Aquilla Sadalla is a Chicago vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, recording artist, and
performance artist whose documented career spans more than four decades — alongside a
parallel career as an educator and maternal-health advocate. Her work moves fluidly between
the concert stage, the classroom, and the community, bringing together jazz, soul, R&B, Africancentered creative music, improvisation, and socially conscious storytelling.

ROOTS IN CHICAGO’S CREATIVE M USIC · 1 9 7 9 – 1 9 9 7

Sadalla emerged from Chicago’s African-centered creative-music tradition, joining composer and
multi-instrumentalist Kelan Phil Cohran’s Circle of Sound by 1979. On September 2, 1988, she
performed with Cohran and Circle of Sound at the Chicago Jazz Festival’s Petrillo Music Shell —
the first of several landmark festival appearances. In the 1990s she became a vocalist,
clarinetist, and percussionist with Samana, historically recognized as the first all-woman
ensemble within the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), performing
alongside Shanta Nurullah, Maia Hubert, Nicole Mitchell, and Coco Elysses.

Samana’s August 31, 1997 performance at the Chicago Jazz Festival stands as
one of the defining milestones of Sadalla’s career — and of the AACM’s history.

COLLABORATIONS & RECOGNITION · 1 9 9 3 – 2 0 1 4

Her recorded work with Cohran includes African Skies, captured in 1993 in connection with
Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and credited to Sadalla on bass clarinet, guitar, flute, and vocals —
documentation that establishes her as a multi-instrumentalist rather than a vocalist alone. In the
2000s, Sadalla contributed vocals to Nicole Mitchell’s multimedia work Vision Quest: Hope,
Future and Destiny, and by the mid-2000s she was a featured vocalist with National Trust, work
that helped connect Chicago’s creative-music community to New York’s underground music
scene.

Sadalla’s collaboration with Hypnotic Brass Ensemble has become one of the most enduring
threads of her career, spanning recording, live performance, and international touring. She is
featured on “Fly,” released June 12, 2013 on the ensemble’s album FLY, and appears in Brothers
Hypnotic, the feature documentary directed by Reuben Atlas and produced with Sam Pollard,
which screened at SXSW, Hot Docs, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and other major festivals
before airing on PBS’s Independent Lens.

SOLO CATALOG & CURRENT WORK · 2 0 0 8 –PRESENT

As a solo recording artist, Sadalla released her debut album Cosmos Watching in 2008, followed
by the 15-track We Can Change Things on July 10, 2017, and Inner City Bluze, Vol. 1 — featuring
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble — in 2025. In 2024, she reunited with the ensemble for a celebrated
performance at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival in Cork, Ireland. She continues to perform with
her seven-piece ensemble Sedallah, and is developing Echoes of the Heart, a live performance
concept that presents music as personal testimony and cultural memory.

EDUCATION, M ATERNAL HEALTH & ADVOCACY

Parallel to her artistic career, Sadalla spent decades as an educator with Chicago Public Schools,
retiring in 2016 after a career focused on curriculum development, literacy, and culturally
responsive, student-centered instruction. That foundation now anchors her current work
developing statewide maternal-health and birth-justice frameworks for Illinois — including
culturally responsive doula workforce standards, trauma-informed maternity-care curricula,
breastfeeding education, and maternal- and infant-loss education. She holds certifications as a
Doula (2022), Certified Childbirth Educator (2024), Breastfeeding Specialist (2025), and Death
Doula (2025).

PHILOSOPHY

Sadalla’s interdisciplinary practice is grounded in the belief that education, culture, health,
history, and creative expression are interconnected. Whether on a concert stage, in a doula
training, or in front of a classroom, her work is organized around a single aim: turning knowledge
into action that strengthens families and communities and builds toward a more equitable future.