Lonnie Holley & Mourning [A] BLKstar 1/18/24 Whitney Humanities Center at Yale

 Some shows are difficult to describe. The spiritual feelings I experienced while sitting in the audience for this event will not be accurately scribed. I can give you the facts and let your imagination conjure the feelings. Let’s start with the venue, WHC is just one of many hallowed halls attached to Yale. An unassuming entrance on Wall Street led to a beautiful auditorium where a hundred or so patrons were treated to this awesome show. M[A]B is an experimental collective of artists and storytellers formed in Cleveland that are self-proclaimed avant poets  who fuse beat making and classic instrumentation to weave afrofuturist tales. An eight person gender fluid multiracial outfit, trumpet, percussion, bass, drums, trombone, multiple vocalists, and a beatmaster on laptop and electronics laid the framework for Holley to work. Lee Bains, guitarist and former student of Holley, gave an added dimension to M[A]B and lent a stage familiarity that was palpable. I will plagiarize the playbill to describe Holley. “Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham Alabama in 1950, Lonnie Holley was the seventh of 27 children and at the age of four was taken from his mother and traded for a bottle of whiskey. He fled abusive foster parents, was hit by a car ( and declared brain dead) and was later sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children (essentially a slave camp).” Hardship, struggle, and furious curiosity fuel the art, visual and performance, from this amazing man. The introduction was given by Holley’s friend and promoter Matt Arnett, son of TV comedian Will. Arnett explained that a Holley performance is completely improvised. An index card with notes and phrases guides the proceeding for Holley and the musicians rendering no two performances the same. On this evening, the concepts of time, education, environmental justice, and freedom allowed Holley to riff. The music moved from gospel to hiphop to afrobeat and was completely engaging. Holley enjoyed word play and had fun with Yale which rhymes with jail and sounds like yell. At one point, when riffing on social justice, Holley intoned “nothing I write, can make it right”, I feel that, nothing I write can describe it right. Props to CCAM (Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media) a well-connected student group that arranged the performance.