A Question of Expansion : * Music: Branching out comes naturally to jazzman George Lewis, whose latest change has brought him to UCSD.

George Lewis’ reaction to life is as wild and enthusiastic as hismultimedia performance artworks. When Lewis finds something amusing, which happens often, his eyes light up and a rolling belly chuckle rumbles from his sizable frame.

These outbreaks come without warning. Lewis responds to life in unpredictable ways. Speaking about improvisation in his campus office, a windowless cubbyhole jammed with books, tapes, albums and computer equipment, Lewis compared a sound to a “large, fast-moving shape. It might be a good idea to get out of the way. It could be a truck . . . or it could be an asteroid!”

Then the chuckle.

Lewis, a gregarious bear of a man, who coyly gives his age as 39--”like Jack Benny”--is enjoying himself immensely in his new job as assistant professor of experimental and improvisational music at UC San Diego. He joined the faculty last fall, and Friday night at Mandeville Recital Hall he will perform six of his latest works: collaborations with such UCSD faculty cohorts as writers Fanny Howe, Quincy Troupe and Jerome Rothenberg, and musicians Jimmy Cheatham and Bertram Turetzky.

An African-American, Chicago-born, one-time avant-garde jazz trombonist who previously lived mainly in Chicago and New York, Lewis doesn’t find anything incongruous about his new career at UCSD, where African-Americans account for only 2.8% of the 14,529 undergraduate student body.

“We’re in a context now where the roles of black people in society are multiplying,” he said. “Some are manipulative, some represent genuine development.” On the plus side, Lewis perceives a new black nationwide cultural renaissance under way, led by artists such as Troupe and novelists Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid.

“Being here (at UCSD), it’s a question of expansion. On the south side of Chicago, with the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Music), we branched out in a different direction (avant-garde jazz). This is another one. As far as I can tell, we’re artists and we go everywhere. Some stay, play and teach in black communities, and I respect that, but we need to be active on all fronts. This is the front I’m active on, and I don’t feel guilty.”

In 1990, UCSD was considering adding to an already-impressive experimental music faculty that includes bassist Turetzky, Roger Reynolds (who won a Pulitzer Prize in composition in 1989), Edwin Harkins and Philip Larson. On behalf of the school, Turetzky, who first collaborated with Lewis during the 1970s, invited Lewis to the campus for a visit.

“The excitement he generated was just dynamite,” recalled Carol Plantamura, chair of UCSD’s music department. “When Jean-Charles Francois went back to France four years ago, the faculty lost one of its main proponents of improvisation that is not jazz, but perhaps has roots in art music. Then John Silber retired last June. With the loss of them, there is no one addressing (non-jazz) improvisation in the department other than George.

“However, he’s not only interested in improvisation. What he does with technology, and his vast, searching mind and knowledge, he relates very closely to Roger Reynolds. They talk the same language, although Roger is not at all involved in improvisation. George’s roots are not only in jazz. He’s very eclectic. He picks up everything.”

Lewis was offered a contract position, and he moved from Chicago to San Diego last summer. This quarter, he is teaching two classes: one in performance, which mainly involves composing and playing experimental music, and an introductory class in music-making, where students study several different modes of creativity. For one class, Lewis brought in a BBC documentary that compared the improvisational methods of Lewis, the Grateful Dead and Zimbabwe tribesmen.

The pieces Lewis has prepared for Friday’s performance are equally eclectic. As of last week, neither Lewis nor his collaborators could predict exactly what would transpire.

For instance, Lewis has chosen three pieces from Troupe’s latest collection of poetry, “Weather Reports,” released in December. The Troupe/Lewis portion of the program is titled “Midwestern Conspiracy.” Troupe will read poetry and Lewis will provide both electronic and trombone accompaniment, joined by other musicians.

As he reads his poems and improvises with words, Troupe will hold a pair of infrared-sensitive wands. As he gestures, his movements will be translated into a variety of sounds Lewis has electronically sampled and stored on a computer disk. One of Troupe’s poems is about his grandmother, so Lewis plans to employ snippets of dialogue he has recorded from several grandmothers.

Troupe has collaborated with avant-garde jazz players before, but never with computer-based electronic sounds and music.

“I think it’s wonderful,” he said. “If I feel comfortable with someone artistically, I don’t worry about it. I like working with people like George because they make me go beyond myself. I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do; he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. There’ll be some moments that’ll be great. Collaborative works aren’t always balanced, but when great moments are achieved, that’s worth the price of admission.”

Howe also will use the wands, which Lewis calls “rain sticks.” Her collaboration with Lewis also involves dancer Terry Sprague, as well as musicians and a variety of video images Lewis is editing together.

Video images will support two thematic axes (love, nature and the body; authority, the city and romance), which Lewis perceives in Howe’s poem of an adolescent girl’s sexual awakening.

To the uninitiated, Lewis’ music--both the computer-generated and the trombone music--may sound random, atonal, chaotic. Actually, much of it is ordered, but differently, using different sounds from what most listeners are accustomed to. Some works, for example, have no steady beat or recognizable melody to tie into, although Lewis gives them complex structures. Lewis writes programs that enable computers to interact with live musicians, and that also allow computers to improvise music within the specific sound and time parameters he sets up.

Lewis says his work often contains three primary elements passed on to him by his father: stories about distant relatives growing up in Civil War-era North Carolina, a fascination with electronics (his father liked to putter with radios and televisions) and music (his dad’s collection ranged from Tab Smith, Lionel Hampton and Lester Young to Roy Rogers).

Lewis has been associated with experimental music in one form or another since the early 1970s. During his years of studying philosophy at Yale, where he graduated in 1974, he spent summers exploring avant-garde jazz under musicians such as Richard Muhal Abrams at the AACM in Chicago.

But during the 1970s, Lewis also had his first encounters with then-primitive computer technologies, which began to permanently alter his artistic vision. He spent two weeks studying experimental music at Mills College in Oakland in 1978, and he presented one of his first computer-generated works in New York City in 1979. It was titled “The Kim and I,” named after his computer, or “Keyboard Input Module.”

Europe has long led the way with government-backed research into experimental music, and from 1982 to 1985, Lewis lived in Paris and studied at the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). UCSD’s experimental music program has close ties to IRCAM, and Lewis met Reynolds for the first time at a conference there.

From 1985 to 1987, Lewis lived in Amsterdam and studied at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, where artists are exploring new ways of employing technology. Lewis then spent a year “surviving” in New York, giving occasional concerts before landing a visiting artist post at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught classes in art, technology, improvisation and contemporary music.

Lewis has made five recordings of his avant-garde jazz, including his 1980 “Homage to Charlie Parker,” plus several collaborations with Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Lacy and others.

Today, he is less interested in the trombone as a jazz instrument and more interested in how his trombone and computer music can be combined with other media such as performance and video to create what Lewis calls “multisensual environments.”

“Someone told me, ‘What you mean is sensual,’ ” Lewis said. “But what I’m really talking about are combinations of text, sound, images.”

As an assistant professor on a tenure track, Lewis seems entirely content with the world of academia. He is pleased and impressed that the university has supported his work so enthusiastically, providing the Macintosh computer and related equipment he uses in his experimental composing.

It’s too early to say what he thinks of San Diego. He lives in a small apartment near University Towne Centre, but plans to move to downtown La Jolla. So far, he has spent most of his time in San Diego on campus.

“I spent 12 years on the road as a musician. In a way, I’m still on the road. This isn’t my home yet. But I think of it potentially as a long-range situation.”

Lewis’ Friday performance begins at 8 p.m. in the Mandeville Recital Hall on campus. Tickets are $7 ($5 for students), available from the UCSD box office, from TicketMaster and at the door. Call 534-6467 for more information.