Okorie “OkCello” Johnson On The Five Things You Need To Shine In The Music Industry

I wish someone told me that music is magic, and while virtuosic music can be magical, virtuosity does not make music magic. Eloquence does. Nothing is more moving than having something genuine and precious to say. So alwasy practice having something to say.

As a part of our interview series with leaders, stars, and rising stars in the music industry, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Okorie “OkCello” Johnson.

Okorie “OkCello” Johnson, an Atlanta-based cellist-composer, looper, improviser, and storyteller, has been featured on the Tamron Hall Show, has been a recipient of the Kennedy Center Office Hours Artist Residency, and was accepted as a sound installation artist for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 2022 Biennale.

He is a co-composer and performer of a cello concerto Liminal, an Atlanta Concerto, which world premiered in February of 2023 with The Georgia Symphony Orchestra, he has scored a documentary for the Atlanta Journal Constitution named Imperfect Alibi, which won an regional Emmy, and he also scored a children’s theatre show for the Alliance Theatre named Head to Toe, which won a Suzi Bass Award.

He has opened for Maxwell and recorded and/or performed with India.Aire, De La Soul, and Big Boi of Outkast. He has 3 studio albums — Liminal, Resolve, and Beacon — and a Christmas EP, An Ok Christmas.

This Summer, Okorie will be releasing a brand-new album, continuing his journey of pushing the boundaries of the cello and storytelling through music. With a sound that blends deep-rooted traditions with innovative sonic landscapes, the upcoming project promises to further explore the emotional and spiritual resonance of his artistry. Fans can expect a powerful and immersive listening experience that reflects his evolving creative vision. His work centers on themes and expressions of the African Diaspora, while also exploring the phenomenon of musical prayer.

Drawing upon his experience as a teacher and writer, OkCello immerses his audiences in vivid stories and songs, creating a richly layered, transcendent concert experience, while also working with companies and educational institutions to leverage the power of music and storytelling to help solve problems and create community.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about your “origin story”. Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

Wow! That’s kind of a long story. However, the abridged version is I grew up in Washington, DC in the mid-70s early 80s. I was six when I started playing the cello in the DC Orchestra. There’s no anecdote to share about how I just immediately gravitated towards the cello. The truth is that it was the only class with space. So, I guess maybe the cello chose me.

While I played all through high school, there was a moment at the end of my junior year when I considered putting the cello down. It was a request from my high school orchestra director to play a senior recital — Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C — that would keep me from quitting. That was the first time that the world and the cello conspired, as they would do many times in the future, to make sure that I never put it down.

Two more moments are pivotal to my identity as a cellist.

The next would be my sophomore year at Morehouse, when I stumbled into who is now my best friend, Julian Tillery. He was playing, in completely atypical fashion for Morehouse, Stone Temple Pilots’ song “Plush” on the balcony of his dorm room, dressed in full grunge regalia — an especially rare sighting on a historically Black college campus in the 90s. Nonetheless, I was drawn to his music, and long and the short of it is that he invited me to take out my cello and jam with him. I resisted initially, but with very little convincing, I agreed to do so, and that moment gave birth to another eight years of playing cello in folk, soul, Neo-soul, Goth, and rock bands.

There was one more moment when the cello not only refused to be put down, but it decided to take center stage in my life. I was 40 years old and was failing in a career as an independent movie producer. It was then that the cello asserted itself through looping and generating an inspiring song that just poured out of me, named “40.” That song would model for me how to tell stories on my cello, and it would introduce me to my community and the world as a musical storyteller. That wave, which happened in December 2014, is still carrying me forward today.

I guess that’s an abridged version. Lol. Maybe not.

What inspired you to pursue a career in music, and how did your journey begin?

As mentioned above, it was in 2014 when I was struggling to figure out what to do with my failing movie producer career that I stumbled into the creative process that would allow me to become OkCello. However, it was in 2021 or 2022 that this particular phase of my career began where I would start traveling around the country and world to play for performing art centers, universities, corporations, and secondary schools. I had been honing my craft for about seven years at that point, but it was the desperation of trying to pull my life together after a divorce that provided the energy and inspiration to really invest in it as a career.

In these last four years, I have learned a lot about show craft, composition, contextualizing my music for complementing themes, and overall production and collaboration.

Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

There’s nothing particularly routine about what I do now, so there usually is an interesting story every month if not every week. Writing and performing music has taken me to perform in Venice, Italy; the countryside of England to shoot music videos; the Kennedy Center for a weeklong residency; and a luxury yacht cruise.

However, perhaps one of the most interesting stories is the moment I got to play with the Kimbanguista Orchestra in Kinshasa, DRC. I had an opportunity to travel to the Congo after I was selected to participate as a sound design artist in that country’s Biennale, an international art festival and exhibit, in September 2022. Being selected, alone, was kind of a life changinging experience. I got to make music and create a sound installation inspired by my interaction with other Kinshasa arts and musicians, focused on the theme, breath of the ancestors. The experience was life changing and magical. And on top of that, one of the other selected artists, an French painter named Helen Jayet (we called her Solange), knew one of the administrators or documentarians (I can’t remember which) of the this amazing Kinshasa orchestra that she had seen a documentary on. Essentially, she reached out to one of administrators for the orchestra and arranged a visit for me and like 10 of the other selected artists that we in the Biennale.

So much about that experience was magical, but the most magical was when I got to trade music with the orchestra.

First they played for me a couple of beautiful pieces that I didn’t know, even though I suspect that I should have. But then, they asked me to play for them. The problem was I hadn’t brought all of my looping gear which is my standard show, so I had to improvise, which went really well. But afterward, I asked the conductor if I could teach the orchestra a piece. He agreed.

I set out to teach them the parts to Liminal, title track of my first album, and I would improvise the solo part over top of it. The orchestra played by ear so well, better than most classical musicians I had worked with before, and they sounded amazing. I started to improvise the solo, and then the first violinist started to imporvise with me, and it was otherworldly. The other visual artists just watched kind of in awe at what was happening. I would say that everyone in that room experienced something singular in that moment. We finished the song, cheered for each other, embraced, and then we got back on the bus and drove the 45 minutes back to our studios. I am not sure I have had many musical experiences like that.

I have co-composed a concerto called Liminal an Atlanta Concerto with Timothy Verville the conductor of the Georgia Symphony Orchestra for looped cello and orchestra. I hope someday soon I am able to go back and perform with them again.

In addition to Helen, I am super grateful to Fahamu Pecou, Vitshois Bondo, Nicolas- Patience Basabose, Grace Kalima, and Grace Kalala for making that trip one of the richest experiences of my life.

It has been said that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

It’s possible that my failed career as a movie producer could be seen as a mistake. I had a really comfortable job as an English teacher at the Westminster schools in Buckhead Atlanta, and I quit that job in order to pursue this dream. It was a pretty big risk to take, and there were people who were depending on me to succeed for their livelihood. Well, the career didn’t happen, and it was a particularly difficult and dark time for me. However, it was out of that darkness that OkCello came. And without that period, I’m sure I would not be talking to you today.

Even more, during my time as a movie producer, I was really just an entrepreneur that was constantly pitching people to see if they would consider funding my film. I learned a lot about ideation, about relationship generation, about networking, and having a dogged determination. I still use those skills every day of my life as OkCello. So, that mistake was especially generative, and I continue to grow from the opportunities it provided me.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My wife, Chaunesti Webb-Johnson, has been amazingly helpful in the last four years of my career. She has been muse and counsel. I am so grateful for her.

Additionally, in the very beginning of my career, there was one person who is here in Atlanta named Alfredo Isaac. I actually can’t remember how we met, but after hearing my music, he was insistent that I needed to record my first album. I have done lots of session work for other artists, but I had never recorded my own project, and I had no idea how to go about starting. He basically said don’t worry about it, and he project-managed the whole thing for me. He had his own music studio, and he would bring me there and engineer my sessions. He would go on to mix and master that album, and he did it all on spec, not 100% sure that he would get a return on the investment he made in my career. I’m grateful that I was able to pay him back, and he was too. He had made similar investments in other artists who had never paid him or reciprocated his efforts.

That first album opened up so many doors for me and legitimized my artistry. Without that album and without him, I’m not sure that any of this would’ve happened.

There are so many others who have had such an instrumental, pun intended, roll to play in my career. Two that I also don’t wanna leave out our Julian Tillery, the guy who first got me playing contemporary music on my cello, and my big brother from another mother, Khari Cabral Simmons. I owe a lot of my life and career to these four individuals.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

I just finished my first ever narrative, music video. That will come out a week after the single, funny how things work out, which is also the title of the album. This has been something of a dream come true, and I can’t wait to share the finished product.

I am also in the process of co-producing a listening party for the full album in October with Komansé Dance Theatre. I’m super excited for that collaboration, as I have worked with the artistic director and choreographer, Raianna Brown, on several projects before. She, her team, and her dancers make beautiful art.

We are very interested in diversity in the entertainment industry. Can you share three reasons with our readers about why you think it’s important to have diversity represented in music, film, and television? How can that potentially affect our culture?

The arts benefit, perhaps, more than almost any other industry from diversity, particularly because it is the contribution of different perspectives that generate new and powerful mediums of expression and advances the established ones we have come to recognize.

Even more, I also understand that so much of the glory that we assign to the “masters of our creative disciplines” depends so profoundly upon taste, familiarity, education, and power. And without divertsiy, these canons and the communities that maintain them are little more than social clubs for people who were raised in the same ways and have incrimental differences in taste that get exaggerated and overhyped.

I’m a big fan of Beethoven’s. I do believe that he is a master of composition. I don’t, however, believe that he is more of a master than say, Prince or Stevie Wonder. Neither of these contemporary masters command as many instruments as the composers of the great symphonies did at that time. However, when we look at the complexity of individual compositions to see just how many independent voices there are– whether we were talking about a Symphony or a pop song– more often than not there are not more than three speaking/singing at any time. The reason is not so much because it is a physical possibility to have multiple voices speaking at one time, but because the human brain can really only detect a couple, if we’re lucky, three different independent voices siumultaneosly.

So, even when we go back and listen to those masterwork symphonies, usually at any moment there are only two lead voices, which is not any more complicated or full than what we hear in Stevie Wonder or Prince’s music. In fact, both Prince and Stevie Wonder have pieces that are rhythmically and Melodically more complicated in ways than many of the master works that we celebrate. It’s only diversity perspective that allows me to be able to arrive at that conclusion. I grew up playing classical music, but I also grew up listening to Lionel Richie and Earth, Wind and Fire, Prince, and Steviw Wonder. Because I was able to travel back-and-forth between each of those worlds, I’m able to identify the building blocks upon which they each rest. And, there are cathedrals of excellence in all of the musical genres and mediums that we listen to, we just have to be able to recognize the building blocks upon which they sit.

It’s only diversity that allows us to be able to appreciate the beauty and grandieur of the genius human spirit in all of the creative mediums in which it decides to express itself.

If we lazily fall back just on the art we are familiar with, educated on, and comfortable with, we miss out on the magic and the many wonderful things that the human creative spirit makes.

As a successful music star, you’ve likely faced challenges along the way. How do you stay motivated? How do you overcome obstacles in your career?

This is an easy one. Music is my church, my coach, my safe space, and my preferred past time. Nothing changes my mood more than the right song, and I find that the truest truths that I ever get to engage are in the interplay of instruments, melodies, and rhythms more than the certainty of words and logic.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

1. I wish someone told me that music is magic, and while virtuosic music can be magical, virtuosity does not make music magic. Eloquence does. Nothing is more moving than having something genuine and precious to say. So alwasy practice having something to say.

2. How much you make is significantly less important than how much you keep. And even more, how you make what you keep grow is most important. I am still learning that.

3. There is use for chaos just as there is for order. Beauty is when the two dance together. You are the dance.

4. Practice the rep and the cannon. Yes. But also, develop a relationship with your instrument that is not solely chaperoned by a teacher, conductor, or composer. Learn and know what your ears and hands want to play and hear.

5. Modern life is long. Prepare to run a marathon, not a sprint.

Can you share some insights into your creative process? How do you approach songwriting? How do you approach musical collaborations?

Songs for me are gifts. When I am commissioned, I do sit down and actively search for a song. However, more often than not, a song arrives because I have made myself an attractive home for a melodic idea. The way that I do that is I improvise. I turn on the creative tap, and I just let whatever wants to come out run out. I will sit an improvise for hours, just listening for a gem to be polished, or I play, paying attention to what moves me. If I cry, laugh, or lose my self in a moment, then I know I have something that speaks. And then, I really try to hear what it is saying — hear the emotions, the story it’s telling, and then a try to capture it into a digestible form.

It’s similar when playing with other artists. I like the word frolic. It’s in the play with our instruments or another artist that we find the things worth keeping.

Your music has resonated with so many fans worldwide. What do you believe sets your music apart?

While I am not necessarily an emotional person in everyday life, I am an emotional person when it comes to music. Music routinely makes me cry, not because it makes me sad, but because I cry at the beauty and eloquence of it. All the time. I think that my music carries lots of emotion in really concentrated doses. I want to believe that whatever emotion I was feeling at the time I met the song, is the emotion my audience feels when they hear it. And because the cello is such a powerful instrument — capable of making you feel deeply — the emotion in my songs is deeply felt. At least that is what some members of my audience tell me.

How do you connect with your audience?

I look at them. That is actually really important to me. In the beginning of the show, I usually scan the audience and try to find their eyes. Something about that helps me to understand what show I will perform for them and/or how I will perform it. I think it is also important when possible for them to see me seeing them. That is when the connection happens.

With your busy schedule and demanding performances, how do you prioritize self-care and maintain a balance between your personal life and career in the music industry?

I don’t do that well. I need to do better. It helps that I am not gigging everyday. There are stretches of time with no gigs. But then, there are also times when I have 5 gives in 8 days. That can be a lot. The only saving grace for me is that I love playing. I don’t necessarily love the flying and the schlepping gear around. But the music is rarely work. And, I think that the playing is also, at times, the self care.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’ve got so many. Some of the ideas take more time to explain than I have here. But the one that matters most to me right now, and it just happens to be the focus of the 4th album I am releasing this year, is “More often than not, the Universe/God/Creaeter is conspiring in your best interest, even and especially when you doubt it is.”

A second would be to speak your world into existence. Language is reality. I have a lot on this one, and not exactly what you might think. But, I do think that language makes our world, not the other way around.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Bobby McFerrin. He has the career I think I want. He is a master of music and of connecting with audiences. Would love to spend some time with him.

How can our readers continue to follow your work online?

www.okcello.com or wherever they follow people but with the handle okcello

This was very meaningful, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!

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Atlanta cellist Okorie 'OkCello' Johnson on music, meaning and life transformed

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