The Forest Percussion Ensemble
The Century Room

5PM

The Forest Percussion Ensemble

($20-$30, 5pm show) The Forest is a cooperative percussion ensemble comprised of five composer/percussionists who possess deep experience working in dialogue with a wide range of African-Diasporic musics, Contemporary New Music, Free Improvisation, and other musical forms and philosophies. The Forest shares and expands upon these traditions through diverse artistic collaborations, performances and workshops with communities of all kinds, explorations of setting and space, the incorporation of new performance techniques, and by performing new and existing works by its members and selected works by other composer/percussionists.

Gustavo Aguilar, Leah Bowden, Andrew Drury, Lesley Mok, Michael Wimberly

**THE FOREST**

The ensemble’s debut performances received standing ovations in New York at Lincoln Center and at Roulette, and on the west coast at Cal Arts, Seattle’s Wayward Music Series, and Bread and Salt in San Diego. In addition to the five performances the ensemble led masterclasses with six universities, workshops with community organizations in five cities, and improvised at the US/Mexican border fence and in the forest in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle.

The Forest is currently planning tours for 2023 and ‘24 while completing work on a studio recording with Grammy Award winning engineer, Jon Rosenberg. Due for release in October 2023, the recording presents Andrew Drury’s suite dedicated to his mentor, “(D)ruminations for Edward Blackwell,” and “Elements of a Storm,” a composition written for M’Boom by one of its founding members, Warren Smith. The recording features Warren Smith (percussion) and J. D. Parran (multiple wind instruments) as special guests.

The Forest is animated by a recognition of the drum as a tool employed since timeimmemorial and in every region of the Earth to bring people together. Drums attract attention, generate a powerful sense of group focus, and raise spirits through a shared somatic experience. The Forest sees in this unique ‘potential of the drum’ a means for community building, for collective and individual renewal, and a source for artistic inspiration.

The Forest has been awarded two grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council and a Jazz Road Creative Residency grant from South Arts.