The Sonic Revolutions of George Lewis

The trombone was the vehicle of Lewis’s initial breakthrough. His astonishing technique ran the gamut from delicate filigree to unearthly howling. In 1977, Whitney Balliett, this magazine’s longtime jazz critic, reported that at one A.A.C.M. event Lewis had unleashed “four consecutive—almost overlapping—ascending arpeggios played in sixty-fourth notes and in different keys,” and that a little later he had “mumbled funny gibberish through his instrument.” The A.A.C.M.’s experimentalism often had a streak of the carnivalesque. Myers, in her set at the Armory, maintained that tradition with an uproarious piece titled “Stay in the Light,” in which she and her collaborators—the bassist Jerome Harris, the drummer Reggie Nicholson, and the vocalist and dramatist Richarda Abrams—enacted a mini-opera at once satirizing and celebrating the search for spiritual enlightenment.