Songs of Life’s Vineyards
A performance by Douglas R. Ewart and Quasar: Mankwe Ndosi, Shanta Nurullah, and Brian Smith
In conjunction with the exhibition Douglas R. Ewart: A Retrospective
Sunday, December 12, 4pm CT
In person at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago
FREE, reservations strongly encouraged
Douglas R. Ewart returns for a final performance alongside the exhibition Douglas R. Ewart: A Retrospective at ESS’s Audible Gallery - also closing on December 12th. This time, Ewart is joined by the group Quasar: Mankwe Ndosi, Vincent Davis, and Brian Smith. Attend the presentation of Songs of Life’s Vineyards live at the Logan Center at University of Chicago, Sunday, December 12th at 4pm CDT.
Photo courtesy of Chelese L. Ewart
Currently, the Logan Center is not regularly open to the public; however, visitors have access for specific performances, exhibitions, and events with a ticket/reservation. Please read carefully their COVID-19 safety protocols, available on the Eventbrite page to reserve spots here.
Artist Bios
Mankwe Ndosi is a Composer, Evoker, and Culture Worker based in Minneapolis who works in sound and soil. Her practices emerge from black ritual legacies of music and performance learned through Douglas R. Ewart, Laurie Carlos, Sharon Bridgeforth, Amoke Kubat, Libby Turner, Nicole Mitchell, Miriam Makeba, ancestors, earth, and collaboration.
Born in Chicago Illinois, Brian Smith studied bass extensively with Joseph Guastefeste (former principal bassist of the Chicago Symphony). While a member of the Chicago Civic Orchestra, Mr. Smith was the first recipient of the Charles E. Clark Memorial Scholarship, which enabled him to continue his studies. In that same period Mr. Smith began studying privately conducting and composition briefly, with Ralph Shapey, later working under the tutorage of Hale Smith. Arriving in New York City in 1976, Mr. Smith has composed and performed music for The Composers forum (NYC), The Dance Theater of Harlem, Thomas W. Buckner, The Ebony Ensemble, Northeastern Symphony and the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance.
His compositions have been performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the Brooklyn Chamber Players and Orchestra, and the Chamber Players of Illinois. Some of his renowned compositions include Deliverance for Orchestra, Dedications for Orchestra, Seven Reasons for Orchestra, Shielding Innocence from Time for Saxophone and Orchestra, They Live Amongst Us for Orchestra and The Jazz X-tet Big Band (of the University of Chicago.)
He has received rewards from the The National Endowment for the Arts, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, Composers Forum (NYC), The American Music Center (NYC), The Philadelphia Composers Academy, The Creative Arts Program, The Jazz Foundation of America and numerous rewards from Meet the Composer.
He has performed and recorded with many artists, including Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Philly Joe Jones, Henry Threadgill, Sam Rivers Big Band, Lionel Hampton Big Band, Frank Foster Sextet, Fred Anderson, Malachi Thompson and Edward Wilkerson's ensemble(s) to name a few. He has performed and been a member of the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Civic Orchestra, Florida Symphony Orchestra, the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra, Dance theater of Harlem in addition to several ensembles and bands in the New York Tri-State area. In 1979, he founded/musical director of the World Bass Viol Ensemble 6 bassist & percussion) and The World Chamber Music Ensemble which he composed directed/conducted as well. Mr. Smith has composed many works, both vocal and instrumental. His vocal compositions range from solo pieces to large choral works. His instrumental pieces range from solo strings to works for ensembles of all sizes, as well as full-scale orchestral works, documentaries, opera and theater productions. Mr. Smith’s musical ideas sometimes find expression in unusual instrumental groupings, as evidenced by his 1988 work (dedicated to the late Maxwell Roach) MAX-i-mum for percussion ensemble (nine percussionists). He and his music has been performed in various concert halls in the United States, Asia, Africa, Canada, Europe and the Caribbean.
Mr. Smith has taught music composition and bass at such institutions as Judson School, the New School of Social Research, Jazz-mobile (NYC), the Henry Street Settlement House NYC. In 1995, Mr. Smith co - founded briefly the Mid-Town Community Youth Ensemble, for children aging from 8 to17 years old. Presently since July 2008, Mr. Smith resides in Chicago, where he is composing, performing, learning and available for teaching.
Vincent Davis, born in Chicago is an internationally acclaimed jazz percussionist, composer and teacher. The seed of music was planted in Davis early, growing up in a home filled with the influences of rock, jazz and gospel. In 1979 Davis left Chicago to attend the Milwaukee Conservatory of Music, where his love of jazz and skill at drumming further bloomed and flourished. It was here that Davis met his mentor Manty Ellis. Davis trained and studied with Ellis, primarily focusing on Jazz trap drumming.
Douglas R. Ewart, Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946. His life and his wide-ranging work have always been inextricably associated with Jamaican culture, history, politics, and the land itself. His father, Tom Ewart, was one of cricket’s most internationally celebrated professional umpires, eventually earning induction into the Cricket Hall of Fame. His aunt, Iris King, was a leading member of Norman Manley’s People’s National Party, and later, the first woman mayor in Jamaica.
Professor Ewart immigrated to Chicago in 1963, 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. The AACM is renowned for its wide-ranging experimental approaches to music; its leading lights include Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Fred Anderson, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Lester Bowie, Kalaparusha Ara Difda, George Lewis, Malachi Maghostut Favors, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Henry Threadgill, and many others, including Professor Ewart himself, who served as the organization's president between 1979 and 1987.
Professor 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 the flutes, pan-pipes, rainsticks and percussion instruments of his own design and construction for which he is known worldwide. Professor Ewart’s work as composer, instrument maker and visual artist has long reflected his understanding of the importance of sustainable and natural materials, particularly bamboo, which serves 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 the widely influential Bamboo Meditations At Banff 1993 and Bamboo Forest 1990. His visual art and kinetic works have has 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 many others.
His graphic/conceptual instrumental work Red Hills (1979), an homage to his native Jamaica, is very widely performed, and his work as performing instrumentalist has been presented in the Caribbean (Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti), Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Holland, UK), Japan, Bali, South America, Scandinavia, and Australia, as well as the United States and Puerto Rico, and recorded on numerous labels, including his own Aarawak recording company. Professor Ewart is the leader of such important musical ensembles as the Nyahbingi Drum Choir, Quasar, Orbit, Quasar, StringNets, and the Clarinet Choir, and in addition to his AACM colleagues, Professor Ewart has performed with 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, George Lewis, Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and others.
Professor Ewart’s highly communitarian work as a conceptual artist is best represented by Crepuscule (1993-present), a massive participation performance coordinated by his ensemble, Douglas R. Ewart and Inventions. Strongly informed by the Jamaican Jonkunnu tradition, Crepuscule is an all-day event that is collectively created by scores of musicians, dancers, visual artists, poets, capoeira, puppeteers, martial artists, activists, elders, children and more, in streets and parks in Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Paris, France, and more. Moreover, this communitarian orientation has long included educational work in underserved communities, such as his work since 1992 in Minneapolis’s ArtStart, summer interdisciplinary arts program since its inception in 1992 and his work since 1980 at Chicago’s Urban Gateways Center for Arts Education, which was documented in the 1992 British telefilm On the Edge: Improvisation in Music.
Among his many honors, Professor Ewart was personally presented with the Outstanding Artist Award by Chicago's first African American mayor, Harold Washington. He is the recipient of the silver Musgrave Award 2019, one of Jamaica’s highest awards for the arts sciences and literature. He has received two Bush Artists Fellowship (1997, 2007), three McKnight Fellowships (1992, 1994 and 2001), among others, as well as the U.S.–Japan Creative Artist Fellowship (1987), a year-long residency in Yokohama where he studied Japanese techniques of instrument building. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and others.