Yellow Springs-based public radio station 91.3 WYSO is making big waves.

As of last week, the homegrown station has officially moved its operations out of the Charles F. Kettering building on the Antioch College campus and into the historic Union Schoolhouse at 314 Dayton St.

With the flip of a switch at high noon on Wednesday, March 18, WYSO made its flagship broadcast from its newly renovated 19th-century digs.

The first audio to sound out was a snippet from the station’s first 1958 broadcast. Station Manager Luke Dennis thanked the listeners, supporters, staff and volunteers who made the move possible, then disc jockey Evan Miller jumped right back into his Midday Music program with some Talking Heads.

There wasn’t a second of dead air in the signal transfer.

“It was truly the proudest moment of my professional career,” Dennis told the News last week.

Built in 1872, the Union Schoolhouse and an adjacent lot were purchased in 2020 for a total of $550,000 by Iron Table Holdings, the real estate company owned by local resident and comedian Dave Chappelle.

In past iterations, Union Schoolhouse was the first integrated school in Yellow Springs, then later, the Village’s municipal offices, and most recently, a shared space for small businesses and art studios. The building sat vacant for about five years and fell into disrepair until it was purchased by Chappelle.

At a 2021 Planning Commission meeting, Iron Table’s architect Max Crome, of Crome Architecture, unveiled plans to rehab and expand the 19th-century building into a shared space for Chappelle’s professional offices and WYSO’s new headquarters; those plans were unanimously approved by the commissioners at the time.

In addition to wholly rehabbing the original structure, Iron Table’s plans included the construction of a new two-story, 10,000-square-foot space to adjoin the schoolhouse’s western facade.

WYSO now leases 19,000 square feet between the original structure and the addition — specifically, the station occupies the bottom two of the schoolhouse’s three stories, as well as the first floor of the two-floor addition. All else will be used as professional office space for Chappelle’s Iron Table Holdings and his Pilot Boy Productions.

According to Dennis, WYSO’s capital investment in the schoolhouse renovations is approaching $4 million — money for new equipment, furniture, wiring and more; Chappelle’s, he said, is nearly $13 million.

“We’re incredibly grateful for his investment in public radio,” Dennis said. “Dave’s been a listener for a long time, and as a cultural anchor himself, I think he supports us because he believes we’re also a local anchor.”

Dennis said that although WYSO will pay more in rent for the schoolhouse — $16 per square foot — than “the sweetheart deal” the station had with Antioch, he said the “state-of-the-art quality” of the new station is entirely worth the price tag.

“There’s no other public radio station like this, with this kind of high-end equipment, with this beautiful of a space tailored to our exact needs,” Dennis said. “It has to be the best in the country right now.”

That’s by and large thanks to Crome’s handiwork, Dennis said.

“This whole thing is bespoke,” he said.

The curb appeal attests. By the sidewalk along Dayton Street is a 30-foot-tall chimney swift tower meant to rehome the birds displaced by the construction — the birds that used to habitate the old schoolhouse’s previous chimney.

A prominent sidewalk guides visitors inside — a feature that Dennis said the Kettering building lacked.

“Nobody really knocked on our door,” he said. “Now, we’re really prominent — almost downtown, and we want people to just drop in. And now, we have a front desk where a volunteer — we’re now calling our volunteer team the Amplifier Corps — will greet you with a smile and show you around.”

Dennis noted that WYSO has a regular rotating cast of about 30 volunteers, but with the demands of the new space and future membership drives, he hopes to recruit many dozens more.

The inside of the schoolhouse is open and airy. A skylight at the crest of the entry room floods all three stories in natural light that plays on the exposed brick and iron beams — “That are going nowhere for the next 200 years,” Dennis said of the building’s newfound sturdiness.

A 4,000-tile mosaic by villager Naysan McIlhargey adorns a front wall, showing wildflowers blooming below a radio transmission tower and a sky of swifts.

Offices and meeting rooms line the atrium’s perimeter, with a stairwell in the center. On the bottom floor are more offices and archival spaces — temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms lined with shelves of old tape reels, documents and film.

“We do news, music and storytelling, and we’ve added preservation as a pillar of our public service because we’re living in a moment in which history is actively being rewritten,” Dennis explained.

Dennis added that he envisions a kind of “reading room” among the schoolhouse’s archives — a place for the public to comfortably spend time among the stacks for research, pleasure or both.

“Take for example, if someone’s doing research on the anti-war movement in small towns in America, this would be the perfect place to come — we have so much documentation on rallies and programming at Antioch,” he said.

Back upstairs and past the dense layers of original limestone that crews had to cut through, one next finds themself in WYSO’s new performance space, which will soon be able to seat 110 audience members around an intimate stage and screen.

Dennis said he’s already in talks with local groups and organizations — such as Chamber Music in Yellow Springs and the YS Film Festival — with the hopes of soon having live performances that could be recorded and broadcasted.

Just beyond this space are nine recording studios — rooms carefully engineered to optimize the sound of the human voice and neutralize “bad” frequencies, as Dennis put it. The rubber below the “floating” floors, the double-paned windows, the specialty HVAC, the bass traps along the walls — all of these designs amount to incredibly quiet rooms, or as Dennis put it, “entirely new planes of existence.”

“Everything’s been done at the highest level,” he said. “I want donors to know that their money went toward the greatest studio setup that any station could have.”

He continued: “Our promise to anyone who’s trained with us in our community programs can come in and use our equipment to do their voice tracking or any other creative work they might have. So this additional space means that no one has to wait in line.”

WYSO’s new home at the Union Schoolhouse ought to signify for villagers and listeners a kind of resiliency, Dennis said.

As the News has reported over the last year, public radio had taken some sizable hits. Last August, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — a decades-old nonprofit that helped pay for PBS, NPR and 1,500 public radio and televisions across the country — was defunded by Congress.

For WYSO, that meant the loss of $300,000 in planned operating funds for this fiscal year and beyond; that amounts to a little under 10% of the station’s budget, which for 2026 is $3.4 million.

“This building is a show of strength for us,” Dennis said. “Just look around the country and you’ll see public radio stations eliminating programs and cutting staff. Not to brag, but we haven’t cut a single staff member nor have we eliminated any programs.”

Presently, WYSO employs 23 full-time staffers and more than a dozen freelancers and contractors.

Anticipating some security, Dennis maintained that WYSO’s relationship with Chappelle is just that of a tenant and a landlord. While Chappelle will have a presence in the radio station itself, he will in no way have an influence on what gets broadcast and reported.

“Our politics are our own and Dave has his,” Dennis said. “When you look at his career, his independence and autonomy have always been his top priorities. Free speech is crucially important to [WYSO and him].”

The News’ several attempts to reach Chappelle or his publicist for comment were unsuccessful.

Dennis continued: “Public radio and independent journalism has never been more important than it is now. And this building is a huge investment in keeping those things here — right here in Yellow Springs — for a long time.”

A ribbon cutting for WYSO’s newly renovated Union Schoolhouse will be Thursday, April 9. Then, on April 18, 10  a.m.-4 p.m., the public is invited to an open house, featuring live music, tours, kids activities and food trucks.

MEET YOUR NONPROFITS | This is the first in a series profiling the ongoing work of Yellow Springs-based nonprofit organizations.

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By Alissa Paolella

After a local woman lost her dental insurance midway through major surgery — leaving her without teeth and facing mounting bills — a volunteer with the Yellow Springs-based Feminist Health Fund saw her story on television and reached out. The nonprofit helped cover part of her care so she could continue treatment and eat comfortably again.

Stories like that are increasingly common, according to Feminist Health Fund board president Ann Cooper, who said requests for dental assistance have grown in recent years.

“We’ve seen a steady stream of requests for dental,” Cooper said. “It’s very expensive, and even if you have insurance, sometimes people have these enormous out-of-pocket expenses.”

Now in its fourth decade, the Feminist Health Fund provides direct financial assistance to women facing unaffordable health care costs including prescriptions, diagnostic testing, dental care and trauma recovery. The organization, founded in 1980 after friends raised money for a local woman with cancer, remains entirely volunteer-run and supported primarily by individual community donations, according to previous News coverage.

The nonprofit’s seven-member board includes volunteers with backgrounds in research, journalism, insurance and technology.

“We each bring something different,” Cooper said.

The group has no application deadlines and accepts requests year-round through its website or direct contact. Instead of reimbursing applicants, the fund pays providers directly, allowing women to choose their own providers and treatments.

“We trust women to make their own choices,” Cooper said. “We are not able to replace health insurance, but we can fill a gap that helps you keep going.”

While the organization began serving Yellow Springs residents, it now assists women across Greene County, with some support extended to adjacent counties. Most applications come from Yellow Springs, Xenia and Fairborn.

The fund also partners with local groups and events, including a public health resource fair in Fairborn and collaborations with faith-based organizations and community nonprofits.

“We find that sometimes we discover ways that we can work together,” Cooper said. “Or they will direct people to us.”

Alongside dental care, the fund has seen increased requests for medications and diagnostic testing in recent years. Some applicants work within the health care system themselves.

“Last year, we had two or three people who applied who were nurses,” Cooper said, noting that one nurse had to reduce her hours because of illness and lost employer-provided insurance. “The ironies are kind of staggering.”

Other applicants are awaiting Medicaid approval but need medication immediately. In one case, a volunteer paid for a prescription so a woman could continue treatment while her coverage was pending.

Cooper said the fund’s name reflects its mission to address persistent gender disparities in healthcare access.

“It helps us to focus on individuals who identify as women,” she said, noting that applicants include transgen-der women and gender-nonconforming individuals. “Our approach is, you are who you say you are.”

A 2024 Commonwealth Fund analysis found that American women face some of the highest rates of skipping or delaying care because of cost compared with peers in other high-income nations.

“We know that healthier women mean healthier communities,” Cooper said. “When you have women who are able to function as family members, as employees, as engaged community members, the whole community does benefit.” 

More than 90% of the fund’s donations come from individuals. Beyond financial contributions, Cooper said residents can help by spreading awareness.

“If you know a woman who’s having trou-ble accessing health care because of the expense, please refer her to us,” she said.

Even modest grants can have a profound impact, Cooper added.

“What seems like a small amount of assistance, from our perspective, can be really big for the person who receives it.”

For more information, email info@feministhealthfund.org or call 937-767-8949.

*Alissa Paolella is a local resident and freelance writer for the News.

Contact: ysnews@ysnews.com

Budget questions — particularly around cemetery spending, future capital needs and how Township funds should be used across departments — have been at the center of recent Miami Township Trustees discussions, first at their March 2 regular meeting and again at a March 9 work session focused on cemetery appropriations.

Across both meetings, trustees worked through cemetery budget lines, discussed how spending should be tracked and debated whether the cemetery, fire and general funds should contribute toward the upkeep and eventual replacement of road department equipment used for work beyond roads.

“I think we all want the same thing,” Moir said at the March 9 work session. “We have a really great cemetery, and we want to make sure we can keep people happy, keep it an inviting place and get a business plan for the future so it can continue to be a great cemetery.”

At the center of the March 2 discussion was the cemetery fund, which Trustee Chair Marilan Moir said has grown over time as the Township expanded Glen Forest Cemetery with new options, including offering natural burial choices in the 5.8-acre Oak Grove, established in 2022, and the forthcoming Pine Forest, slated to open this year.

Moir said the trustees need a clearer picture of how much the Township is spending on cemetery costs, as well as improved processes regarding how that spending is planned and tracked. 

According to Moir, trustees had approved $20,000 for development of the natural burial areas, but total spending appeared closer to $35,000 after work was completed. Trustee Chris Mucher pushed back on parts of that characterization during the earlier discussion, saying some approvals occurred at different times and that trustees had authorized additional work along the way.

By the March 9 work session, trustees shifted from that disagreement toward the practical work of building the cemetery budget line by line. They reviewed salary estimates, utilities, mowing and maintenance contracts and website, certification, recordkeeping and advertising costs. Mucher also revived a broader conversation about road depart-ment equipment. Road departments, he said, often operate differently from other municipal departments when it comes to planning for large future costs.

“If it breaks, you fix it because you need it,” he said. “If you can’t fix it, regardless of whether it’s two years old or 22 years old, you still need it — so you replace it.”

He noted that machinery used for road work is often used for cemetery and other Township projects as well; to that end, he suggested that a line item be included in the cemetery budget to contribute to capi-tal costs for the road department.

Moir said she had begun gathering information about major equipment — including age, expected replacement timelines and estimated costs — so trustees can better understand long-term needs. Trustee Lori Askeland said she would prefer to review that information before assigning any specific annual contributions from the cemetery fund toward equipment replacement.

“For clarity’s sake, especially for those of us who haven’t been around for 30 years, it would help to see that inventory,” Askeland said.

Pauwels approved as fiscal officer

At the March 2 meeting, trustees formally appointed Fiscal Officer Assistant Cyndi Pauwels to serve as fiscal officer beginning April 1, when current Fiscal Officer Jeanna GunderKline’s resignation takes effect.

GunderKline announced in February that she would step down before completing her elected term; following that announcement, the trustees approved increased hours for Pauwels, who began serving as fiscal officer assistant last July.

At the March 2 meeting, GunderKline said she and Pauwels were working through year-end reporting and other recurring responsibilities so the incoming fiscal officer could see how the Township’s financial cycle works, and the trustees thanked GunderKline for helping to prepare Pauwels for the new role.

“She’s committed to helping us have a smooth transition and training,” Moir said.

Trustees also spoke briefly on how fiscal information is presented to the public. Resident Fred Stockwell told trustees during the meeting that he hoped the Township would continue publishing a monthly total of bills paid.

“I’m not trying to increase the load of what you have to present at the meeting, I just don’t want things to disappear,” Stockwell said.

Trustees said they are working toward a reporting format that will provide clearer financial information while meeting state reporting requirements.

“You have a right to see anything on these documents, so we could certainly make them available,” Askeland said.

MTFR report

Miami Township Fire-Rescue also reported several recent incidents and operational updates during the March 2 meeting.

Just days earlier, on Feb. 26, the department responded to a vehicle fire at the intersection of U.S. 68 and Cemetery Street.

In an email to the News, Fire Chief James Cannell said the incident occurred shortly after 10 a.m. as a driver traveling south from Springfield noticed a burning smell. The driver stopped at the intersection traffic light and spotted flames coming from under the hood of their vehicle.

Cannell said officers from the YS Police Department arrived first and confirmed that everyone had safely exited the vehicle before firefighters arrived and extinguished the fire. The cause of the fire, Cannell said, was determined to be a mechanical malfunction.

Cannell also reported that Miami Township Fire-Rescue has continued to meet its goal of staffing three personnel on duty around the clock. The department had logged about 150 runs this year at the time of his report, including a Feb. 21 house fire on North High Street that crews were able to contain quickly.

Trustees approved Cannell’s request to decommission Rescue 81, MTFR’s box truck, and to offer the vehicle for sale.

Contact: chuck@ysnews.com

When filmmaker Catherine Zimmerman learned that her niece, Iden Crockett, had come out as a transgender woman, the moment marked both a personal and a professional turning point.

“I thought to myself, ‘Well, hell, I don’t know anything about anybody who’s trans,” Zimmerman said in a recent interview with the News, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

Zimmerman, a longtime documentary filmmaker who moved back to Yellow Springs in 2017 after decades working in broadcast journalism and independent production, decided to learn the way she knew best: by telling a story.

The result is “Iden: A Story of Love,” a feature-length documentary that follows Crockett through the early years of her burgeoning identity as a transgender woman and explores how that process reshaped not only Crockett’s life, but also the lives of those closest to her.

The film will receive its local premiere at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 31, at Little Art Theatre. The screening, sponsored by YS Pride, will include a post-film discussion led by Phillip O’Rourke.

Speaking with the News last month, Crockett said her aunt reached out to her with the idea for the documentary in late 2020, just a few months after she came out.

“So she was right there, right on the ground floor,” Crockett said.

“I just thought, I need to tell this story,” Zimmerman said. “It’s right here. These are people I know.”

Crockett; her wife, Dhyana; and their three children lived only a block away from Zim-merman when filming began, and over the next five years, the filmmaker returned again and again with a camera, filming Crockett’s life as it unfolded. Sometimes that meant capturing major milestones, such as a legal name change, and sometimes it meant recording ordinary scenes of daily family life.

“It was kind of in bursts,” Crockett said. “We’d give her our schedule — the boys have baseball, I’m going to the courthouse, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment — and she would decide what she wanted to film.”

Zimmerman said she tended to approach filming without much structure in mind, arriving to capture whatever moments were happening in the family’s life that day.

“I would just go in the house and start recording stuff — whatever was going on,” she said. “The kids got comfortable with the camera.”

What Zimmerman had initially envisioned as a documentary centered primarily on the process of gender transition gradually expanded as filming progressed. The story that emerged was about Crockett herself, of course, but it also became a story of the way a deeply personal transformation inevitably ripples outward to affect those closest to the center.

“It really ultimately is about all of us,” Crockett said of her and her family, who appear frequently in the finished documentary, reflecting on their own experiences. “The transition is a personal journey, but you drag everyone sort of behind you with it.”

That perspective, Crockett said, was an important part of telling the story honestly; as a parent, she said she feels it’s important for those viewing the documentary to see the ways that parental relationship changed — and, crucially, the many ways it didn’t — as she settled into her identity.

“There’s always this narrative that trans people are dangerous or bad parents,” she said. “I finally had a chance to be like, ‘Here’s an entire movie about me being a great parent.”

While the documentary makes plenty of space for the love and support of those around Crockett, it also captures the uncertainty, doubt, fear and, sometimes, unfair repercussions that come with changing the direction of one’s own life — the kind of thing one only does when there’s no other choice to be made.

“There’s plenty to miss about being a man — this is America,” she says in the film. “Being a man is great. I’m not gonna lie to you, I didn’t want to leave it behind — I had to.”

Before transitioning, Crockett had spent years working as a firefighter and paramedic in Fairborn. That career, she said, was a defining part of her identity and brought with it a community that she considered family. After coming out, she said she lost that family.

“If I had said, ‘Guys, I’m gay, or I’m a drug addict, or I have a gambling problem,’ they would have understood all of that; they didn’t understand this,” she said. “This was almost six years ago, and so much has changed in what people know and understand in six years. For better or worse, no one understood what a trans person was. I didn’t understand what a trans person was until I was standing in the mirror going, ‘Goddamn, are you trans? I don’t even know what that means.’ They knew even less. So I knew it was going to be the end of my career there.”

As that part of Crockett’s life unraveled, however, another began to take shape. During the years Zimmerman was filming, Crockett increasingly began to develop a long-fallow identity as an artist. She’s since embarked on a number of creative ventures, including writing and publishing poetry, drawing and creating collage, hosting multiple art exhibitions in and around the village and writing a monthly column, “My Name is Iden,” for the News.

The documentary itself played a role in encouraging that shift, Crockett said. Early in the filming process, Zimmerman suggested that Crockett record personal video diaries, which would serve as unscripted reflections about what she was experiencing and feeling during the transition.

“She gave me an iPhone and said, ‘Start recording,” Crockett said. “I sat down and talked for like 30 minutes about things I had never shared before.”

At first, the exercise was pragmatic — a way of capturing raw material for the film — but Crockett said it opened her up in a way she hadn’t expected. 

“I had made art before, but I never shared it, because I didn’t share anything; pre-transition, I would never have agreed to do this,” Crockett said. “But I thought, ‘This is my chance to do something different,’ because I’d seen YouTube videos about transition, and it was often very clinical or there was a clear agenda behind it, but nothing felt 100% honest and intimate to me…. I’d never thought to share like that before, but after I did it, it felt really good. I watched it back and and I decided to share everything.”

The wider process of capturing the moments that make up the documentary often meant working with limitations for Zimmerman. Unlike larger productions with full crews and established access, “Iden” was largely filmed solo, with Zimmerman juggling equipment — “I used at least four different cameras,” she said — and navigating restrictions that often prevented her from filming in workplaces, government buildings or medical settings.

 “The hardest thing about this film was having any cover footage, because nobody would let me shoot anywhere — unless I just went and did it,” Zimmerman said. 

In some cases, that meant filming discreetly with smaller, more ubiquitous equipment.

“When we went to shoot her doing her name change, I was just filming with my iPhone,” she said. “I told [Iden], ‘If somebody asks, just say it’s your auntie documenting you getting a name change.’ And nobody asked.” 

Zimmerman said her early training in television news helped her learn to make  adjustments like that on the fly. She learned her craft shooting on film, she said, and at the time, reporters learned to anticipate what shots they would need in advance.

“A [film] magazine was 100 feet and that equaled 12 minutes — you learn to edit in the camera,” she said. “You do try to hone your anticipation skills. It was a good training ground.” 

Even with obstacles, Zimmerman said the central goal of the film remained consistent from beginning to end: helping audiences understand transgender people not as abstractions or political talking points, but as individuals living ordinary lives. 

 “My whole effort was really to help people understand these are just people,” she said. “If somebody could just see an ordinary person — what they do, what they go through — that was the point.”

That kind of everyday representation, Crockett said, is still relatively rare. 

“I’m not a celebrity. I’m not an actress. I’m not any of those things,” she said. “I’m just a person who’s trans, with kids and a job. That story doesn’t get told.”

Still, Crockett acknowledges that the film’s release comes with a mix of anticipation and uncertainty. Greater visibility can bring new opportunities, but it can also create new risks, she said, particularly when the highest offices in the land stand in open opposition to your identity. 

“It’s a horribly terrifying time to be a visible trans person; if I say something quotable, there’s a real chance that the actual president of the United States could hate-tweet me,” Crockett said. “I hope that [the film] reaches a lot of people and spawns more opportunities for me to continue speaking out and get out there. At the same time, I’m terrified that all those things will happen…. You run the risk of being very public, but without any celebrity privilege. I don’t have any lawyers or powerful friends or anything like that. I don’t have any money.  No one’s gonna put a sheriff’s deputy at the end of my driveway.” 

She added: “But I feel like the project is important enough, and it’s an important time to share it.”

Finishing the film meant shaping years of footage into something watchable and coherent, Zimmerman said — not because there was a lack of strong material, but an abundance of it. 

“There were things I had to cut out just say, “This is redundant. Someone else because it was too long,” she said. “You have to be really strict with yourself. You already said that.”

And she made one cinematic choice she would not normally make by briefly including her own voice in the film, though she said the decision was practical: It was easier to create a way into conversations for Crockett’s children if she helped lead them in. And ultimately, Zimmerman said, “Iden: A Story of Love” exists because Crockett’s children, wife and Crockett herself were willing to open their lives and allow them to be documented.

“I’m grateful to them for telling the story,” Zimmerman said.

Though the documentary captures a transformative chapter in Crockett’s life, she pointed out that her own “story of love” does not end when the film does.

“This period in time,” she said, “is just a part of my journey.”

Contact: chuck@ysnews.com

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.

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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