$20 General Admission (Seated) - $30 Premier (Seated)
Doors open at 7PM
Cosmic bluesman Lonnie Holley is a child of the most difficult times and experiences. To name a few: He was born the seventh of twenty-seven children in Jim Crow Alabama — and at the age of four, traded for a bottle of whisky. As a child fleeing from foster parents, he was hit by a car and declared brain-dead on arrival at the hospital. At age eleven, Lonnie was sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children (functionally a slave plantation, featured in the award-winning 2023 podcast “Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children), suffering the worst abuses your mind can imagine.
To come out the other end of such experiences with anything but a hopeless, broken heart already seems miraculous. And here is Lonnie Holley — who in the course of a productive artistic lifetime of sculpture, painting, film making, and performing (since 2012), who has somehow emerged, through a process of relentless exorcism, determination and hope — as a figure of near-infinite optimism and love.
His recent (sixth) album, “Oh Me Oh My”, is a deeply meditative excavation of history that I’d recommend listening to before the show. Produced by Jacknife Lee and featuring such luminaries as Michael Stipe, Sharon van Etten, Moor Mother, Jeff Parker, and Bon Iver, it’s a calm and intimate masterpiece and an exorcism of our country’s troubled history.
At the outset of 2024, he comes to share his soulful mystic improvisations with us in the company of a sprawling, multi-generational Black Culture collective: Mourning [A] BLKstar, who deserve a full billing in their own right. This is a special event, folks. Gonna be a vibe.
“Holley has an almost shamanistic quality, as if he possessed all the wisdom of the universe”
— New Yorker
“EVERY PERFORMANCE IS A SPONTANEOUS CREATION”
Lonnie was recently listed in the Guardian as one of the thirty artists to see live before you die. His sets are “spontaneous creations;” his manager confessed to me that he hates to miss a show, because each one is completely unique.
Folk, jazz, gospel, blues — Holley’s music contains hints of Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, Lou Reed, Alice Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron, Miles Davis — but there is no obvious influence. He seems to apply the same methodology to music as he does to sculpture: the soldering together of disparate things into misfit, recompiled beauty.
Holley is accompanied by the Afrofuturist collective Mourning [A] BLKstar out of Cleveland, Ohio.. They forage new pathways towards heart music by melding soul, blues, electronics, avant-poetics with futuristic beats.
So consider this one a twofer. M[A]B will play a short opening set before welcoming Lonnie on stage for a second set.