“Toward a Different Kind of Horizon,” a free collaborative concert featuring Moor Mother, Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains and Mourning [A] BLKstar, will be held Friday, March 24, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium.
“Bringing these world-class artists together in Cleveland is a dream,” said concert organizer AJ Kluth, a lecturer in the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University. “I’m excited we’ve been able to make this concert free for the community. This music is adventurous, but it’s for everybody.”
The concert is presented free through contributions from Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Music, Center for Popular Music Studies, Baker-Nord Center for Humanities, Writers House, Department of English, African and African American Studies Program, and from Cleveland Museum of Art and the Oberlin College and Conservatory.
About Moor Mother
Songwriter, composer, vocalist, poet and educator Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) spent years organizing and performing in Philadelphia’s underground music community, ultimately developing a global audience for her iconoclast work. She released her debut album Fetish Bones as Moor Mother in 2016, and has since produced highly acclaimed music, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians.
She performs with the Afrofuturist literary and artistic collective Black Quantum Futurism and co-leads the groups Irreversible Entanglements and 700 Bliss. Her most recent record, Jazz Codes (Anti- Records), was recognized by The New York Times as one of the best of 2022.
About Lonnie Holley
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, Holley’s early life was chaotic, characterized by trauma, exploitation and precarity. From this challenging beginning, he has devoted his life to improvisational creativity, producing art and music that create beauty from that struggle and hardship.
Improvised on the spot, his music and lyrics morph and change with every event, concert, and recording—the result of decades of evolving experimentation. To be released on Jagjaguwar this month, his most recent record, Oh Me Oh My, features collaborations with Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etten, Moor Mother, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Rokia Koné.
About Lee Bains
Bains is a poet and singer-songwriter whose work is steeped in the American South. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Bains’ songs are hopeful, but far from naïve. On the 2022 record Old-Time Folks (Don Giovanni), Lee Bains + The Glory Fires deliver songs that mix the sounds of southern rock, gospel, folk and punk to deliver stories of resistance and love.
Challenging revisionist histories that would prefer to forget the worst parts of our collective past as much as the present neoliberal logic that reduces people to numbers, they celebrate the messiness of humanity and the power of solidarity and love.
About Mourning [A] BLKstar
![Photo of Mourning [A] BLKstar](https://thedaily.case.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/mab-photo-by-jenn-kidd.jpg)
A multi-generational, gender and genre non-conforming amalgam of Black culture, Mourning [A] BLKstar shares the stories and songs of America’s ongoing apocalypse. M[A]B’s music deploys hip-hop production techniques and live instrumentation to create sounds that resonate with the pathways and frequencies that have sustained the African diaspora.
Founded in Cleveland, M[A]B has brought its powerful sound to stages around the United States and Europe, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Le Guess Who? In the Netherlands, and choreographic collaborations with Company Christoph Winkler in Berlin, Germany.