THE FOREST

The Forest is a cooperative percussion ensemble featuring Gustavo Aguilar, Leah Bowden, Andrew Drury, and Michael Wimberly—four artists who possess deep experience with collective performing, improvising, and composing, all while in dialogue with a range of African, Asian and Indigenous diasporic practices, among other musicking approaches and philosophies.

The Forest engages in collaborations, performances, and workshops with diverse communities through the development of newly composed works and the exploration of performance techniques in unconventional physical settings and acoustic spaces. The resulting sonic experience represents a cultivation of each members’ artistic vision, centering a unique perspective on musical form and play.

Coyote Makes a World—The Forest’s multi-media collaboration with Native singer/storyteller čnaq’ymi (lone eagle)—has been presented in Flagstaff, Globalquerque, Soup & Sound, and in a New England Tour in October, 2025. A recording of Coyote will be pre-released on vinyl in Fall, 2025 and released in full by Ropeadope Records in April, 2026.

The Forest led a week-long residency at the University of Illinois, highlighting rarely/never performed percussion compositions of Warren Smith which were performed with Smith himself and guest woodwind player J. D. Parran.

The Forest released its first studio recording—(D)ruminations (Different Track Recordings)—featuring an extended suite composed by Andrew Drury and extrapolated from the Mu First and Second Part recordings of Drury’s mentor, Ed Blackwell. (D)ruminations also features Warren Smith’s composition Elements of a Storm. Special guest performers Warren Smith (percussion) and J. D. Parran (multiple wind instruments), perform on (D)ruminations.

In 2022 and 2023 Forest tours that included performances in nine cities and venues such as Roulette, Lincoln Center, Edgefest (Ann Arbor), Cal Arts, Bread & Salt (San Diego), The Chapel (Seattle), and elsewhere. The Forest has also done masterclasses with seven universities, workshops with community organizations in seven cities, and improvisations at the US/Mexican border fence and in the Cascade Mountains.

“....[(D)ruminations is]an extraordinary manifestation of size in flux and diversity matched only by the breathtakingly vivid recording."

–Marc Medwin in the NYC Jazz Record, June 2024
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