As some of you have read in an earlier post, I had the wonderful opportunity of attending the local TED event here in Atlanta. Hosted and curated by Unboundary, the TEDx Atlanta talks were a great way to, like most TED talks do,  leave you thinking for days upon end, playing in the ‘ether’ of ideas. So much so that in fact it has been two weeks since the event and I’m just now getting around to understand what I heard and writing about it in a way that readers can get what I’m talking about.

I’ll start a series of posts (starting with this one) that will talk about each of the speakers and what I heard that was so profound about each one. I will also start the posts, and end the posts the way Unboundary did, with an amazing and intoxicating performance from Eric Lewis.

Now to put Eric Lewis into words is simply impossible. I will leave it to those exceptionally more talented at writing than myself, like Shakespeare.

I don’t feel I need to labor on about his background, life, or even past work. You can find articles and reviews from the New York Times, and NPR for some of that stuff.

I want to talk about how his music hit me as being ‘profound’. I’m not talking about ‘profound’ in an academic sort of way. I am simply talking about what went off in my head when I was listening experiencing his performance.

You see as you may have read in the above articles, Mr. Lewis has left some of his Jazz brilliance and notoriety (at the top of his game) behind to what you may ask? Pop-Culture and Alternative Rock? Heresy!

But it was something about PERFORMING and the expression of the lyrics to some of these songs that he could relate to, and others could relate to also! His body became an expression of ‘your-mind-on-music’. The problem I have with Alternative Rock and Pop songs are their lack of genuine execution. I never take them for any more than face value because usually the performance or execution is nothing more than marketing for what may be brilliance in writing and expression. Therefore, I shut down. However, when Eric performs them, he breathes life into something I found irrelevant and dead. He saw beauty where I thought there was none. Through his mastery of sounds with the piano, and his ability to physically elude to emotional discourse while playing took me (and others) to a place that puts us in a powerful head-space while we stare in amazement of what we hear and see in songs that we didn’t know was there.

If I could relate the above to art it would be like this. We walk by a hundred beautiful scenes every day. Things we take for granted surround us everywhere. Oh, don’t pay attention to that, it’s just some dumb water lilies. Well, one painter let us see more than the water lilies, and took us to a place of impression and interpretation. Seeing the something in the nothing and challenging our perceptions. Well to me, Eric has done this with music. Those old grunge albums, or lame-recounted scores of new artists have new meaning now, and thanks to Eric I wont look at them the same way again.

The catch is, now that I’ve seen him live, a CD just wont do. Again, it would be like reading about a work of Monet or Renoir. You have to see it to believe it.

Thanks Eric and Unboundary for the ride!!