Text by Giovanni Coppola

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from somewhere between the authentic gospel elegance of Sam Cooke and the magical free-jazz transformism of Sun Ra, describing how Lonnie Bradley Holley's musical narrative moves resembles being assailed from a throbbing and imaginative stream of consciousness, that of someone who from over forty years encounters artistic insights in unfamiliar places and transforms vital pathos into unpredictable, yet always conscious art. Able to restore harmony to memory and curiosity to the future, somehow and in the same way.

Born in 1950 to Birmingham, Alabama, Holley has devoted his life to a practice of improvised creativity ranging from painting to sculpture, filmmaking to music. The seventh of no fewer than 27 children, his childhood was constantly concocted, to the point from of spending months in a coma from as a child, after being hit from a car, and sentenced to three years in prison during his teens. After being released from prison, Holley's art idea was born one tragic night in 1979, in which a fire took away his sister's two daughters, and to to which Holley dedicated his first idea of ready-made-inspired sculpture and silkscreen printing, made of salvaged materials and real-life objects, and painting. In nurturing this passion, over time and always through the concept of trauma art, her works even make it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale and the White House. Lonnie Holley's life, in short, reads like a novel through and through: growing up during the Jim Crow segregationist laws, he was "adopted" from a traveling burlesque dancer who may have taken him from his biological mother. At the age of four, he was sold for a bottle of whiskey, ended up in a reform school, worked as a cook at Disney World, and settled for some time on Airport Hill, a hill near the airport in Atlanta, Georgia.

Needless to point out how, in his idea of music, the roller coaster of these funanmoblic life stories echo loudly. Influenced from a timeless idea of blues, folk and jazz, his goal has always been to recreate a live (but also indirect) meta-reportage with a strong focus on social urgencies, combining universal themes such as the fate of the planet and our relationship with technology. Plus stories of class and race, life and love as seen through the canvas of a difficult from changing America, which was there and in many ways still is exactly as its experience exudes. "I think I was chosen to be an artist because I can take my life and tell to someone else about it. It's important to me to keep track of it," read the liner notes of her "Keeping to Record of It" in 2018. For Lonnie, art represents a form of freedom that eschews from every convention of rule, an expression that is woven between the strokes of sculptures made from recycled materials or by means of intense spiritual and musical catharsis: each creative act is vital, unique, wild and salvific, together.

The actual recording debut, for Lonnie even came , a little over a decade ago, in 2012, with "Just Before Music," a projection of a Hasselian memory quartomondism among textures of ghostly but sincere blues, where the character of revenge and the idea that the past must live again among the ideas of the future, but changing, stands out. "Just Before Music" in fact marks a paradoxical, belated debut for Holley with aopera musical premiere, yet it concentrates within all the fictional cynicism that the jolts of his life have so far told, joined to those meta-narrative stylings that from hereafter he will increasingly transmute into a language all his own. The suspension of time, which stands out between "Mama's Little Baby" and "Fifth Child Burning," is a tribute to memory and a reminder to exorcise it, that it is not there to hurt us but to be overcome.

Beyond to this life and this planet there are other places, seem to whisper the soulful vocals in "Planet Earth And Otherwheres," stunted between feeble rhythms and an interweaving of futurist blues and spoken word, and the circle begins to closing the past to embrace the future: "Keeping to Record of It," released a year later, certifies the same intent, while beginning to to delineate a distinct stylistic line. Inside, in fact, appear almost to surprise Bradford Cox of Deerhunter-whom Holley has always declared himself a great fan-and Cole Alexander of the Black Lips: another America, another way of sacralizing music and flying pindarically around its other worlds. For it is, after all, the first piece in a long wanderings, for Holley, toward mixing sound and character identities that have never been dome.

to certifying an ambition that involves no set rules or paths between known tracks, "Mith" takes five years to to see the light of day, and in 2018 tells of a determined Holley to changing pace once again. Between echoes of the crowded streets of New York and years spent between Oregon and Georgia, it is an album that embraces experimentation that is both painstaking and truthful. It is about the beginnings of the long (and still active) collaboration with the duo Nelson Patton, and whose peculiar post-jazz vocations are perfectly blended with the histrronicity of saxophonist Sam Gendel, along with a "before ambient" legend Laraaji and Shahzad Ismaily on the record's co-production.

The duo, formed from Dave Nelson and Marlon Patton, was born during their college years in Athens, Georgia, where they took the field in the strong experimental jazz band scene, and had already had a point of contact with the Birmingham-based artist, invited to lend vocals on four tracks on their 2016 debut "Along the Way." With a strong minimalist and ambient inspiration, their polyrhythmic composition is tinged with orchestral sounds layered between trombone, drums and electronic elements, in which the background in production and sound engineering, which had so impressed Holley himself, stands out, and that between their follow-ups "Last Year's Sunlight" and "Universal Process," he took the duo with him on a U.S. tour and commissioned them to write the song"I Snuck Off the Slave Ship" for the short film of the same name, directed with to Cyrus Moussavi and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019.

In the midst, also to due to the untimely death of California singer-songwriter Richard Swift in 2018, sees the light of "National Freedom," a tribute where searing blues poems mingle to downtempo dub and freeform piano digressions as they mourn lost loves and scream of anguish. The result of sessions made in the studio with Swift a few years before his death, it is probably the richest and most mature piece, until 2020, in terms of research, matching the agitated late-krautrock echo exploration of "Broken Mirror: to Selfie Reflection," made a year later with Matthew E. White, attesting to how by now his quest has no boundaries or needs, but only a desire for revenge, readjustment and reversal, healthy madness.

Lonnie Holley's present takes us to "Oh Me Oh My," thus takes us to 2023, and the order of things, in this eternal novel, does not change: Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten and former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe accompany a'opera of yet new exaggerated languages, wandering in a universe of cinematic reality between folk roads that intertwine with classic and unmistakable blues echoes. And where this time perhaps the feeling toward the discovery of sweetness prevails: it is a veiledly softer jazz-song, delivering to us all the maturity of an artist now aware of having fun and playing with the present as well.

In their union with Nelson Patton, the experience of a Holley concert elevates if possible that sentiment even more: the duo's ability to weave avant-jazz improvisation that recreates endless cycles of throbbing breaths between the dramatic and the innocent, whose strongest points of light are always-and intentionally-sensationalistic walks through a prose of abstract notes. Combined with the story of an artist who experienced a "before" and an "after" of her own idea of music and then returned an infinite number of combinations and possibilities, their union on a stage can only foster a (new) melting pot of questions, insecurities, jolts. All indispensable elements to find other answers than the usual ones.

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