Composer and jazz trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe has received Americans for the Arts’ 2020 Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities, honoring an artist whose work demonstrates a sustained commitment to advancing community, civic, or social change. The $65,000 award will support him in advancing his community-based work during the fellowship year. Lokumbe, who is based in Bastrop, Texas, recently completed a three-year Music Alive composer residency at the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he composed One Land, One River (2015) and Healing Tones (2019). During the League of American Orchestras National Conference in Nashville in June 2019, Lokumbe led a silent “Walk of Love” through the streets of Nashville, immediately preceding a performance of his work Crucifixion Resurrection: Nine Souls a-Traveling, honoring the nine victims of the 2015 mass shooting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Lokumbe is currently working on The Jonah People: A Legacy of Struggle and Triumph, commissioned by the Nashville Symphony. He is the founder and director of the Music Liberation Orchestra, which teaches music, genealogy, and writing to incarcerated men around the country.
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