The East Side Freedom Library invites you to A Multi-Disciplinary Concert, featuring local musical icons Douglas Ewart, Mankwe Ndosi, Davu Seru and special guest from South Africa Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi. This event will take place on our beautiful front lawn at 1105 Greenbrier Street.

In this intimate concert, Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi will present a multi-disciplinary program combining his cello playing with storytelling and African song. He will be joined by local musical innovators Douglas R Ewart, Mankwe Ndosi,and Davu Seru. This early evening, outdoor program is exciting and offers something for the whole family.

Dr Thokozani Mhlambi not only composes, plays the cello, and sings, but he uses his art and exhibitions to convey African stories/philosophies on an international stage. Recently, his rendition of Lizalise Idinga Lakho by Tiyo Soga was featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mhlambi was an invited contributor to the roaming academy of the Dutch Art Institute, an itinerant program fostering a variety of creative practices at the intersection of art & theory. In 2019, he collaborated with revered Chinese visual artist Dachan, in a live performance/ installation at the Zeitz Mocca Museum in Cape Town. In 2020, Mhlambi was selected as an Artist-in-Residence at Cite International Des Arts in Paris, supported by the Institut Français.

Douglas R. Ewart, Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946, and his life and his wide-ranging work have always been associated with Jamaican culture, history, politics, and the land itself.

Professor Ewart immigrated to Chicago in 1963, where he became involved with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), which is renowned for its wide-ranging experimental approaches to music, and served as the organization’s president between 1979 and 1987. His extremely varied and highly interdisciplinary work encompasses graphic and conceptual musical compositions as well as conventionally notated works), painting and kinetic sound sculpture, and multi-instrumental performance on saxophones, flutes, and woodwinds, pan-pipes, rainsticks and percussion instruments of his own design and construction for which he is known worldwide.

Mankwe Ndosi is an Evokalist / Composer / Culture Worker of sound and soil. Her practice emerges from black ritual legacies of music and performance learned from and played with Douglas R. Ewart, Laurie Smith Carlos, Sharon Bridgforth, Amoke Kubat, Nicole Mitchell, Miriam Makeba, Zach Bagaason, ancestors, earth, and many peers across species, cultures, and creative genres. She used her creative practice to nurture relationships with her community, ancestral legacies, and the earth. Her work is aimed at supporting the interconnection and liberation of our personal, social, and terrastral structures, practices, and mythologies.

Davu Seru is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Saint Paul. Since 1998 he has performed as a drummer and composer throughout the United States and France, for which he has received the prestigious McKnight Composer Award, Jerome Sound Artist/Composer Fellowship and commissions from institutions such as Walker Art Center. In addition to his musical pursuits, Davu is a published author and a professor of English at Hamline University.

East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, St. Paul
No admission fee, but donations for the musicians are strongly encouraged.