Tectonics 2022 Artist Profile
Perhaps best known as a composer, improviser, sculptor and maker of masks and instruments, Douglas R. Ewart is also Emeritus Professor, The School of the of Chicago, lecturer, arts organization consultant and all around visionary. In projects done in diverse media throughout an award-winning and widely-acclaimed 40-year career, Mr. Ewart has woven his remarkably broad gifts into a single sensibility that encourages and celebrates--as an antidote to the divisions and compartmentalization afflicting modern life-the wholeness of individuals in culturally active communities.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1946, Douglas R. Ewart immigrated to Chicago, Illinois in the United States in 1963. His travels throughout the world and interactions with diverse people since then has, again and again confirmed his view that the world is an interdependent entity. An example of his efforts both to study and to contribute to this interdependence is his use of his prestigious 1987 U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship to study both modern Japanese culture and the traditional Buddhist shakuhachi flute, and also to give public performances while in Japan. In America, his determination to spread his perspective is part of the inspiration behind his often multi-disciplinary works and their encouragement of artist-audience interactions. It is also the basis of the teaching philosophy with which he guides his classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for twenty five years, and the basis of the perspective he has brought to his service on advisory boards for institutions such as The National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer (New York City) and Arts Midwest. Mr. Ewart uses his past experience as chairman of the internationally renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to celebrate and build upon the history and achievements of the organization, and is from this perspective a natural extension of the activities he has been engaged in for the past four decades.
His administrative, teaching and other duties have not prevented Ewart from maintaining several musical ensembles, the Nyahbingi Drum Choir. the Clarinet Choir, Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions, Douglas R. Ewart & Quasar and Douglas R. Ewart & Stringnets. Nor has it prevented him from releasing some of the resulting music on his own record label, Aarawak Records (founded in 1983), which has released his Red Hills and Bamboo Forest, Bamboo Meditations at Banff, Angles of Entrance, New Beings, and Velvet Fire.
Always seeking new ways to be an agent of transformation, and convinced that compositions should change, just as their performers do, Ewart has created new or revised musical forms, such has his suite “Music from the Bamboo Forest,” which is in a state of constant evolution (its score currently comprises six movements employing a cornucopia of flutes, reeds, percussion instruments--many of them handmade -- and significant audience participation). Each performance or production by Ewart reflects time-tested structures, but each also incorporates his most immediate experiences of America and the world, and taps his many creative engagements with collaborators such the master musicians as Muhal Richard Abrams, Amina Myers, Beah Richards, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Curran, Anthony Davis, Von Freeman,
I am a composer, musician, instrument builder, educator, writer, conceptualist, craftsman, tailor, philosopher, and community activist. Over the past forty-years, my work has evolved into a confluence of indivisible practices. Each discipline aids and acts as a catalyst for the others, with music as the overarching galvanizing agent.
As a composer, I utilize many methods to actualize my works: traditional western notation, graphic and texted scores, improvisation, oral directives and gestures, as well as, memorization vehicles and techniques. I have always sought, and continue to honor the inclusion of an intuitive level within my compositions that utilizes many of the innate sensibilities of the artists. Sensibilities that are all too often neglected, underestimated, misunderstood, and dismissed.
This approach to composition and the visual arts requires musical and artistic acumens of the highest caliber. The performers are required to develop interpersonal commitments in order to create fresh, questing, collaborative, challenging, and uninhibited work and performance trajectories. As such, these compositions necessitate concentrated rehearsals to create substantive and sustainable musical creations.
Another vital compositional component is the construction of musical instruments and sound sculptures. By creating my musical instruments, my sonic devices, I am able to construct and/or access unusual sounds, vistas, and kinetic movements in the development of ensembles that would otherwise be impossible to achieve.
As a community-supported artist, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to aspire to be a beacon and drum major for spiritual, cultural, social, and political change and development. I conceptualize my responsibilities in society from this viewpoint as I strive to balance artistic integrity and social responsibility. For me this balance is achieved through the stimuli of novel sound, language, materials, techniques, technologies, movement, and fresh costumes that nevertheless anchor themselves in many traditions.
Ongoing, my work is also an intended contagious communication of self, manifest in the evaluation and development of expression and self-interrogation inherent in my internal interactions, and, the interactions of and between members of the community. I want to magnify the links and the overlaps of play and work, laughter and seriousness, esoteric and generic, ethereal and earthy, mythology and pragmatism, gravity and levitation, meditation and concentration, the fine lines between child and adult, imagination and realism.
In response to the almost adversarial compartmentalization of the various artistic disciplines, my endeavor is to engage the community in a blurring of the boundaries between artistic practices, such that there is a recognizable unity, and a conscious recognition of the correlation between our treatment of art practices, and, the way we engage in and embrace planetary views that foster global progress and development. This work is nurtured by artistic interactions with the community.
