Levitt AMP Springfield Music Series presents NATU CAMARA

Bring your lawn chairs, blankets, and picnics for a free, family-friendly outdoor concert on the lawn in the block adjacent to the Illinois Governor's Mansion. Around the turn of this century, our headliner Natu Camara began her music career in the Ideal Black Girls, a Guinean quartet considered West Africa’s first all-female R. & B. and hip-hop group. Since relocating to Harlem, the Ivory Coast-born singer has flipped her musical equation. Where before she was an African artist performing music with an American edge, now she’s a New Yorker playing work steeped in Afro-pop. The songs on her solo album “Dimedi,” from 2018, are delivered in English, French, and her native Susu, and all are cast in a lush bounce that reflects its gestation in a Mali studio. Though constitutionally upbeat, Camara’s work is rooted in desolation: she came to her current musical incarnation in the wake of her husband’s death from cancer, playing a guitar he had gifted her as a wedding present. Through woe, she radiates.