Timed to Women’s History Month, Still Soaring builds on 2024’s Flying High, returning to the women singers who came of age during the swing and big band era, artists whose voices helped define American popular song while their working lives were shaped by demanding and often unseen conditions. Frequently the only woman in a traveling ensemble, these singers carried repertoire, authority, and personality across the country night after night, navigating sexism, racism, and physical exhaustion while being expected to project glamour and command onstage.

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Rather than functioning as a one-off tribute, Flying High is conceived as an evolving program grounded in lived experience. “Women were there from the beginning,” Fulton notes. “They were integral to the music and to the cultural fabric of the twentieth century, but they made enormous sacrifices to do their jobs.” That perspective informs the project’s focus on labor as much as legacy.