Eternally NOW by Douglas R. Ewart

Eternally Now by Douglas R. Ewart

from Songs and Stories for a New Path and Paradigm

         photos Tony Smith

September 10

Outdoor Screening 8, 8:30, 9pm

on the 8EAST Plaza, Pender and Carrall Streets, Vancouver

with an introduction by Douglas R. Ewart

Online 8pm

Reserve seats to see the film in person here.
1 Ticket, $10, reserves a location with space for two.
Limited drop in seating and standing room also available at 8EAST, by donation.

For those that can't make it in person, the film will be screened online Sept. 10, 8pm here.

Screening continuously in Chicago, Sept. 10 - Dec. 12, 2021 at

About Eternally NOW

Eternally Now was inspired and predicted on the concept and notion that we must sing, play music, visualize, say and write the positive things about human conditions, relations, and reality, which we are endeavoring to realize in order to have a full and complete civilization.

Eternally Now consists of narratives, vocal and instrumental music, videos and photographs, a plethora of human thoughts and experiences that describes just how close and inextricable our fundamental platforms are as humans, and that we must seek universal input, concepts, and solutions to our challenges and problems.

Eternally Now is created as part of NOW Society’s Creative Music Series #10, Songs and Stories for a New Path and Paradigm. From January to July 2021, 39 improvisers and 2 engineers collaborated by creating in the present, by imagining what might come and by responding. The musicians improvised in sequence in nine different cities; files moved from musician to the engineers, to the next musician and so on… The engineers created architectural master halls from the artists’ sonic and visual material, from location and space, from time folded and expanded, resulting in 36 improvised films and in the formation of new works by composer Douglas R. Ewart. The passion, generosity, vulnerability, humour and strength in these films document artists transcending separation through collaboration.

• 36 improvised films, released these on the TV8E online episodes from Sept 18 - Dec. 4)

• featuring 39 musicians, 2 engineers (from Vancouver, Toronto, Rimouski, St. Paul, Montréal, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Chicago, Amsterdam)

• new works by Douglas R. Ewart (featuring 36 musicians) in various formats to be released in September 10 and December 11 and beyond by the NOW Society

   

“Eternally Now"
Composer: Douglas R. Ewart
Audio Engineer: Sheldon Zaharko
Video Engineer: Ron Ruiten
Commissioned and Produced by NOW
Artistic Director: Dr. Lisa Cay Miller

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Maggie Brown - voice, Fred Jackson Jr. - saxophone, Ben LaMar Gay - cornet, Darius Savage - bass Cécile Savage - bass (Chicago) JoVia Armstrong - drums (Los Angeles) Douglas R. Ewart - Reeds. Laura Harada - violin. Michelle Kinney - cello. Mankwe Ndosi - voice (Minnesota) Yves Charuest - alto saxophone, Gabriel Dharmoo - voice, Mili Hong (Korea) - drums, Vicky Mettler - guitar, Ida Toninato - bass saxophone (Montréal), Douglas Kearney - poet (St. Paul), Éric Normand - guitar, bass (Rimouski), Elizabeth Lima - clarinet, voice (Toronto), Matthew Ariaratnam - guitar, JP Carter - trumpet, Cesar Chew (Mexico City) - drums, Bill Clark - trumpet, Dailin Hsieh - zheng, Feven Kidane - trumpet, Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi - electronics, John Korsrud - trumpet, Lisa Cay Miller - piano, Brad Muirhead - bass trombone, Roxanne Nesbitt - bass, voice, John Paton - guitar, Dawn Pemberton - voice, Carol Sawyer - voice, Lucy Strauss (South Africa) - viola, Natasha Zrno - clarinet, Cassandra Blondin-Burt - poet (Denendeh/Yellowknife NWT)

Artist Bio

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, Orbit, Quasar, StringNets, and the Clarinet Choir, and in addition to his AACM colleagues, Professor Ewart has performed with Cedric I Am 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.

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, Guelph Canada 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 has received two Bush Artists Fellowships (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.

The audios and the videos were then layered as a complete amalgam, and can be run consecutively as quartets, and there are other versions of the composition in which all the artists are layered and presented as one two minute piece, and that group was also halved to eighteen artists, and further divisions are possible with each proffering two minute long pieces.

There is an opening exhibition of some of Douglas R. Ewart's visual art works at Experiment Sound Studio in Chicago along with "Eternally Now," scheduled to take place on Friday 10th September at ESS, and ESS will air the audio visual work starting on the 10th September and will run from opening night through the 10th December 2021.