Funny How Things Work Out: Okorie “OkCello” Johnson and the Music That Found Him Back

As a young artist — before his name lit up marquees across the city and the country — Atlanta-based cellist Okorie Johnson’s creative map criss-crossed the Old Fourth Ward. He bought his strings from Voss Violins, just across from what is now Dancing Goats. He forged his first collaborations with musicians out of Speech’s old studio on Edgewood, played his first outdoor gig on the Atlanta BeltLine, and recorded early projects at 800 East, a neighborhood studio off of Highland Avenue that still feels like home. He shopped at Murder Kroger. Ate at Eats. Rehearsed, recorded, and performed in and around the corridor long before it was lined with cranes.

“So much of my creative life — the origin of it — is in that part of the city,” he says. “It was hard to be a creative and not be there. It was where everything was happening.”

By the time he was in his 30s, he’d been a filmmaker, a teacher, and a man with a cello chasing a dream always a little out of reach — until one day in December 2014, on his 40th birthday, the chasing stopped. Sitting in his home studio, not sure how to keep going as a full-time artist but not ready to quit, he picked up his cello and looped a bassline. And then he looped again. And again. Until something cracked open. Until the tears came.

By the time he finished, he was sobbing. Shirt soaked, shoulders heaving. “It changed my life,” he says now. “I had stumbled onto something more honest than I’d ever written.”

That single musical phrase, although unplanned and unscored, became the root of a new song. That song became a performance. And that performance became a year-long practice of monthly shows, each one a public act of self-discovery. By the end of 2015, Okorie was no longer working inside other people’s visions — he had finally built his own. That was the start of OkCello.

From that quiet moment of self-trust, his career began to stretch, far across the city and beyond.

He’s since performed across the U.S. and internationally, including in London, Las Vegas, New York, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was featured in the Kinshasa Biennale. He’s played Atlanta Symphony Hall, created commissioned works for the High Museum of Art, and was selected as one of six artists featured in The NEXT Movement, a PBS concert film honoring the city’s cultural vanguard. He’s scored for theater and film, contributed to gallery installations, and served as an inaugural fellow with Emory University’s Arts & Social Justice Fellows program. No matter how far the music takes him, he remains rooted in the city that gave him space to become.

A Sound All His Own

It’s hard to explain what OkCello does on his instrument without flattening it. Is it classical? Sure. But it’s also Afrobeat, soul, jazz, hip-hop — all of it, infused with the rhythms, scales, and storytelling traditions of the African Diaspora.

“I like classical music, and it’s what I first learned to play on the cello, but that wasn’t my life,” he explains. “When I wasn’t playing, I was listening to Prince. I was listening to hip hop, go-go, alternative music, folk–you name it. I realized I didn’t want to separate who I was from what I played.”

And to be clear, he doesn’t just play the cello, he loops it, layers it, bends it until it speaks to you. His music doesn’t seek to impress. It aims to tell the truth. About grief. About faith and all the tenderness and complexity of being human.