Slide Rules

Experimentalist George Lewis embraces music, and life, beyond the brass.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Oct 4, 2006

When most of the early members of the Chicago-based AACM were sweating in nightclubs, Lewis was studying philosophy at Yale. They theorized out of a desire to push jazz beyond accepted boundaries. But for Lewis, the theory was always the important thing: The music was simply a means to pontificate.

"There's no romantic jazz narrative here," he laughs. "It's all about introspection."

Lewis gives the impression that his musical background is almost irrelevant, and he avoids discussing his early experiences beyond a childhood predilection for Roy Rogers (how often does one get to hear an experimental musician sing "Happy Trails" over the phone?) and time spent in school bands ("One wants to avoid myth-making"). He doesn't have one of those epiphany stories about the moment the music possessed him, either. "Doesn't everyone get introduced to jazz at some point in their lives?" he shrugs. "It's part of what it means to be a literate person in the United States. Or maybe even more in other countries, where they pay more attention to it."

He does, however, acknowledge the impact that post-1965 John Coltrane had on him: That was the year Trane made the transition from forward-looking jazz artist to out-and-out avant-gardist, a move that polarized audiences. "It's a funny thing," says Lewis. "They keep reprising 'Giant Steps' forever and ever, but in fact, Coltrane's reputation as being a spiritual force is not based on that era of music. It's based on what he did later, the stuff where he extended the boundaries of himself and really looked deeply inside and found things there. The music that we're told was a product of madness or something. I got ahold of it too, and it sort of prepared me for meeting the people in the AACM."

Lewis joined the AACM in 1971, about six years after the group formed. He recalled waking early for 9 a.m. Saturday theory classes with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, where the instructor would stress the importance of composition. "That would seem to be the thing that people were least interested in having them do, from the standpoint of the stereotypes that surround African-American musicians," says Lewis. "The idea that they shouldn't be composers was pretty uppermost, and so this is the thing that was being challenged directly by the AACM. This is why I became a composer." Here, Lewis hesitates a bit, and signals the need to qualify the reference to himself as a composer. He finally settles on "one who works with form in an extended way" as an acceptable definition.

Of all his compatriots, however, Lewis is perhaps the furthest removed from the standard notion of composition. Having been turned on to electronic music while studying at the University of Illinois, Lewis became an experimentalist in the most literal of ways, his musical efforts becoming as much about tinkering and inventing as creating and composing. He started incorporating computers into his music in the mid-'70s. "It's easier now, because you can buy a Macintosh and sit at home with it," he says. "But in our period, things were too hard. There were no Apple computers, and you had to learn how to build things. All the old war stories ... the old computers you could buy via mail order were for engineers, so you had to read the manual six times before you understood anything."

In the late '80s, Lewis designed a computer program called Voyager, which "listened" to a live musician and created harmonically appropriate responses — an improvising automaton, essentially. Lately, he has been working with a similar system for interactive video, which he intends to use during his duo show with Chicago-born saxophonist Matana Roberts, a new-generation AACM member. These days during performances Lewis spends a good deal of time in front of a computer, though he resists calling himself a laptop artist, claiming that he "started too early to take on a new moniker." His trombone seems almost anachronistic when he picks it up.

Lewis' acoustic instrument works more as an interface with his electronics than an end in itself, and Lewis is always trying to transform his sound even further. "I think you have to make sure that you don't get stuck in repeating the same stuff over again," he says. "You don't want to make yourself into an object of nostalgia. Acoustic or electronic, computers, people — it's all part of the same stream now."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

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