Maia + Douglas R. Ewart duo

Sonjia Hubert Harper, better known by the moniker Maia, grew up in Atlanta and arrived in Chicago in the 1970s. There she met Phil Cohran, co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, with whom she soon developed a fruitful creative partnership; he wrote music to score her poetry, and she choreographed dances to accompany his performances. Maia founded Samana; AACM’s first all-female multi-instrumental/vocal ensemble, with fellow multi-instrumentalists Shanta Nurullah and Nicole Mitchell, with the intention to showcase its members’ multiplicity of talents. Eschewing a “hardcore jazz” aesthetic, Samana, guided by Maia artistic direction, sought inspiration in contemporaneous social movements as well as in west African folk traditions. That same heterogeneity of influence is evident in her solo work, which fuses fierce moral clarity with sensuous whimsy. Over the buoyant patter of congas or the celestial twinkling of the vibraphone, Maia chants, whispers, hollers, and yawps with her signature ebullience, calling for democracy on “Time Ta Boogie South Africa,” prophesying the end of a troubled world on “Sooner Will Be Done,” or regaling audiences with stories of her ancestors in Dahomey on “Afro Blue.” Maia is now based in Los Angeles, where, since 1999, she has lived and worked as an actor, educator, and flautist for the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra.

Douglas R. Ewart moved from Kingston, Jamaica 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 AACM; he later served as the president of the AACM from 1979 to 1987. In his multimedia artistic practice, Ewart is often interested in building instruments out of found objects; his “People’s Idiophone,” staged for public participation on the streets of Minneapolis, is a matrix of saucepans, hubcaps, pot covers, and cymbals that can be played by leather mallet or by hand. Meanwhile a “sonic top” made out of a scratched and severed LP he terms “crepuscular,” because it is in “the twilight of its original intent.” Ewart’s use of unconventional materials is inseparable from his pursuit of unorthodox sound. His work often unfolds within extremely limited pitch ranges of homemade wind instruments, deriving sonic complexity from alien textures: scraggly, bristly, thunderous, and cavernous. He amplifies the anomalous noises of his breath on oversized flutes or similar instruments, allowing wheezes, sputters, and other irregular sounds to penetrate the music and define its timbre. Ewart’s instruments and sonic sculptures have been exhibited at venues including the Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry Chicago. His other honors include a U.S.–Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, two Bush Artists Fellowships, three McKnight Fellowships, an Outstanding Artist Award granted by former Chicago mayor Harold Washington, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. He is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago.