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Music Mystic: A Sound Healing Experience, the healing arts festival by Dr. Jacqueline “Bouvier” Copeland, will make its highly anticipated debut on October 3 at Hacienda Elm in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, bringing together global Afrodiasporic music, healing arts and community ritual in one of the country’s most celebrated cultural destinations.
Created by acclaimed social change artist, scholar, philanthropist, producer and Women Invested to Save Earth Fund (WISE) founder Dr. Copeland, known artistically as BOUVIER, and hosted by renowned lifestyle entrepreneur Michelle Wedderburn, the immersive festival has been crafted as a space for reflection, restoration and human connection during a period of profound social upheaval. Open to all in person and worldwide via livestream, Music Mystic will also launch WISE’s global ‘Soul Fusion: The Sound Healing Experience’ initiative, a multiyear programme designed to expand access to the healing and unifying potential of Afromusic while bringing artists, audiences and communities together across borders.
At the heart of the festival is Bouvier’s most personal live performance to date, a 15-song immersive concert drawing on her distinctive blachant singing style, pronounced “black chant”, and shaped by her Gullah Geechee heritage, wider Afrodiasporic traditions and decades of cultural research and travel. Blending spirituals, blues, gospel, soul, jazz, African musical traditions, chants and other global sacred influences, the performance will feature Isidro Capilla on drums, Guinean musician Sekou Conte on kora and djembe, Carlos Vargas on keyboards and Ricardo Urbina on bass.
The vocal and instrumental arrangements are designed around frequencies, melodies, harmonies, rhythms and somatic movement intended to encourage feelings of calm, relaxation, inner peace, ancestral and spiritual connection, hope and joy. Beyond the concert itself, the Mexico edition will include poetry readings, an Afromusic history film screening and discussion, Jamaican Afrocuisine and Music Mystic massages performed in time with the live music, creating a wider healing-arts experience that extends beyond the stage.
For Bouvier, Music Mystic brings together strands of a life and career that have long existed side by side. She first turned to singing for comfort during a difficult childhood, later developing music into a private spiritual practice alongside an award-winning international career spanning philanthropy, anthropology, and cultural advocacy. Encouragement from Quincy Jones gave her the confidence to pursue music publicly later in life, before José James connected her with GRAMMY-winning bassist Ben Williams, who produced her critically acclaimed debut album Blachant.
Since then, Bouvier has taken her work around the world while building a catalogue of four album projects and 35 songs. “For me, the music called spirituals, blues, gospel, soul and more are my mother tongue, a language, a way of feeling and expressing the world that I was exposed to before birth”, she says. “It’s more than entertainment. It’s soul medicine in the tradition of the ancestors who created Afromusic.” Music Mystic represents the fullest expression yet of that philosophy, uniting her artistry, philanthropy and movement-building around the belief that music can be a tool for personal healing, cultural connection and social change.
The October event is conceived not as a one-off festival but as the starting point for a broader international movement. Through the Soul Fusion: WISE Music for Change initiative, Bouvier aims to make the transformative potential of Afromusic more accessible to communities worldwide, encourage cross-cultural collaboration between Afrorooted musicians of different backgrounds and generate new funding for disadvantaged youth arts and social-service programmes, particularly those supporting abuse survivors and orphans.
The Mexico livestream will also serve as the pilot for a new WISE streaming channel dedicated to broadcasting high-quality Afromusic healing-arts events globally, while attendees both online and in person will receive a digital programme containing artist biographies, song information, music and film links and further resources for continuing their own sound-healing journey.
From 2027 through 2028, WISE plans to build on the San Miguel de Allende launch with further Soul Fusion festivals in North America, Latin America and Africa, extending the Sound Healing Experience into an ambitious global platform connecting music, healing, culture, philanthropy and community.
Music Mystic: A Sound Healing Experience takes place on Saturday October 3 at Hacienda Elm in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Advanced tickets are available right now via Eventbrite and global audiences can join the official livestream here.
