One of those nights that happens once, vanishes, and becomes legend in the years that follow.

“I love the concept of reworking: that the music continues to breathe, the music continues to live,” the artist known as Moor Mother told writer Brandon Stosuy during a conversation for the Walker Art Center. “The sounds continue to migrate, they continue to grow—they continue to have their own life.” It’s the clearest entry point to her upcoming performance with Lonnie Holley at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on November 20. A curated before-set program from In Sheep’s Clothing will ease the room into the night.

Under the name Moor Mother, Camae Ayewa has spent nearly a decade shaping a catalog that moves between experimental hip hop, free jazz, electronics, and archival collage. From Fetish Bones (2016) through Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes (2019) and Black Encyclopedia of the Air (2021), her albums keep widening their reach, and her work with Irreversible Entanglements pushes improvisation into politically charged territory. She’s also collaborated with billy woods and recently released the blistering The Film (2025) with metal band SUMAC, a record that pushes her voice into jagged, volcanic terrain. Each new work continues that expansion, folding ensemble playing, electronics, and spoken vision into something porous and unpredictable.

Holley’s path takes a different but complementary arc. His discography spans from Just Before Music (2012) and Keeping a Record of It (2013) through the long, weathered meditations on MITH (2018), the spare reflections of National Freedom (2020), and the guest-heavy textures of Oh Me Oh My (2023). His newest album, Tonky (2024), brings an unusually rich cast into his orbit, including Angel Bat Dawid, Mary Lattimore, Jeff Parker, and others who help stretch his improvisational instinct into new shapes without sanding away its handmade edge.

His perspective on creation is grounded in lived necessity. “Tonky was my nickname because I was taken to a honky-tonk,” he told Crack Magazine. “All my albums are about trying to find that fun and meaning — recycling our trash and debris, the words and thoughts of my mind, into something beautiful.” For Holley, art is survival. “Music keeps my brain at work,” he said. “My mind is a carousel and my thoughts just keep coming.” He describes himself as “the living change, the root that forces its way into the ground.”

A collaboration like that at The Wallis sits inside a long lineage of rare, unrepeatable improvisatory crossings. Think of Derek Bailey and Cecil Taylor in the late ‘80s, two gravitational systems testing each other in real time. Think of Sun Ra and John Cage sharing a Coney Island stage in 1986, a collision so unlikely it still feels half-mythic. These moments have a way of becoming legend precisely because they happen once.

Holley and Ayewa step into that lineage at The Wallis, two artists with fully formed worlds choosing to improvise together for the night and let the room tilt the work where it needs to go. Collaborations this open grow rarer as careers widen, which is why the evening already carries the charge of something future listeners may wish they hadn’t missed.

Ayewa keeps her own sense of success closer to the ground. “It’s already a success just to be in the same space with my fellow collaborators,” she said in the Walker interview. “We’re all learning and gaining from these experiences.” The audience, she insists, is part of that process. “The audience is just like us. We’re all students of this. We’re all learning.” And that, for her, is the point: “the success of bringing people together—the audience, the performers, the people commissioning the show—for all of us to get inspired and to come together.”

The performance takes place at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in the Bram Goldsmith Theater, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd in Beverly Hills, on Thursday, November 20 at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are available now: https://thewallis.org/show-details/lonnie-holley-moor-mother