Lewis Jordan: Freedom And Intonation: Improvised Music And Exploration
November 11, 2008

Lewis Jordan performing at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
On October 4, 2008, musician Lewis Jordan performed a series of poems, musical improvisations and jazz standards on top of the grass mound. I initially asked Lewis to perform as part of this project because I was interested in having someone who was versed and had participated in the experimental or avant-garde jazz scene in San Francisco and beyond. This scene to me seemed to flirt with Utopian ideas both in its experimentation and in its individual narratives. Lewis accepted because he said he was both enamored with the idea of playing on top of a grass mound, which was saying goodbye to utopia, while also being expressly dubious about the idea. You can read more about this below in the interview that I made with him and/or you can hear his performance reacting to the site in the MP3 podcast available below. This was the fourth of six events that I produced as part of A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards to Utopia).
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Categories: A Grass Mound. Tags: Avant-Garde Jazz, Improvisation, Poetry, Utopia.