Douglas R. Ewart + Black Bamboo Fire
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
TIME: 2:30-3:30PM
Venue: Hyde Park Union Church. 5600 South Woodlawn Ave.
Man behind a drum set, a man playing a flute. Followed by a close-up of a woman’s face and a man playing the drums.
DOUGLAS R. EWART
Douglas R. Ewart, Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica. His life and work have always been inextricably associated with Jamaican culture, history, politics, and the land itself. Ewart immigrated in 1963 to Chicago, where he studied music theory at VanderCook College of Music, electronic music at Governors State University, and composition at the School of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (of which he later served as president from 1979 to 1987).
Ewart’s extremely varied and highly interdisciplinary work encompasses music composition (including graphic and conceptual scores as well as conventionally notated works), painting and kinetic sound sculpture, and multi-instrumental performance on virtually the full range of saxophones, flutes, and woodwinds, including flutes, pan-pipes, rainsticks, and percussion instruments of his own design and construction.
His work as composer, instrument maker, and visual artist has long reflected his understanding of the importance of sustainable materials (particularly bamboo), which serve not only as primary physical materials for many of his sculptures and instruments, but also crucial conceptual elements of some of his most important recordings, such as Bamboo Meditations at Banff 1993 and Bamboo Forest 1988. His visual art and kinetic works have been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ojai Festival, Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and others.
His graphic/conceptual instrumental work Red Hills, an homage to Jamaica, is widely performed, and his work as performing instrumentalist has been presented on several continents and recorded on numerous labels. He has also been the leader of several important musical ensembles, including Nyahbingi Drum Choir, Quasar, Orbit, Quasar, StringNets, and the Clarinet Choir. He has performed alongside Cedric Im Brooks, Ernest Ranglin, Cecil Taylor, James Newton, Anthony Davis, Robert Dick, Jin Hi Kim, Alvin Curran, Von Freeman, Yusef Lateef, Richard Teitelbaum, Mankwe Ndosi, Edward Kidd Jordan, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, and others, in addition to his AACM colleagues.
Ewart has been honored with, among other things, two Bush Artists Fellowships, three McKnight Fellowships, the U.S.–Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the NEA.
The musicians:
Renee Baker - violin, viola, voice, percussion
Mankwe Ndosi - vocals, poetry, percussion
Nicole Nolan - choreography, dance
Rita Warford - vocals, poetry, percussion
Vincent Davis - drums, balaphone, percussion
Brian Smith - bass, percussion
Douglas R. Ewart - composition, winds, narrative, electronics, percussion