Malawi McDonald's 18th Birthday

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trombonejb
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Joined: Fri Apr 06, 2018 11:31 am

Malawi McDonald's 18th Birthday

Post by trombonejb »

Today would have been Malawi Lee McDonald's 18th birthday.

Malawi was a brilliant musician who excelled at the bass trombone at a very young age.
In December of 2018, I heard about them (preferred pronoun) for the very first time by reading Jeremy Smith’s tribute to them on his website, Last Row Music. When I read this, I was happy to learn about yet another brilliant young musician, but I was also devastated that I would never meet them in person. A part of me felt that the powerful message of their life deserved more than their short life had to offer. I genuinely wanted to be a part of that. But at the time I didn’t know what exactly that would look like, so the idea stuck in the back for over a year and a half.

After proving that I could make a documentary by completing one about Arthur Pryor in May of last year, I reached out to Malawi’s mother, Laura who agreed to explore the idea of creating something similar. What originally was going to be something I would complete in a month ended up taking six.

I interviewed Laura as well as a dozen of Malawi’s friends, musical mentors, and teachers. I spent an entire month over the summer going through their entire facebook and youtube account snagging every one of the over 2,000 photos, videos, and comments I came across. Later that fall, the McDonald family sent a box of hundreds of musical programs of concerts that Malawi attended and performed at. This included Malawi’s own musical compositions binder, the very first yellow springs community band concert they played in, several trombone festival folders, and the list goes on. Laura and I also kept in contact regularly where she shared countless stories about Malawi that I would never have heard of otherwise.

By the time I had done all the research about Malawi’s life last November, I had a script that was 75 pages and a 53 minute-long unfinished documentary that was on track to be over 2 hours long. But since I had decided on making this project my senior capstone project, I had a looming deadline and I had no choice but to settle with making a shorter version of the documentary. That shorter version, which is linked below, still ended up being 48 minutes long. After 6 long months of hard work, the documentary was finally premiered on November 28th, 2020.

There is simply no words to describe who Malawi really was. When asked if I had the opportunity to ask Malawi one question, it would have been this. “How did you do it?” Anyone can fit into the world of 7 billion, but can you fit the world of 7 billion into one? The answer is yes. Malawi McDonald was the whole world of 7 billion, and more.

Please join me in celebrating their life by watching my documentary about them. And, if you’re able to, play Malawi’s bass trombone solo composition, “Trombophonics.”


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