Vanessa Rubin & her Trio—Brandon McCune, Kenny Davis, Winard Harper—join forces with
Poet Nancy Mercado for a dynamic fusion of jazz and poetry that hits the heart and the pulse.
Revered as both a torchbearer and a storyteller, jazz vocalist Cleveland native Vanessa Rubin possesses a voice hailed with crystalline clarity, hearth-like warm, emotional depth and keen burnished wisdom she can deliver with playful lioness sass. From swing to bossa nova to blues, ballads and contemporary covers performed with small and large ensembles, Rubin’s interpretive ability to move through the Great American Songbook to modern jazz composers/arrangers like Tadd Dameron and Horace Silver to contemporary composer as Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers and Sting is masterful. Beyond her international touring, Rubin is an accomplished writer, producer, educator, and arts advocate. Her most recent 2021 endeavor, curator and producer of Sundown Jazz @ V’s Place, an outdoor summer performance jazz series in Cleveland, Ohio is ongoing. http://vanessarubin.com/
Nancy Mercado—New York’s New Generation Beat Poet Laureate (Lifetime Award) and American Book Award honoree—stands as one of the most influential voices in contemporary poetry. Named among The Frederick Douglass 200, she’s a poet, playwright, editor, and activist whose work has traveled from the United Nations to Lincoln Center, the Whitney, Casa de las Américas, the Dodge Poetry Festival, The Public Theater, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Author of It Concerns the Madness, Las Tres Hermanas, and seven stage plays, Mercado has also edited acclaimed anthologies including if the world were mine. Her poetry, essays, and interviews appear widely in journals and collections such as Tar Baby, Blind Persistence, and Bigotry on Broadway. Across her career, Mercado’s work remains rooted in artistic excellence, cultural memory, and social justice.