If you\u2019re ever invited into a Palestinian home, you\u2019ll never leave without dessert.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re greeted with so many kinds of cookies and teas,\u201d said Bella Hadid, the Palestinian American model, activist and co-host of Saturday night\u2019s Artists For Aid benefit show at the Shrine Auditorium. \u201cBut also love, hugs, and compassion. Palestine is one of the most beautiful places in the world. My dad never taught me to hate anybody \u2014 it was always about love and understanding that everyone\u2019s history is exactly what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
That embodied the mood that Hadid and a sprawling cast of collaborators and musicians tried to cultivate at the third annual benefit show produced by the Canadian Sudanese artist Mustafa. Joined by co-host Pedro Pascal and a roster of musicians including surprise guest Chappell Roan, along with Shawn Mendes, Omar Apollo, Raphael Saadiq, Clairo and many others, they took a period of profound grief and fury about the intractability of the world\u2019s current crises and tried to refocus on immediate relief for children and medical care in war-ravaged Palestinian territories and Sudan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always knew that an artist\u2019s power did not come from their musical knowledge,\u201d Mustafa said, introducing the night. \u201cI always knew that an artist\u2019s power comes from the expansion of their empathy.\u201d The performers that night tried to use that moral connection to help fix what they could.<\/p>\n
![\"Chappell](\"https:\/\/ca-times.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/baa8a6b\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/4393x2929+0+0\/resize\/1200x800!\/quality\/75\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fce%2F3b%2Ff2a80e3545328312c2bf9b45de6e%2F1536892-et-gaza-sudan-benefit-036-rb.jpg\")
<\/p>\nChappell Roan, left and Lucy Dacus, right perform onstage during Artist for Aid benefit concert at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026 in Los Angeles , CA. <\/p>\n
(Ronaldo Bolanos\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n
Mustafa \u2014 the richly baritoned Toronto singer-songwriter whose 2024 LP \u201cDunya\u201d drew wide praise \u2014 has become a significant figure straddling global folk music and activism. His songwriting poignantly speaks to third-culture-kid longing over intimate acoustic guitar work, like on \u201cName of God.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet he acknowledged onstage Saturday that he\u2019s perhaps more comfortable as an organizer than performer. His humanitarian work with Artists For Aid is similarly precise and broadly accessible \u2014 Saturday\u2019s show raised $5.4 million for the Palestine Children\u2019s Relief Fund<\/a> and the Sudanese American Physicians Assn<\/a>. In a moment when even humanitarian work around these regions can be wrenched by bad-faith political agendas, Mustafa\u2019s framing of the purpose of Saturday\u2019s show was savvy and measured. I didn\u2019t recall the words \u201cIsrael\u201d or \u201cTrump\u201d spoken a single time onstage.<\/p>\n Instead, Mustafa hosted more than four hours of music from a range of artists that spanned pop, folk, rock, R&B and well beyond. Few causes could bring the clamorous noise-rock of Geese onto the same stage as Mendes performing his pop hit \u201cStitches,\u201d but such was Mustafa\u2019s reach as an artist and magnetism as an activist.<\/p>\n Rather than speak directly to the rage at global humanitarian disasters \u2014 or to a recent ICE killing of a young mother and the U.S. invasion and ouster of Venezuela\u2019s president \u2014 the music was loose and tender for the breadth of the long night. From the first notes of Cameron Winter\u2019s bleary piano ballad \u201cIf You Turn Back Now,\u201d where he sang \u201cThe devil will love you to death if you let him,\u201d Saturday\u2018s show was about harnessing communal feeling rather than incendiary gestures.<\/p>\n Mustafa performs during onstage during Artist for Aid benefit concert at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026 in Los Angeles , CA. <\/p>\n (Ronaldo Bolanos\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n Many sets were simply a relief from the daily abattoir of awful news. Omar Apollo endearingly forgot the lyrics to his hit \u201cEvergreen (You Didn\u2019t Deserve Me At All)\u201d and sang them off his phone; Ravyn Lenae\u2019s \u201cLove Me Not\u201d shimmered without a worry in the world. While Shawn Mendes brought out Maggie Rogers for an earnest, resilient duet of \u201cYouth,\u201d Blood Orange and Daniel Caesar each broke down their expansive productions into bedside folk. Raphael Saadiq\u2019s \u201cSinners Prayer\u201d called back to his decades of immersion in R&B\u2019s moral searching, while Jazmine Sullivan\u2019s take on Nina Simone\u2019s \u201cI Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free\u201d drank from Simone\u2019s legacy of using music both to speak truth to power, and to articulate depths of pure feeling. The night\u2019s most overt performances addressing the current crises came from Palestinian American and Sudanese American poets Noor Hindi and Safia Elhillo. <\/p>\n The sentiments were more hopeful than one might expect, given how it\u2019s so easy to succumb to despair right now. ICE took a neighbor of mine last week \u2014 I came home from errands to find my street pasted with signs saying a man was kidnapped here. Thousands of Angelenos and Americans have absorbed the same and worse losses every day of the last year. Gazans and Sudanese have felt them, at an infinitely more brutal scale, for years.<\/p>\n Yet amidst all that, under Mustafa\u2019s aspirations at the Shrine, there were pearls of hard-fought compassion in the music, like when Lucy Dacus of Boygenius, one of rock music\u2019s great wits today, brought out her friend Chappell Roan to raucous gasps form the crowd.<\/p>\n Roan has caught some grief for her thoughts on the 2024 presidential race, but rather than dive into that fraught terrain here, the two instead covered the Magnetic Fields\u2019 \u201cThe Book of Love,\u201d a song about the small gifts and clumsy gestures that make a relationship secure.<\/p>\n They harmonized beautifully over a tightly-apertured standard about reciprocated sweetness \u2014 a song performed at the scale of a treat in the home of a refugee.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The concert hosted by Sudanese Canadian artist Mustafa benefited Sudan and Gaza relief work, with Clairo, Omar Apollo, Lucy Dacus, Raphael Saadiq and many more. If you\u2019re ever invited into a Palestinian home, you\u2019ll never leave without dessert. \u201cYou\u2019re greeted with so many kinds of cookies and teas,\u201d said Bella Hadid, the Palestinian American model, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2248741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2248740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/At-the-Shrine-Bella-Hadid-Pedro-Pascal-and-Chappell-Roan.com2Fce2F3b2Ff2a80e3545328312c2bf9b45.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2248740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2248742,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248740\/revisions\/2248742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2248741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2248740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2248740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2248740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Mustafa](\"https:\/\/ca-times.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/e9dbced\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/5142x3428+0+0\/resize\/1200x800!\/quality\/75\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2b%2F78%2F182e8dda4b1ab8c756982a689f55%2F1536892-et-gaza-sudan-benefit-015-rb.jpg\")
<\/p>\n