4/22/2024 0 Comments Avant garde font style![]() ![]() tended to be categorized as avant-garde jazz, although, as Lewis’s scholarship has shown, it should have been incorporated into a canon of experimental composition that has a long history of shutting out Black artists. Their music combined African American traditions with insights gleaned from classical modernism and various world cultures. On a break from college, he joined the A.A.C.M., which had formed on the South Side of Chicago in 1965, with Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill among its early members. As a third grader at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, he took up the trombone, which, he later wrote, appealed to him as “big, shiny, and weird.” He went on to Yale, where he studied music theory and majored in philosophy. Lewis grew up in Chicago, the son of Southerners who had come North as part of the Great Migration. His second, “Comet/Poppea,” arrives in June, in Los Angeles. The ensemble has also recorded “Afterword,” Lewis’s first opera. ![]() In a December concert at the Park Avenue Armory, the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which Lewis is the artistic director, played his music on a double bill with a performance by the composer-pianist Amina Claudine Myers, another A.A.C.M. At the age of seventy-one, he is at the height of his productivity he had seven premières in 2023, in New York, Vienna, and points in between. Let’s simply say, then, that this genially authoritative figure deserves an extended round of applause. ![]() His 2008 book, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,” is a riveting portrait of communal originality, with the author assuming a background role. Yet a routine encomium to Lewis’s achievements and influence would ignore the import of his scholarly writings, which resist the usual narratives of individual genius. George Lewis is one of the most formidable figures in modern music: a composer of international renown, a legendary improvising trombonist, a computer-music pioneer, a professor at Columbia, a stalwart of the Black avant-garde collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. ![]()
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