Miranda Martini

Multidisciplinary artist Miranda Martini shares songs off of her new album The Historian — her first solo album in 10 years — which meditates on her connection to the land, her ancestors, and the uneasy mantle of “singer-songwriter.” Freely blending bluegrass and R&B/soul, The Historian pays tribute to Martini’s Black prairie ancestors, particularly those of the Black prairie communities of Maidstone and Campsie from which Martini descends.

As she says in the album liner notes, Martini wrote the title track to honour three historians: her great-great-aunt Daisy Williams, who was the keeper of the family’s stories; her great-uncle Phillip Risby, an artist whose paintings are a mirror of a life lived as a Black man growing up in North America; and her mother, writer and historian Cheryl Foggo, who ignited in Martini a passion for using art to understand the world and her place in it.

Onstage, Martini uses her molasses-rich voice and gift for storytelling to invite audiences into her living room, making magic with crowds of 15 people or 500.