bio
Devon Gates is a Brooklyn-based bassist, vocalist, and composer whose work sits at the intersection of jazz, chamber music, and social storytelling. A Harvard-trained anthropologist and Berklee-sharpened improviser, Gates has worked with esteemed artists including Vijay Iyer, Terri Lyne Carrington, Sara Serpa, Fay Victor, Ingrid Jensen, Jason Moran, Jen Shyu, Marta Sanchez, and Nicole Mitchell, and performed at venues including The Jazz Gallery, the Monterey Jazz Festival, London Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, DC Jazz Festival, Winter JazzFest, the Roulette Intermedium, and SFJazz. One of 2024’s Up and Comers of the Year (The New York City Jazz Record), she was featured on bass and vocals in Terri Lyne Carrington’s Grammy-nominated release We Insist 2025, and is a 2026 Next Jazz Legacy Awardee.
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 served as composer on projects for playwright Phillip Howze and dancer Victoria Lynn Awkward, 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 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). In fall 2026, she premiered her original one-act song cycle Ghost Stories (featuring herself and dancer Victoria Awkward) via a residency at the esteemed Baryshnikov Arts Center, and self-published its accompanying zine of her original lyrics and essays, Ghost Stories: A Concatenation, edited by visual artist Samaira Wilson.
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 is currently a teaching artist for Musicambia, an NYC-based nonprofit that facilitates music education in prisons, and faculty at The New School.