College of Performing Arts Faculty

Profile

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 collaborated with leading figures across the modern jazz landscape and earned recognition for compositions that are as emotionally direct as they are structurally fearless. Gates has worked with esteemed artists including Terri Lyne Carrington, Vijay Iyer, Jen Shyu, Fay Victor, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, and Sara Serpa, 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. After being named 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 newest Grammy-nominated release, We Insist 2025, a tribute to the seminal Abbey Lincoln/Max Roach.  

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. Devon is also a passionate educator and facilitator, who has held teaching positions at Harvard College, the Berklee Bass Department Summer Workshop, and Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and is currently faculty at The New School, and a teaching artist for Musicambia, an NYC-based nonprofit that facilitates music education in prisons.