Program Notes for AACM@60!

AACM@60!
September 13, 2025
McGuire Theater

AACM@60!

Wadada Leo Smith — trumpet

Amina Claudine Myers — piano, organ

Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions:

Douglas R. Ewart — composition, poetry, electronics, didgeridoo, winds, percussions

Melvin Gibbs — bass

Mankwe Ndosi — vocals, little instruments

Lela Pierce — choreography, improvisational dance

Davu Seru — drums, percussion

Edward Wilkerson Jr. — didgeridoo, winds

Tonight’s performance will run approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

Please join us before and after the performance in the Walker’s Cityview Bar.

Accessibility Notes

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For questions on accessibility, content and sensory notes or to request additional accommodations, call 612-253-3556 or email access@walkerart.org.

Learn More

The Back, the Before AACM: A personal reflection

My family had music in it from the radio, the piano, the voice, the record. As I listened to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Miriam Makeba, I developed an international palate that sat side by side next to:

Frustrations with definitions of Blackness that did not fit
Insistence on creativity as a generator of transformative possibilities within the human and extra-human worlds—the personal and the structural
A hunger for Black expansive and experimental creative institutions
An experimentation and frustration with the everyday, easy sounds
Wanting sounds that express the full range of human experience, of the land living.

A making of community through collective work that brought me into the orbit of Janis Lane and Douglas R. Ewart. Creative music, what others might call “Free Jazz,” gave access to the entire legacy of sound—the legacy of the sounds of creation and expectation to combine in unique ways. Each practice, each concert a training, an awareness, a making of worlds, a listening, creating, and generative instinct. What music is waiting to be born? What texture is required of the moment? What study is to be combined with the study of my bandmates?

Douglas brought me to the Velvet Lounge in Chicago to begin learning—what I fondly call my graduate school in music. A dunking into the world of deeply rigorous and inventive musical practitioners who would not wait or be polite, but would listen and respond, take space and make space, make meditation and congestion of elephants and lions.

In a Chicago where Blackness is just what you are—who you are—wherever you are. Definitions were not constraints but choices and adornments on a Blackness that was kaleidoscopic and irrefutable. A reclamation of before enslavement pushed Black folks past the edges of what humans could do. A self-defining. The legacies of enslavement made into industry, all while degrading and denigrating those who are abused (without questioning the humanity of the abuser or their enforced reality). A recognition of the throughline for African peoples and a branching into the Diaspora. Ancestry that was not contained by enslavement and that called forth to futures where enslavement was a story that we went through as a humanity—and not an immovable foundation for our ways of living together. Ancient, ritual, cosmic, landscaped.

Douglas invited me into his world and his ensemble Orchestra Inventions, and my world, my desires, my expectations for music and myself changed. I entered and was nourished by a new family of creative music. To stretch and be stretched. To learn and make a mark.

– Mankwe Ndosi

Read more of Mankwe Ndosi’s article on Walker Reader: Centering on the AACM: The Length of Dignity

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For more information about Wadada Leo Smith’s history at the Walker, including recordings, photographs, and his Ankhrasmation language scores, visit our Living Collections Catalog.

About the Artists

Born on December 18, 1941 in Leland, Mississippi, WADADA LEO SMITH began his musical journey steeped in the musical traditions of the South. He composed his first piece of music at the age of twelve, and at thirteen started performing with Delta Blues and other traditional bands. In high school he played in and served as assistant director of the concert and marching bands under the direction of Mr. Henderson Howard.
Smith received his formal musical education from his stepfather, composer/guitarist Alex “Little Bill” Wallace, one of the pioneers of electric guitar in Delta Blues. He was further educated through the U.S. Military band program at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (1963); Sherwood School of Music (1967-69); and Wesleyan University (1975-76). He has researched a variety of music cultures, including African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American.
Smith defines his music as “Creative Music,” and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world.
He has created Ankhrasmation, a symbolic image-based language for performers or musicians. He started his research and designs in search of Ankhrasmation in 1965, and his first realization of this language was in 1967, when it was illustrated in the recording of The Bell (Anthony Braxton: ‘Three Compositions of New Jazz’).  Ankhrasmation has played a significant role in Wadada’s development as an artist, ensemble leader and educator.
Smith was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ten Freedom Summers, (Defining Moments in the History of the United States of America), a collection of compositions inspired by the civil rights movement and released as a 4-CD boxed set. Ten Freedom Summers has also been awarded a MAP Fund Award (2011), Chamber Music America New Works Grant (2010), National Endowment for the Arts Recording Grant (2010), Southwest Chamber Music commission with support from the James Irvine Foundation and Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009-2010). Smith was named DownBeat Magazine’s Composer of the Year in 2013.
In 2016 Smith received a Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. In addition, he received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement “honoring brilliance and resilience.” In 2018 he received the Religion and The Arts Award from the American Academy of Religion. In 2019 he received the UCLA Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the University of California, Los Angeles. United States Artists named Smith a 2021 USA Fellow, and he has been selected as a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM). Earlier in 2022, he also was commissioned by the LA Philharmonic to write the orchestral pieceGondwana: Earth, a Blue Sanctuary, Oceans, Seas, Lakes, Rivers, Springs and Lagoons; Paradise Gardens and Skies, as well as String Quartet #13, performed by the JACK Quartet.
Smith’s America’s National Parks earned wide praise as one of the best albums of 2016 from The New York Times, the NPR Jazz Critics Poll, The Wire and many other media outlets and was voted 2016 Jazz Album of the Year in DownBeat Magazine’s 65th Annual International Critics Poll, which also honored Smith as Jazz Artist and Trumpeter of the Year and featured him on the cover of the magazine twice: in November 2016 and August 2017.  He was named Artist of the Year in the 2016 Jazz Times’ Critics Poll.
The Jazz Journalists Association has honored Smith as their 2013 Musician of the Year, 2015 Composer of the Year, 2016 Trumpeter of the Year, 2017 Musician of the Year plus Duo of the Year for his work with Vijay Iyer, and the 2022 Trumpeter of the Year.  In 2022, Smith earned the Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Among Smith’s numerous other awards, commissions and residencies are an Other Minds residency that commissioned Taif, a string quartet (2008); Fellow of the Jurassic Foundation (2008); FONT (Festival of New Trumpet) Award of Recognition (2008); Islamic World Arts Initiative of Arts International (2004); Fellow of the Civitela Foundation (2003); Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2001); “Third Culture Copenhagen” in Denmark presenting a paper on Ankhrasmation (1996); Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program (1996); Asian Cultural Council Grantee to Japan (June-August 1993); Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program (1990); New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Music (1990); National Endowment for the Arts Music Grants (1972, 1974, 1981).
Smith’s work has been recorded extensively on more than 100 albums as a leader/co-leader. His most recent releases include Wadada Leo Smith String Quartets Nos. 1-12 and The Emerald Duets.
Smith is a member of the historic and legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He is also a member of ASCAP.

AMINA CLAUDINE MYERS, Pianist, Organist, Vocalist, Composer, Master Improvisationalist, Actress and Educator.  Ms. Myers has performed nationally and internationally throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and North America.  She is well known for her work involving voice choirs, voice and instrumental ensembles.  Ms. Myers’ career in music began in her preteens and throughout high school directing church choirs, singing and playing gospel and rhythm and blues.  She began playing and singing jazz in college in and around Arkansas.  Myers studied concert music at Philander Smith College, Little Rock, Arkansas and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Education.
After moving to Chicago, Ill. in the 1960’s Ms. Myers taught in the public school system for six years.  She attended Roosevelt University briefly and became a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1966.  As an AACM member she started composing for voice and instruments.  In 1975 she organized her very first choir for a musical she wrote called I DREAM. 
In 1976 Ms. Myers moved to New York City where her career became even more multifaceted.  In 1977 she moved into the theater realm, writing pieces for this medium.  She acted and composed music for a number of Off-Broadway productions. Ms. Myers was the assistant musical director for AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ prior to it’s Broadway production.  In 1978 she was choral director at SUNY at Old Westbury for a year.
Ms. Myers has recorded and/or performed with Archie Shepp, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra, James Blood Ulmer, Lester Bowie, Bob Stewart, Joey Baron, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt,  Muhal Richard Abrams, Bill Laswell, Eddie Harris, Von Freeman, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Frank Lowe, Rahsaan Roland Kirk  and other well known artists.  Myers conducts workshops, seminar and residencies at colleges and universities, nationally and internationally.
Her larger works include: INTERIORS, a composition for chamber orchestra conducted by Peter Kotik and performed by S.E.M. Orchestra.  This piece was produced by the AACM and performed at the NYC Society of Ethical Culture;  IM-PROVISATIONAL SUITE FOR CHORUS, PIPE ORGAN AND PERCUSSION;  for 16 operatic voices, pipe organ and two percussionists;  WHEN THE BERRIES FELL, eight voices, piano, Hammond B3 and percussion;  A VIEW FROM THE INSIDE, a staged piece showing the workings of the inside mind.  This included a chef from New Orleans and his assistant, a weaver, pianist, guitar/trumpet/voice (Olu Dara) and choreographer Rrata Christine Jones.  Original art work by Ms. Myers was on the set;  FOCUS, a piece written for piano, voice, electric bass and photographic images from Myers’ home town of Blackwell.  HOW LONG BRETHREN, based on Negro Songs of Protest originally created by Helen Tamiris, was recreated by choreographer Diane McIntyre.  The music score was created by Genevieve Pitot with original orchestra arrangements by Leslie Loth.  The orchestral score was discovered with instrumentation only.  Ms. Myers recreated and re-edited parts that were found in pieces from the archives of George Mason University.  She conducted the symphony orchestras with choruses (The Wesley Boyd Singers of Washington, D.C at George Mason University; and the Western University Chorus from Western University).  Myers has composed a few big band compositions performed by AACM musicians.  She has performed works written by writer Ntozake Shange and other new works created by Diane McIntyre. Myers has collaborated in ongoing concerts with her soul sister Sola Liu where they are combining Chinese and Afro-American music traditions through singing, playing and dancing.
Most recently Ms. Myers has been performing original works of jazz, blues, gospel, spirituals and improvisations for the pipe organ. She has performed at Columbia University (St. Paul’s Chapel) NYC; St. Marks, Phil., Penn. and cities throughout North America, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Norway and Finland.
In 2010 Myers was commissioned by the Chicago Jazz Institute to compose and direct a composition for a 17 piece jazz orchestra in honor of the late and great composer, arranger and pianist Miss Mary Lou Williams’ 100th birthday.  She was also commissioned by Baritonist Thomas Buckner to compose a composition for him.  She titled it I WILL NOT FEAR THE UNKNOWN for baritone and piano.  The performances were “lots of fun” says Myers.
Ms. Myers has received many grants and awards, including National Endowment for the Arts, Meet The Composer, and The New York Foundation for the Arts.  She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame 2001 and the Arkansas Jazz Hall of Fame 2010. 
Ms. Myers resides and teaches privately in New York City.

Perhaps best known as a composer, improviser, sculptor and maker of masks and instruments, DOUGLAS R. EWART is also an educator, 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 has taught since 1990, 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, Fred Anderson, Joseph Jarman, Yusef Lateef, Roscoe Mitchell, Ajule Sonny Rutlin, Rita Warford, Dee Alexander, Robert Dick, George E. Lewis, James Newton, Cecil Taylor, Richard Teitelbaum and Henry Threadgill.
Beyond sound itself, Ewart’s music finds natural extensions (in every sense of the word) in the instruments he makes, which run the gamut from unique wind instruments to percussion instruments. Beyond these are sculptures, sound sculptures, and individually handcrafted masks that have been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. All these elements of his art are on display every year in Chicago and in other cities in stagings of “Crepuscule,” which in Ewart’s own opinion best represents his celebratory spontaneity and commitment to organic inclusivity. A massive collective composition, “Crepuscule” is a celebration of sunset that brings together diverse musical groups, dancers, artists and activist for a musical and visual event that has become one of the signature programs of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, being held annually at the city’s Washington Park. Ewart improvises with the scores of other performers who come together for “Crepuscule” by using not only well-known wind instruments but also his own wondrously inventive percussion instruments (crutches, oars and skis transformed by cymbals and bells). In addition to having been adopted as an annual ritual in Chicago, “Crepuscule” has been performed in Philadelphia, PA and Minneapolis, MN, and employed by the Banlieues Bleues Festival in Paris, France to unite the diverse artistic and ethnic cultures of Paris’ inner city communities.
Ewart is the winner of the Bush Artists Fellowship (1997), Minnesota Composers Forum/McKnight Foundation fellowships, Jerome Foundation grants, Mayor Harold Washington’s Outstanding Artist Award and a Naropa Institute residency among many other honors. He has performed at the Moers International Festival (Germany), at the University of Puerto Rico San Juan, throughout Brazil, in Tokyo, Perth, Havana, Paris, Stockholm, London, Düsseldorf and Berlin; in the U.S. he has performed at Mobius (Boston), The Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Science Museum (St. Paul), 1750 Arch Street (Berkeley), Painted Bride (Philadelphia), Creative Arts Collective (Detroit), Lincoln Park Zoo and the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago), Merkin Hall, the Public Theater, The Kitchen and Carnegie Hall (New York). He has led workshops and lectured at Louisiana Nature Center (New Orleans), University of Illinois Unit One (Champaign), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC.), Northwestern University (Evanston), University of Chicago and the Banff Center for the Arts (Alberta, Canada). 

MELVIN GIBBS is a Grammy nominated composer, musician, artist, and writer, born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has been called “the greatest bassist in the world” by Time Out New York magazine and was 2019 winner of JazzTimes Magazine’s Critics Poll in the category: Electric Bass.
His book “How Black Music Took Over The World” will be released by Basic Books on April 14th 2026.

Of Tanzanian and African American heritage, MANKWE NDOSI is celebrated for a sound and practice that spans genres and disciplines: celebrating influences from Jazz and African legacies, Hip Hop and Soul, performance art, theater, public art and improvisation. She has toured and recorded with independent hip-hop powerhouse duo Atmosphere and Brother Ali. Her solo releases include Do Gooder’s Blues (2009) and the critically acclaimed Science and Spirit (2012). She describes her style on Science and Spirit as “live, creative improvisational work with hip hop.” A long-time creative associate of Chicago-based AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) Mankwe has spent years exploring improvisational and creative music making at the forefront and intersections of modern creative and avant-garde Jazz. She tours and performs nationally and internationally with noted 2014 appearances with Nicole Mitchell and Ballake Sissoko in France and Switzerland, performances in the world-premier of River See, Sharon Bridgforth’s theatrical jazz masterwork in Chicago and Boston, performances with mentor and AACM stalwart Douglas Ewart. Her vocal work as a member of Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble is featured on the 2014 release Intergalactic Beings. Jazz Times reviewed the album, citing it as a “bold contribution to the art of Afrofuturism connects the all-embracing avant-gardism of the AACM, the cosmic chaos of the Sun Ra Arkestra.”

LELA PIERCE (she/they) is a Black multiracial artist who grew up in rural MniSota Makoce – the ancestral and current homeland of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. She has lived in the Twin Cities for nearly 2 decades -maintaining artistic practices in painting, performance and installation work. Lela has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016) as well as Rosy Simas Danse and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (both 2015-present). In 2018 she was awarded a Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship for visual art through MCAD. Her work has been presented internationally in India and Sweden (including a solo show at Kalmar Konstmuseum) as well as several Twin Cities venues. Lela holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, and an MFA in interdisciplinary art and social practice from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is currently a visiting professor of Sculpture at Macalester College.

DAVU SERU is an improvising musician, composer and scholar known primarily for his work on drums. For the past 20+ years he has worked with musicians such as Milo Fine, George Cartwright, Nirmala Rajasekar, Douglas R. Ewart, Michelle Kinney, Dean Magraw, Paul Metzger, Evan Parker, Didier Petit, Babatunde Lea, Nathan Hanson, Mankwe Ndosi, Rafael Toral, David Boykin, Donald Washington, Guillame Seguron, Tony Hymas, David Boykin, Chris Bates, Catherine Delaunay, and Nicole Mitchell Gantt. Davu is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and is Curator of the Givens Collection of African American Literature at University of Minnesota.

EDWARD WILKERSON JR. is an internationally recognized composer, arranger, saxophonist, clarinetist, and educator based in Chicago, where he has been closely associated with the AACM, serving at one time as its president. He first came to prominence as a member of Khalil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, participating in a number of recordings by the group. As founder and director of the cutting-edge octet 8 Bold Souls, and the 25-member Shadow Vignettes ensemble, Wilkerson has toured festivals and concert halls throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. “Defender,” a large-scale piece for Shadow Vignettes, was commissioned by the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund and featured in the 10th Anniversary of New Music America, a presentation of BAM’s Next Wave Festival. His music can be heard on over a dozen recordings, including two film soundtracks and the critically acclaimed albums Birth of a Notion, and 8 Bold Souls, both on his own Sessoms Records label.

Living Land Acknowledgment

The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today. 

We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself. 

We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work. 

Acknowledgments

About the Walker Art Center

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