Baltimore’s Billie Holiday: A Musical Tribute to Lady Day

Maimouna Youssef aka Mumu Fresh (Vocalist) is a Baltimore born Grammy nominee and Indigenous Music Award winner. Maimouna has performed to sold out audiences, in renowned venues around the world, electrifying stages alongside countless musical giants including Common, The Roots, Sting, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Billy Ray Cyrus, Femi Kuti, Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Raphael Saadiq, the National Symphony Orchestra, Dave Chappelle, and others. She has received world-wide praise for her viral NPR Tiny Desk performance addressing gender inequities and women’s rights. Maimouna is committed to ‘Art Activism’ and has performed within the US prison system, Congressional Black Caucus, I.M.A.N. Central, The W. K. Kellogg Foundation and more, bringing awareness to important social issues.

Nasar Abadey (Drums | Concert Artistic Director) is a Lecturer of Percussion at the Peabody Institute. Abadey is the founder and leader of SUPERNOVA®. This band performs music from the threshold of Jazz to beyond, expressing their compositions through traditional African rhythms, bebop, fusion, Afro-Cuban, Afro Brazilian, modal, and free form. Abadey has performed with many jazz greats and has appeared in various music festivals internationally. His credits include: Amiri Baraka, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Rouse, Gary Bartz, David Sanchez, Cyrus Chestnut, Gregory Porter, Sonny Fortune, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Kenny Kirkland, Gary Thomas, Stanley Turrentine, Sun Ra, Frank Morgan, Bobby Hutchinson, Pharaoh Sanders, and others. 

Sean Jones (Trumpet) is Professor and Richard and Elizabeth Case Chair of Jazz Studies at the Peabody Institute. Before coming to Peabody, Sean served as the Chair of the Brass Department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Sean turned a 6-month stint with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra into an offer from Wynton Marsalis for a permanent position as lead trumpeter, a post he held from 2004 until 2010. In 2015 Jones became a member of the SFJAZZ Collective where he was a member until 2018. During this time, Sean produced and released eight recordings on the Mack Avenue Records. Sean has been prominently featured with a number of artists, recording and/or performing with many major figures in jazz, including Illinois Jacquet, Jimmy Heath, Frank Foster, Nancy Wilson, Dianne Reeves, Gerald Wilson and Marcus Miller. Sean was selected by Miller, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter for their Tribute to Miles tour in 2011

Herman Burney (Bass) has traveled all over the world to establish his impressive list of performance credentials as bassist with Nnenna Freelon, Marcus Roberts, Freddy Cole, Wynton Marsalis, Sonny Fortune, Harry Pickens, Eric Alexander, Wycliffe Gordon, Rene Marie, Monty Alexander, Etta Jones, Oscar Brown, Red Holloway, Natalie Cole, Cedar Walton, Eric Reed, and many others. Herman was an integral part of Freddy Cole’s band for nearly 5yrs and played on many of his recordings, including “Rio de Janiero Blue” and the Grammy nominated CD “Merry Go Round. 

Lawrence Jackson is the author of the award-winning books Chester B. Himes: A Biography (W.W. Norton 2017) and The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics (Princeton 2010).  In 2002, he published Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 1913-1952 (Wiley), and he has written a memoir on race and family history called My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (Chicago 2012).  Professor Jackson earned a PhD in English and American literature at Stanford University, and he is a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship awardee. A Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University, he is the founder and director of the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts to create opportunities for enhanced intellectual and artistic relations between Hopkins and Baltimore City, his hometown. He is completing a book about his return called Job’s Labyrinth, or, Shelter (Grey Wolf 2021).