Ancient Is the Future: Sounds in Clay

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Douglas R. Ewart (b. Kingston, Jamaica, 1946) is a lecturer and workshop director; the past president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and instructor in the AACM School of Music; and a performer of original music with Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, and others. At age 10, he started to experiment with sound and design musical instruments—tin cans were altered to become hand drums and pieces of wood were fashioned into rattles. When his family bought a rug rolled around a large piece of bamboo, he seized on the bamboo as a potential flute. Thus began what has become today a high art practiced by Ewart alone: the construction of sonorous “totem flutes” colorful as bamboo rainbows, adorned with wood-burned designs and haunting images. Ewart’s kaleidoscopic talent finds expression in a range of forms, including instruments, inventions, masks, costumes, music, and acting, and his repertoire might be mistaken for the work of a small culture rather than one man.