That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

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Part II: Jazz Greats and Great Jazz: An Evolutionary Riff
George Lewis
George Lewis is my idea of an artist who maximizes the present and visualizes
the future. He’s an author, composer, improviser, researcher, and trombonist
who also uses computers and computer software to make music. He
joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago
in the 1970s, collaborated with free jazzer Anthony Braxton, and worked with
avant garde musicians Derek Bailey, Lester, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn
(see Chapter 8 for more about free and avant garde jazz). Lewis also plunged
into computers and software to create interactive electronic music (a computer
responds to what he plays, and he responds to what the computer
“plays”), and he teamed with filmmakers and video artists to produce performance
pieces that combined music with projected visuals.
Lewis’s recordings include
� Conversations
� Endless Shout
� The Shadowgraph Series: Compositions for Creative Orchestra
� Voyager
For a look at one of music’s experimental laboratories, visit the Web site for
France’s Ircam (www.ircam.fr), where Lewis and other artists go to explore
new ways of making music, particularly by using new technology and complex
software.
Anthony Davis
George Lewis’s friend and sometime-collaborator, pianist Anthony Davis, is
another jazz musician moving beyond the old boundaries. Davis’s early
career included free jazz with Lewis, Anthony Braxton, and Oliver Lake, but
he has become known as the composer of experimental operas like X, The
Life and Times of Malcolm X, and Amistad, as well as music for Broadway productions
including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millenium Approaches.
Lewis (at Columbia University) and Davis (at the University of California San
Diego) are full-time professors as well as internationally respected artists,
which means that they’re providing an incredible range of creative options
to budding musicians.