Ewart, Douglas

Ewart, Douglas , Jamaican musician; b. Kingston, Jamaica, Sept. 13, 1946. As a child in Jamaica, the story goes, he was always building things, from go-carts, to kites, to musical instruments, fashioning drums and shakers, and even then seizing on the possibilities of flutes made from bamboo. When his family moved to Chicago in 1963, he attended vocational school where he studied tailoring. Music entered his life forcefully, though, through his association with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which as part of its activist outreach, ran a music school where he studied with founding members Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Joseph Jarman. He has since blossomed both as a maker of music and musical instruments, particularly bamboo instruments. He has performed on flutes, saxophones, and electronics with many of his fellow Chicagoans, including recording sessions with pianist Abrams; saxophonists Chico Freeman, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Braxton; and trombonist George Lewis, with whom he shared the eponymous duets project, George Lewis/Douglas Ewart. He is also a sculptor and educator. He has been chairman of the AACM and participant in panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and other arts organizations. Under an NEA fellowship, he studied the crafting and playing of shakuhachi flutes in Japan for a year.

Discography

George Lewis/Douglas Ewart (1979); The Bamboo Forest (1990); Bamboo Meditations at Banff (1994).

—W. Kim Heron