Highland Park Arts Center Show!

Hello friends,

I hope life is treating you well!

I’m writing to invite you to a special concert on Thursday, August 27th in the Highland Park area of Chicago. Bandleader Donovan Mixon is an incredible guitarist and composer—his music is fresh, daring, and full of fire. If you enjoy hearing cats improvise on burning tunes, this is a show you won’t want to miss.I’m really looking forward to it. As I dig into the music—with its hard grooves, bouncing odd meters and angular harmonies—I’ll be doing my best to sound good up there.Hope to see you there!

More on the man and the music:

Finding Center: A Sonic Memoir, an immersive concert experience created by Chicago‑based guitarist, composer, and educator Donovan Mixon. This multi‑sectional performance weaves together contemporary jazz, improvisation, chamber textures, and global influences to form a deeply personal musical journey of resilience and renewal.

This is an AACM-supported presentation, bringing a Chicago creative music ensemble into a Highland Park gallery setting. The Art Center is an especially fitting space for the project because the music is rooted in memory, improvisation, composition, and dialogue — qualities that can resonate differently when presented in conversation with visual art.

Inspired by a life lived across Turkey, Europe, and the United States, Mixon’s latest project transforms trauma into beauty and connection. Finding Center is a meditation on chaos and calm, loss and love, despair and hope — a search for balance that feels both intimate and universal. “Music has been my anchor and my refuge,” Mixon shares. “It has helped me navigate the storm, find fleeting moments of peace, and hold onto the light even as darkness loomed.”