George Lewis Author(s): Jeff Parker and George Lewis Source: BOMB , Fall, 2005, No. 93 (Fall, 2005), pp. 82-88 Published by: New Art Publications Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40427707 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms New Art Publications is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to BOMB This content downloaded from 115.70.22.62 on Tue, 02 Mar 2021 05:04:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Y This content downloaded from 115.70.22.62 on Tue, 02 Mar 2021 05:04:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M GEORGE LEWIS U BY S JEFF PARKER I C I FIRST MET GEORGE LEWIS IN 1999. IT WAS AT THE VELVET rience reminded me of a ring shout- everyone had Lounge in Chicago, where I was performing as a their say, but the collective was just as important, member of the Fred Anderson Quartet for a live creating an improvisatory environment in which I felt recording, and Lewis was composing the liner notes. truly open. He introduced himself and said that he would like to interview me for the book he's writing, a history JEFF PARKER of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Hey. I have a bunch of topics I want to try to cover. Musicians (AACM), the legendary, innovative and GEORGE LEWIS influential Chicago-based musician's collective, of Really? (laughter) which we are both members (an extensive project- J P I'm hoping that they will kind of lead into one another. he's done 90 interviews since 1998, and the book will But maybe not. (laughter) Okay. Well, one thing I've be published by the University of Chicago Press in noticed is that you create a historical as well as a 2006). I was quite familiar with him and much of his socio-political setting for seemingly all the work that work, not to mention awestruck and flattered that he you present. Is this something that you feel is neces- even knew who I was. A few days later he showed up sary only as it applies to you and your work, or do you at my old apartment in Bucktown and asked me ques- feel that all art is political in nature? tions about music and myself that shone a fresh light GL Tve always wanted some kind of subtext in my on the path I was heading down (I'm still traveling that compositions, and I think where it starts to get path). This was the beginning of a friendship that has intense for me is with the piece called Homage inspired me in ways that I could've never imagined. to Charles Parker, which was done at the AACM Lewis wears many hats: he's a trombonist, an Festival in 1978. It was in two parts. For the first improviser, a composer, a pioneer in music technol- part we put contact mies on cymbals and Douglas ogy and computer music, a scholar, an historian, a Ewart used mallets and brushes, and I had, like, multimedia artist and an educator. He has always stomp boxes from the '70s (laughter), Electro- been light years ahead of the pack, asking questions Harmonix stuff, phasers and flangers. You could that need to be asked, addressing and eloquently get sounds a lot like [Stockhausen's] Mikrophonie articulating issues about the various relationships I and II and things like that. So the idea for me was between art and society, and realizing his humanistic that this kind of represented Charlie Parker's life, vision through his brilliant works. I've had the plea- which seemed to me to be very turbulent. My inter- sure of working with Lewis on two occasions. The pretation of Parker was that he really was trying to first was as part of a performance and discussion realize more than society was going to allow him (along with Kelan Phil Cohran) that George curated, to achieve, and so he found other, more destruc- called "Frankiphones and Silver Cycles: African- tive ways to exercise the rest of his prodigious Americans in Electronic Music" (2002), where I also energy. You know, all the things he was reputed to got to see an incredible performance with Lewis, the be, this extremely smart guy who could talk about great Roscoe Mitchell and Lewis's computer-interac- anything. Fred Anderson has this wonderful inter- tive composition/improviser Voyager. The second was view with him on tape where he's talking about I the "Baden-Baden Free Jazz Meeting," which George Bartók. He's very voluble, very well read and so on. i describes as And then the second part of Homage was these z two ethereal seventh chords: Charlie Parker's an event that, since the late 1960s, has had a afterlife. I wanted to go back to the "Bird is free" idea- "Bird Lives," that phrase coined by Ted Joans o.I long and important history in European impro- s¿ in the '50s. o vised music. For this edition of the meeting, I < N wanted to explore ways in which technology JP Sure. d § dovetailed with improvisation in creating a site GLof Douglas was playing alto saxophone; I played an hybridity between electronic and acoustic sound electric keyboard. The idea was to approach these z worlds. Each of the musicians I chose for the proj- historical and socio-political energies in a sublim- </> inal way, sort of like what Anthony Davis was Ui ect seemed to me to be addressing that nexus in § some way- Jeff Parker (electric guitar), Guillermo doing on a grand scale with [his opera] X, or with UJ LL. O E. Brown (drums/electronics), Kaffe Matthews Amistad, which is an even more amazing opera Q£ UI (electronics, Great Britain), DJ Mutamassik (turn- than X, I think. CJ UJ tables), Miya Masaoka (koto, electronics); 48nord The other important point for me was my I I- (Sigi Rössert, bass and electronics, and Ulrich recording Changing With the Times, which was i LL. Müller, guitar and electronics); and me. done in '92, where all the pieces deal with history, memory and with how black males are viewed in Three days of performances followed, and the expe- society, through looking at an older black male- This content downloaded from 115.70.22.62 on Tue, 02 Mar 2021 05:04:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G in this case, my father- and using an original text my approach to getting it to work. 8 E by him, more or less a found text. He went to this J P Are you referring to Voyager? You started working on O adult education class and they said, You guys read this in the late 70s, right? R the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and then G L The first interactive computer music piece I made G write your own autobiography. In other words, it's was in '80 or '81. Then in '82 I went to IRCAM E a slave narrative. [Institute for Music/Acoustic Research and You know, the idea that art has to have a politi- Coordination] in Paris, worked on a piece there for a L cal basis seems a little too much like preaching to couple years, then premiered it there in '84. It was E other people about what they should be doing. On a network of three computers that were making W the other hand, seeing artists as political seems music, and they were listening to four musicians: I almost intrinsic because of what you have to go Douglas Ewart, Derek Bailey, Joëlle Leandre and S through to get art before the public, or to make a Steve Lacy. space in which it can be interpreted or understood, J P And this is before Voyager. thought about or debated. GL Yeah, maybe three years before. It was my idea JP Right. of a virtual orchestra. I didn't call it that in those GL All of that is a political process shot through with days, but it had something you couldn't have in the usual dimensions of class and race and gender "real life," at least not in the classical domain: and sexuality and all the rest of it. There's that an orchestra that improvised. There was a lot of whole thing, in classical music mainly, the idea disapprobation, so in that environment you could that political music is just not quite as good as get individual brilliant improvisers, like Frederic music that is apolitical. But why should music be Rzewski, for example, but you weren't going to necessarily secular, with no spiritual component, get a whole culture. So you created it in software necessarily apolitical with no claims on society? (laughter), and then you could invite people like That's kind of out of touch with the realities that Frederic. we face. Voyager was more an architectural than a JP You have a strong compositional background. I use conceptual change from the IRCAM piece. It was the term compositional in the organizational sense. In a massively parallel type deal, where you had a your approach to music, there's often no written nota- large number of software "players" that could play tion.