An Explorer Pushes the Frontiers of Jazz

From one angle, trombonist/composer/computer programmer/pedagogue George Lewis could be perceived as a case of a jazz musician who crossed over.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Lewis was involved in the Chicago-based jazz amalgam known as the AACM, the Assn. for the Advancement of Creative Music, and a member in good standing of the transatlantic free improvisation community, playing with Derek Bailey, John Zorn and countless others.

Cut to the ‘90s, and Lewis is ensconced in academia--a faculty member at UC San Diego and a composer--with a bent for computers--traveling in new-music and contemporary classical circles.

In fact, the real story is more basic and more complex. Lewis is one of those musicians who discovered the truth hiding in plain sight: Avant-garde jazz and contemporary classical music are logical bedfellows.

“If there is a home base,” Lewis says of his musical identity, “I would say it’s in African American musical practice and traditions. And even there, there’s a multi-genre or multi-traditional sensibility at work. It basically comes down to the questions of who am I and how am I going to put who I am into this piece? These are the same questions that anybody faces,” he said of musicians.

So who is he, and how does he put his identity into his music? At least a few answers will emerge today and Saturday at California Institute of the Arts during its Musical Explorations 2000 series, where Lewis will wear all his various hats as a CalArts/Alpert Award artist in residence.

He has been conducting workshops since Wednesday with CalArts students. This morning, he delivers a public lecture; tonight he performs his music; and Saturday he participates in a conference on improvisation and culture. Tonight’s concert will represent a wide range of his music, including chamber music from the last two years, a big-band piece he wrote for AACM leader Muhal Richard Abrams’ group in the ‘70s, and one ink-still-wet piece created in collaboration with his workshop students.

Speaking by phone from his home in La Jolla before heading up to CalArts this week, Lewis talked of a “new attitude” toward his work in the past few years.

“I looked around and realized that there were some things that I really wanted to do. I saw that I was in a position to get those things done, and that I really shouldn’t worry about what people were thinking or anything like that. That made a lot of difference.”

And in fact, the last five years have been especially productive for Lewis. His performances and commissions have taken him to the respected Parisian computer-music think tank IRCAM; the famed new-music Bang on a Can festival in Manhattan; and to Beijing, Barcelona and the New England Conservatory Improvisation Festival. In addition to the $50,000 Alpert Award, meant to recognize and sustain artists in “early mid-career,” he has earned grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and has appeared on nearly 100 recordings.

From the beginning, Lewis has been a jazz-plus kind of guy. Born in Chicago in 1952, he developed a fiendishly personal virtuosity on the trombone, experimenting with new techniques--multi-phonics and percussive and timbral effects--while extending jazz traditions and mixing cerebral seriousness with winking humor.

In 1971, he joined forces with the AACM, shortly after its formation as an organization meant to broaden jazz’s boundaries and promote self-expression. The AACM runs a school in Chicago and is the progenitor of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

When Lewis went off to college--Yale--he got his bachelor’s degree not in music but philosophy, graduating in 1974, and his title at UC San Diego is professor of music in the critical studies/experimental practices program.

He discovered computer music in the late ‘70s, at Mills College in Oakland, where he taught composition. Hearing work by such Mills-based computer music-makers as David Behrman, Lewis eagerly jumped in, long before the current state of digital ubiquity. He clarifies: “We’re talking about single-board things with 1,000 bytes of memory.”

But even in its primitive state, the computer was hopelessly alluring for a musician with natural exploratory instincts.

“I’d been working with a group called Quadrasect,” Lewis remembers, “a wind group with people from Chicago and the AACM, and these four computers hooked together sounded like that, like a group of people improvising. It had all the kinds of surprises and all those wonderful unexpected commingling of ideas and synergy that you would expect from improvisation. I thought ‘Man, I have to get me one of these.’ ”

Learning computing more or less on his own, Lewis developed an interactive program called Voyager, which responds in a “duet” setting with a human musician. Lewis’ music-generating machine--which in a more refined form, he still uses as a compositional and performance tool--is highly flexible and can seem more original in its variations than a human musician.

But, Lewis says, the computer does “repeat” itself. The program is “based on these algorithms that come together in certain combinations. When a certain algorithm gets put up against another algorithm, it’s going to produce something similar [to what it produced before]. It will make you think, oh, I see, this is the Keith Jarrett moment coming up. Oh, there’s the Philip Glass moment, or the Pierre Boulez-from-the-1950s moment, or whatever.

“I wouldn’t want to call it licks, but you can tell there are certain areas that the machine will go into. I don’t think that’s such a different process [from human music-making], because there are certain areas that I’ll go into too.”

Improvisation remains a crucial marker in his work, with Voyager or in other settings, such as his duet with koto player Miya Masaoka, “The Usual Turmoil,” which was recorded in 1998. But he also has built up a library of notated compositions in recent years, often with improvisatory schemes woven into them. His album “Endless Shout,” recently released on John Zorn’s Tzadic label, includes a 20-minute uncharted collaboration with Voyager, and a 1996 piece called “North Star Boogaloo” is a quirkily rhythmic piece for percussionist Steven Schick combined with samples of a text written by and read by author-scholar Quincy Troupe. (Both Schick and Troupe are on the UC San Diego faculty with Lewis.)

Collaboration is another part of Lewis’ aesthetic. He has a particular interest in bouncing ideas off his colleagues in the brave new world of no-categories music, and there are a lot of them in Southern California, many, like him, situated in academe. He names in particular trumpeter-composer Leo Wadada Smith at CalArts, flutist-composer James Newton at UC Irvine and pianist-composer Anthony Davis at UC San Diego. “There’s a lot of energy focused in this area,” Lewis says.

Jazz per se still enters into Lewis’ musical life. He was involved in the all-star trombone group Slide Ride, which released a critically praised album in 1995, followed by a tour.

When Lewis considers the source of his varied music, he always returns to the wellspring of the AACM. Right now, he’s working on a book on the organization, and on a personal level, he points again and again to the AACM’s open-ended, open-minded approach and its self-reliant do-it-yourself emphasis.

“The AACM followed that model of not wanting to be subject to genres, and especially not categories based on race and class. People just wanted to be able to come together and create an atmosphere in which anything was possible.”

As a hard-to-pigeonhole musical figure, Lewis has sometimes found himself struggling for acceptance. He perceives the presence, however subtle, of cultural “policing,” particularly regarding black artists who resist sticking to an existing genre.

But, as he says, the whole point of his musical trajectory is that you “can’t pay a lot of attention to the cultural thought police.”

“The ultimate point, for me, is to make sure that, at every moment, I’m remaining true to what I feel is right for me to do. Since that’s happened, I’m much happier. Psychologically, it’s a boon. I think the work is better. I can put it out and say, ‘Yep, this is it. That’s done.’ ”

* George Lewis performs tonight at 8, Roy O. Disney Music Hall, CalArts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia. Free. (661) 253-7832.

*

“I looked around and realized that there were some things that I really wanted to do. I saw that I was in a position to get those things done, and that I really shouldn’t worry about what people were thinking. . . . That made a lot of difference.”

GEORGE LEWIS

Composer, musician, professor