Composers Now will launch its 15th anniversary season on October 29 with a Dialogues program at the New Orleans Jazz Museum, bringing together three Louisiana-rooted composer-performers for an evening that blends live chamber music with conversation about how place and history shape new work. The 7 p.m. program at the Old U.S. Mint building on Esplanade Avenue will be hosted by Tania León, the organization's founder, and will feature New Orleans native Courtney Bryan, Baton Rouge-born trumpeter Steve Lands, and composer-violinist Sultana Isham, each presenting roughly 10-minute chamber works.
The event, as reported by Biz New Orleans, marks the opening stop of Composers Now's 2026-27 season, which will continue later in New York City and online with world premieres, new commissions and mentorship initiatives. The Dialogues format itself is not new: Composers Now launched the series in 2015 in Harlem as a town-hall-style forum pairing live performance with direct conversation between composers, performers and audiences before expanding it across the country.
A Host With National Standing
León brings serious institutional weight to the New Orleans stop. She won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her orchestral work Stride, becoming, per the seed reporting, the first Latin American woman to win the prize, and was named a recipient of the 45th annual Kennedy Center Honors the following year, an honor the Kennedy Center has tied to her six-decade career as a composer and conductor after fleeing Cuba for the United States as a refugee in 1967. Before founding Composers Now in 2010, she served as founding music director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem starting in 1969 and as new music advisor to the New York Philharmonic from 1993 to 1997, according to the organization's own program history. Hoodline previously noted León's Kennedy Center recognition in coverage of singer Gladys Knight scaling back her own touring schedule.
The organization she built now supports living composers through concerts, commissions, creative residencies and mentorship, and it stages its own annual festival every February featuring performances and conversations with composers, per the Biz New Orleans report. That mission is on full display in the trio chosen for the New Orleans launch, each of whom carries both deep local roots and a national creative profile.
Bryan Brings Her MacArthur-Winning Sound Home
Courtney Bryan, a New Orleans native and 2023 MacArthur Fellow, will perform an excerpt from her piano concerto House of Pianos, arranged for piano and string quintet. The MacArthur Foundation recognized Bryan with its roughly $800,000 fellowship for work fusing classical, jazz and sacred Black music traditions with social and political themes. The full concerto, which premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, is structured around five movement scenes depicting imagined gatherings of pianists across history, in settings ranging from rent parties to praise houses, according to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Bryan holds the Albert and Linda Mintz professorship in music at Newcomb College within Tulane University's School of Liberal Arts, earned her doctorate at Columbia University, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. She has held residencies with Opera Philadelphia, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and the Jacksonville Symphony, and co-founded the Mellon-funded Jazz Generations Initiative operating in both New Orleans and New York. Her catalog, per the seed reporting, also includes Suddenly Last Summer, Dreaming (Freedom Sounds), Visual Rhythms and Gathering Song.
A Meteor Shower Inspires Lands' Trumpet Suite
Steve Lands, the Baton Rouge-born trumpeter and composer, will perform the prelude and first part of his Draconid Suite for trumpet, piano and strings, with pianist Oscar Rossignoli accompanying him. The piece was originally commissioned for a performance honoring the annual Draconid meteor shower and draws its imagery from dragons falling from the sky, according to the Biz New Orleans account. Lands has performed and recorded with Maroon 5, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the Black Keys and members of the Marsalis family, and his New Orleans ties run deep: his multidisciplinary suite Rearranging the Planets premiered at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2022 during his tenure as a Creative Assembly Cohort member.
Isham Translates Astrophysics Into Opera
Sultana Isham, a composer, violinist, scholar, filmmaker and interdisciplinary fellow at the Sundance Institute, will present a work for string ensemble shaped by her interdisciplinary approach to sound and storytelling. Isham scored the documentary The Neutral Ground, which earned her a 2021 International Documentary Association nomination for best music score; that film, directed by CJ Hunt and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, examined the controversy surrounding New Orleans' 2015 vote to remove four Confederate monuments, according to New Music USA.
Isham made her composer-conductor debut with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in 2023 and also composed the score for the HBO docuseries Stax: Soulsville, USA. She served as researcher and composer for All Skinfolk Ain't Kinfolk, and she is currently an OPERA America 2024-26 Discovery Grantee developing Rogue Objects, an immersive planetarium opera. The project, created with librettist and director Janani Balasubramanian alongside astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History, translates research on brown dwarfs into an operatic score slated for a 2027 premiere, per OPERA America.
A Historic Mint Building Sets the Stage
The venue itself carries its own layered history. The New Orleans Jazz Museum occupies the 1838 Old U.S. Mint building at 400 Esplanade Avenue, a structure that served as both a U.S. and Confederate mint before its conversion into a museum, and it now stewards a collection of more than 25,000 jazz artifacts, including Louis Armstrong's 1913 first cornet, according to the Louisiana State Museum. Hoodline has reported on infrastructure investment at the site, noting that the museum secured a $900,000 federal American Rescue Plan grant in September 2022, paired with $225,000 in local matching funds, to build a new outdoor performance stage and renovate its historic grounds.
The Dialogues stop follows other recent live bookings at the Mint, including Hoodline's coverage of a Carmel-based Latin jazz pianist performing at the venue last month. For Composers Now, though, the format sets this night apart from a standard concert booking: it is built around direct exchange between the three composers, León and the audience about the ideas, influences and creative processes behind each work, continuing a model the organization has used to connect contemporary composition with community audiences since 2015.
