(TOMS RIVER, NJ) -- Grunin Center for the Arts presents The Martha Redbone Roots Project on Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 7:00pm. The New Yorker magazine called the band "a brilliant collision of cultures..."

Ms. Redbone and her ensemble of masterful musicians take their audiences on an American music journey through times past and present, weaving the sounds of her childhood and her ancestral homelands in coal country, Harlan County, KY, celebrating the music of her multi-cultural Southeastern heritage. Music that conjures up stories from the early days of the mountain, embodying the folk, blues and gospel sounds from the ancestors of the Black migration mixed with Indigenous foundation of the region. Martha Redbone and her band invite you through sound and story to her HOME.

Martha Redbone is a vocalist, songwriter, composer, music educator, and 2021 United States Artist Fellow celebrated for her tasty gumbo of roots music embodying the folk and mountain blues sounds of her childhood in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky, mixed with the eclectic grit of her teenage years in pre-gentrified Brooklyn. Inheriting both her nickname and powerful voice from gospel-singing African American father and the resilient spirit of her mother’s Southeastern multiracial Indigenous heritage, Ms. Redbone broadens the boundaries of American Roots music with songs and storytelling that share her life experience as an Afro-Indigenous woman and mother in the 21st century. Redbone also works in partnership with longtime collaborator/husband Aaron Whitby. Together, their music gives voice to issues of social justice, connecting cultures and celebrating the human spirit.

Redbone’s album The Garden of Love: Songs of William Blake (produced by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band founder and Grammy-winner John McEuen), is “a brilliant collision of cultures…”(New Yorker). Redbone and Whitby are the composers, arrangers, and orchestrators of original music and score for the 2022 Broadway revival of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuff, the 1976 classic choreopoem by the late Ntozake Shange, premiering at the Booth Theater, garnering seven Tony Award nominations and critical acclaim. Redbone and Whitby are the 2020 Drama Desk Award recipients for Outstanding Music in a Play and the 2020 Audelco Award recipient for Outstanding Composer of Original Music and Score for the Off-Broadway revival.

Tickets range from $39-$49 and are available for purchase online.  Grunin Center for the Arts is located on the campus of Ocean County College at One College Drive in Toms River, New Jersey.

The Martha Redbone Roots Project are: Martha Redbone (Vocals, percussion), Aaron Whitby (Piano), Charlie Burnham (Violin), and Fred Cash, Jr. (Bass).

For 60 years, Ocean County College, a public two-year community college sponsored by Ocean County and the State of New Jersey, has provided area residents with the opportunity to benefit from higher education. OCC is an innovative academic leader offering affordable, student-centered, high-quality educational experiences that prepare and empower diverse learners to contribute to and succeed in global societies. OCC invests in and fosters academic, economic, and cultural excellence, and ensures financial strength by generating new revenue streams, engaging in national and international university and corporate partnerships, and cultivating a technologically progressive and entrepreneurial spirit.