The concert hosted by Sudanese-Canadian artist Mustafa benefited Sudan and Gaza relief efforts, featuring Clairo, Omar Apollo, Lucy Dacus, Raphael Saadiq and many more.
If you are ever invited to a Palestinian home, you will never leave without dessert.
“They welcome you with many types of cookies and teas,” said Bella Hadid, the Palestinian-American model, activist and co-host of Saturday night's Artists For Aid benefit at the Shrine Auditorium. “But also love, hugs and compassion. Palestine is one of the most beautiful places in the world. My father never taught me to hate anyone; it was always about love and understanding that everyone's story is exactly what it is.”
That embodied the mood that Hadid and an extensive cast of collaborators and musicians sought to cultivate at the third annual benefit show produced by Sudanese Canadian artist Mustafa. Accompanied 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 deep grief and fury over the intractability of the world's current crises and sought to refocus on immediate relief for children and medical care in the war-torn Palestinian territories and Sudan.
“I always knew that the power of an artist does not come from his musical knowledge,” Mustafa said when introducing the night. “I always knew that the power of an artist comes from the expansion of their empathy.” That night, the artists tried to use that moral connection to help fix what they could.
Chappell Roan, left, and Lucy Dacus, right, perform on stage during the Artist for Aid benefit concert at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on Saturday, January 10, 2026 in Los Angeles, CA.
(Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times)
Mustafa, the richly baritone singer-songwriter from Toronto whose 2024 LP “Dunya” received high praise, has become an important figure straddling the line between folk music and global activism. His songwriting speaks poignantly to third-culture kids' longing for intimate acoustic guitar work, as on “Name of God.”
However, on Saturday he acknowledged on stage that he may feel more comfortable as an organizer than as a performer. Her humanitarian work with Artists For Aid is equally pointed and widely accessible: Saturday's show raised $5.4 million for the Palestinian Children's Aid Fund and the Sudanese American Doctors Association. At a time when even humanitarian work in these regions can be affected by bad faith political agendas, Mustafa's formulation of the purpose of Saturday's program was intelligent and measured. He did not remember the words “Israel” or “Trump” being spoken even once on stage.
Instead, Mustafa presented over four hours of music from a variety of artists spanning pop, folk, rock, R&B and more. Few causes could bring Geese's clamorous noise-rock to the same stage as Mendes performing his pop hit “Stitches,” but such was Mustafa's reach as an artist and his magnetism as an activist.
Instead of speaking directly to anger at global humanitarian disasters (or the recent murder of a young mother by ICE and the US invasion and overthrow of the president of Venezuela), the music was loose and tender throughout the long night. From the first notes of Cameron Winter's murky piano ballad “If You Turn Back Now,” where he sang “The devil will love you to death if you let him,” Saturday's show sought to tap into community sentiment rather than incendiary gestures.
Mustafa performs on stage during the Artist for Aid benefit concert at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on Saturday, January 10, 2026 in Los Angeles, CA.
(Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times)
Many sets were simply a relief from the daily slaughter of bad news. Omar Apollo lovingly forgot the lyrics to his hit “Evergreen (You Didn't Deserve Me At All)” and sang it into his phone; Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not” shined without a care in the world. While Shawn Mendes brought out Maggie Rogers for an earnest, rugged duet of “Youth,” Blood Orange and Daniel Caesar split their sprawling productions into folky tunes. Raphael Saadiq’s “Sinners Prayer” evokes his decades of immersion in the moral quest of R&B, while Jazmine Sullivan’s cover of Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” drew on Simone’s legacy of using music to both speak truth to power and articulate depths of pure feeling. The most overt performances of the night addressing the current crisis came from Palestinian-American and Sudanese-American poets Noor Hindi and Safia Elhillo.
The feelings were more hopeful than one might expect, given how easy it is to succumb to despair right now. ICE took a neighbor of mine last week. I returned home from running errands to find my street littered with signs saying a man was kidnapped here. Thousands of Angelenos and Americans have absorbed the same and worse losses every day of the past year. Gazans and Sudanese have felt them, on an infinitely more brutal scale, for years.
Yet amidst all that, beneath Mustafa's aspirations at the Sanctuary, there were pearls of hard-fought compassion in the music, as when Lucy Dacus of Boygenius, one of the great ingenues of rock music today, brought out her friend Chappell Roan to raucous gasps from the crowd.
Roan has been feeling some grief over his thoughts on the 2024 presidential race, but rather than delve into that fraught terrain here, the two covered Magnetic Fields' “The Book of Love,” a song about the small gifts and clumsy gestures that make a relationship secure.
They harmonized beautifully on a very open standard about mutual sweetness: a song performed on the scale of a gift in a refugee's home.
