28: Eric Lewis - The Singular Genius of Elew
02:06:44 Share

When you go on holiday, there is no finer achievement than doing absolutely nothing. Nothing on the beach, nothing by the pool, walking kind of nowhere and chatting about nothing. As an Expedia member, you can save up to 30% when you add a hotel to your flight, so you can have a bit more money to go out there with great ambition to do absolutely nothing. Expedia. Made to travel.

Hi, this is Eric with a few thoughts for this week's housekeeping. What I want to bring up this week is how to think about the Portal podcast. And in particular, I want to give a few thoughts on how we should measure the scale of a critique or the power of an idea and how these two different concepts might interrelate.

Many years ago, I used to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we had our own very peculiar notion of celebrities back then. I mean, Tracy Chapman literally used to busk on the street for money, and NPR's Car Talk guys lived locally. It was within that milieu that I would go to talks for entertainment. As a broke graduate student, lectures were a godsend as they were free and plentiful. I would attend them the way other people would go to movies or concerts, and from time to time, that would include Noam Chomsky's lectures on political theory as he worked at MIT.

I was always impressed by his sincerity and sometimes I would stay after and talk with him. On one such occasion, I told him that I had had a conversation with a contact at NPR and that that person might be interested in getting him a regular slot of perhaps five minutes or more. I was naturally very excited to make something like this happen if it were in fact possible. Noam's response was surprising to me at the time. He was absolutely emphatic that he was not interested. Somewhat stung, I asked him why he was so definite.

He replied in such a small slot against a backdrop of NPR-filtered news, he would appear to the audience to be a stark raving madman, and that there was no way of presenting a deep critique so as to overcome the relentless framing of the news into narratives in which NPR was engaging. I have thought about that interchange many times since then, as I have been haunted by its implications. What good, after all, is a Chomsky-level analysis if it is barred from having any impact when done at scale?

When we have a critique of a well-known narrative or worldview, it usually can be sorted into a taxonomy according to whether it accepts, bends, or is forced to break the frame of the storyline with which it contends. As an example, imagine we were back in 2016 and I were to critique the coverage of the U.S. presidential election for failing to contend with the ideas of Donald Trump. Saying that, "I feel that we aren't covering Trump sufficiently because we all know that Hillary is going to win," would constitute a critique, but one that accepts the narrative without challenge.

Saying instead, Hillary is going to beat Donald Trump by much less than she imagines and will have to build her mandate after the inauguration if she is to be effective, would bend the Hillary is inevitable media narrative. But saying instead, I think all the pundits and polls are wrong and that Donald Trump should be expected to win, would break the narrative entirely. This breaking of the frame is usually cause for derision and is, of course, exactly what got Ann Coulter ridiculed on Bill Maher's program when she made just that prediction.

To return to our story in Massachusetts, almost all of Chomsky's points were in fact narrative breakers in this third category. He would have stories we'd never heard from East Timor, detailed history on Iranian self-determination and oil reserves, data on Chilean atrocities. To accept Chomsky was to accept a world of different stories that, oddly enough, could usually be authenticated, but which were frequently not referenced outside far-left circles.

Thus Chomsky could not play inside the game of NPR, which was often bending and sometimes challenging official narratives, but seldom ever breaking the dominant frames within which the storylines developed. In short, Planet Chomsky was an alternative universe in which a Howard Zinn might be found, but where you would never find Samuel Huntington or Henry Kissinger. I mean, they might have talked down the street at Harvard in the adjacent zip code one digit off, but it was another incompatible universe entirely.

So what can one say about the style of deep critique which must break the frame of its target without knowing any further information? Well, in the first place, no one can really argue that all frame breaking is unwarranted. I mean, clearly the US view of North Korea is such a critique, for example, as is the mainstream Baptist critique of an offshoot cult like the hate-fueled Westboro Baptist Church.

And yet, when the narrative under scrutiny is our own narrative, the very one upon which we depend to give direction, meaning, and security in our daily lives, we can be relied upon to fight everything that breaks our frame, irrespective of its validity.

So with this in mind and the COVID pandemic response as our backdrop, who are today's deep critics? And should we be listening to them or ignoring them as is our reflex? Well, I'm glad to say that Noam Chomsky is still going strong. And I dare to think that upon his eventual exit from this world, he may well be remembered as America's leading public intellectual, even by many of the respectable people who paid him absolutely no mind while he was still a living threat to our system. Nassim Taleb, of course, is another candidate.

Now, Taleb's idiosyncrasy is notwithstanding. It is particularly difficult to contend with the substance of Taleb's critique because it is so vast. Where other people trade accusations about the misuse of statistics, Taleb verges on saying that the field of statistics is itself the problem. While some might argue about the fallacy of appeal to authority in a particular case, Taleb instead goes after many of the expert class by name, endearing himself to his targets by calling them IYI, for intellectual yet idiot.

He does this, I believe, because he wants to signal that all frames coming from the mainstream should be considered dead on arrival with him unless verified from first principles. A third case might have been my old friend and colleague Serge Lang at Yale, who I may discuss another time as he is no longer with us. And I will leave Scott Alexander, Venkatesh Rao, Peter Thiel, Nick Bostrom, and others for another time.

My aim in bringing up these various and varied critics is to bring to consciousness that there is actually almost no real information content in pointing out that we disagree with nearly any deep frame-breaking critique if it's targeted upon our own narratives. This must be the baseline expectation if we wish to see ourselves as self-aware and metacognitive. We oppose most all such critics reflexively and completely independent of the merit of their arguments for reasons of self-preservation.

And yet, and yet even knowing this, my goal at the portal is, at least in part, to provide you, the listener, with just such a deep critique. The problem here is that the critique as it stands is simply so vast that it is difficult to consider independent of whether or not it makes sense or is true. Think, for example, about the past episodes we've been through. We've asked you to rethink science and its culture from the bottom up.

The portal, in fact, began with an interview about stagnation during a period where most everyone else was talking about some dizzying pace of technological change. We've explored the idea of universal societal lies and preference falsification and the idea that Judaism might not even be a religion.

and most insanely, the need to stave off an apocalypse, potentially through planetary escape, well before we were all told to stay indoors as a planet to avoid a killer virus. I mean, if there is a silver lining to this pandemic here at The Portal, it is surely that our talk about the twin nuclei problem on the Joe Rogan program and worldwide apocalypse seems a lot less far-fetched after transitioning suddenly from business as usual to worldwide lockdown.

So, how can this be done at scale without paying the same exact reflexive penalty of cognitive dissonance as all the other deep critics seem to have suffered? If there is an answer here, it is to be found in the concept of the portal itself. My goal is not to tell you that where we are is terrible and contains no meaningful options. The highest ambition, in fact, of the program is to show you how else you might think about finding passages to something real and more meaningful than the place you were when we first met. After that, if you want to remain in place, that would be a choice rather than a sentence.

So what I want to leave you with is a notion which I believe goes back to Richard Dawkins. At some point, he opined that one could measure the power of an idea as if it were a fraction. To this way of thinking, the power of an idea is measured as what the idea explains divided by what the idea is forced to assume. For example, Dawkins might claim that the theory of evolution is powerful specifically because it explains the origin of all known species and adaptations, but only assumes the principles of natural and sexual selection.

Maxwell's equations, by contrast, are powerful because they explain light, x-rays, radio waves, magnetism, electricity, photons, all as an unpacking of a single geometric concept. Weber's theory, by turns, that all government can oddly be unpacked from the simple concept of a monopoly on violence would be such a theory in the social rather than the natural sciences.

As such, it may be easier to accept Darwin's, Maxwell's, and Weber's critiques of all that came before them, specifically because their criticism is not scattered and flows simply from unifying and underlying principles. In the case of the portal, we have endeavored to follow this example.

Quite simply, and there's no getting around this, our critique of modern life is partially characterized by just how deep it is. Yes, we are really saying that we have had a universally unworkable leadership class in place for nearly 50 years and that most of our institutions are not functioning ethically or honestly. In other words, most of us adults grew up in a bubble. Of course, that probably sounded a lot crazier to many before most people saw the worldwide clown show that was and is the developed world's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But just imagine that almost every critical area of civil society leadership is just as badly prepared as our public health sector to react to immediate changes in need, and you will start to watch your brain tune out, as it may well have during initial discussion of the virus in January.

After all, what would one do to fix it? I mean, I myself get enervated just like you whenever I think about the most straightforward implications. Where would we even begin, for God's sakes? Yet this is why we have endeavored to provide you with a very small denominator to combat the sense of hopelessness. I mean, if there is more or less only one root cause to the problems we are picking out, then our idea will have power in the sense of Dawkins, and we need not work individually on thousands of idiosyncratic downstream emergencies clamoring for our attention.

In our theory, almost all of this novel level of systemic failure in institutional leadership follows from a simple change in growth regimes. In the post-war regime from 1945 until the early 1970s, growth was so remarkable and constant that we built our institutions around expectations of economic expansion and technological innovation.

And then, just like that, most all of that growth stopped around 1971 through 1973, maybe having to do with predictions of Derek DeSola Price more than 10 years earlier, which we can discuss another time. Like Weber's theory of a monopoly on violence or Darwin's explanation of selection, the validity of this simplification rests on what can be unpacked from relatively mild assumptions through the theory of embedded growth obligations.

Because these institutions are all facing the same system of pressures, there is a near universal need for every titular head in this cohort of leaders to hide the fact that their institution is predicated on high growth expectations and that they are all now failing and that the expectations cannot be met.

Further, if this is correct, they are failing in exactly the same ways with the same class and type of leaders at the helm, whose top skill must be this masking of the inability of the leadership to meet the growth obligation embedded within the foundations of their institutions, simply to keep the game going. This is what must now come to an end. Generations are in fact defined by their cognitive development during whatever environment was present during their formative years.

The important generational divide is likely between the silent and baby boom generations on one side who grew up as children and young adults amidst real growth and who are thus attached to the narratives of success under difficult circumstances. With Gen X and the millennials still waiting their turn and largely alienated from narratives which offer them very little other than debt and near permanent holding patterns. Once the baby boomers in silence exit the system, we are likely to see their successors start to actually admit to the terrible state of the institutions.

So if you're interested in this theory, this is now your homework assignment. As you watch this cohort of leaders wrestle with the COVID pandemic, ask yourself, what part of the bizarre nature of this response can be deduced from the theory of embedded growth obligations?

We have now spent in the United States the last 28 years under baby boomer administrations. So how well did they do to prepare us for this pandemic? Did they leave us stockpiles of essential supplies? Did they resign when they failed in their duties? Are their instincts compatible with the heavy burdens which are now likely to cascade from here?

And if pandemic leads to depression and depression leads to war, would you wish to send yourself or a child into battle under President Sanders, President Trump, or President Biden as commander-in-chief? Or would you look for a portal instead to avoid this choice? Returning sponsor Theragun is one of the perks of having sponsorship behind the program. I mean, frankly, I get introduced to products that I love but that I would never have even known about, much less purchased.

Theragun is a leading percussive therapy device that delivers a soothing and relaxing massage-like experience in a handheld device that you or a partner can direct over sore shoulders, aching leg muscles, or tired arms.

And in the middle of a pandemic, there is a huge need for those who enjoy regular massage as part of a fitness, exercise, and wellness practice to replace deep muscle tissue work with a safe alternative that I have found both relaxing and stress relieving. So when you're cooped up and probably in need of a massage, why not feel better naturally, treat your pain, and get back to your life?

Try Theragun risk-free for 30 days or your money back by going to theragun.com slash portal. And for a limited time, our listeners to the podcast get up to $100 off on each new device. That's theragun.com slash portal. Theragun spelled T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N dot com slash portal. Returning sponsor Wine Access has been great to us at the portal and they more or less let us do what we want with the ad copy. Let me make a recommendation that's both good for them and good for us.

consider dressing for dinner while you're sheltering in place in a way that's unnecessary and opening a bottle of wine. That's a damn sight better than you absolutely have to. Why? Well, I don't know. Just despite this virus and to have a little bit of panache in this trying circumstance, I think is a great affirmation of the human spirit. So if while shut in, you're looking to educate yourself about the world of wine, why not challenge the wine geeks at Wine Access Wine Club because they're offering an amazing deal.

For only $150, you'll get a shipment of six premium wines at an average of $25 a bottle, but you know you're going to be getting great value that is top quality at minimal price because they're scouring the world for offbeat offerings.

Plus, as a member, you'll get 10% off all other Wine Access purchases. So, don't wait. Sign up for the Wine Access Wine Club today. Use our special URL, WineAccess.com slash portal, and you'll get all the details at WineAccess.com slash portal.

This Portal episode introduces you to one of my favorite people and favorite artists on Earth. Now let me say this, if you were to ask me which of my guests so far is most often an open portal to the transcendent, this is the one. And I've seldom been as certain as I am here. It's hard to know what to say about Elu, aka Eric Lewis. Two things, however, are clear. He is a straight-up genius and a force of nature. Are we friends? I'd definitely say yes, but it is a strange thing to be friends with an avalanche or a tsunami.

At our Shabbat dinner table, for example, he's one of our favorite guests, but he often speaks to me in riddles and sometimes reminds me in speech of how Jimi Hendrix used to struggle to talk to mortals. And in many ways beyond that, the comparison seems a good one. If one looks at the musical notation meant to say what Hendrix was doing on guitar, it is remarkable how little is captured. This is because Hendrix expanded the dimensionality of the guitar with feedback, micro embellishments, and electronic wizardry so that the notes provided only the barest substrate for the tapestry of sound that was being woven.

In many ways, Eric has done the same thing for the piano. So just as Les Paul preceded Hendrix in using the studio as an instrument, and flamenco artists were tapping on fretboards long before Eddie Van Halen changed the percussive guitar game, Eric was not the first to play with the internal organs of the piano to coax out new sounds.

but far beyond the prepared piano experiments of art music composers when erich ripped the cover off the piano to play both the keys and the harp-like strings behind he brought so much dimensionality in soul that he at last overcame the critical limitation of the instrument that had plagued it since its birth the piano's mechanical action which is one of the great triumphs of pure mechanical engineering ensured that there was regularity to most every note

Eric replaced that regularity and created a higher dimensional instrument. If the piano was Einstein to the harpsichord's Newton, in Eric's hands the piano went relativistic and quantum finally at the same time. I should say that this is one of many different innovations that Eric has brought.

he has explored the fusion of baroque counterpoint and jazz into a style that he calls counter bop which quite frankly stretches my mind farther than it can often go as well as innovating rock jazz to replace the tin pan alley songbook of standards additionally he has innovated in several aspects of showmanship as well as djing and screenwriting which is hardly surprising as my entire body can seemingly fit inside his brain case

As for this interview, a word of warning. I should say that Eric is being very kind to me indeed by inviting me to at least pretend to play along with him, either on the high registers of the piano while he is playing or using the clogged harmonica that I happened to find in my pocket the morning we recorded in L.A. on a famous Yamaha that was apparently used to record Angie by the Rolling Stones. I would appreciate it if you didn't see it as me getting in his way so much as an act of supreme generosity from a true innovator and friend to a humbled curator.

I hope you will look into Eric's music after you've had a chance to listen to our uninterrupted conversation after these ads from our sponsors, and that you'll sit back, relax, and meet the portal that is my friend, Ilu, Eric Lewis. I think we're all struggling with nutrition under shelter in place. However, I think that returning sponsor Athletic Greens has a pretty interesting offering.

They make a powder which, when mixed with water, gives you an all-in-one health drink, having 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients that include prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, superfoods, and more, giving you a single alternative to help support your body's nutritional needs across five critical areas of health, energy, immunity, gut health, hormonal and neural support, and healthy aging. A one-stop shop for many of your concerns under this really difficult situation.

So, whether you're taking steps towards a healthier lifestyle while sheltering in place for yourself and your family, or you're an athlete pushing for better performance, Athletic Greens takes the guesswork out of everyday good health and nutrition. Why not just try it? Jump over to athleticgreens.com slash portal to claim our special offer today. That's 20 free travel packs valued at $79 with your first purchase. That's athleticgreens.com slash portal.

The portal welcomes back returning sponsor Quip, makers of complete dental hygiene solutions. Okay, here's a problem you didn't quite know you had. The odds are excellent that your teeth are just not exciting enough to you. Yet components of your teeth derive from the neural crest during development and so, perhaps surprisingly, your dental health and brain health may have much more connection as you age than you think.

And what's the greatest threat to your brain via your teeth? Well, you're probably so busy, lost in thought, using your brain while brushing your teeth that you're almost certainly cheating your teeth by not spending a full and careful 30 seconds on each of the four quadrants of your mouth. That's why Quip's stylish battery-operated toothbrush vibrates whenever it's time to switch quadrants, letting you see just how much you've been racing through toothbrushing. Yikes!

And with floss solutions, toothpaste and refill service, Quip makes sure that you are always fully armed to put that smile forward with confidence that you, my friend, have world-class oral discipline every time. So go over to getquip.com slash portal right now to get your first refill for free. That's your first refill free at getquip.com slash portal spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash portal. Quip, they're the good habits company.

Hello, you found the portal. I'm here today with one of my favorite people and our guest, Eric Lewis, alias Elu. I don't exactly know how to describe what he is and what he does, but we'll start with pianist and we'll go from there because he's also a DJ, screenwriter, and a guy who, one of the reasons he's on the show is that it seems like everything he touches, he has to innovate. So Elu, welcome to the portal. Hi, thanks Eric.

So one of the things I just want to jump right into is that I'm super frustrated with where music has been recently. And I think it's really interesting that you occur in our era. From my perspective, a lot of our popular music has been getting simpler as it was getting more intricate and more depended.

on musicianship back in the 70s. And a lot of what we're seeing is a shift to the studio, to simpler forms. And you come along, and for my money, you are innovating at the very highest levels of jazz, rock, and pop all at the same time. Are you seeing something like that, where you are somehow like a salmon swimming counter to the stream? Or do you think that you're just...

part of our age and in fact it's the same as it ever was. Thank you first of all for saying that. I think of myself as just an arch traditionalist in some sense. Part of the tradition of jazz with a nod of the hat or on Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Tatum,

Part of the tradition of jazz is to innovate and to individuate, as Carl Jung might say perhaps. That is the focus I find myself orbiting, and that's my pursuit. I've sort of painted myself in a corner in a lot of different ways, and I use that sort of sense of being trapped or forced to commit to this thing that I've

painted myself into a corner with and I use that particular situation, that particular scenario to drive out and bring forth innovation as they say, ingenuity, what is that necessity is the mother of ingenuity or mother of invention. Well, that's just the thing. So for people who don't know you and they're going to not only know you hopefully, but we have a beautiful Yamaha piano behind us and they're going to feel you,

Let me just give you sort of a non-musician's impression of where I've seen you innovating. Okay.

First of all, you've taken what used to be called prepared piano, where people would leave like bricks and paper clips in the back of the piano. And you've stuck your hand in there to coax all sorts of sounds out that add such a rich dimensionality to your playing that you have access to many more degrees of freedom than a standard person. So you're playing in the back and in the front of the piano. You've innovated this idea, which you called rock jazz, which was a canonical innovation in that

Originally, when jazz was coming up, people used the popular songs of the day as the substrate on which to improvise. And you pointed out that Autumn Leaves is not a part of our current canon, it's a part of our older canon, so why not use the rock songs that everyone knows as the substrate to be true, not to the letter, but to the spirit of jazz, which is to use that which everyone knows and show them something they don't. Huge innovation.

Like all of the best Jerry Lee Lewis footage where he kicks away the bench and he's just playing standing there. You've got this insane, powerful stance. You use this armor to convey...

the aggression and I think, you know, I was talking about the violence of creativity. One of the reasons we're afraid of creativity is that we're afraid that creativity is always a violent act. You came up with this thing called counter bop where you're bringing sort of bop like counterpoint into the jazz idiom and achieving a level of independence, we say of your hands, but of parts of your mind that I've never, I don't think I've ever seen at the keyboard.

To say nothing of how you've innovated, I'm starting to hear that you're DJing from inside of the piano. It feels to me like everything you touch is a response to a constraint, that you take on the constraints of the traditional, and then you force yourself, Houdini-like, to break out of them. Is that an accurate description of what it is that's driving this sort of explosion? I would say that most of it is accurate. Some of it would be argued from the perspective of branding,

and that sort of kind of thing. But isn't that part of innovation? Right. So there's that. That's part of creativity too, and it's important as well. So I would definitely say that Counterbop, of all of the innovations, is one that's got the heaviest musical academic durability. I would say that rock jazz was innovative

However, I'm not the first person to play rock tunes or rock covers on a piano. I think I might be the first person to sort of go at it with the ferocity and the physical degree of power and endurance and sort of fidelity to those pieces. So I think that I go about that particular endeavor in an innovative way.

Branding it as rock jazz, perhaps that's innovative and using that as a wedge to create an extension of my career. So, you know, there's an innovative quality there. I would say Counterbop, which is a more recent situation, more recent device that I've come up with. That's something that I can definitely say is innovative in the sense that I really haven't heard anyone say,

mix Bach counterpoint with bebop. There's a lot of people that have brought Baroque counterpoint, European counterpoint into jazz. However, and this is for all of the people who are going to immediately pounce on this statement or scream, wail that, oh, it has been done before. Actually, no, it hasn't.

Hasn't been done in a swinging way. So the idea that jazz doesn't have to swing or that sort of kind of a thing, that's going to be a thing. And that particular wormhole right there can go very deep. But suffice to say that no...

playing Bach counterpoint or that sort of kind of a thing inside of jazz is very different from counter bop, which is why I call it counter bop. Right. It's not counterpoint. Right. It's counter bop so that you have two Bud Powell or two Charlie Parker like lines full of all of their internal striations and internal acrobatics, shall we say harmonic melodic acrobatics working within the traditions of swing jazz.

the traditions of bebop at the same time simultaneously. There are a couple of pianists that do have some very highly developed left hands that are able to do it to a degree and perhaps a good degree, but I haven't heard anyone get it to

like the highest levels and I believe that I've found a way to do that. I have to say this because I'm not a jazz guy. I don't have some of the problems that you have. We just, there's an elephant in the room and I want, I want to kill it at the beginning, which is,

Jazz is such an intellectual pursuit and it's so discriminating as to the fine points of one's ability that it really is a Mount Olympus and it's left most of the world behind. And so you always have this problem that when you're talking, the small number of jazz cats who can really track what you're saying and who know the history, like they're historians of the subject will always pounce. Any simple statement is going to be wrong. Mm-hmm.

And they'll point you to something that happened with Django Reinhardt way back when. And it's incredibly intimidating to have to work within this tradition. And one of the things I've most appreciated about you is

is the way in which you're willing to both take on the constraints and totally overturn the apple cart at the same time. So that you're really true to the spirit. And I think the people who will resist you at first will thank you later. If you think about Ray Charles, for example, who wasn't quite at this level of jazz mastery, but as an innovator brought gospel into the popularity, and boy, did he catch hell for that.

or, you know, playing around with country idioms, you know, the, the black guy taking on what are supposedly white songs and showing what can be done with them. I think that one has to, to, to,

to break sensibilities and norms. And one of the things I don't want to get caught up in is have you self censoring yourself. So I'm going to take full responsibility for all the wrong things that we say about jazz history on this show. Not your problem. My problem. What do you see for people who don't understand the difference between, let's say a Miles Davis and a, and a Kenny G nothing, nothing against Kenny G or,

What are the top people in this field do differently? How did America end up with a classical music that was this advanced this quickly? And who are the really top priests at the pinnacle of that summit for you? Okay. So that's a solid and complex, multifaceted octopus question. Uh-oh. Which is fine. It's understandable. Okay. I'm a big fan of science.

And I try to exploit the scientific method whenever possible. So from the perspective of the human animal, you know, every sort of opinion about this or that, as far as sound goes or as far as as far as certitude or validity, for instance, if you put Kenny G's name next to Miles Davis's name, I think that it's difficult to

have a truly acerbic scientific conversation about that. There's going to be those that feel as though Kenny G is the greatest musician that's ever lived. And there's going to be those that think that Miles Davis is the greatest

musician that ever lived and then there will be those that think that the idea of calling someone the greatest musician that ever lived is in and of itself is flawed. I agree with that. And has a bias inherent in it that intrinsically undermines the sort of conversation or the purity of your system. So I don't want to trap you in that. Oh no, no, it's fine. No, no, it's fine. I feel as though it's important to

as far as in the process of me answering your question and in the process of you getting a sense of who I am and how I feel about things or how I classify things. So that answers the first aspect of my approach to comparison. Got it. So existentially speaking, they're sort of the same depending upon, you know, for instance, you could do a mind hack where you turn on a television and

and switch the channel to something that just gives you white noise. Right. Shh.

Now, you can do a mind hack where you could hear jingle bells inside of that white noise. You can pretty much hear whatever you're listening for. John Cage certainly explored ideas like that. Right. You can hear whatever you're listening for in something. And this goes to politics. This goes all the way out into all of human thought and bias endeavors, right? So I'm a chess player, so I shy away from that particular idea.

battle line I'm going to shy away from putting a qualitative or a sort of a validate validation oriented thing with regards to the Kenny G versus the Miles Davis let me take Kenny G out of it I think it's a perfect example actually you're not going to let me out of it okay go ahead but it's perfect though alright it's perfect yeah yeah it's perfect

The extremities always allow us to get to clarity as far as I'm concerned. And that's a big aspect of what I look at when I'm evaluating things. You know, the more extreme something is, the more pronounced it is, the purer it is and the easier we can see how it functions in reality.

Our political climate is one of extremes these days. So then it's very clear. Everyone's agendas are very clear. And so we can see how those things interact and where they agree, where they disagree. And, you know, the basis is upon the basis, the basis is basis or whatever that word is, the plural basis, the basis upon which each extreme side proffers, you know, their position to be concrete. Well, anyway, so when it comes to,

the aspect of classifying levels of greatness in musicians and stuff like that, that becomes a difficult thing to nail down because of the movable objective criteria, the attackability of the objective criteria that we would try to put out there. But what we can talk about, we can talk about branding, we can say, or we can talk about physical difficulties, we can talk about things like that,

I'm trying to remember all of the questions, but I can say that as far as who really inspires me in that sense. At the highest level. Right, at the highest level. To you. Yeah, to me. I'm highly inspired by John Coltrane. I had a chance to tour with Elvin Jones, who was his drummer. So I was able to be Sorcerer's Apprentice for two years. Amazing experience. I would say I really...

Look up to many of the European classical masters, Stravinsky, Litz, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff, Debussy. I look up to Hollywood film masters, Martin Scorsese. I look at German impressionistic master F.W. Murnau. I mean, there's so many...

geniuses in so many diverse fields to be inspired by. And to me, the actual physicality or device or technique that they're using to access the light, shall we say the light is somewhat secondary. I just am inspired that these people touch the light. I mean, Simone Biles, this gymnast that's out now is doing amazing things. The Williams sisters, Michael Jordan moving forward.

Steve Jobs. I mean, Einstein, Newton. There's just so many numerous people. I'm inspired by the existential fact that they even exist. Okay, well, this is...

in large part what the portal is all about. And just to open something up, and I think this is the perfect episode to do it, I haven't said it before. The N is often too low in any particular field. The number of true geniuses, like if I think about physics, there are lots of people who would be considered geniuses in any other field. But like the top level geniuses

five people or less in the last century, you know? And so you have to aggregate field by field by field if you want to see the pattern. And in some sense, that's what I hear you saying is that you're looking, you're not going to let the instrument define where you look for inspiration and what you port back into your own craft. Sure, there are specific dynamics to executing music.

behaviors, ideas upon a particular device or medium. The inspiration for that sort of thing, in my case, comes from multiple places, which I'm sure is the same for many people. As far as within the field, who really inspires me, like I would say John Coltrane and Art Tatum, from the perspective of how they merged extreme, extreme ideas

technical mastery of their given instruments, how they merged that with a profound quote in-house, I'm referring to in their own mind, in their own flesh, a profound in-house understanding of where to put the music and what approaches to take similar to a chess player in the sense that a chess game, if you know how the pieces move, okay, cool.

Yeah. And if you as long as you're functioning in some kind of way that you can either digitally or physically move pieces around, you can be part of the game. So now how do the levels begin? How do you get from there to Magnus Carlsen? Right. And so that internal game of, OK, why did you decide to defend this when, in fact, the greater attack was coming over here? You know, that kind of stuff. OK, so this is a great example.

analogy with jazz in a weird way which is if I go back to a guy I think of as potentially the greatest creative genius of jazz arguably would be Louis Armstrong who sort of invented modern jazz from the hot fives hot sevens not to slight the jelly roll mortons of the world

That is understandable to me in the same way that a game of like Morphy or Capablanca was understandable when chess was sort of in an earlier stage of its development. But as both of these fields progressed, you always have this problem, which is that the greater play loses the casual observer.

Like they can't figure out what's going on. And I bring this up in the context of something. I saw you hanging out with Herbie Hancock and it warmed my heart. I heard him describe playing with Miles. And he said, I hit a chord that was so wrong and so off, I wanted to clutch my head. And he said, what I didn't know is that there was a level of musicianship beyond this that

where Miles heard the same chord and figured out the exact right notes to play that made it the right chord in arrears. And it was a keyboard player, you know, talking about a trumpet player who was fixing his mistake because he didn't hear it as a mistake. He just heard it as notes to be played with. And I think about that in terms of like the improvisational idiom, yes and.

There are levels and levels and levels, and they lose us as casual observers. Would we have known that moment happened if we were in that club or at that recording date if we weren't at the top level of the profession? Well, I think, as they say, if you have a good plumber, you never know anything's wrong, right? So I think...

We're in the business of not letting the audience know that anything has gone wrong. Now, analyzing the word "wrong" and that sort of kind of a thing, that's where a matter of skill and understanding come into play. We're talking about phenomenology at that point. We're talking about event horizons. We're talking about existentialism at that point. Let me be slightly less obtuse.

In the world of film scoring, I think Bernard Harmon was the one who made the famous statement about the great paradox that exists in music, where a piece of music could quote unquote be terrible. It could be really weak, bad, have a lot of inconsistencies, fail at a lot of different levels, clearly be mediocre in its aspirations and its execution of those aspirations.

However, however, with the right visual apparatus going with it, with the right film going with it, suddenly that piece of music is the penultimate apex zenith of perfection for that particular moment. This is the great paradox. So similarly, when Herbie played that chord, Miles definitely aware of this type of paradox and,

can come to that and put a sound with it that transcends one aspect of sonority, transcends one aspect of analysis and speaks, as Miles Davis said, a higher level of theory. It speaks to a higher level of theory. If you're coming from the perspective that any sound is just a sound free of bias, free of predestination, you suddenly have expanded your toolbox.

And so then it just becomes a question of how familiar are you with employing these, quote, out-of-the-box sorts of effects and manipulating that sort of kind of thing. You know this joke that Leonard Bernstein put into West Side Story where –

he takes the most dissonant interval, the tritone, right? And he goes, Marie, which is like, uh, and then, uh, he goes to the fifth, which is like the most consonant. And then he's like the most beautiful word I ever heard.

And the whole idea is that the release from maximal tension into maximum sonority is the most gorgeous thing. So he's going to take the ugliness and just serve it up as like this is the feeling of just having met your true love. In screenwriting, conflict and tension are the building blocks of your story. I mean, that's drama. That's irony. Night and day. These are the...

Binaries, these are the opposites, life and death, pain, pleasure, happy, sad, all of these things, opposites. There was a philosophy of aesthetic realism that one of my professors in Manhattan School of Music would talk about.

And I don't want to butcher their tenants. However, one thing did stick out. They would always talk about was how the coming together of opposites is how beauty forms or, you know, is the component of beauty. And so, you know, while I might not necessarily call it beauty or, you know, put that term to it, movement, right?

Speaking of counter bop, speaking of bebop, speaking of improvisation, movement is the core issue. I mean, even getting down to neuroscience is the brain enables movement.

moving topics around, moving pieces, moving music, moving people, movement, movement, movement, dance, movement, choreography, movement, movement, how you use harmony, how you use writing, how you use words. All of these things work towards that same thing. Movement. Einstein said, when asked about the universe, when asked about God, something's moving. There's

There's something moving. And yet he froze it in space-time. The whole concept of space-time freezes the wave. And so there's something profound about the fact that his insight arguably got rid of movement by putting time as part of the substrate. And this is going to come up when we talk about cubism, where you have been...

on this new project, which is again, once, once again, seemingly increasing the dimensionality of independence, like parts, no longer, it's just two parts of your hands being independent. It's like multiple parts of the same hand are now independent. Um,

And that goes back to like Duchamp with the nude descending a staircase, which was something of a reference to space and time where the tube of the nude, like one human form creates a tube over time. Do you see that you're playing with sort of concepts that are coming out of this science inspired exploration and the tension even internal to somebody like Einstein? Is it movement or is it frozen? I'm,

quite inspired by neuroanatomy and I'm quite inspired by physics. A good buddy of mine is far more articulate about math and physics than I am. He's a big devotee of that stuff and he's a musician. His name's Marcus Miller, not the bass player, he's a saxophone player. But he's really interesting.

And so he and I talk about stuff like that. I tend more towards the neuro analytical side of things. So I'm very interested in the homunculus. I'm interested in the hippocampus and the corpus, corpus callosum and how the different hemispheres of the brain enable movement, which plays directly into my coordination. So I explore those kinds of spaces. I explore how we perceive time less so than,

the actual substrate of time itself. And, you know, although I do ponder those things, I am very concerned with what's going on under the hood. You know, what's going on in the mind. I like to analyze transcripts of conversations between someone who has dementia versus someone who has Alzheimer's and listen to them talk to each other, how they understand each other. Because to me, that's the same as like two pieces of music being played at the same time.

You know, because when something makes no sense at the language level or it's incoherent, the only way that we have to try to glean anything from it is by analyzing it from a different perspective. So if I analyze it as music, like the rhythm of my voice, you see what I'm saying? Right.

these are the kinds of techniques and manners and methods of analysis that start to come into how I go about assessing genius, pursuing genius and pursuing challenges and pursuing fluidity at what I do. And so getting back to that question of Miles Davis and Kenny G again, we're starting, we're starting to get into topics that form the substrate of analysis. These are the

All these topics are the components of a platform of analysis through which I ponder the event horizon of music and musicians. So...

Like Lex Luthor said to Otis in Superman, you know, there's some people who can swerve. Some people can movement. Some people can look at the contents of a bubble gum wrapper and figure out the secrets of the universe. You know what I'm saying? So that's the thing. So if we want to,

pejoratively what call Kenny G a bubblegum rapper but yet actually I know you didn't I'm not accusing you of that all right just saying yeah I'm just saying but so many people normally do this is why I'm the reason I just folks at home the reason I chose Kenny G was that he was accessible I agree and just like bubblegum

People would argue that his music is bubblegum compared to a filet mignon or a funeral. Well, where I was going next with that is that if I think about two records of Miles, Bitches Brew versus Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew was pretty challenging, even though it was trying to be a little bit more in the rock idiom. Kind of Blue, despite the fact that it is

unbelievable musicianship was inviting and it became so iconic because it worked at so many different levels. It didn't intrinsically tell me, you know, a bug off kid, this is for experts only. It said, this is the highest level of musicianship and it's going to work in a way that you can put it on without having to, you know, just,

break your head over it. When I think about Art Tatum, when I used to put the needle onto my vinyl Art Tatum albums, I would only do it if I was in some place to receive the brilliance of this person that I could not possibly understand. He was playing so fast and so technically at such a different level. I mean, would it be fair to say that many pianists consider Art Tatum

you know, the absolute, maybe even the top guy ever to play jazz piano. - Sure, many would, and then there would be those-- - Who would claim that it's not that musical. - You know, go contrary to that, and that's normal. - Okay, but just, some people at home have never heard of Art Tatum at all. - At another level,

there's different times for different things and different moods to every season too. Right. You know, there's situations where Art Tatum's best would be inappropriate or counterproductive. Very few circumstances in my life do I think, wow, I really just want to hear some Art Tatum. The only situation I'm in when I really feel that for myself, and again, not as a musician, is

is when I want to remember what the human mind is capable of. And this is the great conundrum. This is the great paradox because, as we were saying, someone could hear Kenny G's silhouette, for instance, and experience profound tranquility and serendipity. They could listen to Yanni and get that.

There's people if you go to YouTube you can look in a comment and someone would say oh, he's the Mozart of our generation something like that, so Incredulity yeah is there's I'm sure of course you've heard of it the the fallacy of the incredulity fallacy Where just because it's impossible for you to find believable makes it untrue so similarly

There's only a certain threshold that classifying or dissecting validity or worth can go. And, you know, let me put it to you this way. There's a story about Charlie Parker where he was at a club and he was listening to a guy play that was to everyone else's opinion, you know, really weak, but Charlie Parker was like really into checking it out. And, um,

he was able to hear things inside of what that guy was doing or what that guy was going for that gave him ideas. And I think when I was first starting out with rock jazz, that was something that I experienced in a different kind of way, where when I first started hearing some of these young bands and I would hear some of their live shows on the internet at that time on YouTube, um,

I would think to myself, man, this doesn't really sound that great, but the people are loving it. Yeah. And so then that caused me to have a different thought process about, hmm, maybe there's other aspects that are in play that connect to people's enjoyment of things. And so, you know, it really called some things into question. You know, it really caused me to think about things from multiple perspectives and, you

basically threw me into the ocean suddenly. It's just like what we see in politics, where you can feel really strongly about a particular thing, then you can find out that there's others that feel, even potentially for the exact same reasons that you feel strongly about a thing,

for those exact same reasons, they feel the exact opposite thing. And it can be a very incredulous sort of kind of situation. - Well, I bring up this example of Dolly Parton writing this brilliant song, Jolene. And if you look at the lyrics, they're incredibly tight and economical and conveying so much more through implication than they even state explicitly.

Jack White heard the song recorded with the white stripes, turned it into a pre-murder ballad singing the female song from a male in a male voice. And Dolly Parton, I believe, wrote him a letter saying, you may understand something about guitar, but you understand nothing about women. But I think the joke was on her that she'd written such a brilliant song that she didn't realize that it was now approachable from a completely different angle that she hadn't

had the last word on her own song. So there are all of these weird... And that reminds me of the difference between Newtonian physics and model versus Einstein's physics and models and, you know, the quantum theory and things of that nature, how I might be misstating this, correct me if I'm wrong, that classical physics start to break down at the quantum level.

You would say that classical physics is recoverable from the deeper model, but only as an approximation to the true physics within a regime. But nobody has thrown away Newtonian physics because of Einstein, because where it works, you don't need the extra Einsteinian perspective. Now...

That was an amazing statement. Did you trap me in something? No, you just said something cool, though. You just said something that blows the whole thing open very nicely. Tell me. Well, we don't need necessarily X. We don't need to discard X in this location, or we don't necessarily need to bring in Y to this location. So we can substitute...

Art Tatum for Rachmaninoff. Yeah. We can algebraically plug in Kenny G. Miles. We can plug in whichever artists or things that we want to in a thing and have that same exact dichotomy of this works in this particular space. Eric, I totally agree. You see where I'm going with that? So similarly-

Let's just say people want to have a romantic evening. But Eric, look, there is an aspect of this that I'm fighting, which you're making a very deep point that whatever moves you, whether it's the way the performer looks or the feel of the evening, there is the total effect on the audience and the listener from having been present at a performance.

There is also something which I can't get escape, which is you're just at a different level than just about anybody I ever meet. And we can play around with that. And, you know, I play a little bit of piano. I know when I'm being when I'm in the presence of greatness and you are at a different level than almost anybody I've ever met. And you don't have to.

Say anything back, but it's an uncomfortable thing to hear. We can talk about the fact that who knows, maybe Taylor Swift is as musically interesting as Miles Davis. It's a reasonable. That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying. Okay. Let's look at it from a different perspective. Another perspective. Let's look at it from a DJ perspective. All right.

What is a DJ's job? A DJ's job, one of the jobs of a DJ is to curate and present music for people for a particular occasion to elicit either a certain response or to provide an atmosphere that the venue or the client is interested in. Now, if we take that down to a microcosmic level inside of our own head,

Take it to the piano, for instance. Take it to these instrumental scenarios. Each note that I decide to play in that nanosecond, in that microsecond that I decide to play it, that's the same as me DJing. That note is a track. Now, imagine how many notes that you would hear in the average performance and then

In my case, I'm going to play a zillion notes, right? Yeah. So then that's a zillion tracks that I've dropped in a particular moment or a particular session. So I'm trying to get into how mental processes are uniform, whether it's at a hyper slow speed or a hyper fast speed. The same process is there. So this conversation that we're having is,

might seem nebulous or maybe even evasive on my part or vague in my part or non-committal or something like that. No, I should tell people that in general when you and I talk, what I get is a time release understanding of your points over the next three or four days as they finally make sense to me. So I'm going to challenge my audience. I told them at the beginning of this show that I would never spoon feed them

You are a more challenging person to talk to because, quite frankly, your perspective is just richer and you speak in an unusual fashion. And I, quite frankly, it takes me days to understand what conversation we just had usually. Well, I appreciate the accolades and I love you too, Eric.

I really love you. I admire what you've done for us. And I'm going to blow people's mind by just letting you be you. But it is important to know that these levels of being exist. And that's part of why the show is called The Portal, is that you are in touch with something that most people have no ideas even available. Well, I will say that I do find inspiration having recovered from heavy depression and heavy panic attacks, even mentally.

sort of debilitating ones that it's inspiring for me to try to share perspectives that hopefully some people could use to get a different angle on their sufferings. Say like when I talk about some of these things or when I answer your questions, a certain sort of type of way, some of these techniques, some of these ways that I'm managing myself,

Also helped me manage stress. Helped me manage depression. Helped me manage panic attacks. And you've had anger. I've seen anger in you. Certainly, yeah. Anger control, things of that nature. Fury, rage. And it also helps me get a higher chess rating, too. Because, well, think about The Godfather for a moment. Remember how the James Caan character, Sonny, ran out the house because Carlo was...

you know, he was being super aggressive to his sister. But then the bad guys realized, oh, that's the way to get him out there because he'll jump on that. And so then they manipulated. Got him at the toe. Yeah, they manipulated his anger. They manipulated one aspect that was predictable about him and they manipulated that to get out there. So similarly, I think within ourselves, there are certain weak spots or different things that can manipulate us whether we want to or not into being

bad situations or whether it's a micro bad situation or macro bad situation. And so it's important to develop techniques to manage those kinds of things. Ergo, Bach's well-tempered clavier. So I always wondered why, because growing up as a kid, I was like, why is it called well-tempered? What does that mean? I only know one kind of temper. Well, anyway, all of these particular devices and techniques and responses all play to

trying to find the most accurate answer and find the most accurate way to approach a situation. And that's a very musical thing. How do we approach this? We see it in chess too. How do we approach this position? It's your move. You've got to make a move. The clock's ticking.

How do we approach this? You can see it in screenwriting. Okay, I've got this idea. I want to have this character save the world. How do we approach this? Okay, I'm at the piano. The people are waiting for the next tune. Okay, I've got this idea. I'm playing something with my left hand, and I've got this idea that I want to bring out. I've got this energy that I'm feeling. I've got this inspiration that

but how do I approach it? How do I bring this thing into existence, existential reality, aesthetic reality? How do I do this? Intentions oftentimes are not enough. It has to match up with execution. That's when we start to get into the conversation of levels. Now, again, it can become a debated and subjective thing

And that particular stalemate, getting back to the Kenny G, Miles Davis thing. Yeah. That particular stalemate only gets broken by something objective. When we're faced with subjectivity that seems endless. Yeah. Then that stalemate gets broken by the simple question of, OK, who's going to pay for it?

Ultimately, so who's going to hire Miles Davis? Who's going to hire Kenny G? Now, that can get to the lament that you were referring to earlier in the big picture. Well, then you have these problems of like the comedian's comedian can't get hired, but all the people who can get hired look to that person and they say, that's the guy who's really got it going on. This is the confusion about this. Now, the thing quite, you know, I'm just going to over, you're an overwhelming presence. I'm going to try to overwhelm you right back. Okay.

One of the things that I love about your playing is that you're playing at this incredibly technical level. It's so inventive, but you bring so much soul and so much showmanship and the branding, the whole thing is going on. Whatever layer of the stack I want to plug into, it's available to me. If I want to just have

the most beautiful tunes, you're providing that. If I want to see something new and innovative, it's happening. And what I've seen is, you know, and I, this is a little bit off color. It's like you make love to a room of 3000 people at a time and everybody's locked in there. Everybody's in the pocket. Everybody's feeling the groove and we're thinking and we're feeling at different levels and

I think maybe one of my mistakes here is that I need to get you in front of the piano first, have you play us some stuff, and then when we talk about these levels, I'm not going to be quite as back-footed. I probably shouldn't have done the Kenny G thing just because people will infer that I meant something from it that I didn't, but so be it. I disagree with you. I think that it was perfect. I think that it's actually a spectacular performance.

because it's really going to be a type of provocative and easily recognizable distinction. - Maybe people will talk it through, yeah. - Well, yeah, I mean, it gets back to one of the other points that you were making with regards to distinction. How do we tell things apart? So we have to use things that are very distinct in order for us to have a distinction in the conversation. I mean, that's the same thing that happens in great film.

If your premise or your opening part of your film lacks a strong enough of a distinction about a situation, that particular lackage, deficiency is going to haunt the film the whole time. You know, the premise of Dirty Dancing, there's this professional dancer and there's this competition and he wants to win that. His partner ends up having

Super dangerous, super harmful, I guess illegal, just terrible abortion. And then there's this rich girl whose father is a doctor who saves her life, that woman's life. But now she can't dance anymore.

And so then the daughter now, who is a klutz, has to be taught how to dance so that this guy can go ahead and win the competition. But it has to happen in secret now because the father, you know, it's the plot. However, it struck me, it blew me away that such an amazingly painful, controversial topic. Right. Such as abortion. Right. You know, such an amazingly painful.

painful, excruciatingly, mind-bendingly sad topic. And divisive. Divisive. Yeah. Yet... Could propel that story. Yet this is a dance at the finale, the dance in the finale. We see that at weddings online. You can see different couples trying to do that. So when it came out in the, you know, cinematically or as far as storytelling, the power...

of such a topic that seems, what does that particular thing have to do with a dance competition? But think about it. As a screenwriter, I thought about it, if you take that out,

Then you're sitting with pen and paper and you're like, okay, well, I've got this dance competition. I've got this dancer. I've got this klutz. So the good guy, you know, the great dancer needs to teach this klutz how to dance so that he can win the competition. Now, if you replace that other scenario with multiple...

types of problems you'll find that it's hard to get something as compelling as that however that person took a heavy risk now the screenwriter was a woman so then she yeah the screenwriter is a woman and she was a mambo dancer and she was her father was a doctor and she went to country clubs and so she experienced this dickens like type of life where you know there's

Rich and poor and all these kinds of things. And I'm sure her father was warning her about the dangers of sexual activity and pitfalls of what he's seen and stuff like that. So she put that all together.

So perhaps because she had an experience with it and she's a woman that she was able to speak on those subjects so amazingly. And she had the understanding of how to bring those subjects together because she lived it. Right. You know, however, it wouldn't occur to the average person. But this is what we call genius. You know what I'm saying? That's genius. And it's lasted the test of time. But that's my whole point with why.

the whole opening and this gets back to what you're talking about when we're talking about genius and things of that nature. You did a genius thing, yet you're trying to get me

discount that or go away from that but I'm identifying you're a genius and that ties to what I was saying about how Charlie Parker would hear a guy that people would say what's he talking about but he's listening intently that's the whole point all these things come together so you've created this podcast as the example of the thing that we were talking about in the podcast

Yeah, these are wheels within wheels. Wheels within wheels. Yeah, this is universes within universes. Quantum, it all breaks down at this level, but it holds at this level. This is why we love having you over for Shabbat dinner, my friend. All that kind of thing. So you did it from the very beginning. All right. Your instinctive thing, I didn't force you to choose those names. Yeah. You naturally chose those names. All I'm doing is the same thing that I would do inside of my mind. If I get an idea-

the sensor, the filter in my mind is like, wow, that's actually pretty cool because I'm referencing all these other things. I'm seeing all this stuff. It's just like a chess game. I'm seeing the checkmate. I'm like, wow, this king is positioned over here. Okay, I've got to do this in such a way that by the time I'm going to spring this trap...

He doesn't even see that that subtle move he made actually provided an opening for him. Well, the funny thing is I think I chose Kenny G, if I recall correctly, because I think I remember hearing that he had actually been an innovator with some circular breathing technique and that he was somebody who was...

seen as being middle of the road, but actually a good deal above that in musicianship. So I think I had some different process. I wish it was that I had some super clever idea, but it was probably only one or two moves deep. But thank you for saying... It still functions perfectly. Because through dancing, I get to dance with you, so you get to...

do what Miles did to my Herbie Hancock move. - And just like in Dirty Dancing, he had to take what she was doing and from what I've understood about dancing in that particular format, it's the man's role traditionally to showcase the female.

Yeah. He's more of basically a pole, you know, a static figure that's showcasing all the things that she can do. That's what makes a good male dance partner. I don't know how things work as far as, you know, how we're identifying and, you know, on political roles these days. However, I think traditionally that's kind of how it works. There's a beautiful aspect to this concept that.

healthy male-female relations in a heterosexual context have to do with passing power back and forth. And so the idea is that he might have the responsibility of leading, which people will say, well, that's an oppressive act. But then if the idea is, no, but it's not just that I'm leading. My role is also to become the substrate to showcase your abilities. Right.

These kinds of dynamics have broken as we've gotten very simplistic in saying, well, that's power, that's oppression, and not recognizing that these things are part of an interwoven whole.

So the idea is that if I evaluate myself as a podcaster and I'm just thinking about myself and I'm not thinking about the dynamic of the conversation, because I'm just learning this. This is like I'm eight episodes in or something like that. Yeah, it's a question of I need to learn more yes and because of the improvisational idiom that podcasting is. Right, and improvisation is...

is everywhere, everyone's doing it. Each word we speak is improvised. We're drawing from a vocabulary. We're putting concepts and ideas to sound. We're utilizing these instruments and we're bringing out energy and we're moving things around to create a type of movement, progression. And these are all the things that get depicted in art all over the place. So a lot of times it's very easy to

find genius or brilliances, the hard part can be after you've managed to identify it, accurately that is, to stay with it and then bring in enough tradition or enough substantiation, further demonstrate why that thing is genius. That's been my mission in this particular conversation. I thought... Fantastic.

pivoting between the Kenny G and the Miles Davis element was brilliant and it provided such a great foundation for the conversation because we could have gone we can go further we can talk about how Kenny G racially is very interesting in fact that was one of the things yeah well that was one of the things that inspired me as Elu was the idea that

There was a huge number of black people that really got into this guy playing soprano saxophone. They were really into it and they made him rich, you know, much to the consternation of many black jazz musicians who couldn't understand how a white musician like that could get such loyalty and money. I know nothing about this.

From do you have an answer as to why target demographic? Well, because some things transcend, quote, quote, color. It is what it is. Some things transcend that for different reasons, for different reasons. So part of Elu was also an experiment because I was thinking, well, that's interesting. What if I tried that in reverse? What if I.

A quote unquote black guy from a murder capital from Camden, New Jersey. Yeah. Look it up, folks. Camden, New Jersey. There's a Rolling Stone article called Apocalypse, New Jersey. The sad story of Camden to get a sense of where I'm from. I'm native of that place. What would happen if I, who has spent my life learning Miles Davis, learning Art Tatum, learning all of this traditional culture,

"black" music, what if I learned how to play the Rolling Stones? What if I learned how to play Nirvana? What if I learned how to play that stuff? Because when I was doing the traditional thing, I won the biggest competition in jazz. I got a full scholarship. - It was the Thelonious Monk competition. - Yeah, I won the Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition. I had also gotten a full scholarship to Manhattan School of Music, which I graduated Dean's List.

All of these types of accolades. I toured the world with Wynton Marsalis. But I couldn't get a record deal, which is always... I mean, when I talked about your anger, I couldn't get a record deal. I was so flabbergasted to hear this. And then the idea that you figured out this hack...

- Right, and that's what we're getting into here. So when we talk about Kenny G, Miles Davis, it goes deep into a lot of aspects for me because I looked at him, I looked at Yanni, I looked at Liberace, and I was like, wow, they have massive followings. If you took them to downtown New York's jazz scene, how distinctive would they be as far as skill level goes relative to

you know, your average college musician or post-college musician. So then that was where I got the idea to, well, one of the places that I got an idea to do an experiment. Well, what would happen if a quote unquote black guy from the hood decided to start expertly playing Sweet Home Alabama, which I ended up playing on America's Got Talent. The enigma of that, speaking of elephants in the room, right? Right.

The elephant in the room is you see this guy. I mean, sure, the average person is going to say, oh, I don't see color. Oh, wow. You're just playing Sweet Home Alabama. But, you know, I don't know. I kind of don't think so. I don't think it's just that. But either way, that's my point. So I sought to see if the same thing could be true in reverse. And sure enough, it did happen.

Now, I didn't write my own music the way Kenny G wrote, like, silhouette. I didn't use drum beats and things of that nature. And so there's relativity as far as, you know, degrees of success with that. However, I did achieve a very... Okay, but, like, even in this situation, just to riff off of it. Sure. You know this movie, Victor Victoria, the story of a woman playing a man playing a woman, a female impersonator? Yeah.

Right. Right. Okay. So you're telling me when you do satisfaction, right.

that you're actually swerving and feeding the Rolling Stones back to white audiences, potentially a very visibly black man. On the other hand, there's this beautiful video of Keith Richards taking a part in dissecting satisfaction. And he says, you want to know what it is? And he starts playing it as like a Mississippi blues on the guitar. And so you realize that he took this riff from

you know, off of the fifth, sixth, flat seven, you know, typical blues pattern, disguised it. And now you're sort of weirdly the black guy playing a white guy, playing black music, feeding it back to white audiences. And in some sense, giving this really beautiful and friendly middle finger to this whole

notion of race dividing us that we have to both note it because it does exist and it influences us no matter how much we deny it. On the other hand, it doesn't have to preoccupy us constantly and be the only thing. I always think about this race and IQ point that keeps coming up. I never see this happening among people who are deep into music because the contributions have been so profound from everywhere that it just is like

Why are you exploring these ideas that clearly don't capture who has contributed and how much has been done? For me, chess has been a great liberator or a great questioner of some of these more, quote, race-driven concepts because I learned chess from basically black street hustlers in Washington Square Park.

You prefer speed chess. Yeah, Blitz guys. And so they had great admiration and aspiration towards some of the Russian GMs. And just to hear these men who are the epitome of soul, the epitome of, quote, blackness, flavor, all of that stuff, rhythm, all of that stuff, to hear them muse about Capablanca or to pull out a game...

or Tao or some of these great masters to go over those games and say, well, see, he's a killer here. No, hold on, hold on. Wait a minute now. We've got to watch the bishop. Watch the bishop. Boom. Okay. Okay. He saw that. He saw me coming, huh? Like just all of the snappy patter. I remember getting into it about –

- Conversation in Washington Square Park about Tigran Petrosian, the chess player. And these guys were convinced that somehow he hadn't been understood for the soul that he was bringing to the game. - Right, so for me to get around that was very striking because at that time I was really starting to feel my depression was coming in, my panic was coming in because in my thoughts I'm like, wow, I've won the Monk competition.

I've towed the line, full scholarship, came from Camden, full scholarship, graduated, all this stuff. But the powers that be don't find me, I guess, marketable enough to have me be a representative of their agency, you know, in the form of a recording artist. So I really started to have some really mind-bendingly rageful and, you know,

Things going on in my head and and I noticed that there were some other artists quote unquote white artists that were starting to experiment with rock in the jazz lane. They were getting jazz record deals, but they were working with rock concepts overtly questioning does jazz have to swing and things of that nature that me from the Wynton Marsalis.

purist background and aspiration, I would never question does jazz have to swing, right? So there was a lot of anger starting to build up from a couple of different places, from

you could say a political aspect and also from a personal aspect because I'm like, I can't even get a record deal here. Like how good do I have to play? What do I have to prove here? And ultimately who are you guys to judge whether I'm worthy of a record deal or, you know, it kind of got into these kind of simplistic and superficial anger, which diminish. And this is one of the reasons to be blunt about it. Since I heard you play first, I don't know,

close to 10 years ago, but maybe in person a little bit less. I've often thought I have to be promoting this guy, not because he's not going to get famous on his own, but because he shouldn't have to say what doesn't need. It just doesn't need to be said. I, when I watch you in a room, um,

Everyone knows something amazing has happened. And if I could just tell one story from our personal life, we were having dinner, my wife and I, with Sam Harris. And he was fading in San Francisco. And I said, hey, do you want to go over and hear a friend of mine play a little piano? It didn't sound very inviting. I wasn't going to tell him anything more. So he says, you know, fine if it's quick. So we get him over to this place. And you're there. We go over and there's this old beat up Steinway. And there's a crowd of people who are sitting around waiting to hear you play.

And this one woman will not be quiet. She's just not calming down. She's on her phone. And you say something like, hey, something amazing is about to happen. You're about to have a life altering experience. You need to be in the right frame of mind. And everybody in the room who knew you knew what was about to happen. And everyone in the room who didn't know you said, what? Nothing. Nothing. Nobody talks like this.

The room quieted down. I've never seen Sam Harris so deep in meditation. He was, his whole world was like rewoven with the music you were playing. And he was just speechless at the end of it. And we all stayed up late into the night. There is something in this which is, it doesn't need to be said. I don't know why...

It's so hard to get through because the music does speak for itself. But I think it goes back to your just wheels within wheels curation. One of the things I wanted to do, and you were one of the people I had in mind when I started this podcast,

was I wanted to show people what is possible in their lives. And I'll be honest with you, you have two separate effects on me. Sometimes I hear you and I just sit down at the piano and I want to play, play, play, play and get better. And other times I don't want to touch it. I don't want to look at it because I know I'm never going to be at that level. And it is difficult and uncomfortable to work with genius and to see it in a field in which you're just playing and you're never going to aspire to be at the top of what you might be able to achieve.

That particular night, I know that you're paraphrasing or recalling. I know how I get when I feel as though there's a person that's violating things for others. So I don't recall my exact words. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't call attention to myself in the sense of, hey, I'm about to do something amazing tonight.

In that sense, if I did, it wasn't from a narcissistic standpoint. No, Eric, it wasn't. It was from a... She thanked... I don't know if you remember this. She came up to me and she said, he was absolutely right. That said...

I just want to kind of clarify that because I don't want to create the impression of a naked, narcissistic, egotistical kind of thing. That's not my point. You did say something like that, but it was the feeling of it. For me, it's just that she was ruining a situation. You've got Sam Harris there. You've got people there. And she's bringing a scenario that ultimately no one else was going to sort of deal with it.

And so I kind of making a choice for everybody. And then this, you see this. So then I had to make a choice as well. This is the thing. How often do you have a conductor who stops a performance of an orchestra, you know, of 50 people because somebody's cell phone goes off, right? This is now a common feature. We don't make the room for opening our hearts. And I think to be blunt about it,

I'm sorry if I told the story in a way that didn't convey it, but what actually happened was that we all did have a communal experience that we're still talking about. I can tell you that there are a small number of performances. The time I saw Prince open for the Rolling Stones, the time that I saw a clarinet player play,

Blow Dizzy Gillespie offstage that I'd never heard of named Tony Scott There are a very small number of things that actually just change your life And this is one of those that was one of those nights on the other side. I've come to understand over time mm-hmm what aspects of my playing and also what aspects of my personal behavior or presentation

have been detrimental to my progression in certain aspects of the business. So I also want to make sure that I bring in that aspect too, because it's very immature also to come with a Knights Templar kind of perspective. We've seen that and we've heard that. And that also is not brilliant because the fact of the matter is they're

many reasons and many contributing factors, many dynamics that play into careers, into helium, into buoyancy and the like. And so over time, I've come to understand a lot more about how energy works and how I've been very good at

transforming the energy in a room and bringing people to these types of ecstasies. However, there was another aspect that I was less concerned with. Now, I think that because of the panic attacks and the depression and stuff like that, I was a lot less sensitive to it and the anger as well. However, as time has gone by, I've gotten better. I've improved my technique. I've grown through it.

and I've found ways to harness anger and panic attacks and depression and bring it into the music in a powerful way and in a technical way, it's caused me to have even more vision. And my chest rating has improved. So I'm able to analyze myself and realize just because I could raise the roof on a place didn't necessarily mean

provide a blank check for me to get a record deal. They're looking at other aspects and those aspects are important too. Like, see this is, and this gets again back to the Kenny G, Miles Davis construct, the model, because one thing that I didn't understand is

If I'm going to work with a record label, then I'm making an implicit statement there. I'm saying that I want to be a part of their family. I'm saying that I want to represent them at multiple levels. Now, I was coming from a very uncompromising place. I was coming from a very narrow, we could say, place. I also was sub-aware sometimes.

how I sounded in certain aspects. These days, I've come to understand, as I've gotten so much better, I've come to understand, wow, there are so many other aspects. You didn't have the luxury back then. I mean, if I can be honest about it. Sure.

I'm not really ready to be in front of the world. It's very terrifying having a podcast because I don't have all my stuff sorted out, but nobody does. Nobody does. And one of the things back then is you were, you were a terrifying guy because you were completely uncompromising, you know, and I get in there and I try to have a musical conversation with you and you're very patient with me, but inevitably, you know, it shows the levels that we're at and,

I could see how exacting you were. You have been driving yourself. You were in a competition with you alone, so far as I can tell at the piano. And you've been pushing yourself farther and farther. And I love the fact that you're getting the recognition and that it's giving you the luxury to look at yourself. And as your mental state goes up, the vision expands and your chest rating improves. But we also have to honor that.

that it may be that it is as a developmental stage and just to turn it back to the Kenny G Miles thing that we want to shed where we were. I was in a narrow place. I was in an angry place, but sometimes that stuff is like colostrum. It's needed to get going and you have to go through those periods where you've got that anger and furor because

Because that's what causes things to progress and that advanced your story quite the it's quite the paradox that I'll have to concede that that that's very true Had I not been so angry had I not had those issues rock would have never appealed to me because What rock enables one to express? Yeah, I wouldn't have had that to express the lyrics of rock and

are very different from the lyrics that you'll find in a Gershwin or a jazz tune. And it was those lyrics that provided me some escape

From the literature saying, screw you to Neil Young and screw you to the governor of Alabama in the song. Right. And to your point about swing, the word rock transition from rock and roll where rock is a rocking motion. It's a verb to rock where it's Led Zeppelin and it's just a giant stone edifice and it doesn't move. Right. And the same question comes up.

with jazz. But let me ask you, can I lure you to the piano and sort of explore some of these ideas with me at the keyboard and give my listeners a taste of what we're talking about? Yep. Fantastic. ... ... ... ... ...

Yeah, and I was also able to hear the independence of the lines and I'm assuming that is good chunk improv. It's all improv.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

♪♪ ♪♪

so

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

so

so

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

so

*music*

♪

Thank you sir.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

Thank you All right, you've been through the portal with the maestro of genius himself Mr. Eric Lewis. His name is Ilu. He's all over the internet and wherever you buy your music and come out to see him in concert I guarantee you've never seen a show quite like it.

that would be an amazing fact that you'll remember forever. Eric, thank you my friend.