Events - Live

Ayanna Witter-Johnson

Plus Special Guests

15 Feb 2013

Doors 8:00 pm

This is a seated concert.

The Space

Tickets - £5 Early bird / £7 General admission available from Nottingham Contemporary reception or online (Booking  Fee Applies)

"Cellist and singer Ayanna Witter-Johnson has to be heard to be believed. Her self-assured style blends a honey-sweet vocal delivery with bewitching, and bewildering, cello-playing." Time Out                                    

Unique and captivating, Ayanna Witter-Johnson is a composer, jazz vocalist, cellist and pianist who has developed musically from a diverse background of mixed cultures.  Her compositional versatility includes writing for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, big bands, string quartets and choirs as well as songs, soundscapes and pieces for solo instruments and tape, across a range of styles including jazz, classical, contemporary, R&B, soul, reggae and electro-acoustic.

Witter-Johnson began playing the piano at an early age, later taking up the ‘cello during her teenage years and graduated with a First Class Degree and the Vivian Prindl Outreach Prize for the Most Innovative Professional Skills Project from Trinity College of Music, London where she studied composition with Alwynne Pritchard and classical ‘cello with David Kennedy.  She has studied composition with John A. Thomas, Errollyn Wallen, Andrew Poppy, arranging with Paul Bartholomew; orchestration with Stephen Montague and classical ‘cello with Sue Sutherley (London Philharmonic Orchestra).  Throughout 2008 Ayanna was a participant in the London Symphony Orchestra’s Discovery Panufnik Young Composers Scheme which is designed to facilitate the development of orchestral writing for talented young composers and was also an Emerging Artist in Residence (EAR) at London’s Southbank Centre.  In 2009 she commenced her Masters of Music in Composition degree at the Manhattan School of Music and in 2010 won the ‘Amateur Night Live’ at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, NYC, following in the footsteps of Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Jackson and others.