Devon Gates

Devon Gates is a bassist, vocalist, and composer from Atlanta, Georgia, now based in Brooklyn, NY. After studying anthropology and jazz performance at Harvard University, Berklee College of Music, and the Royal Academy of Music (London, UK) she has emerged in the contemporary jazz scene, working with esteemed artists including Terri Lyne Carrington, Vijay Iyer, Jen Shyu, and Nicole Mitchell, and performing at venues such as The Kennedy Center, SFJazz, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, and the London Jazz Festival. Recently named one of 2024’s Up and Comers of the Year (The New York City Jazz Record), she also leads her own projects as a bandleader, collaborator, and composer, bringing her unique blend of jazz, chamber, and soul influences to New York, Japan, Italy, Mongolia, India, the UK, and more in recent years.

In 2022, her original composition “Don’t Wait” was published in the Berklee Press New Standards collection of 101 lead sheets by female jazz composers curated by Terri Lyne Carrington, and since then she has been the recipient of the inaugural Marion Brown Prize (Bowdoin College), Composers Now First Commission Award 2024, and HerVoice Prize (Chicago Acapella) for her choral and chamber compositions.

Creating across boundaries of discipline and genre, Gates has written original music in collaboration with playwright Phillip Howze for theatrical work, “Self Portraits” (Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn), worked as a curatorial assistant for the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice’s New Standards touring gallery exhibition, garnered viral attention for her arrangement and live performance of H.E.R.’s “Hard Place” with the Harvard Opportunes acapella ensemble, and has contributed original music for the audio edition of Tricia Hersey (The Nap Ministry)’s newest book We Will Rest! The Art of Escape (released November 2024).

Devon is also a passionate educator and facilitator, who has held teaching positions at Harvard College (Music Department Teaching Fellow to Prof. Vijay Iyer), the Berklee Bass Department Summer Workshop, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and Hilton Head Jazz Camp, and organizes carceral education work as a founding member of Freedom Classroom, a continuation of the Prison Studies Project. As part of her honors thesis for the Harvard Anthropology Department, she developed the SOL, or Sounds of Liberation Collective, a community-engaged initiative to provide commissions and build community among other non-male-identifying peers in the Boston jazz/creative music scene.

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