Improvisational keyboard artist Lonnie Holley never sings or plays the same song twice, but local residents will get to hear him once in a performance at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester on Saturday, Jan. 13.

“It’s all about freedom,” Holley said. “I am an originator of freestyle.”

According to Chester resident Bruce Josephy, who helped arrange the upcoming appearance, each concert is a unique experience.

“Lonnie plays music he has in his head. It is created in front of people every night,” explained Matt Arnett, his manager, booker, and organizer.

Holley uses everything in an early life characterized by extreme poverty and incarceration at the age of 11 in the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children to fashion a unique musical testament to endurance in the face of monumental hardship. (The school was the subject of a Podcast, Unreformed, that exposed the extraordinarily cruel conditions the young residents were subjected to.) One critic has called Holley’s 2023 album, Oh Me Oh My, “an extraordinary aural memoir that tells a cosmic story of survival.”

According to Arnett, Holley’s music is a synthesis of jazz, blues, gospel, and field hollers, the last growing from the work songs of slaves and later black forced laborers.

Holley himself performed exactly that kind of labor at the Alabama Industrial School.

“If you want a word to describe Lonnie’s music,” Arnett said, “just call it American music.”

Arnett met Holley when he was still in high school through his father, art collector William Arnett, who focused on the work of Black Southern artists who had been overlooked by the traditional art world.

When they started together, Arnett admitted Holley’s music and his performances were so out of the ordinary that it was hard to book him.

“In the early days, it was difficult to introduce him. It was not so easy to find gigs,” he said.

Now, Holley plays throughout Europe and South America as well as through the United States.

Holley’s appearance in Chester is a result of the combination of geography and friendship. He had appearances booked in both New York and Boston, and Josephy and Carol LeWitt, who had met Holley when he was artist-in-residence for a month at Mahler LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, saw those bookings as a great opportunity for a stopover in Chester. The concert will benefit Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester.

During his time in Spoleto, Holley was immersed both in his distinctive sculpture and his music.

“It was a unique experience,’ Josephy said. “He is such a special soul.”

To Holley, music and art go together, though he started as a sculptor decades before he performed music. He has been a musical performer for some 20 years, but his first sculptures, made in 1979, were tombstones he carved for a young niece and nephew who had died in a fire. He used blocks of sandstone-like material that he found, and using found objects became a feature of his work.

“I have been thinking about music and art my whole life,” he now says. “The music helps the art get the focus it needs on what I am doing. We all need to focus on our skills in life,” he said. “There are so many temptations. I don’t want to focus on the temptations. Music and art put you on the right path.”

Holley is eager to explain he is still learning. “Every day, I am growing smarter,” he says. But formal learning is another matter.

He is sometimes described as someone who was illiterate, but Arnett says he does read, though it is a challenge.

“I like to see a story through pictures; who wouldn’t want a bunch of National Geographics?” he said.

Holley will appear at Chester with a Mourning [A] BLKstar, a multi-generational music collective from Cleveland. Holley connected with them through alternative rock artist Lee Bains, who knew the Cleveland group were fans of Holley’s music.

The band has a list of the kinds of things Holley wants to sing about, and because they know his work, they have a sense of what shape his music at any particular performance might take.

But they have no sheet music to follow, either.

“They were fans of the music,” Arnett said. “They can get an idea from his title what the music is going to sound like.”

Lonnie Holley in Concert at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester

Saturday, Jan. 13, at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are available at https://bit.ly/3Rn4ZvB for $55.20, or on sale at the door for $65.87.