MUSIC REVIEWS : Lewis Prods EAR Unit to Stretch

When George Lewis picks up a trombone, anything is liable to happen, and something liberating usually does. For the virtuosic musician, who has ably bridged the jazz and new music worlds for nearly 20 years and is now teaching at UC San Diego, improvisation is more than an idle concept. It’s a way of being, a license to explore the gray areas between existing musical genres.

At Lewis’ appearance Wednesday with the California EAR Unit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the hosting ensemble found itself recharged and reformed. With the world premiere of his exhilarating work “In the Mix,” Lewis asked members of the group to stretch far beyond his sparse vignettes of notes-on-paper that provided a loose structural grid.

Lewis is far more fluent in the mysterious ways of improvisation than the EAR Unit, but the group rose to the occasion nobly. In short, Lewis played the wily house guest who showed up and rearranged the furniture, leaving the place in a beautiful mess.

Fortunately, Lewis’ piece, which took up the concert’s second half, counteracted the opening work, Mark Waldrep’s “Thrown Doors,” a noisome electro-acoustic affair that suffered from an unbearable cuteness of being. In it, cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick and flutist Dorothy Stone were interrupted by “random access accompaniment”--sampled material of such irrelevance as new age drivel, heavy metal guitar, and natural sound bites. This kind of post-modern patchwork shtick is stale news by now. It added up to bad old wine in a recycled bottle.

Far more impressive in the first half was Eric Stokes’ “Whittlings,” a kind of Bali-meets-Kansas City concoction, in which a bluesy set of four notes are permutated in an ironically folksy minimalist fashion. Virko Baley’s “Dreamtime” celebrated life during dream states, in an adventurous piece full of jauntiness, delirium and existential dread.

Following that eloquent portrait of a fitful sleep, the EAR Unit came fully alive, embracing music of the moment after intermission. The iconoclastic Lewis did the honors of egging them on and waking them up.