Clarinet Professor is Featured Performer and Composer on New Album

Albany Records has released a new album by the Burnt Reeds ensemble, a quintet of woodwind musicians that includes Associate Professor of Clarinet Jessica Lindsey. The first album by Burnt Reeds, which began performing in 2020, “Homegrown Melodies” is a collection of new works by six composers of the Carolinas, commissioned by the quintet.

“We started to work on this specific project in 2023, dreaming big with an application for an Opportunity Grant from the City of Charlotte,” said Lindsey, who has also composed a piece for the album.

Their successful application resulted in a $28,600 Opportunity Fund grant, which supported the commissioning, rehearsing and premiere of the new compositions at a public performance in February 2024. A subsequent Culture Blocks grant from the Arts & Science Council funded a series of 11 free community performances in August 2024.

To support the costs of recording, editing and mastering the album – all engineered by Senior Lecturer of Music Rick Dior at his Acoustic Barn Productions – Lindsey received an Artist Support Grant from the ASC and a 2025 Faculty Research Grant from the university. 

The music of “Homegrown Melodies,” by composers Madison Bush, Amber Ferenz, Teil Taliesen, Dylan Taliesen, Zach Zubow and Lindsey, evokes experiences of North Carolina, from the personal to the geographic.

A South Carolinian who comes frequently to Charlotte, Bush’s “The Drive There and Back” suggests “the interconnection of North and South Carolinian relationships and communities across formal borders,” ken tianyuan Ge writes in the liner notes. Ferenz, who lives in Winston-Salem, encapsulates North Carolina’s “natural beauty and topographical diversity” in “From the Mountains to the Sea.”

Teil Taliesen’s “The Heroine’s Journey” is a “genre-bending collaboration” with the producer RoyalCity LiF, who provides an “electronic meshwork” of “trap-inflected textures,” Ge writes. Zubow’s brewery-inspired “One For Me, One For You” incorporates a Celtic flavor, while Dylan Taliesen’s “Growing Up Klezmer” includes both traditional tunes and original material.

In Lindsey’s “Land of the Sky,” the musicians “imitate and converse with pre-recorded samples of trains and birds,” writes Ge. The blend of acoustic and electronic sound, found throughout this album, is an area of energetic exploration for Lindsey. In 2021 she and her “Spatial Forces” duo partner, Christy Banks, released the electroacoustic album “Little Spectacle,” featuring commissions by seven composers.     

In addition to Lindsey, who plays bass clarinet on the album, Burnt Reeds includes Teil Taliesin on oboe, English horn and ocean drum; Dylan Taliesin on clarinet; Jack Murray on soprano and alto saxophones; and Stephanie Lipka on bassoon. Learn more about the quintet here.

Photos by Dionna Bright.