The Chicago Tribune named Nicole Mitchell and Malian kora virtuoso Ballake Sissoko's September performance at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts one of the top jazz performances of the year for the "daring world premiere" of “Bamako*Chicago Sound System," calling it "intensely contrapuntal, lustrously sonorous music-making."

Nicole Mitchell, 50, the artist-in-residence at this week’s Winter Jazzfest in New York, brings an eclectic ear and a frothy vigor to her instrument. The flute is rarely given much of a chance in jazz — maybe it seems too quiet, too liquid, too fey — but she has transcended all that, becoming a leading voice of the music’s cutting edge.

The Daily Pilot/TimesOC Man and Woman of the Year in Theater for 2017 are the artistic director of UC Irvine’s New Swan Shakespeare Festival and the executive director of One More Productions at the Gem Theater in Garden Grove, Eli Simon and Nicole Cassesso.

To be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 28, at the university’s acoustically superior Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, the two-hour fundraising event — aptly billed as a Jazz Piano Summit — will culminate with a joint performance by Cecil Lytle, Mike Wofford, Joshua White, Tobin Chodos and Kei Akagi.

The perennial theme of the directionless child's search for identity is told in the book "She" by author and UC Irvine English professor Michelle Latiolais.