George Lewis, part 1
George Lewis is a composer of contemporary classical music, an avant-garde jazz trombonist, an electronic sound artist, an essayist, and the author of A Power Stronger than Itself, the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a black composers’ collective based in Chicago, where he grew up. A dazzling polymath, he moves between the worlds of new music, jazz, academia, computer science, philosophy and visual art with extraordinary ease and humility. In our conversation, George talked about his working-class Chicago roots, his experiences at Yale and in Europe, his views on “cultural appropriation,” his ambivalence about being seen as a trombonist, why he thinks about John Coltrane more than John Cage, and why he’s proud to be considered an Afro-futurist.