Okorie ‘Ok Cello’ Johnson conjures a brighter future with the release of new album ‘Beacon’

“The album is named from a song that is particularly special for me,” said Johnson. It is, one, my attempt to kind of channel Miles Davis — really, the kind of exploratory, honest, emotional, experimental jazz that I think he’s just really amazing for pioneering. But it also is this idea that music, and art, in particular, has the capacity to travel into the future. It has the capacity to connect with our future selves and perhaps cement connections between the person we want to be and the person we are right now. And the idea behind Beacon is, it’s essentially a love letter to the future Okorie I’d like to be.”

“I hope it’s a model for how, maybe, we could even all use the song as a way of imagining who we want to be, imagining the world that we want to live in, and more important, imagining that that world remembers us,” Johnson added.

How Beacon explores language in a new way for its composer:

“My show is certainly musical, and there’s a lot of looping,” said Johnson. “There’s a lot of improvising. But there’s a lot of storytelling, and in addition to there being a certain amount of storytelling, I think there’s a lot of intellectual exploration. It’s kind of like being in a classroom, in all the great ways. I love the classroom — I think it’s one of the most beautiful places. Anyway, but I have a strong relationship to language as well, and the cello is one of those things that kind of gets me out of my head and gets me out of my mouth, right? And I love that. But I also enjoy when the two are able to join forces.”

“There’s a song on the album called ‘Your Hand,’ which is a poem about love that I was really moved and inspired to write recently. There’s definitely a subject of that poem,” Johnson hinted. “In many ways, that poem and that partnership between words and music are what I hope to some degree there’s more of a future for, for me.”

“I do think that I will use language in this moment to support, augment, amplify what I think oftentimes my cello is trying to get me to say.”

On Johnson’s adventurous reinterpretation of “Those Were The Days,” the theme from All in the Family:

“I really love that melody,” said Johnson. “I think it’s a really beautiful major pentatonic scale that is used wonderfully. But more exciting for me is that the show was such a brilliant piece of satire and just the way in which we were invited to recognize but also be critical of Archie Bunker and his disinterest in staying with the times. You know, he was racist, he was homophobic, he was sexist, and the show used his stubbornness as a way to illustrate how the world was changing and how those of us who care to change with it need to do so, or else we were going to be left behind.”

“It’s a problematic melody in 2021. You know what I mean?” said Johnson. “It’s a problematic song, and as a Black man who’s very aware of the fact that I’m Black and very conscious and progressive in my values and my politics … it’s complicated for me to go around singing, ‘Those Were the Days,’ right? But that melody is so beautiful, and it’s so, really, West African, and so many ways in which the Great American Songbook is inspired by jazz, which is essentially Black people, Africans in this country, translating these centuries-old cultural and artistic instincts through a New World situation and schema and drama … into a modernity that is complicated and painful and marginalizing.”

Okorie Johnson, a.k.a. OK Cello, presents his new studio album Beacon, available on all major streaming platforms. The album is available to preview, stream and purchase via https://www.okcello.com/.