Cleveland Collective Mourning [A] BLKstar Celebrates 10 Years of Musical Experimentation

RA Washington raises an arm and twists it, showing the art that’s centered on the back of his hand: three letters, M-A-B, perched atop three black blocks. He got the Mourning [A] BLKstar logo tattooed there 10 years ago, the week after he, LaToya Kent and James Longs went into the studio to record what would become the collective’s first record, BLK Muzak. 

“We’d never played a show yet,” he says, seated near a window in his Tremont home. “In spirit, I thought we would be going 10 years, at least — or forever.”

It feels apt: to know something like “the back of your hand.”

A decade ago, the Afrofuturist musical collective was built with the intention to grow and morph, as the artists within its ranks have. The core of M[A]B remains from those early days: Washington on drum machines and samples, vocalists Kent and Longs, drummer Dante Foley, trumpet player Theresa May and guitarist Pete Saudek.

There were comings and goings. Powerhouse vocalist Kyle Kidd and trombonist William Washington departed for other ventures — Kidd, with a solo career, and Washington, with Da Land Brass Band and other projects. Artists like Chimi, Andersiin Pyramids, Kafari and Lee Bains cycled in and out as members and collaborators. Jah Nada, who started by recording and mixing M[A]B’s 2020 album, The Cycle, became the band’s current bassist.

“Early on, we started calling ourselves a collective because we figured if we had a chance, people’s lives would change, and maybe we would have different members come in and out,” RA says. “Being a collective, trying to exist with some of those practices of collective work and responsibility, really helped us and helped frame not necessarily our political intent — but kind of echolocated the effort with concepts we feel are actually in keeping with how you want to be as human beings; and how you can survive and maybe annihilate capitalism is through collective work agreement.”

It’s an approach that fuels M[A]B’s experimental, soul, punk and whatever-else sound. You’ll hear it on Flowers For The Living, the group’s latest full-length studio album, which arrived this May. Its 10 soothing tracks center in vulnerability and love — themes inspired by a string of social media posts by Theresa May, on giving flowers to the people you appreciate while they’re still alive to receive them. 

The album’s title track gently asserts both the miracle of existence and life’s impermanence. “We should tell ourselves ‘I love you,’” Kent delivers. “The flesh is weak among us.”

M[A]B came together in grief a decade ago, when RA and Kent’s close friend and collaborator Dwayne Pigee, who performed as Francois Fissi Bissi Okrakongo, was killed in a 2016 shooting in Cleveland. It happened a month after David Bowie’s death and the release of his album Blackstar. Both events factored into the band’s name, “Mourning [A] BLKstar.”

In the past 10 years, M[A]B’s fan base has expanded around the globe. Thanks to collaborations with Bains, the group signed with Don Giovanni Records and collaborated with acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Lonnie Holley. The band has released plenty of music — about 110 songs, spread between singles, EPs and intense albums that include The Garner Poems (2018), Reckoning (2019) and Ancient // Future (2024).

“We’ll keep that kind of schedule, a record every nine or 10 months, and flip-flopping (tours in the) U.S. and Europe, as long as we can — unless we all end up in worker camps or whatever, because of the political climate we’re in,” RA says nonchalantly.

M[A]B’s music, since the band's inception, simmers and responds to topics of injustice and racism.

“The personal is the political,” RA says. “If you have any concern for humans existing, if you actually care about yourself and care about your family, the things that you make are going to be informed by a political mindedness.”

The seven M[A]B band members regularly cram into the front room of the house to practice and write new songs. A drum kit fills a quarter of the space; art and posters and bundles of cords decorate the walls.

In the past decade, the band found its groove here, growing more seamless in its compositions. “It’s very much telepathy in the room,” RA says.

Flowers For The Living is the latest, but another M[A]B album is already forming for spring or summer of 2026. RA queues up some of the band’s newest songs, which flow from a speaker in the room. Flute parts, bass riffs, spoken word and warbling synth come together in a collage of sounds and grooving, head-nodding beats. They meld together on this sonic effort that continues onward and outward, into its next decade — into more ears and minds in and outside of Cleveland.

RA bobs his head to the music that he and M[A]B tracked just this fall: the start of the band’s next phase.

Ten years, at least, he said — or forever.

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