I believe that music has the power to inspire, nurture and transform one’s perspective, and that’s what I try to do with my music,” says Nicole Mitchell, one of the artists to grace this year’s WNUR Chicago Sounds Jazzfest. “Music is a spiritual path towards self-actualization.”

Mitchell, a Chicago native and internationally celebrated jazz flutist, played with the David Boykin Expanse at the festival in 2001 and again last year with the Nicole Mitchell Trio – Josh Abrams and Marcus Evans made up the other parts of the group.

“I’m honored to be invited again to the festival,” Mitchell writes in an e-mail interview. “And this year I will bring my group Black Earth Strings.”

Many musicians believe there is a correlation between their music, personal expression and identity. Mike Corsa, a Weinberg senior and the general manager for WNUR, presented the best explanation for this relationship.

“Improvised music is, in its essence, about spontaneously transforming one’s personal, private emotions into sounds emitted from one’s instrument – and communicating feelings to the listener through these sounds that could be presented no other way,” Corsa says. “No other kind of music is more perfect for this task than improvised music, since the performer doesn’t have to be confined or restricted by a pre-composed score. Everything that the listener hears is coming straight from the musician’s soul.”

WNUR is one of the only places in the area and one of few across the country that tries to bring this creative force to the people on a mass scale. It’s no secret that the campus radio station, on the whole, has the goal of exposing its audience to original music that’s otherwise unable to get time on the air.

“WNUR has a great relationship with local musicians. There aren’t enough radio stations or festivals that regularly support creative music,” says Mitchell, who has performed at the Moscow Jazz Festival, the Nouve Forme Festival in Verona, Italy, and other high-profile events. The jazz show at WNUR, in particular, “is extremely devoted to the Chicago jazz community,” Corsa says. “We play the music, we announce the shows, we do interviews, we have live performances, we give away tickets and CDs, we do whatever we can to support and promote the music we love so much.”

While the jazz show places special emphasis on local artists, Swiss native Charlotte Hug, the opening act for Mitchell, will play in Chicago for the first time. In an e-mail interview Hug writes, “For the Chicago scene I am enormously curious.”

Knowing she wanted to make music for the rest of her life, Hug took 10 years of viola lessons from her grandfather as a child and has since grown to become a celebrated jazz musician who has also studied visual art. Combining her interests, Hug says she finds inspiration for her artistic work by “being awake and curious – by reading literature, seeing films (and) being in nature: in the mountains or in different urban or emotional spaces.”

Hug embodies the free spirit that others involved in the festival associate with jazz. One example is her pursuit of abnormal locations to record and perform that “are distinct from the conventional concert hall” and enhance her music by adding visual, acoustic and emotional elements that are not present otherwise.

Hug’s previous performances have taken place in the caverns of the Rhone Glacier, the source of the river of the same name, located in the Gletsch valley of Switzerland; a claustrophobic sado-masochistic torture chamber in the red light district of Zurich; and in the underground passageways of a 250-year-old prison in London.

Other musicians on the line-up have not, to the best of my knowledge, performed in subterranean dungeons in foreign countries, but they are creative and distinguished artists nonetheless.

The headlining act, Douglas R. Ewart, though born and raised in Jamaica, has become a major force in Chicago music. As former president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and teacher for the organization, Ewart is a renowned instructor who has taught workshops at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans and numerous other renowned institutions. He says the instruction he provides his students “reaffirms their belief in themselves.

Opening act Jason Ajemian writes off his influence on the local scene with a shrug: “If they think I’m hip, that’s cool I guess.”

The fifth annual Chicago Sounds Jazzfest, hosted by Northwestern’s own WNUR-FM (89.3), will be held this Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Wallis Theatre. Tickets cost $8 for the public, with a $3 discount for students.