Aurora Nealand – The Monocle

Aurora Nealand was born in Pacifica, California, and after studying saxophone at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she became involved in musique concrète, and in New York, where she studied the work of Laurie Andersen, Brian Eno and Philipp Glass, she moved to New Orleans in the south of the USA. Nealand plays saxophone and accordion, and she is also a singer endowed with a colorful timbre. In “The Big Easy” she formed her band The Royal Roses, with whom she has since caused quite a stir with her “non-traditional traditional jazz”. “The Monocle” is the title of her solo project, with which she has already realized the sensational audiovisual performance “KindHumanKind” in 2019. Even more radical than in her many other projects, she mixes tradition and modernity with “The Monocle” and exuberantly tears down the border fences between genres and genres that often seem so insurmountable. Sometimes she sings gospel songs, sometimes she plays the music of the Cajuns from Louisiana on the accordion, then she blows intuitive music on the saxophone: Nealand is always concerned with the expression of herself in order to reveal the greatest possible level of emotion to the audience.