Three Rivers Arts Festival

The Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, a production of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, is a celebration of the arts in downtown Pittsburgh unlike any other in the nation. Each of its world-class, multi-disciplinary performing and visual arts attractions is free to attend and open to everyone.

Schedule:

06:00pm - 07:00pm: Jon Muq

For Jon Muq, a singer-songwriter born in Uganda and now living in Austin, Texas, music is part of a larger conversation he’s having with the world and everybody in it. Drawing from African as well as western musical trends and traditions, he devises songs as small gifts, designed to settle into everyday life and provoke reflection and resilience. “These days the world is sad,” he explains, “so I wanted to make happy songs. I wanted to write songs that connected with the listener in a very personal way. When someone listens to my music, it’s not just about me and what I’m singing. It’s about how they understand the songs individually. I think these songs can speak many languages, depending on what you want from them.” Muq’s experiences as a child in Uganda and as a man in America give him a unique perspective on the world he’s addressing. “I grew up in a very different life, where so many people pass through hard times just because they don’t have much. Our biggest issue was food scarcity. Then I came to a different world, which gave me a picture of how to write a song that can find balance with everyone wherever they are, whether they have a lot or not much.” With his May 31st debut album with producer Dan Auerbach and tours with Billy Joel, Norah Jones, Mavis Staples, Amythyst Kiah, Corinne Bailey Rae, and others, Muq is expanding the scope of his music to speak to more and more people.

07:30pm - 09:00pm: Martha Redbone

Roots Project

Martha Redbone is a vocalist, songwriter, composer, music educator, celebrated for her tasty gumbo of roots music embodying the folk and mountain blues sounds of her childhood in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky, mixed with the eclectic grit of her teenage years in pre-gentrified Brooklyn.

Inheriting her powerful gospel-singing father’s voice and the resilient spirit of her mother’s Southeastern Indigenous culture, Redbone broadens the boundaries of American Roots music with songs and storytelling that share her life experience as an Afro-Indigenous woman and mother navigating in the new millennium. Martha also works in partnership with longtime collaborator/husband Aaron Whitby. Their works give voice to issues of social justice, connecting cultures and celebrating the human spirit. Her album The Garden of Love: Songs of William Blake (produced by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band founder and Grammy-winner John McEuen), is “a brilliant collision of cultures” (New Yorker).

Redbone and Whitby are the composers, arrangers and orchestrators of original music and score for the 2022 Broadway revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuff, the 1976 classic choreopoem by the late Ntozake Shange, premiering at the Booth Theater, garnering seven Tony Award nominations and critical acclaim. Redbone and Whitby are the 2020 Drama Desk Award recipients for Outstanding Music in a Play and the 2020 Audelco Award recipient for Outstanding Composer of Original Music and Score for the Off-Broadway revival. Redbone is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow.

This engagement of Martha Redbone is made possible in part through the Mid Atlantic Tours program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.