Ondara came over to the United States from Kenya with the intention of following Bob Dylan’s footsteps as a folk singer and successful musician. Friday night, January 30th, if I closed my eyes, I could have sworn I was transported into a Bob Dylan space odyssey time warp.
Everything about the evening was surreal or at the least unexpected. The Cedar Cultural Center’s floor was crowded with attendees, over 400 of them milling about for this standing show with minimal seating. It’d been a while since they’d had such a robust turn-out.
Ondara and the Jet Stone Conspiracy opened with a number that couldn’t have been more appropriate in light of what’s happening right outside the doors of The Cedar in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis.
“Look now what I’ve become, an alien, an alien…someone from another space and time…just anyone, no one…” lyrics from An Alien in Minneapolis.
The crowd, mostly white Millennials with strong input on either side of Gen X and Gen Z, found themselves falling in love with Ondara’s sound and message if they weren’t already. Some might have recognized Bob Dylan’s influence and would even agree if Ondara proclaimed himself a protégée of Dylan.
The musician’s inflection, lyric choices—all his songs the band performed were original—all the way to the mumbling were straight up Dylan-esque. I’m not sure Ondara’s lyrics would qualify for a Nobel Prize in Literature as Dylan’s did, but give him time. He’s only 33 years old.
Ondara, like Dylan, also emanated an unapologetic energy for his music. Even when singing cryptic lines such as “She was always but a miracle / The scientist kind / her man was a neanderthal / With pain came design” from his third number, A Nocturnal Heresy.
Honestly, many times, I couldn’t even understand his words. But that did not take away from the sound and for the many times when his message was perfectly clear. With ache in his voice and his hand gestures waving to the distance, the piano sensitively reflecting Ondara’s emotions, we all wanted to sob even as we sang with him, “I’m just getting good at saying goodbye, getting good at saying goodbye…there goes my innocence…”
Someone called from the audience, “We needed this, we needed you so much…” perhaps voicing how our collective political pain needed his lyrics to speak for us and give us some relief.
The opening act, Montevale, a pair of Americana musicians with the chops to host the entire evening started promptly at 8 pm. They gave us 45 minutes of entertaining harmonies with an Appalachian flavor playing guitar and banjo and engaging us with warm chatter between songs.
Although they’d opened for Ondara in Chicago and Madison, on the surface, they seemed an unlikely combo to balance the evening’s ticket. But Ondara proved Montevale was exactly right when he teamed up with the duo calling them back to the stage at the end of the evening.
He also brought up a string trio that included Jacqueline Ultan on cello further demonstrating his wide repertoire.
His final song, a solo, included the lyrics, “When my body cannot keep up with my enthusiasm…” It’d been a long night. It was past 11 pm. It was time to go home even though none of us wanted to head back into the subzero weather, we did it with Ondara’s warmth in our souls.
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About Susan Budig
Susan is based in Minneapolis and reports on general assignments for Mshale with a focus on entertainment. In addition to reporting, she is also a writer, poet, teacher and coach.
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