Ars Nova Workshop presents the exploratory group MESTIZX led by vocalist Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and drummer Frank Rosaly at Solar Myth on Monday, March 31.

Partners in both marriage and art, the Amsterdam-based duo of Bolivian-born singer and multi-medium performer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and renowned Chicago expat jazz drummer Frank Rosaly dove into the sounds of their respective ancestral roots in Bolivia, Brazil, and Puerto Rico to create a deeply personal meditation on decolonization and the defiant power of ritual and protest. For their debut album they chose the title MESTIZX – a non-gendered version of the sometimes slurred Spanish colonial word for a “mixed person” – as a means of both challenging and embracing the liminality of their identities and artistic practices. The music creatively infuses Latin rhythmic patterns and oblong swing from pre-and post-colonial Latin America into a collision of avant jazz, art punk, Chicago post-rock, bomba, plena, cumbia, Andean, minimal, electronica, and folk. While the form of the ensemble shifts from moment to moment in the studio with a host of inspired collaborators, for this performance MESTIZX takes the form of a stellar quintet featuring bassist Matt Lux, cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, and keyboardist Ben Boyd.