artist background
Jadele McPherson is a performance artist who has worked in music and theater in Chicago, New York, Miami and Cuba for two decades. She has performed throughout the U.S. and internationally in Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. Jadele began her musical journey at a young age playing Violin and Oboe, and singing in choirs before she began working as a vocalist rooted in Afro-Cuban sacred music, guided by akpón Naivis Angarica. McPherson wields her voice and sound art to create collaborative works based in Black experimental and improvisational lineages, and to explore healing and embodied memory in the African Diaspora. She founded the interdisciplinary theater collective Lukumi Arts (2008), which has produced an array of projects focused on sound and healing, and mutual aid. The pieces narrate local histories by immersing audiences in live, interactive musical experiences.
Some of Jadele’s most recent performance work includes a residency at JACK in Brooklyn (April 2021) focused on creatively engaging Eusebia Cosme’s archive and legacy; a performance for Abigail DeVille’s Light of Freedom at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. (October 2021). Early this year her single on the album Lovely by Miguelo Valdés and the Feeling Messengers was released and McPherson had her debut performance at Carnegie Hall with the world renowned percussionist, singer and bandleader Pedrito Martinez and his band for Yoruba Soy in December 2021.
In February 2019 Jadele released her solo debut EP entitled “Peace & Quiet” while she has collaborated with many musicians. Some of those credits include a residency at the Zinc Bar with pianist-composer Dayramir Gonzalez for (2015); Okonkolo which released an EP and album led by musician-babalawo Abraham Rodriguez, Freedom Now! by singer-cultural worker Karma Mayet Johnson; Word, Rock & Sword concerts curated by Toshi Reagon; Shake Loose: A Celebration of Sonia Sanchez at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the James Baldwin tribute Can I Get a Witness? at Harlem Stage, co-created by director Charlotte Brathwaite and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, and No More Water/The Fire Next Time at Park Ave Armory (2018).
Jadele has organized and participated in many panels, artist talks, and media interviews. After she produced La Sirene, a piece about José Antonio Aponte and spiritual memory in the Cuban and Haitian diasporas (2016), she was invited to curate a musical performance for the Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom exhibition at NYU in 2018. In December 2020 McPherson produced the artist talk and performance series Mind, Body & Soul: Afrofuturist Sacred Sounds as a fellow working with the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.
photo credit: Jesus Baez photos below: Juan Caballero (Yemaya stage) Bernadeta Serafin (Capote & McPherson), Michael Madera and Walter Wlodarczyk (A Woman’s Body is Her Nation, Yali Romagoza)
