Maple House Collective presents

The Ernest Dawkins Trio

playing two sets

doors at 730 music at 8

$10 suggested donation

"Chicago saxophonist Ernest Dawkins has pursued music professionally for nearly 40 years, and in that time he's built a legacy that's among the city's richest. Over the decades his New Horizons Ensemble, active since the late 70s, has included some of modern jazz's most gifted stylists and innovators, among them bassist Yosef Ben Israel, guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Avreeayl Ra, and trumpeter Marquis Hill (who won the Thelonious Monk Competition this year). His extended compositions for larger groups have been presented at prestigious festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, among them Sons d'Hiver in Paris and the DC Jazz Festival; the most recent piece, last year's Memory in the Center, an Afro Opera: Homage to Nelson Mandela, premiered as part of the 2014 Chicago Jazz Festival. Much of Dawkins's work exemplifies an activist commitment to African-American heritage and social justice—an outlook he shares with his colleagues in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Chicago-­based collective that helped accelerate the embrace of black free jazz by the global avant-garde. (The AACM celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and he's currently its chairman.) His compositions are militant yet celebratory, interspersing declamatory narratives from spoken-word artist Khari B. and passages of iconoclastic dissonance with hard-swinging, exultant celebration."
-the Chicago Reader - read their full article about him here