The live performance hosted by Sudanese Canadian artist Mustafa benefited Sudan and Gaza reduction work, with Clairo, Omar Apollo, Lucy Dacus, Raphael Saadiq and plenty of extra.
Should you’re ever invited right into a Palestinian residence, you’ll by no means depart with out dessert.
“You’re greeted with so many sorts of cookies and teas,” stated Bella Hadid, the Palestinian American mannequin, activist and co-host of Saturday night time’s Artists For Support profit present on the Shrine Auditorium. “But additionally love, hugs, and compassion. Palestine is among the most lovely locations on the planet. My dad by no means taught me to hate anyone — it was all the time about love and understanding that everybody’s historical past is strictly what it was.”
That embodied the temper that Hadid and a sprawling forged of collaborators and musicians tried to domesticate on the third annual profit present produced by the Canadian Sudanese artist Mustafa. Joined by co-host Pedro Pascal and a roster of musicians together with shock visitor Chappell Roan, together with Shawn Mendes, Omar Apollo, Raphael Saadiq, Clairo and plenty of others, they took a interval of profound grief and fury concerning the intractability of the world’s present crises and tried to refocus on quick reduction for kids and medical care in war-ravaged Palestinian territories and Sudan.
“I all the time knew that an artist’s energy didn’t come from their musical information,” Mustafa stated, introducing the night time. “I all the time knew that an artist’s energy comes from the growth of their empathy.” The performers that night time tried to make use of that ethical connection to assist repair what they may.
Chappell Roan, left and Lucy Dacus, proper carry out onstage throughout Artist for Support profit live performance at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Corridor Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026 in Los Angeles , CA.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Occasions)
Mustafa — the richly baritoned Toronto singer-songwriter whose 2024 LP “Dunya” drew huge reward — has turn out to be a major determine straddling international people music and activism. His songwriting poignantly speaks to third-culture-kid longing over intimate acoustic guitar work, like on “Title of God.”
But he acknowledged onstage Saturday that he’s maybe extra comfy as an organizer than performer. His humanitarian work with Artists For Support is equally exact and broadly accessible — Saturday’s present raised $5.4 million for the Palestine Youngsters’s Reduction Fund and the Sudanese American Physicians Assn. In a second when even humanitarian work round these areas could be wrenched by bad-faith political agendas, Mustafa’s framing of the aim of Saturday’s present was savvy and measured. I didn’t recall the phrases “Israel” or “Trump” spoken a single time onstage.
As an alternative, Mustafa hosted greater than 4 hours of music from a spread of artists that spanned pop, people, rock, R&B and nicely past. Few causes may deliver the clamorous noise-rock of Geese onto the identical stage as Mendes performing his pop hit “Stitches,” however such was Mustafa’s attain as an artist and magnetism as an activist.
Quite than communicate on to the trend at international humanitarian disasters — or to a current ICE killing of a younger mom and the U.S. invasion and ouster of Venezuela’s president — the music was free and tender for the breadth of the lengthy night time. From the primary notes of Cameron Winter’s bleary piano ballad “If You Flip Again Now,” the place he sang “The satan will love you to dying when you let him,” Saturday‘s present was about harnessing communal feeling slightly than incendiary gestures.
Mustafa performs throughout onstage throughout Artist for Support profit live performance at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Corridor Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026 in Los Angeles , CA.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Occasions)
Many units have been merely a reduction from the day by day abattoir of terrible information. Omar Apollo endearingly forgot the lyrics to his hit “Evergreen (You Didn’t Deserve Me At All)” and sang them off his telephone; Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not” shimmered and not using a fear on the planet. Whereas Shawn Mendes introduced out Maggie Rogers for an earnest, resilient duet of “Youth,” Blood Orange and Daniel Caesar every broke down their expansive productions into bedside people. Raphael Saadiq’s “Sinners Prayer” referred to as again to his many years of immersion in R&B’s ethical looking, whereas Jazmine Sullivan’s tackle Nina Simone’s “I Want I Knew How It Would Really feel To Be Free” drank from Simone’s legacy of utilizing music each to talk fact to energy, and to articulate depths of pure feeling. The night time’s most overt performances addressing the present crises got here from Palestinian American and Sudanese American poets Noor Hindi and Safia Elhillo.
The feelings have been extra hopeful than one may count on, given the way it’s really easy to succumb to despair proper now. ICE took a neighbor of mine final week — I got here residence from errands to seek out my avenue pasted with indicators saying a person was kidnapped right here. Hundreds of Angelenos and Individuals have absorbed the identical and worse losses day by day of the final 12 months. Gazans and Sudanese have felt them, at an infinitely extra brutal scale, for years.
But amidst all that, underneath Mustafa’s aspirations on the Shrine, there have been pearls of hard-fought compassion within the music, like when Lucy Dacus of Boygenius, one in every of rock music’s nice wits at present, introduced out her pal Chappell Roan to raucous gasps kind the gang.
Roan has caught some grief for her ideas on the 2024 presidential race, however slightly than dive into that fraught terrain right here, the 2 as a substitute lined the Magnetic Fields’ “The E book of Love,” a track concerning the small items and clumsy gestures that make a relationship safe.
They harmonized fantastically over a tightly-apertured commonplace about reciprocated sweetness — a track carried out on the scale of a deal with within the residence of a refugee.
