Jazzman Lewis Gives Form to Art of Improvisation

At any given instant, someone somewhere is improvising music. It’s what musicians do, what they have always done, and what they will always do. It seems so commonplace an activity as to hardly warrant remark. But at one of those occasions when music was being improvised, an astounding concert in the Roy O. Disney Hall that highlighted a short George Lewis residency at CalArts, the composer and trombonist mentioned that there had been a lot of big words spoken and now it was time to put something behind it. Indeed, more big words were to follow. Lewis happens to be a protean man of many notes and many ideas, all of them compelling.

Lewis turned his residency into an exploration of improvisation, particularly in the context of new music and the latest thinking about music and technology. That included a talk by the composer as well as an all-day conference Saturday on improvisation and culture. It is an ungainly subject, and rather than try to rule it in, Lewis attempted to do exactly what he succeeds at doing in his music--move into uncharted grounds.

As impulsive a human activity as improvisation is--you might even say it is the guiding principle of how we live our lives--it is not a particularly well understood process. Does formal composition exist to bring some established order into this improvised chaos of living? Or is composition merely the writing down of improvisation? The border is porous. Schoenberg once said that he wrote “Erwartung,” one of the great early 20th century Modernist works, in a feverish stream of consciousness, not knowing where the notes came from.

Yet, as a developed art form, improvisation in Western music owes the greatest debt to the African American tradition. Although improvisation was once a common part of Western art music (Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were famous improvisers) it is no longer. For Lewis, this implies a racial dimension. Lewis, who naturally flows between jazz and highly advanced experimentalism (particularly his exciting interactions with computers), is a pioneer, since American experimental music has a history of looking the other way when jazz enters the room. Or at least of pretending to.

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In connecting improvisation with experimental music, Lewis explored the jazz concept of “shine,” that special indefinable luster that a player gets from his instrument. Shine, Lewis explained, represents the limit of what an instrument can do. On the trombone, it can be at the electrifying edge just before the instrument cracks, but in non-improvised music most players are much too anxious about their tone to find it.

The human nature of improvisation is its social distinction. Lewis spoke of the nature of a great jazz solo as a personal narrative and our need to listen to the experience of others. Wadada Leo Smith, the noted trumpet player and one of the organizers of the conference, insisted that when practiced at its most elevated levels, improvisation is a process that can transform society, and he pointed to the political effect of a remarkable Bob Marley performance in Jamaica.

Smith also had the most provocative aside of the conference, mentioning that improvisation is not just the making up of notes on the fly but something far deeper. Duke Ellington’s band, he suggested, may have given performances in which everything was worked out in advance, but the music still had the power of improvisation.

Young computer composers were on hand and listening intently. It is precisely that power, whatever it is, that is what they are seeking to provide their machines with a soul. And the African American tradition can provide a model. Curiously, even though computers and African American improvisation (which is the foundation of popular music) are both at the very mainstream of modern life, they represent Lewis’ uncharted territory, art music’s cutting edge.

What of the music? Lewis let it speak for itself; there were no explanations for Friday’s program of his five pieces covering a quarter of a century. As a thinker, Lewis may be a voracious intellectual, but as a musician he is a galvanizing presence who seems to transcend the need for words altogether.

His improvisations on the trombone--the first piece was a completely improvised trio with the astonishing clarinetist J.D. Parran and pianist Scott Walton--command a mesmerizing sonic universe. In two big-band pieces, “Endless Shout” and “Hello/Goodbye,” solo improvisations (from extraordinarily accomplished and creative students at UC San Diego, where Lewis teaches) were like windows into new worlds, with Lewis’ irresistibly driving music setting them off in orbit.

A recent work for string quartet for percussion, “Signifying Riffs,” was a mysterious conversation of eerie, repetitive motives. A collaborative piece that came out of a workshop of CalArts performers introduced some electronics, which Lewis uses with uncommon rhythmic and textural imagination, making the room seem to come to life. But then, making the room come to life, whatever he does, seems a Lewis specialty.