# The revolutions of George Lewis – is one of the most formidable figures in modern music: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/02/16/the-revolutions-of-george-lewis-is-one-of-the-most-formidable-figures-in-modern-music-video-photos/
- Published: 2024-02-16T00:02:28+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**As composer, improviser, electronic pioneer, and scholar, Lewis is one of the 
major musical minds of our time. George Lewis is one of the most formidable figures
in modern music: a composer of international renown, a legendary improvising trombonist,
a computer-music pioneer, a professor at Columbia, a stalwart of the Black avant-
garde collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.**

Yet a routine encomium to Lewis’s achievements and influence would ignore the import
of his scholarly writings, which resist the usual narratives of individual genius.
His 2008 book, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental
Music,” is a riveting portrait of communal originality, with the author assuming
a background role. Let’s simply say, then, that this genially authoritative figure
deserves an extended round of applause. At the age of seventy-one, he is at the 
height of his productivity; he had seven premières in 2023, in New York, Vienna,
and points in between. In a December concert at the Park Avenue Armory, the International
Contemporary Ensemble, of which Lewis is the artistic director, played his music
on a double bill with a performance by the composer-pianist Amina Claudine Myers,
another A.A.C.M. veteran. The ensemble has also recorded “Afterword,” Lewis’s first
opera. His second, “Comet/Poppea,” arrives in June, in Los Angeles.

![George Lewis - Minds in Flux - Music Review - ACOMSDave](https://i0.wp.com/acomsdave.
com/wp-content/uploads/George-Lewis.jpeg?w=640&ssl=1)

Lewis grew up in Chicago, the son of Southerners who had come North as part of the
Great Migration. As a third grader at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools,
he took up the trombone, which, he later wrote, appealed to him as “big, shiny, 
and weird.” He went on to Yale, where he studied music theory and majored in philosophy.
On a break from college, he joined the A.A.C.M., which had formed on the South Side
of Chicago in 1965, with Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe
Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill among its early members. Their 
music combined African American traditions with insights gleaned from classical 
modernism and various world cultures. The A.A.C.M. tended to be categorized as avant-
garde jazz, although, as Lewis’s scholarship has shown, it should have been incorporated
into a canon of experimental composition that has a long history of shutting out
Black artists.

The trombone was the vehicle of Lewis’s initial breakthrough. His astonishing technique
ran the gamut from delicate filigree to unearthly howling. In 1977, Whitney Balliett,
this magazine’s longtime jazz critic, reported that at one A.A.C.M. event Lewis 
had unleashed “four consecutive—almost overlapping—ascending arpeggios played in
sixty-fourth notes and in different keys,” and that a little later he had “mumbled
funny gibberish through his instrument.” The A.A.C.M.’s experimentalism often had
a streak of the carnivalesque. Myers, in her set at the Armory, maintained that 
tradition with an uproarious piece titled “Stay in the Light,” in which she and 
her collaborators—the bassist Jerome Harris, the drummer Reggie Nicholson, and the
vocalist and dramatist Richarda Abrams—enacted a mini-opera at once satirizing and
celebrating the search for spiritual enlightenment.

In 1982, Lewis moved to Paris to work at ircam, Pierre Boulez’s lavishly funded 
electronic-music studio. Defying a prevalent high-modernist mentality, Lewis programmed
Apple computers to react to live sonic input and deliver improvisatory responses.(“
Rainbow Family,” his major project at ircam, can be heard on Carrier Records; the
saxophonist Steve Lacy, the multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart, the guitarist Derek
Bailey, and the bassist Joëlle Léandre took part.) Lewis later introduced an interactive
human-and-machine software platform called Voyager. He has therefore had long experience
contemplating the philosophical issues around artificial intelligence. His conclusion
is that the behavior of the machine depends heavily on who is programming it. In
an essay about Voyager, he argues that his system enacts the density and multiplicity
that have long characterized Afro-diasporic music-making.

In the nineties, Lewis took up his first major academic post, at the University 
of California, San Diego. He soon gathered admirers in the contemporary-classical
field, not least because of the force of his intellect. So many heady ideas proliferate
in his pieces—titles such as “Tractatus,” “Mnemosis,” and “Signifying Riffs” give
the flavor—that one can overlook their visceral appeal. Granted, Lewis is by no 
means an easy-listening composer: his episodes of controlled chaos can rival the
stormiest creations of the European avant-garde. But his acute ear for instrumental
timbre means that the textures never devolve into murk. One signature device is 
to pit shrill, birdlike cries in the upper winds against sustained, heaving sonorities
in the bass. You hear this oceanic, almost Wagnerian effect in Lewis’s large-scale
orchestral work “Minds in Flux,” which had its première at the Proms, in London,
in 2021. (American orchestras should take it up.) At the same time, he hasn’t lost
the impish wit of his youthful outings.

![New York Hot Jazz Festival Music In New York, 52% OFF](https://encrypted-tbn0.
gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRKb99RhtvbDvjEbzhk_JIx4atmxFXPhOLKlhlwif_kQtzc96lWL7WnFLhEaXOiUGns8nE&
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The two scores that Lewis presented at the Armory embodied a dialectic of complexity
and play. First, the International Contemporary Ensemble, under the direction of
Rebekah Heller, lit into the 2013 piece “Assemblage,” whose title alludes both to
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of agencement—“contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity,
and emergence,” in Lewis’s paraphrase—and to the artistic practice of reworking 
junk objects. At the beginning, eruptive full-ensemble gestures give way to a gently
purring harp figure and to snappy rhythms on agogô bells. These incipient grooves
are almost immediately waylaid by fresh alarms and excursions. The ensemble had 
no trouble adopting Lewis’s turn-on-a-dime energy, conveying a kind of happy exhaustion
at the end.

“Blombos Workshop,” for solo piano, written in 2020, is inspired by a seventy-three-
thousand-year-old abstract design found in the Blombos Cave, in South Africa. The
piece seems to conjure a prehistoric avant-garde musical workshop, a sonic analogue
of the visual culture that can be glimpsed in the cave. Fully notated passages—scampering
runs, precisely hammering chords, ghostly arpeggios—are interspersed with opportunities
for improvisation. The first twenty-four bars indicate rhythms, dynamics, and registers
but not precise pitches. The ending, too, is left open. Cory Smythe, himself a composer
and improviser of note, proved an ideal conduit, making the distinction between 
Lewis’s ideas and his own elaborations inconsequential.

“Afterword,” which had its première in 2015, is in some ways Lewis’s most conventional
score to date. It is an opera in eleven scenes, fully notated. The libretto, however,
is thoroughly unorthodox. It tells the story of the formation of the A.A.C.M., mining
material that Lewis gathered for “A Power Stronger Than Itself.” The composer has,
in other words, made an operatic adaptation of the scholarly history that he wrote
about the collective to which he belongs. We’ve come a long way from the Florentine
Camerata—yet not immeasurably far, since several founders of the opera genre mythologized
themselves as Orpheus, the original composer. In “Afterword,” new myths are afoot.
The libretto tends not to specify individuals, instead assembling a collage of overlapping
voices. As in the book, the focus is on the collective workings of a community. “
Heroes, gods, and masters do not exist in our sight” is one crucial line.

The opera’s musical idiom has its own contrarian magic. Lewis adopts a fairly severe
non-tonal language, with angular vocal lines piercing thickets of dissonance. Some
listeners have found the result disconcerting: people raised on the South Side seem
to have been possessed by the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg. To my ears, it’s a productive
defamiliarization effect, banishing stereotypes and signalling cross-cultural influences.(
Threadgill, in his recent memoir, “Easily Slip Into Another World,” written with
Brent Hayes Edwards, recounts being dumbstruck by his first encounter with Schoenberg’s“
Pierrot Lunaire.”) There’s also an arcane comedy at work. In a scene depicting the
A.A.C.M.’s inaugural meeting, which included a strenuous debate about the nature
of originality, one voice sings, “Do people even know what original music is? I 
don’t.” In response, we hear the instrumental equivalent of a wry smile: low cello
tremolo, some light taps on cymbals and tam-tam, a quizzical piano arpeggio. Let’s
start with that.

![George E. Lewis - MacArthur Foundation](https://i0.wp.com/www.macfound.org/media/
photos/lewis_george_download_2.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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