Videos from “Toward a Different Kind of Horizon” Concert up on YouTube!

The band as it appeared in Gartner Auditorium. Photo by Darnell McAdams.

It took a few months, but I’m excited to finally be able to share video from the concert I’d organized in March, 2023. TLDR: Find here a playlist of eleven incredible collective improvisations from Moor Mother, Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains, and Mourning [A] BLKstar. The CMA’s Gartner Auditorium was packed that night, every seat booked for the free show. Having arranged everything for this show from envisioning the event, writing grants/raising the money, working with the artists and their teams on everyone’s contract and needs, organizing the press, coordinating the venue, tech, projections and photography, satellite events on CWRU campus and at Oberlin – all on top of my regular duties at CWRU and as a freelance working musician – I was EXHAUSTED, but excited. When the date for the event actually came, it proved to be a whirlwind couple of days. The day before the show, Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains, and members of M[A]B held a poetry roundtable event on campus. The next morning, Moor Mother (who flew in at 6am that day after collaborating on a project in NYC late in to the previous night with Kevin Beasley and miraculously gave her all for the 22 hours she was in Cleveland) and members of M[A]B offered a public talk/Q&A in CWRU’s Clark Hall. That morning we also learned that after having made the trip to Cleveland and taking part is some of the event’s activities, Lonnie took ill and wasn’t able to join us in-person that night. We were all worried for him. True to form, Lonnie – because he’s a workaholic and didn’t want to let us down – sent some voice memos that RA Washington sampled to incorporate that evening. These turned out to be crucial jumping-off points for the improvisatory music that ensued. Happily Lonnie pulled through and was well enough to make his appearance at Big Ears festival a few days later.

The band and crowd sending some love to Lonnie Holley who, after traveling to Cleveland, couldn’t make the performance due to illness. Photo by Darnell McAdams.

In my line of work, we’re sometimes asked what kind of “public musicology” we do outside of our classrooms. This is, I suppose, a step in the direction of the kind of public musicology I’d like lean into as an organizer, scholar, and musician – more to come, no doubt. If you weren’t able to make it or want to check it out again, I’m so pleased to be able to share more of what went down that evening. Big love to all. As Lonnie Holley likes to say: “Thumbs up for Mother Universe!”

RECAP: “Toward a Different Kind of Horizon” was a collaborative, improvised musical event offered for free at the Cleveland Museum of Art in March of 2023. It was conceived, organized, and produced by AJ Kluth. Each of these musical moments was completely improvised. For her first appearance in Cleveland, the iconoclast Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) joined visionary artists Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains, and Mourning [A] BLKstar for a collaborative performance in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium. While not a concert of his music, the title of the performance is inspired by the words of Sun Ra: “Calling planet Earth…I am a different order of being…I represent a different kind of horizon…”* In this spirit of challenge, these artists come together to create new, improvised music that wagers the comfort of the known for the promise of a speculative horizon, daring the listener to follow toward a new way of being.

Indelibly American artists informed by the Black radical tradition, the musics of Moor Mother, Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains, and Mourning [A] BLKstar encompass elements of free jazz, hip hop, gospel, and more. Their poetry, improvisation, and cutting-edge musical production techniques are deployed in service of plurality, liberation, reparative justice, and joy. Respondent to, but not mired in the inequities of the past, this is music to challenge and inspire us all.

This concert was loosely organized around the idea of Afrofuturism; that logic, aesthetic, and mythos that animated so much of Sun Ra’s otherworldly vision. This attitude casts the world into a strange loop where the past and future are put in dialogue to refigure the horizon of the present. In this moment in the US, characterized by polarizing narratives that often work in bad faith to mis-represent the past, weaponize identity politics, and promote anti-democratic policies that keep people divided, we are urgently in need of such a model for visionary dialogue.

An Afrofuturist musical attitude, theorist Kodwo Eshun tells us, does not emerge from history but instead “arrives from the future” as a guide for imagining what might be.** As such, this improvisational music functions as a time and a space of the “as if” for imagined futures, a poetic topography of the “not yet.” This music is a liberation technology that helps us respond to our realities and to speculate futures–but it also makes demands. To answer its call is to be changed. Let us follow it together toward a different kind of horizon.

Note: Due to illness the day of the concert, Lonnie Holley does not appear. However, his voice and vision are manifest here via sampled voice memos he produced for the occasion.

* Mugge, Robert, dir. Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise. 1980; New York, NY: Winstar Home Entertainment, 1998. DVD.
** Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998 (pg -005).