds, Long Beach Opera, NakedEye Ensemble, and San Francisco Girls Chorus. She is the founder of fo’c’sle, a record label dedicated to adventurous music from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
https://www.theresawong.org/
Indira Edwards (they/them) is a violist, composer, and music educator located in Detroit. They feature in a variety of live and recorded projects in Detroit, most notably as a touring and recording instrumentalist in the folk-rock band, Dick Texas. Indira has developed many improviser relationships including with Mike Khoury's Spite of Darkness, featured at the 2025 Catalytic Sound Festival; with cellist, King Sophia, in their duo, Ataraxia; with Baltimore-based cellist, John Pablo Rojas, in their duo, Iron Joy; and with flutist, Valerie Salerno (Dick Texas), in their duo, Hot Bananas. As a composer, Indira is interested in exploring the musical possibilities of unconventional sound generators and de-centering the composer in the rehearsal-performance process. Their latest composition, Placements, for wind-up toy ensemble, choir, and instruments, explores toys as the core musical idea of a long-form, large ensemble composition and features performer-generated material. Indira is an urban farm-hand, and a teaching artist and production manager with the Sphinx Organization. Their personal devotion is to making music accessible through free and reduced guitar and string instrument repair while completing their Bachelor’s of Music at Wayne State University.
https://www.instagram.com/littl.fly/
King Sophia is a cellist, vocalist, electric guitarist, composer, educator, disc jockey and poet based in Detroit, MI. Classically trained with a degree in cello performance from University of Miami — Frost School of Music, their music has roots in jazz, blues, and avant-garde. As a solo artist, they have become known for their genre-bending work combining cello, voice, and electronics. In addition to solo projects and their Neo-soul protest music ensemble, the Unbroken Circle, they take alternating combinations of performer, arranger, and composer roles in various groups such as Autophysiopsychic Millenium, White Flowers, Ataraxia, and Sovereign Beat Unit. For over 2 years they've arranged for and led The King’s Trio in their lecture and performance series, Listening B(l)ack, which showcases historically under-discussed Black composers and compositions. Over the past 3 years, they have been a lead organizer for the Detroit revitalization of the pagan holiday, Imbolc, and led an annual salon and jam session called the Imbolc Community Creation Session. King has been an artist in residence at major institutions such as Vanderbilt University, University of Michigan, Ragdale and Cranbrook. Overall, they prioritize projects centering cultural preservation, strategic resistance, and radical joy.
https://www.kingsophiamusic.com/
Carla Kihlstedt is a composer/improviser, violinist/violist, singer, writer and educator. Her musical voice is grounded in the economy, intimacy and immediacy of song. Blurring the lines between pop, rock, folk and art song, her larger pieces (Black Inscription, Necessary Monsters, 26 Little Deaths, At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire, Pandæmonium, X Amendments) have all grown from a single idea – the ocean, dreams, imaginary creatures, the machine age, quarantine – which allows her to explore facets of a complex world through different lenses.
An award-winning violinist, a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and a long-time instigator of composer’s collectives and bands of all sorts, Kihlstedt fuses her classical technique and ear for nuance with her DIY maker-space ethos. A collaborator at heart, Carla has co-founded many bands, including Tin Hat (Trio), Rabbit Rabbit Radio, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, 2 Foot Yard, Minamo, The Book of Knots, Fred Frith’s Cosa Brava, and Causing a Tiger. She has written for the International Contemporary Ensemble, the San Francisco Girls Chorus, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Johnny Gandelsman, Brooklyn Rider, Variant 6, ROVA Saxophone Quartet and Dither Big Band, and has created soundtracks for choreographers Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Shinichi and Dana Iova-Koga/inkBoat and the Joe Goode Performance Group. She has worked with many wonderful musicians including Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Tom Waits, Shara Nova, Ben Goldberg, Tony Levin, Shahzad Ismaily, Gabriel Kahane, Trevor Dunn, Ches Smith, Anna Webber, Mary Halvorson, Christian MacBride, Tony Maimone, Tracy Chapman, Madeleine Peyroux, and Mr. Bungle.
Carla is on the faculty of the Contemporary Musical Arts Department of the New England Conservatory, the MFA in Music Composition program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts at CalArts, and has co-facilitated the Creative Gesture Lab for composers and choreographers at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She is currently incubating an international educational, environmentally-motivated youth chorus project called Long for This World.
https://www.carlakihlstedt.com/