Catherine Sikora and Eric Mingus at Coconino Center for the Arts

Catherine Sikora and Eric Mingus create music that lives in the bones and breath—where improvisation becomes language, and sound becomes a vessel for history, place, and presence.

Catherine Sikora is a tenor and soprano saxophonist, composer, and improviser whose playing carries the deep imprint of natural landscapes and sonic exploration. From the moment she first heard the wind singing through a metal gate as a child, she has been captivated by the magic of resonant air. Her devotion to the saxophone is both spiritual and fiercely disciplined, informed by years of study, practice, and international performance. With sixteen albums as leader or co-leader, Sikora’s work spans collaborations with artists such as Susan Alcorn, Brian Chase, and Ursel Schlicht. She is a member of the soprano saxophone quartet Chaos Theory (led by Sam Newsome) and the improvising trio Eris 136199. Her music has been featured on BBC’s Freeness, Free Jazz Blog, and festivals including Jazz em Agosto (Lisbon), Vision Festival (NYC), Documenta 15 (Germany), and the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Eric Mingus is a vocalist, composer, poet, and multi-instrumentalist whose career defies categorization. With a voice that can move from thunder to lullaby, and a creative lineage rooted in the legacy of Black American music, Mingus works at the intersection of jazz, blues, punk, poetry, and performance art. He has collaborated with artists including Howard Johnson, Elliott Sharp, Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm, while developing his own multidisciplinary works such as The Mill—an ongoing project that explores ancestral memory, survival, and storytelling in the Great Smoky Mountains. He leads the Sacred Routes Vocal Ensemble, using words and melody to trace the roots of our human connection. In addition to private coaching of musicians, Eric teaches at The New School, is a judge and educator at the annual Charles Mingus High School competition, has lectured at Berklee, Harvard, UC Irvine, the Banlieues Blues Jazz festival (Paris, France) and the In Situ Arts Society (Bonn, Germany). He taught vocal improvisation classes and a Charles Mingus workshop at London’s Community Music House. As a duo, Sikora and Mingus build landscapes in real time—improvised dialogues where breath, voice, and instrument move together through terrain that is sometimes ecstatic, sometimes aching, always alive. Their work reflects their distinct cultural lineages—Ireland and the Black American South—and honors both the intimacy of collaboration and the expansiveness of improvisation.

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