Mwenso & The Shakes

New York-based Michael Mwenso is a musical polymath who spent his teens as James Brown's understudy. In 2007, he organized a late-night jam session at the famed London jazz club, Ronnie Scott's, which led to Wynton Marsalis handpicking him to be musician and curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Entrenched in the company of a few dozen talented Harlem-based musicians, Mwenso soon found the ten musicians that became The Shakes.

Mwenso & The Shakes specialize in musical code-switching, freely adopting and repurposing the drama, whimsy, and spirit of the Great American Songbook, African beats, funk, modern jazz, dance pop, Delta blues, and cabaret theater with equal, effortless verve. The Shakes' vocalist, Brianna Thomas, describes Mwenso's Harlem-based dectet as, "theater meets opera meets James Brown meets jazz meets total improvisation." Pulling from, among other material, its 2019 live debut, Emergence [The Process of Coming Into Being] - which NPR Music hailed as "an explosion of ideas and sounds wrapped around familiar instrumentation" - the band brings a vibrant and powerful set to Duke Performances' virtual season.

- Eric Tullis