Lonnie Holley is an African-American artist, musician & art educator. A true original with a generous, uplifting & warm spirit.

We welcome Lonnie back to The Cube for a two night residency of improvisation & deep feeling. No two shows are ever the same and it is always an honour to be in his company.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. Lonnie’s art and music are born out of struggle and hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of a furious curiosity and biological necessity. 

That drive manifests in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, music, and filmmaking.  His art has been featured in exhibitions and publications throughout the world, and is in the collections of major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Tate Modern & Camden Art Centre alongside many others. 

Free spirited, soulful music with a stream of consciousness energy that orbits similar visionaries such as Sun Ra, Joni Mitchell & Gil Scott-Heron. Lonnie has released seven critically acclaimed albums including Just Before Music (2012), MITH (included as one of the best albums of the decade by The New Yorker) & the latest Tonky, earlier this year. He has toured extensively throughout the United States and the Americas, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, sharing stages with Bill Callahan, Tinariwen, Daniel Lanois, Laraaji and others. 

Lonnie continues to make art, music, and as he puts it, “thoughtsmith,” from his home and studio in Atlanta, Georgia and around the world.

“I tell a lot of people, the universe is my studio” - Lonnie Holley

Shahzad Ismaily joins for both nights as a very special guest. Shahzad is an American multi-instrumentalist & composer of Pakistani descent who has worked in theatre & film and contributed his distinctive musical language to 100s of records by artists including Marc Ribot, John Zorn, Yoko Ono, Laraaji, Colin Stetson, Sam Amidon, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & Laurie Anderson as well as a key presence on the grammy award winning albums of Arooj Aftab.

Artist & composer Allan Gilbert Balon was born in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe in 1986 and is now based in Créteil, in the Southeastern suburbs of Paris. Allan’s practice combines sculpture, composition & sound installations to explore themes of presence & intimacy.

He has released music on Recital Program & Séance Centre, exhibited at New York’s MoMA PS1 and played a UK debut earlier this year at London’s Cafe OTO. This Bristol performance represents a rare chance to see him perform.

Allan’s debut, The Magnesia Suite, begins with a submerged choral voice that reverberates closely amongst long held organ chords introducing a lo-fi patchwork waltz of home recorded pieces drawing together piano, reeds, percussion & echoed voices. An assemblage of private histories and memory, flowing lucidly in a coastal drift of dissolving lines between the outside environment and internal space.

An intimate air hangs over Allan’s craft. Private music that evokes something of Erik Satie’s furniture music. A sense of the overheard, slowed down ragtime piano rolls drifting from a parlour window; spliced tape & late night radio FM interference. Allan gives us an architecture of sound that recalls the spatial tensions of dissonance and warmth held in the piano chords of Thelonious Monk and minimalist reverence of Charlemagne Palestine & Alvin Curran with the unhurried, wandering poise of the piano works of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.

Quiet notes that bring to mind the late composer Talib Rasul Hakim’s reflections to accompany one of his own pieces as “atmospheres-of-sound floating above and around segments of moving silence”.

Monday 10th November w/ Shahzad Ismaily & Allan Gilbert Balon

Tuesday 11th November w/ Shahzad Ismaily & Patricia Cadavid