Dr. Mark Lomax II returns to Yellow Springs with “Unity Suite”
- Published: April 3, 2026
Columbus-based drummer, composer and educator Dr. Mark Lomax II will return to Yellow Springs this weekend with a work more than 20 years in the making.
Lomax and his Urban Art Ensemble will present “The Unity Suite” Saturday, March 7, 7–9 p.m., in Herndon Gallery at Antioch College. The nine-movement work, organized in three sets of three pieces, draws on Lomax’s experiences in the Black church and his long-standing belief that music can bring people into deeper communion with one another.
The performance will be Lomax’s third in the village, and in past conversations with the News, he has spoken about music and the wider arts as vehicles for “radical humanity.” In speaking with the News this week, Lomax said “The Unity Suite” travels a similar road, though the road began in a place of uncertainty.
“In 2001, that fall, there was 9/11, and then a month and four days later, my oldest daughter was born — and the world was different, period,” Lomax said. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on, to be honest. … It was hard to have hope.”
A newly married father who, at the time, was “very active in the church,” Lomax said he turned to scripture — specifically, Ephesians 4:4–6 — for grounding.
“One God, one spirit, one Lord, one faith,” he said. “And I was also wrestling with my faith and with my very conservative, Black-church-going family, who said being a jazz musician was not the stuff of God, and that kind of set me on this path.”
He noted John Coltrane’s — “A Love Supreme” which the Mark Lomax Quartet performed in celebration of the spirit-led album’s 60th anniversary last year at the Foundry — and the work of drummer Max Roach as being places where he found that the “boundaries and borders” that often separate the sacred and the secular did not exist.
“They came out of the Black church … so we had those connections,” Lomax said. “So that scripture [from Ephesians] encouraged me that there was a conversation that we could have that was beyond nationalism, beyond dogmatic religious constructs of uniting more broadly as human beings. And I thought, at the time, as I do now, that there’s nothing better musically to bring people together in joy and some common sense of who we are than the blues, gospel and what we commonly refer to as jazz.”
From that framework, Lomax began constructing a large-scale work modeled on the arc of a church service: praise and worship, sermon and benediction. He said the structure was also, in part, a response to Wynton Marsalis’ “In This House, On This Morning,” which follows a similar flow.
“I was like, I can do that, but I can do it my way,” Lomax said, adding that once he had the framework for the piece, it came quickly.
“It literally poured out of me,” he said.
Lomax premiered the original version of “The Unity Suite” in 2002, but said initial performances didn’t draw much attention or attendance.
“Maybe 40 people heard it, if you count the band,” he said with a laugh. “So I thought it was a failure, and I put it on the shelf.”
For two decades, “The Unity Suite” lay dormant. Lomax continued composing and recording, including his 12-album cycle, “400: An Afrikan Epic” and building a body of work that blends jazz, gospel, blues and symphonic language in service of communal storytelling. But amid recent election cycles and increasingly divisive public rhetoric, Lomax said he found himself again asking how artists might help people find common ground.
“I was like, what can I write? What can I do?” he said. “And the ancestors were like, ‘Oh, you already did that work.’ Literally, I hadn’t thought of this piece for years.”
Tracking the suite down, initially, was something of a challenge, as the original sheet music was nowhere to be found. But Lomax had recorded a Cincinnati performance on the now mostly defunct minidisc, and after locating old cables on the internet, was finally able to listen to the suite again — and “the bones were still good,” he said.
Over several months in 2024, Lomax reshaped the work, tightening it from nearly three hours to about 75 minutes, rewriting large sections and refining its throughline. Thus, the newly reworked suite now lives in three “meditations” of three pieces each: “Mgongi: Praise & Worship,” “Nommo/Ntu: The Sermon” and “Muntu/Bantu: Benediction.”
The first meditation begins with a kind of joyful, horn-forward wind-up (“Devotions”), running into a high-energy gospel evocation (“Thank You!”) and then a cool-down (“Sermonic Selection”) before heading into the second meditation. The “Sermon” portion begins with an extended piece that fluctuates between subdued tones and energetic riffs (“Prayer and Selflessness”), resolving into the driving rhythms of “By Any Means Necessary,” before landing at “Altar Call,” a piano-only piece with yearning tones that beckon the listener forward. The “Benediction” begins with “Doxology,” in which Lomax set the well-known offering hymn tune — “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” — to West African rhythms. The piece is appended by the jazzy, measured “They Sang a Hymn and Departed,” which leads into “Postlude,” the service’s — and the album’s — jubilant exit.
The revised suite was recorded last summer with the Urban Art Ensemble — Kenyatta Beasley on trumpet; Rob Dixon on alto saxophone; Edwin Bayard on tenor and soprano saxophones; Dr. William Menefield on piano; Dean Hulett on bass; and Lomax on drums — and premiered last fall at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Mark Lomax II and the Urban Art Ensemble performed “The Unity Suite” in the Herndon Gallery. (Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
Since premiering the rewritten work, Lomax said the response from listeners has been encouraging, in that — true to his goal of fostering unity — it seems to resonate across a variety of backgrounds.
“It didn’t matter if people had a church background … or if they were atheists or agnostic or Catholic,” he said. “Every person that I’ve spoken to or sent me a note said that they had an emotional experience.”
Lomax described the idea of unity as it drove the writing and rewriting of the suite in terms of interdependence and collective individualism, and the understanding that recognizing one’s own humanity requires recognizing it in others.
“Once I define myself in the context of my humanity, then I have no choice but to see you in the context of your humanity,” he said. “And the role of the artist is to remind people of their humanity.”
That view, he said, isn’t only metaphorical music, infused with intention, can indeed have an effect on people’s lived experience, particularly in times of strife.
“When we set our minds to do the work through music of bringing people together and healing and transformation, the music carries that energy,” he said. “Toni Morrison is famous for saying that times like these are when artists go to work. … My challenge is that we need more artists and arts supporters and lovers having these conversations.”
Beyond the stage, Lomax said he’s also working to create spaces for that kind of engagement through CFGTV.com, a streaming platform he and collaborators launched in October. He said the subscription-based service aims to curate content that leaves viewers feeling “better when they log off than they did when they logged on” in a kind of digital extension of the space he works to create in performances.
Ultimately, he said, in a cultural moment saturated with fear, conflict and “neg-tive vibrations,” he doesn’t believe that responding with hope and a desire for unity is “toxic positivity.”
“It’s really hard to be positive right now. You have to use the spiritual tools you have, and that’s words, that’s our voices, that’s our instruments, our hearts,” he said. “It’s an uphill battle, but it’s one that has been won before, and we can win it again.”
Contact: chuck@ysnews.com
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