George Lewis

George Lewis

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George Lewis

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George Lewis is an improvisor-trombonist, composer and computer/ installation artist, who studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. As a composer, Lewis has explored electronic and computer music, computer- based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter is documented on more than ninety recordings. He has worked closely with film/video artists Stan Douglas and Don Ritter, as well as with contemporary musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis,Bertram Turetzky, Count Basie, David Behrman, David Murray, Derek Bailey, Douglas Ewart, Evan Parker, Fred Anderson, Frederic Rzewski, Gil Evans, Han Bennink, Irene Schweizer, J.D. Parran, James Newton, Joel Ryan, Joelle Leandre, John Zorn, Leroy Jenkins, Michel Portal, Misha Mengelberg, Miya Masaoka, Muhal Richard Abrams, Richard Teitelbaum, Roscoe Mitchell, Sam Rivers, Steve Lacy and Wadada Leo Smith.

In the last five years, Lewis's works have been presented at the IRCAM Summer Academy (France), De Ijsbreker, the Groningen JazzMarathon and the BIM-Huis (Netherlands), P3 Art and Environment (Tokyo), the Centro Multimedia/ Centro National de las Artes (Mexico City), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/iEAR Studios, Metronom (Barcelona), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, the Bang on a Can Marathon at Alice Tully Hall (New York), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), the Beijing International Jazz Festival, the New England Conservatory Improvisation Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the Western Front (Vancouver), the Center for New Music and Audio Technology (Berkeley) and the Velvet Lounge (Chicago).

Lewis has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in the "Interarts Inquiry" and "Integrative Studies Roundtable" at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). His published articles on music and cultural studies have appeared in journals such as Black Music Research Journal and Lenox Avenue. His article, "Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic Memoir" will appear in Arcana: Musicians on Music (Granary Books), and his forthcoming book, "Power Stronger Than Itself: The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians" will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001. Lewis has served as Darius Milhaud Professor in Composition at Mills College, as lecturer in computer music at Simon Fraser University's Contemporary Arts Summer Institute, and as Visiting Artist/ Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lewis has received numerous Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the 1999 recipient of the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts. Lewis now serves as Professor of Music in the Critical Studies/Experimental Practices area at the University of California, San Diego.

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