It’s a triple-bill of visionary sound as outsider prophet Lonnie Holley, Afrofuturist poet Moor Mother and free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements take over the Utzon Room for a night of radical catharsis.
A liberating night of visionary free jazz, hip-hop and transcendent vision
Three of American music’s most radical acts transform the Sydney Opera House Utzon Room for a visionary night of genre-defying sound, Afrofuturist free jazz and experimental noise that will leave you shaken, liberated and uplifted.
Returning to the Sydney Opera House after a legendary performance at Vivid LIVE in 2019, Alabama-born sculptor and outsider artist turned musical shaman, Lonnie Holley live channels a vision from another world right before your eyes, creating a haunting, surrealist musical and poetic landscape of transcendence, beauty and decay that recalls the likes of Gil Scott-Heron, Alice Coltrane and Arthur Russell at their best. In a storied, mythical career encompassing and surpassing sometimes brutal and tragic beginnings to his present inspiring Blakean visions, Holley has collaborated with Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective and Julia Holter, while his latest and most ambitious record, Oh Me Oh My, features contributions from Sharon Van Etten, Bon Iver and Michael Stipe.
Making her Sydney Opera House debut, Moor Mother is the solo project of Philadelphia-based artist, Afrofuturist philosopher and social activist Camae Ayewa. Dubbing her approach “Black quantum futurism”, Moor Mother draws on experimental noise, jazz, punk, hip-hop and spoken word performance to deliver revolutionary politics over radical soundscapes across acclaimed records like Black Encyclopedia of the Air (2021) and Jazz Codes (2022).
As vocalist, Ayewa also forms one fifth of the eclectic free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, alongside bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer and drummer Tcheser Holmes. Formed in 2015 as a “vehicle for Black liberation”, the band’s radical Afrofuturist sound combines revolutionary rigour and punk spirit with funk grooves and spacious electronic sounds. This is their Sydney Opera House debut.