A Conversation with Douglas R. Ewart

Sam Gould (SG): One of the things I really appreciate about the work that you do is that whether you’re working with sculpture, performing here in the neighborhood at George Floyd Square, or performing within a retrospective of the work of your friend George Lewis at the Walker Art Center, like you were the other night, you handle each instance just like the other two. No separation, no hierarchy. Maybe I’m just reading into it because you live a few blocks from my house, but I see this really fluid and very important landscape that you're creating by making space in all of these spaces. An expanding terrain of our neighborhood, and vice versa for the other spaces you inhabit. Do you feel that way too? Or do you delineate between playing in Powderhorn Park, at the assembly we organized at the Third Precinct, or someplace like the Walker? Is there a difference to you?

Douglas Ewart (DE): Well, I look at myself as a global citizen. You know, we live on Planet Earth. It is huge, vast, and at the same time, it's small compared to many of the other planets. And so I relate to wherever I am as a citizen, and as someone both receiving and hopefully, reciprocating. Certainly there are differences when you're doing work in different environments and different contexts, but there's an aspect of you that, in my view, should remain unchanging.

And so, you know—relating to people, relating to the environment. Care of the environment, care of where you are… I don't see any difference. If I'm here and I see someone in need, I don't see why I can't relate to them. And if I go to Japan, and someone is falling, or someone needs assistance, or someone is being generous, the idea that you don't extend the same kind of feelings and action towards them… what I would call an embrace, a spiritual embrace, a joyful embrace, in terms of the human spirit. I’m part of the human family, and I see a connection to everything. 

I see a connection to everything within what is called one's work, and my work is my life. I don't really see a separation. Certainly, there are things that one is able to do because of their physical capability, and if you lose those capabilities then, you know, you have to adjust and do something else. But while I’m capable, this is part of what I do. I'm not necessarily interested in having, for example, my workshop across town. I like the idea that my workshop is right by me, so that when I have a spark or a thought, I can go right to it. I can roll out of my bed and go to it, or I can lay in it as part of my bed. 

My relationships with the world and people are similar in terms of my response as a human being, and my care about the planet, whether I'm in Powderhorn Park, if I go to Longfellow, or if I go further to Rondo. Or if I go to Jamaica. I don't litter there. I don't litter here. I care about the environment, because I see the global relationship, the connection, and I see the same kind of connectedness within my work. For example, I do some work with spinning tops. And people might think, well, an adult is playing with spinning tops! Yes, an adult is playing with spinning tops. It's meditative for me, and it's also transformative in terms of how I can relate to its simplicity and its complexity. For example, I started building tops when I was a child. And some children on this block swung on our gate many years ago and broke it, and their parents were very upset with them. And I thought, “Hey, I wanted to swing on that gate! I just knew the gate wouldn't bear my weight.” Yeah, but I almost put my foot on it because of the ride—the joy of it! And so I said, “Well, you know, the kids need more stuff to do.” And so we embarked on building some instruments, and some tops. The kids were so enamored with the top.

SG: What kinds of instruments did you make together?

DE: We made shakers, we made rain sticks, we made didgeridoos. We made some trumpets. In fact, here’s one of them right here. [Plays horn.] So here, we have a simple device. I thought, “Well, wow, you know, this top thing is very interesting.” They played incessantly with it. And that gave me an idea for a composition using tops. And so I made over 300 tops—from spools, from bamboo, from clocks, from wheels, anything that I thought could spin. I even made some square ones, but the square ones are very dangerous, because when they slam into something, they catapult and back off. BANG! So I stopped making squares. 

We did a piece with the tops. One of the things I noticed was how people related to each other around them. Firstly, when you're involved with spinning tops, you have to get down on the ground. At some point, you have to get to the same level. Especially with children, because we often stand up and we’re looking down on children. Here, you get down on the ground. Everybody's pretty much at eye level. And there is a camaraderie. Everybody wants to show everybody their particular technique of how to spin. And there are different kinds of ways that you can spin. You can spin using your fingers, you can use your palms, and then, to get even stronger torque and velocity, you can wrap the cord.

SG: Any technique works, so long as you spin. 

DE: It occurred to me that we were dealing with physics in a very interesting and practical way. And you could get children involved in physics, in translating some of the behavior of a top and talking about the equation of the top. What is torque? What is force? What is momentum? What is precession? What is orbit, friction, inertia? 

You have this Doppler effect, because some of the tops make sound. Some of them make flute-like sounds. At a certain velocity, they don't make any sounds, but as they slow down, you start to hear this vvvvhhhrrrr. As it gets slower, that goes away. So I had a residency at three schools, and I thought, “Okay, we'll build tops. The kids will make the tops, and then they'll decorate them.” So here you have now a component, a visual aspect to the top—besides the top itself, having already been a sculpture—now you can embroider it, embellish it with paint, wrap things on it. Now you have a piece that is visually autonomous. 

And you have the aspect of it being a top, and you can talk about its properties in terms of the material it's made up of. Some of it's made from wood, some from plastic, some bamboo. You can start talking about bamboo. Bamboo is a grass. It belongs to the grass family. There are over some 1500 species of bamboo—how bamboo is used, how rapidly it grows, its effectiveness. Its tensile strength. It's used for scaffolding when building different types of construction material; you can eat certain species of bamboo when they're young. Panda bears eat bamboo. And bamboo is used to make instruments because it's naturally hollow, except for nodes. And then you start talking about what nodes. Are you talking about different diameters, different thicknesses? Now you're now engaged in botany, you're dealing with physics, you're dealing with horticulture, agriculture. I don't see any boundaries between these activities, these ideas. What you're doing encompasses so many things, if you can sort it out.

SG: I think that’s really beautiful—this idea of utilizing a simple design, but a simple design that is boundless. If you engage it mindfully with all of yourself, you can keep going and find all of these different permutations. That seems to be a throughline in most everything that I see you do.

DE: It’s expansive. The limits are you. There are no limits to it, if you're thinking creatively, and if you're engaging others. Because I know some things about physics, I started taking a physicist with me to the schools. So we're dealing with somebody who can demonstrate and talk about physics, expanding on what I've already spoken about and have done with the students. Then on top of that, we could make musical compositions using the top in a chance game. One iteration was we put a graph on the ground with letters and numbers. The musical alphabet, seven letters. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And we can use numbers—let's say, intervals from one to 116. And so we put this thing on the ground, and we put these different things in the boxes on it, and then we spin a top, and when it stops—let's say the top stops on a G. “Oh, so now we have the letter G.” Then we spin again, and let's say it winds up in a seven. Now we have a G seven. We could have a G dominant seven, we could have a G major seven, G minor seven, G diminished seven, G augmented seven. So just from two spins, we've generated this much that we can translate to musical language on a board or on paper. Another spin will generate yet that much more material, so in not many spins, you've generated great possibilities for composition. You're using both determining factors. And you're also using chance factors, improvisational factors. 

So you can see how you can take what seems to be such a finite aspect, a spinning top, and now it's become expansive. From there you can jump to other possibilities. You can talk about the system—the solar system, the heavenly bodies, because they have similar conduct to a spinning top or to a body of water. So you can now talk about planets and their behavior. And you can relate it back to the conduct of a top. So now you can spin a top, analyze its conduct, and transfer that analysis to the conduct of a planet. So now you're showing the relationship to things. And you've also now shown that people often think that simple means easy, but they're two different things. Simple means that it can be more complex, and usually it means where you've trimmed away the fat, so to speak. Where you've gotten to the nucleus of an idea. 

So that's how I see my “work,” my activity. Part of that is you're recycling things. I find discarded toys, discarded old clocks, bowls, and of course, I acquire bamboo and utilize bamboo. So the top might consist of bamboo, it might have metal inserts, it might have acrylic inserts, and it might have a certain kind of wood. It might be poplar, it might be maple, it might be cherry. So now you're looking at Botany. You can talk about cherry, you can talk about cypress, you know? Where they grow, the particular kinds of things that are good for that. Like, cypress is resistant to water. It's very good because it grows in swampy areas. You can talk about cedar wood and how it's used in making instruments. How First Nation people use it in making their drum frames. 

I don't see anything that I'm not related to. Or any one that I'm not related to, from the aspect of life—from the aspect of looking at everything as being connected, and that things are not isolated, or compartmentalized in a way that our society often does. Isolated means not just things and objects. They do it to people!

SG: How much did arriving as a young person in Chicago, from Jamaica, play in terms of engaging materials and cooperating with people? 

DE: Well, you know, coming to Chicago from an island… I was 17. My first reaction was the size of things, the availability of certain things. The climatic change, the density, the architectural change. Because where we lived, in Kingston, there were a few high rises, but nothing like Chicago. In Kingston, we're not talking skyscrapers. People lived in cottages, the roads were smaller. 

I grew up in a city. That idea of city life was normal. Chicago is a whole ‘nother kind of city. How the weather changes in Chicago—that changes one's behavior. I wasn’t used to that. In Kingston, we lived in a community that was very, very close knit. In fact, I'm still very closely connected to people I grew up with as a child. Few people can say they have a friend that they've had for 70 years. Even 60 or 50 years. I tend to keep long-term friendships, even the ones that I've forged here in the US. Part of it is we didn't move around. We lived in one place. I moved to other places, but my grandmother's house was central. I was born there, in her house. If I went somewhere else to stay for a while, I would wind up coming back to that home. 

So when you come to a different culture, a different place, you tend to do some of the things that you grew up doing, in terms of materials and creativity. There was the abundance of things here in the US, but then the mindset of growing up in a culture where people made a lot of the items they used. When I was growing up it wasn't considered a luxury, but we had custom made clothes. You went to somebody and they made a shirt, your pants. In some instances, they even made shoes. You took care of everything! Even your clothes. In Jamaica, most people didn't have a washing machine, so people wash by hand. When you got home from school, you went right in and took your clothing off. You took your uniform off because you would wear it for maybe two days, and then you would change. So you'd have maybe two uniforms, and you would change one midweek. Wednesday to Friday, that kind of thing. Your shoes had to be cleaned at night. Those kinds of disciplines were crucial. 

Douglas R. Ewart

The wealth of the US was quite evident. But because my folks didn't have money, we tended to use our creativity to develop a lot of things that we utilized, or you found ways to acquire things that you needed in a more economical way. We grew up eating fresh food every day. We didn't have a refrigerator. So you might have had somebody that bought a block of ice and put it in a box with some sawdust or shavings and that would keep the ice from melting away. You kept things cold that way. But by and large, we didn't even do a lot of that. It was that you cooked today. Unless it was of a certain kind of cooking, it would spoil very rapidly because of the heat. So people cooked a fresh meal with fresh ingredients. So you grew up in that kind of light. When I came to the States, and particularly when I moved from my parents’ home to my own thing, I started to go to the farmers market, things like that, because you develop relationships with people. 

It's a form of improvisation and a form of adjustment. It's a form of relating to people, making friendships. When I went to Maxwell Street Market, where I bought my produce, I’d go every Sunday. You start relating to people. And when you go to them and buy $10 worth of something, they throw something in. You go to another vendor, they do that too, but if you go to the supermarket they don't care. Or, it’s not even that they don’t care. It's different ownership. The people that work there don't own the store. Plus you’re dealing a lot with prepackaged items that are doled out in a certain fashion. You're dealing with relationships when you go to a farmers’ market.

SG: Like playing music with somebody: you give a little bit of something, they give a little bit of something.

DE: The tops are a reality and a metaphor all at the same time. Now, you know, this is very expansive. When I did the first iteration of the Sonic tops piece, we had people doing spinning tops, we had double dutch, we had a poet, a young person doing roller skating. Then we had an elder that walked, and because he's a mathematician, he was doing his poem about math. He was talking about the physics of dark matter and stuff like that. This is all simultaneous. We had somebody doing a Capoeira kind of dance. Tai Chi. And then we had people videoing and showing the video back, so at the same time that we had to be videographers. There were scores of people involved. It was really a community project. A lot of top artists came and lent their support, and I was only able to give up, like, ice cream money.

Interestingly enough, Mount Greenwood Park, where this first piece was staged, was historically a boundary-like place. It was known that Black people weren't supposed to go there, especially all at one time. So you know, this was changing when we were doing the piece there, but those overtones were still present.

The work is about involving people. The joy, the sheer joy that people have in playing with what seems like child’s play. We shouldn't lose that aspect of us. We can talk about immaturity, but some aspects of being childish are beautiful because you're unscrambled, you're unbound. You're observing, you're curious. Your curiosity is boundless, your imagination, your willingness to try something. Of course, children also grew up in environments in which their creativity is stifled. 

One of my points that was actually in this piece—there was a man named Richard “Shake-a-leg” Thomas. He said children often died from the constriction of the exploratory nerve. He said sometimes children will be on the bus, and they'll say, “Hey, what’s that?!” The parent might not know, so in their embarrassment they tell the child to be quiet, or shut up. But some will say, “Let's find out.” Sometimes adults want to play as though they know everything. But my idea of life, my idea of building things and playing music—it's a confluence. I don't see them separate. One thing feeds the other. When I came to the States, I wasn't playing music formally.

SG: When did you really start playing?

DE: When I was young, I started beating on tin cans back in Jamaica. I didn't have a drum. But we played tin cans, and we imitated Nyabinghi drumming, Count Ossie and Mystic Revelations. The Rastifari and Count Ossie—theirs was someplace I visited, and I listened to live. I knew the musicians, and I used to go to that camp. From the Skatalites, to Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso, Johnny Moore. Donald Drummond. I knew them. Some of them to talk to, and some of them by being close to them, just being around. I grew up with that. But I never had any formal musical training, and I didn't play any woodwinds or anything. I started playing around my 21st year. I started with alto saxophone, and eventually got clarinet and flute and expanded from there. But I studied tailoring, and I used to make leather goods to sell at art fairs. And I started experimenting with making bamboo flutes, which I also sold at art fairs. During the 60s there was a lot of do-it-yourself kind of… propulsion. In the culture, people were making sandals. People were tie-dying, batiking. People were kind of going toward those things that they had stopped doing because of mass production.

Douglas R. Ewart

SG: But it was all part of a much larger community. It wasn't siloed off. All of these things flowed together.

DE: Exactly. People saw the need. Co-ops were founded. All of these things converge for me, because I was endeavoring to be an artist. I had part time jobs in order to survive. I went and did art fairs in order to bolster my part time salaries. I made leather goods, and then I made flutes, and that evolved into making more elaborate kind of flutes, and costumes too. 

SG: Discovering the community around the Association of Creative Musicians (AACM) must have felt like home for you? 

DE: You know, I actually went to a AACM concert for the first time, and afterwards I was talking with one of my schoolmates, Joel Brandon. He was a formidable flutist and a whistler. 

SG: We need good whistlers. 

DE: He's an incredible whistler! He whistled by inhalation rather than an exhalation. Anyhow, I told him I had been to one concert and he said, “Yeah, you know, you should come back.” And I started going to the AACM concerts on Sundays. And next thing you know, I had met these people, including Joseph Jarman. Eventually they formulated a school, and I started attending the school and began formal study of various instruments and theory and composition. I eventually went to a few colleges. I went to Loop Junior College, which is now Harold Washington College. I went to VanderCook School of Music. And I went to Governor State University. In fact, George Lewis and I went to Governor State University together, and we studied with Dr. Richard McClary. We started playing electronic music there.

SG: Let’s get back to what we were talking about at the beginning. You’ve been playing this George Floyd Bunt Staff over these last two years. It’s an instrument that you constructed. You told me the other day that you had made something similar before, but after George Floyd was murdered, you expanded on it.

Douglas R. Ewart

DE: Yeah, well, I was working on a sculpture. A sonic sculpture using bundt pans. And you know, bundt with a T is the spelling for the pans. So I called it the bunt staff. B-U-N-T, such as bunting in baseball. Bunting is a sacrifice play. It's typically done when the bases are loaded, or when several people are on base, and they can't seem to get a good hit. So the person hits barely, they just stick out their bat and let the ball hit it. And the ball drops very close to the batter. And this makes the fielders start running, which gives the people who are already on the base an opportunity to run home. It's a sacrifice for the better, for the whole even though they're out. Yeah, they're not gonna make it to any place unless the people make an error or something.

So I started making a piece years ago. The bundt staff itself, but I was using bamboo. And bamboo is very great for making many things. But some species can be very light. It didn’t seem to work for what I was after. But when George Floyd was murdered, I had this staff in construction. I had several bundt pans already attached, or partially attached, but I was not satisfied from the standpoint of how it was being formulated. The construction of it. The construction wasn't well crafted in my notion of crafting, and the pieces were loose. I needed a heavier kind of staff to make the piece work, at least during that time. Now, I might be able to solve some issues that I couldn't solve then. But then I got struck by this idea, because all the time I was working on the piece I hadn't I didn't know about George Floyd. George Floyd hadn't been murdered yet. But, you know, again, when you work on something, ideas sometimes finally converge, they mature and something comes to you and you're like, “Wow, Bundt Pans! Bunt Staff!”

SG: The convergence tells you what you were missing.

DE: Yes! And so I thought, okay. “I should make one of these things and make it a tribute to George Floyd.” Now I've completed four. I'm still on the fifth one. I have the materials all prepared to build at least 10. I’ve been using them in different settings. 

SG: Whoever who will be reading this likely doesn’t realize how close we were to the site of his murder. Both our houses are just a few blocks away. The aftermath affected our neighborhood for generations to come. We’ll see what those effects turn out to be. The thing that’s been the most powerful thing for me personally is when you started bringing the George Floyd Bunt Staff out. It became a sonic symbol of that moment. Something to gather around.  

I've seen you perform that in so many different contexts. At George Floyd Square, at the People’s Assembly that we organized in the precinct parking lot. [In October of 2021, Confluence and collaborators organized a People’s Assembly in the parking lot of the 3rd Precinct, where Derek Chauvin was stationed, to collectively imagine the future of our neighborhood. In contexts outside the neighborhood too—with Irreversible Entanglements at the Walker Art Center, at public parks throughout the city, with George Lewis at the Walker. As someone who experienced the eruption following George Floyd’s murder, to see you utilizing the Bunt Staff—that is a deeply resonant object for me. It it is an object that resonates sound, yes, but it is also poetically resonant. It resonates. It calls out to us. It’s an incredible thing.

DE: It’s carved. It has symbols burnt into the wood. It's wrapped, it's got beads on it, it's got paint, it has leather, it has different kinds of materials to keep the bundt pans in place. And at the same time, the pans are fastened to make them free enough to resonate. You can strike it with different kinds of materials. You can bow it. By moving it, either spinning it or shaking it back and forth, you can create a whole ‘nother kind of vibrational effect. It's a very capable and vast instrument. It's a powerful device. The bell quality of the bundt pans. 

You know they say about idle hands in somebody's workshop. You have to envelop and employ yourself in terms of life. I have a lot of interests. I love to read. I collect bells, I belong to a bell society, and people wonder what we do in a bell society. It's very interesting, because there are thousands of shapes. Bells are made from all kinds of materials and they have different functions. So there are different materials, different shapes, different reasons that people use them for celebration. It's a summoning device or an instrument. It's used in church services. It's used for school. It's enormous, what bells are. Fire alarms, even police used to have bells on their cars. Trams, I have all kinds of tram bells. In fact, the Philadelphia Assembly Bell later became the Liberty Bell. The abolitionists used that bell. 

You used to be able to rent that bell, or lease it for functions. So when we were having our function in the Third Precinct, and we wanted to get people to come—to attract people, we might rent that bell. William Penn had the first one casted and brought to Philadelphia. And it broke. Ringing, it cracked. They had some people, I think the guy's name was Snow, and another gentleman—they had a foundry there. They melted the bell down and made another one. That one cracked too. 

But this is a metaphor. Something cracks. Liberty, imperfect liberty as we know it here. But again, you know, it’s the vastness and the interconnectedness of all the little things that we do. The parts of history and the stories that people know nothing of. They think that the Liberty Bell was made as a symbol of liberty, but it was made to call people to assembly. It was made to call people, to gather people. It was never intended, when it was made, to symbolize liberty. The abolitionists dubbed it that because they utilized it, just like so many other groups.