Standing at the piano is amazingly rigorous and painful.” (
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The critics pan him; the jazz world ostracizes him — but the boldfaced names love him.
Eric Lewis, 37, a child prodigy pianist who won prestigious competitions and toured the world with Wynton Marsalis, has given it all up for a little Nirvana.
Instead of tickling the ivories with standards by Duke Ellington, he now rocks out to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black” for a growing base of adoring fans, including the Obamas, Leonardo DiCaprio, Donna Karan, Tea Leoni, David Duchovny, Hugh Jackman, Forest Whitaker and Gerard Butler, to name a few.
Lewis doesn’t play the piano like a normal virtuoso. He gets inside the instrument to pluck and scratch the strings, and he climbs below it to knock on the wooden frame, pulling strange and disconcerting sounds from the instrument. He performs without a bench, standing in a deep fencer’s lunge, often dressed in all black except for a pair of giant silver wristcuffs that make him appear like a knight going into battle.
Which, in a way, he is.
“The armor is a symbol of my defiance,” says the jazz defector, who goes by the name ELEW and has fought off a slew of critics who deride his self-named “Rockjazz.” The New York Times said Lewis “took overwrought tunes and bore down on them until they became more so.” The Ottawa Citizen said his “stunt” playing had nothing on Jerry Lee Lewis.
To hell with them, says Lewis. His transformation was inevitable.
A child prodigy from Camden, NJ, he first met Marsalis at one of the trumpeter’s shows when he was 13. He was invited into the band leader’s trailer, where he told Marsalis and his entourage that he liked fusion jazz pianist Chick Corea. Marsalis laughed him off. Forget about Corea, Marsalis said. Thelonious Monk, he said. Stick with the purists.
Lewis became obsessed with Monk and became a jazz purist himself. He would soon earn a full scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music and from 1996 to 2005, he was a regular in Marsalis’ touring and recording groups, as well as performing with singer Cassandra Wilson, drummer Elvin Jones and trumpeter Roy Hargrove.
In 1999, Lewis won the prestigious Thelonius Monk International Jazz Competition, which, typically, is followed by a record deal on a jazz label. But none came.
“I thought I had made my bones, but no one wanted to deal with me,” Lewis says. “Not one label approached me, not one producer, nobody. I still don’t know why.”
He figures he didn’t schmooze label execs properly. And he blames Marsalis for not helping him score a deal similar to the ones that helped his other sidemen, such as pianist Marcus Roberts and drummer Jeff Watts, turn into respected bandleaders. Marsalis would not comment.
Meanwhile, Lewis started listening to rock music, buying Linkin Park’s “Meteora” about seven years ago. It inspired him to experiment with rock songs in which he played bass, guitar and drum parts all on his piano. The roots of ELEW had been born. “I had an awakening when I heard that album,” he says. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ ”
Lewis was also dividing his time between Lincoln Center, where he played with Marsalis, and Washington Square Park, where he played chess for serious cash, losing as much as $10,000. He says it was like getting an MBA, and it inspired him to quit Marsalis’ band in 2005.
“I met a rogues’ gallery down there [in the park] and I changed a lot from that experience,” he says. “There was no subjectivity on the chessboard. Whereas in Wynton’s world, everything was so rhetorical.”
As ELEW, he played his own gigs and audiences took notice. One night at a conference he was scheduled to play, Lewis performed on the hotel’s lobby piano while Whitaker looked on. A crowd of five dozen gathered.
They did it again the second night, but this time 200 people listened, including Donna Karan. She booked Lewis for her fashion show the next week in NYC, where he was noticed by former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers, who invited him to play for the first couple.
Now ELEW travels the world playing private gigs, charity galas and high-end boutique openings, promoting his album, “ELEW: Rockjazz Vol. 1.” He says his theatrics are merely an expression of the energy buzzing around inside him.
“Standing at the piano playing like that is amazingly rigorous and painful,” Lewis says. “I do it because for years I went around the world with Wynton and would just sit there and play for hours. I needed to go to a dance club when I was done just so I could move. I was watching the years of my youth melt away while I was sitting at the piano.”