Tonight, the evening of Tuesday May 12th, the President and First Lady are hosting a unique event celebrating poetry, music and the spoken word, and pianist ELEW is set to perform solo on the piano for an audience that includes the President of the United States of America: Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and an assembly of our nation’s political, artistic and cultural leaders. Binside TV recently had the pleasure of attending a live performance by ELEW at the Gates in New York City. Stay tuned to Binside TV to watch our ELEW coverage to learn more about this phenomenal artist.
Here is an excerpt from a Guardian UK review of ELEW's live performance.
You see, Lewis doesn't just play the piano. Rather he owns – pwns – it. Reaching inside the lid, he pulls and pounds at the strings, creating a magic eye pictures of sound – walls of noise that suddenly snap into focus as you realise you're actually listening to the opening bars of Evanescence's Going Under, or The Knife's Heatbeats or Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. And just as you've worked out what's going on with the strings, Lewis starts on the keys – reinventing songs you've heard many times before in ways that you'll probably never hear again. Jesus Christ, the man's so good he could cover Coldplay's Clocks and make it sound edgy and frightening and weird and brilliant. And so he did.
Pioneering a genre that fuses classic jazz with modern pop and rock, ELEW’s masterful arrangements and blistering re-interpretations have now ignited interest in the highest seats of American power, and he has been invited to lend his signature Rockjazz sound to a commemorative evening of music and poetry at the historic home of the American President. In addition to ELEW, the evening’s entertainment will include the actor James Earl Jones, the writers Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman (who are husband and wife), the jazz singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote and starred in “In the Heights.” The event, which is scheduled to begin at 7:45 p.m., will be shown live at www.whitehouse.gov. Set to unleash his thunderous harmonies on a gathering of unequaled power-players at our nation’s most sacred structure, it seems as if ELEW has finally found a platform commensurate with the ambition and intensity of his art. We are happy for ELEW's success. If you are in Washington D.C. ELEW is having an upcoming performance. We recommend you check it out and visit ELEW's blog for the latest updates.
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