Jazz great Eric Lewis, former pianist for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, has made a genre-wrecking break with traditional jazz. His jazz-infused modernist renditions of alternative-rock songs, played with classical magnificence, have traditionalists fuming. But nonetheless, Lewis’s delivery of songs by Angels and Airwaves—as he may demonstrate on May 8 when he plays Joe’s Pub—will rock your world.
During a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) session in Long Beach, California, Lewis played a recast of the Evanescence song “Going Under” on a baby grand. His long white shirt cuffs drooped out of an elegantly tailored jacket, and his rounded ’fro—trimmed at Robert De Niro’s request for Lewis’s jazz performance in the film The Good Shepherd—had grown back with a vengeance.
His playing is like performance art. Reaching under the piano hood, he strums metal strings. One finger hammers a single low key, slowly skipping to a stop. Reverberation of that note plays against a thunderclap of percussive keyboard. His fingers race up the keys with fantastic speed, the ensuing notes expressing anxious discomfort. After a sonorous melody breaks through, planes of dissonant rumbling surface. The term “genius” flashes to mind.
The exactitude of Lewis’s touch hints at the classical training he’s received since he was two years old; the college degree in Jazz Performance he obtained from Manhattan School of Music; and years spent with Marsalis’s traveling ensemble. A native of Camden, New Jersey, where his mom was a gifted classical flutist, Lewis met Marsalis when he was 13. “I was immediately put in my place but enamored with this person who spoke with such vehemence,” he says. He went on to study jazz on a full scholarship while jamming at clubs in Manhattan. “When I graduated, I immediately went out on the road on a world tour with Cassandra Wilson,” says Lewis, who will perform in France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and the UK in July. “I traveled to Sweden with Roy Hargrove. By that time my playing had matured to the point that the musicians from Marsalis’s band also said, ‘Yeah, get Eric.’”
Ultimately, conforming to old-school jazz became constricting. When he broke with Marsalis, jazz critics doubted he had what it took to go solo. After much soul-searching, he discovered the sounds of Linkin Park and Jay-Z. “When I finally broke away from jazz and recognized the beauty of rock,” he tells me in a music studio on the West Side, “that’s when the light bulb went off. Some jazz musicians were covering rock tunes, but they were doing rock almost like chamber music. I learned how to create these powerful rock effects so I could carry on like a guitar player for two or three hours.”
At one Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, Lewis performed his new jazz-rock. Its popularity was instantaneous. “Wendy Oxenhorn of the Jazz Foundation of America invited me to play a secret showcase at the Lenox Lounge in Harlem for Quincy Jones, Claude Nobs of the Montreux Jazz Festival, and Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark,” says Lewis. Nobs booked him on the spot for Montreux.
At TED, Lewis’s popularity bloomed during his impromptu late-night sessions. Thirty people attended the first night, then 60. By day three, a crowd of 200 showed up to dance, including Robin Williams; John Lilly, the head of Mozilla; Forest Whitaker; and Donna Karan. Karan not only invited him to play for her fall 2009 couture collection at the Stephan Weiss Studio, she also insisted that Sandy Gallin book Lewis for his famed pre-Oscars party. Stars including Barbra Streisand and Oprah attended. During the party, Tobey Maguire asked for a private audience, which included Leonardo DiCaprio and Bar Refaeli, who pulled up chairs to hear Lewis’s rendition of “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers.
