Unleash Your Creative Fury with ELEW
Eric Lewis, known as ELEW, is a multi-talented artist with a career that spans the worlds of music performance, composition, and film production. Eric started his music career as a jazz and concert pianist playing with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and winning the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition. Reinventing himself as ELEW, he pioneered the crossover musical techniques Rockjazz, Counterbop, and Piano Turntablism. Among many other accolades, Eric has opened for Josh Groban, produced tracks for Lil Wayne, appeared on America’s Got Talent, spoken at TED, and performed at the White House for the Obamas.
In this conversation, Chris Sparks takes you inside the mind of a musical genius as ELEW shares the strategy, mindset, and principles required to put on an epic performance. You’ll learn how to reverse-engineer a creative vision, the keys to reinvention as an artist, why preparation seeds adaptability, how to overcome perfectionism, career lessons from the world of blitz chess, and much more.
See above for video, and below for audio, resources mentioned, highlights, topics, and transcript.
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Resources Mentioned:
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
Check out previous Forcing Function Hour episodes.
Topics:
(02:46) ELEW’s business Bible and the origin of Rockjazz
(13:22) Radical reinvention
(28:05) Zugzwang vision
(46:57) Mastering the fine art of learning and enduring
(52:22) The creation of Counterbop
(01:00:29) Performance preparation & zen vigilance
Conversation Transcript:
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Hello from Las Vegas. I am honored to introduce today's guest, Eric Lewis. Eric Lewis, known as ELEW, is a multi-talented artist with a career that spans the worlds of music performance, composition, and film production. Eric started his career as a jazz and concert pianist playing with Wynton Marsalis, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. After winning the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition, ELEW shocked the jazz world by embarking on a rock-influenced solo career, and a new genre he invented called "Rockjazz." Since then, Eric has wowed many audiences with his unconventional playing style. He's opened for Josh Groban, produced tracks for Lil Wayne, appeared on America's Got Talent, spoken at Ted, and performed at the White House for the Obamas.
Now, Eric has made two very notable innovations on the piano: Counterbop and Piano Turntablism. Both techniques involve simultaneously executing two independent melodies. So imagine he's playing two different yet recognizable songs at the same time, kind of like a DJ would, but on the piano.
Now, I lived with Eric for five years, so I'm a little bit biased, but I think he's one of the top five pianists alive today. It's easy to dismiss someone like Eric as a total savant, just an outlier, that his talents can't be replicated. Now, he certainly has immense, innate talent, but much of his success is very hard-earned, and I suspect that you'll find the way that his mind works to be quite interesting.
Now, ELEW and I are about three stories apart at the Encore Hotel. We are both participating in the World Poker Tour World Championships, Eric as a performer and myself as a player. So I ran into Eric and asked him to join the show today to share some insights on how to unleash our creative fury.
Thanks for joining me today, Eric.
ELEW (02:20): Hey, Sparks. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chris (02:24): It's a complete honor. So many places we can jump in. I think an interesting one is the creation of Rockjazz. So take us through you—You're a little bit fed up with the rigidity of the jazz world, you wanna go your own way, and you decide, "Hey, what is the thing that only I can do?" Talk to us about how Rockjazz came to be.
ELEW (02:46): There is a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. And that book blew my mind, because when I was experiencing all that frustration and consternation and a sense of trappedness, it was that book that essentially became my business Bible. And so there were about three rules in that book that I executed, and achieved a lot of success from my execution of those rules. Rule number one was, take a look at what everyone is doing around you that is similar to what you'd like to be like.
Now, this is all gonna explain the Rockjazz question that you asked. It's all comprehensive. So number one, I looked around and I said, "Well, who's doing what I would like to do?" So I noticed Yanni—who is an instrumentalist that doesn't sing—so I noticed Yanni, Liberace, Kenny G. What do they all have in common? One word names. So, step one was, "Okay, I wanna change my name from Eric Lewis to ELEW." And so that was step one. Number two, it says first impressions are super powerful. And so being number one or known as number one at something is super powerful. So then I said to myself, "Okay, how do I apply that? Can I say I'm the number one piano player?” Well, I could, but there would be way too many people arguing that point, whether it was true or not. So I said, "Nah, that's gonna invite too much controversy, and I won't be able to hold that ground." So then I look at the next rule, which says, "If you can't say that you're number one at something, create something that you can say you're number one at." And that gave me the idea of coming up with a genre brand name that I could say, "I am number one at this. 'Cause I just coined it."
And so then began the process of me trying to figure out, "Okay, well, what will I call what I do?" And so I thought about Power Piano, Power Jazz, I thought about all these different things. How am I gonna spell ELEW? It looked weird to me at first. And all those dissonances were going on. ELOO, ELU, like all these different things. And so finally I settled upon ELEW, all caps, just like YANNI. And then I settled upon Rockjazz because I was simply inverting a term that had been out there called jazz-rock, which kind of implied soft-hard. But my version of rock-infused jazz was gonna be a lot harder edge. I wasn't using jazz as a way to escape the difficulties of rock, so I called what I did Rockjazz.
There's some other reasons for this, too, but they're sort of salacious. But either way, this one worked out as a perfect answer for that question. So, Rockjazz. So that's how I got it. And then I was able to then say, "I am the number one Rockjazz pianist." And it works. And that was my wedge, that was my threading of the needle, and everything worked like a charm. "ELEW." Sounds exotic. It's a one-word name, it's all caps. What's our reference point? Oh, it must be like YANNI. So all the psychological triggers were there, all the priming was there. And what does he do? It's called "Rockjazz," so it gave people a location for their thoughts and way to categorize me, et cetera.
So it started off, there was a little bit of difference, there was—How, ELEW? What's that? And then people somehow —The collective consciousness suddenly accepted it. "Oh yeah, that's ELEW. What's he playing?" "Rockjazz?" "Rockjazz, what's that? Rockjazz. Oh, yeah." So the human brain is a wonderful thing.
Chris (06:53): I heard this great quote yesterday that tradition is peer pressure from dead people, and this feels like a really good description of jazz, in that it's a very rigid definition from people who are no longer around that the music must look and sound like this. So talk about that decision to leave what had already been a very established, successful career following in the footsteps of legends, having theirs, their sign-off. This decision to embark into the unknown, go on your own and start to create your own thing and essentially turn your back on a lot of the people who had signed off on you so far. What was that decision like, and you know, how did that process come to be?
ELEW (07:40): The process came to be in this way: I won the biggest competition in jazz, and I was not given a record deal. And I didn't quite understand that. So that was heartbreak number one. Heartbreak number two was noticing that it was okay with the industry, the jazz industry, the music industry, the jazz industry, that I was turning thirty and nothing was happening for me in terms of being anything more than Wynton Marsalis's pianist for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Now, under normal circumstances, many people would be very happy with that. I was a bit more ambitious. I didn't come to New York just for that to be what I wanted. So those of us who are a little more ambitious, a little more entrepreneurial or greedy, whatever you wanna call it, then there's a price to pay for that. Either way, I had so many things that I wanted to do creatively, and I felt that I should be a little more supported in those endeavors at that time, and when I was not supported in those endeavors I found that to be upsetting, and I also noticed that there were individuals that were being given those record deals, that were being given that support, were given that love and care.
Now, I have a lot more maturity now, and a lot more business understanding at the executive level to understand why those choices were being made, but I didn't at that time. And so I said, "You know, I'm going to have to stick a knife between my teeth like a pirate and climb up this rope and get it done my way." I tried it their way, I got the full scholarship, I graduated from conservatory on the Dean's List, I've won the biggest competition in the world, I'm playing with the top, most prestigious jazz artists in the world, and none of this is moving the needle for me as a personal artist. I'm running out of time. I gotta make a move.
And so I hit that fork in the road, I hit that threshold point, and so I left, and I started reading a lot of special forces autobiographies. Navy Seals, Green Berets—I went to war. I thought about the idea that Navy Seals are invisible because they'll carve their own path to a strike point as opposed to using the standard paths, that way they're ghosts, they're unobserved. You can't mine or booby trap the whole jungle. You don't know where they're coming from. So I said, "Ah, I will carve my own path into the strike point that I'm looking for."
And then I sought to arm myself with the information, the tools needed. And that's where The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding came in. I got the fighting spirit from Musashi and Sun Tzu and Machiavelli's The Prince and the autobiographies of these special forces members, but the actual business tool I applied rigidly was The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. And so that's more of the anatomy of the psychological and emotional process, the sort of junction point, the sort of foundation that led to that decision.
Actually, I'll give you one more example. I was in Buenos Aires, I was in Argentina. I had just completed a long world tour. We started in Moscow, and for three months we were touring, and it finally ended in Buenos Aires. Argentina. World Cup. And so I remember looking out into Orchestra Hall with my Brooks Brothers suit on and thinking—Kanye West had just popped up in the news for some antics, and I was thinking, "Wow." You know, "My life is melting away as I keep trying to satisfy this Louis Armstrong, Dixieland kind of scenario here. But I want more. More is out there to be had. I could be having a little more fun than this, with the music. Look at this guy, Kanye."
And so somewhere in there, I started asking these questions, and so it was a combination of what I perceived as betrayals from the industry, what I perceived as others kind of setting my threshold and kinda trying to tell me, "This is what you should be satisfied with," that sort of thing, and just kinda looking outside of the fish tank and saying, "Well, wow. There are other ways that this is getting done, so let me take a chance on myself at thirty. If it doesn't work out, I can always get back in here, you know, whatever, but I need to take a shot on my own. I need to take a shot on myself. I need to bet on myself really hard, really quick. Let's see what happens."
Chris (12:32): There seems to be a really important inflection point in the career of anyone who goes on to outsize success is they recognize that things are going well, but I'm trapped in a local maximum here, and I'm starting to hit diminishing marginal returns, that I'm going to need to leave this really good place, and it's gonna feel like a large step back in the short run, it might upset some people, at the risk of some public embarrassment, but that ripping this Band-Aid off is the only that way I have a chance of getting up to the real mountain, rather than this nice hill that I'm sitting upon. And you completely reinvented yourself. You took off the Brooks Brothers suit, you stood up, you came at them hard. What have you learned about reinventing yourself?
ELEW (13:22): What I've learned is that it connects to something that Lee Iacocca once told me. I ended up hanging out with Lee Iacocca. Through a strange series of events, he and I became friends. And we were watching the Orange Bowl at a villa in Beverly Hills. A Chrysler commercial came on, and he said, "Oh yeah, I designed that." It was kinda surreal. And I said, "Well, I'm just kind of getting started on my own here, and you're this titan, so I don't really have the greatest of questions to ask you, I wish I did, but if you could give me some bit of advice, something to be aware of, what would you tell me, what can you tell me?" He said, "Change."
And so that is the core of reinvention. Change. Now, in the Five Rings of Musashi, he talks about the law of radical change. The samurai, Musashi. The law of radical change, which has to do with this particular sword stroke. But the idea is that if you make a radical change, you actually control the world. The world has to change also. That's the law of radical change. You make a radical change, you're actually forcing the world to change too. That's what I discovered about reinventing myself. That's the fun of reinventing oneself. And the more technically accurate and sound one is at reinventing themselves, and radical with it, the more radical a result one will get. So I went from the Brooks Brothers suit playing more Dixieland or some more experimental jazz, or whatever, dealing with Wynton Marsalis's world, I went from that to setting the roof on fire at the Sundance Film Festival, hanging out with the guy who played—Bill Pullman, the President from Independence Day, as he's introducing me to, "Hey, man, I want you to meet this new kid, this new young actor, his names Chris Pine. He's going to be the new Captain Kirk." And then he and I became friends. And there's Bono walking into the room.
And you know, I started raising the roof at the TED Talks, and you know, all this and that. So that's how radical a change I made, and that's how radical a result I got from the world. Self-reinvention certainly is a superpower. It's certainly something that we all can do, we just have to understand how to be radical enough with it to get the result we're looking for.
Chris (16:05): I love that. Yeah. We're all changing, but it's very incremental. It needs to be a complete transformation. Probably not being radical enough, and that if we change the world is forced to change along with it. We start to hold the cards.
I wanna dig in on this theme of reinvention a little bit. One of the major areas that you reinvented yourself was your stage presence. So, concert pianist, you're wearing your suit, you're very quiet, maybe introduce the song. You're playing as very much part of an ensemble, you know, more subdued. Change that to your performance style now, which has continued to evolve, where you're standing up, you're completely facing the audience as you unleash yourself on the instrument, and we just see you almost as a channel for all of the emotion that's coming from you to your fingers. We see it all over your face, very intentionally so. Talk to me about these elements that you discovered as a solo performer. I know all of this are all combined, these elements, as part of a unique, memorable performance.
ELEW (17:29): Well, it reminds me of chess. It reminds me of when you sacrifice a big piece, like a rook, for a pawn, say, on your opponent's king side. You now have to try to play this game minus a rook, however, it stimulates creativity, it creates a lot of options and possibilities, because the opponent typically is operating under the principle that no one's gonna give up a rook for a pawn. So similarly, when I got rid of the piano bench and started standing, I noticed that that immediately and radically separated me from every other piano player's brand in the world, because nobody does that for a full show. I created that brand. And the cameras and the paparazzi noticed it, and so click, click, click, click, click, click. And it's like, "Okay, cool." And then I noticed that, you know, at first I used to wear a little bracelet, a small bracelet, but then I noticed that in the pictures it didn't show up, even though it was beautifully intricate from my personal eye, it didn't show up on the cameras. And then it dawned on me, "What if I wear armor? How cool would that be? Another radical addition."
And so I began wearing armor, and thus got that brand going on as the guy who stands and wears armor. And then I started getting people making custom armor for me, et cetera. And the wild hair, and of course it's—Another piece was, you know, this is the black guy that's playing Sweet Home Alabama. That's playing rock. That's really radical too. We would expect him to do some hip hop or some R&B, but he's playing metal, playing Breaking Benjamin.
Chris (19:22): Metallica, Linkin Park, yeah.
ELEW (19:23): Yeah. Yeah. He's going screamo, emo, all that. So what's with this? Again, tactical, radical change. I've got all this classical technique, but if I play church-based music that's R&Bish, that stuff’s not even designed to feature a European classical technique, for the most part. Harmonically, and stuff like that. So the rock gave me the type of musical genre that had enough aggression built into it to capacitate the amount of aggression that I felt. I could go inside the piano and make those metallic, scary sounds, like Pantera, Dimebag, you know what I'm saying? And so it opened me up. So again, I had to make a radical choice, because now, like you said, I have to deal with being excoriated by the jazz press and, you know, all these sort of kind of things, but at the same time being highly embraced by those who are far more wired into the pop world and the business world, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think that that's the neighborhood of what you're asking. I might have drifted off. Was that the spirit of what you were asking?
Chris (20:35): That's exactly right. Yeah. I'm looking to demonstrate—More than anyone else I know, I mean, I know a lot of people who read books, but you read and really think very deliberately about how to apply these lessons strategically. And I said, thinking about the elements of yourself as a performer, I think there's a lot of connections to thinking about yourself in terms of your career trajectory and differentiation and path, and what are the things that only I can do, and what are the things that I can be best at and really lean into, and demonstrating that the success that you've had in your career, all of the notable names who, notably so, recognize your talent, that it all comes from this very strategic, thoughtful, deliberate place that's grounded in this chess-like strategic mind.
ELEW (21:33): I see. Yeah. Again, that's where The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, adherence to that, came up big, because I was always looking at that differentiation. I was always looking at concepts like, human beings always go for the easiest thing, the simplest thing. So once I sacrificed the rook, once I gave up jazz, which was essentially giving up all of my clout and all that stuff to this other realm where now I'm pretty old to be starting this kind of pop space—So I had to really come with something that matched up with the ease with which pop acts and pop theatrical behaviors are absorbed by the audience. And so that's where I saw a lot of deliberate changes needing to be made.
I also, by the way, had a bone to pick with the jazz community, because I noticed that there were some acts that were playing their version of rock, but getting major jazz record deals. And I was just like, "Man, I've been this big purist, yet I'm getting passed over by guys who are playing, like, Radiohead and stuff like that." I'm like, "What is this rock stuff? I don't even know what rock is, honestly." And so then that's where when I finally got my heart broken enough, I broke down and had—These kids at a masterclass told me, "Oh, you know, you should check out Linkin Park, I think you'll like it." I'm like, "Well, is it gonna be really fiery?" He's like, "Check out Linkin Park." And then I got my head blown, and then my mind blown. And that's when I saw all of these opportunities to take my technique and bear down in a solo piano way. I saw a way that I could make a rock experience out of the solo piano virtuosity. And so it was.
And so once I had that wedge, I just kept building and building and causing that wedge to get more and more radical and adding more and more to it and stacking more upon it. And so, yes, it was a very deliberate element that has, you know, grown and evolved and I've been testing it with audiences over time and just continuing to build it, very much like a chess game. Get that initiative and then you hold onto that advantage and you keep morphing it and trying to preserve it.
Chris (23:56): I love that wedge concept. This was a really big one when I was talking with Dan Dworkis on the show. So he's an emergency room doctor, trains emergency teams on essentially how do they have performance under extremely high-pressure situations, and it comes down to that, of really decomposing bets to smallest possible unit and continually iterating and double-down on those successful bets, successful experiments, as we call them here in Forcing Function. If you're making radical but small moves and if you see some result there, you know, your opponent backs down, makes a move that's suboptimal, well, you can press that advantage. And pick your metaphor, here. You're talking about competition, warfare, et cetera, a lot of success is your ability to shift and control the field of play. So bring the competition to the area where you're strongest, and the best way to do that is to create a new area that has not existed yet.
ELEW (25:01): That's highly important, because the element of time comes in there. To time, and space, which is a chess principle. Like I said, I knew that at a certain age point I wouldn't have the flexibility. Had I not done what I did back then, at this point I wouldn't have the flexibility to make even more radical moves, because the window of opportunity starts to close off. Just like a chessboard. Sometimes you hit these positions where, "Okay, I really don't feel completely ready to sacrifice that rook for that guy's pawn, but if I don't he's gonna shut the door on even the possibility of that. Now I can either wait for another cycle of energy to happen, but if I wanna preserve the momentum and the initiative, I gotta take a bet on myself to make that big sacrifice to keep the initiative, to keep the momentum, to keep the pressure on, keep the other person working really hard to try to figure out where I'm coming in, because I'm not predictable yet. At a certain point things can become predictable, and that's where you can resign a game. Similarly, if I was, you know, forty, fifty years old, sixty years old, still at Lincoln Center, and then, "Well now I'm ready, now I have the courage to take a bet on myself, I wanna start creating some brand," it would be way too late because there's other factors that come into the picture.
So it's all this sort of—It's very similar to a biological clock kind of concept, basically. But either way, that's where the deliberacy and the acuity and the precision come into it.
Chris (26:48): Yeah. So, all opportunities are temporally limited, and if you have the ability to strike fast by knowing what you're looking for, you can receive an outsized amount of the opportunities, because you're someone who's proven that they can capitalize on it. And I think the chess analogy is very apt here. A lot of our late-night conversations explore the parallels between poker and chess, where a lot of the advantage in poker and chess comes from getting inside your opponent's decision loop, forcing them into uncomfortable positions where they're likely to make errors, because of that, that building pressure. And for those of you guys who know chess a bit, you know, Eric is quite proficient in the Blitz format, where you get—Each player gets five minutes for all of their moves, and if you run out of the five minutes you lose the game. So time can be your enemy or your ally. We were talking about this a bit last night. Talk me through this thought process as far as moving quickly and putting your opponent back in the blender where time is now against them and they start to feel the walls closing in. What's going on when you're in the middle of a match?
ELEW (28:05): Well, it's similar to your first question, when you were asking me what led me to leave Lincoln Center, the top jazz gig, to go out and do the unknown and that sort of thing. The answer is a chess term. It's called "zugzwang." German word. Fun word. "Zug," "zwang." Zugzwang. Zugzwang is a position that one can arrive at where it's your turn to make a move but there's no good moves to make. Now, when you're first starting to learn chess, you're vulnerable to some of the simple three, two, four move checkmates, and stuff. As you become better and play stronger opponents, no one's going to mate you and you're not going to mate them in four moves. You're going to have to kind of grind it out and kind of get into a ground and pound or a real actual fight. So zugzwang then becomes the new weapon. The time, position, all that stuff, it all boils—In my mind it all boils down to zugzwang. All the masters and hustlers that beat me over and over, that was the trait that kept appearing, that was the trend I kept seeing. They're getting me into a spot where I've got no good moves.
So chess essentially becomes Monopoly at that point. I keep landing on very expensive property that I don't own. So it's as simple as that. So career-wise it's the same thing. If I don't figure out a way to make my playing more distinguished or more radical, the cement will dry and I will be fixed in this spot. So even when I decided to call what I do "Rockjazz" at that time, I was thinking, "Calling it Rockjazz allows me to have the whole span of the rock repertoire at my disposal to employ in a jazz way." A jazzy way. So you know, I was thinking about, "I've gotta create space for myself, so the term that I pick has to create space for me to operate now that I'm jumping out of this fish tank, and into the big ocean." So I use that behavior over and over. I'm always thinking about that. It's like, okay, with this move, how many options do I get? How much space can I get with this move? In chess, there's a thing to be avoided. It's called "idle checks." That's just where, okay, seize check, give check, as they say. You know, just because you can check someone doesn't mean you should just check them for checking them's sake, that's idle, because sometimes you can chase a guy's king into a better hiding place, and you've exposed yourself. You've done their developmental work for them.
Sun Tzu says you want your enemy to, you know, bring a lot of food to the battlefield, and then you engage him and eat his food. Don't bring a lot of food to the battlefield. In The Book of Branding, they were saying, "Let your competition do the market research for you." So there's these different ways of keeping your side of the fish tank slim and streamlined and to let the environment do a lot of that lifting and research for you, and just kinda scavenge off of them. Avoiding that zugzwang spot where okay, I've got no more good moves. So basically my point is, I look at it as "zugzwang vision." There's X-Ray vision and there's zugzwang vision. I'm always looking for the short term, they call this the "zug." I'm always looking for the zug.
It's like, "Okay, if I make this move and he counters it and this happens, now I'm gonna be in a position where I've lost the initiative, where I'm gonna be in the zug." Or I'll make this little pawn move, but if that person doesn't realize that I'm trying to set them up for a zug situation where they're not gonna have any good moves, if they're looking for, "Well, where's his attack? Where's the check? Where's the piece he's trying to take? I don't see it." That's because I'm not trying to take a piece, that's because I'm not trying to checkmate you. I'm trying to put you in a zug. If I can get you in a zug situation, you're going to have to give me a piece. You're gonna get checkmated, because you are going to make a move that you would never make under normal circumstances, 'cause you're in a position where you've got no good moves. That's how that happens. That's how games get won. The fight is in the zug area. How can I get the guy in a position where he has to make a move that he would never make?
You see what I'm saying? That is the concept. No one's going to just give you their king. So how many steps backwards in reverse engineering does one have to go 'til you find a point that eludes or escapes their vision of what you're doing and working in that range so that by the time they see what you've been orchestrating, "Oh, whoa. You've been putting me in a position where I have less and less moves on the Monopoly table. I've got less and less real estate, and those sub-optimal moves keep intensifying. Slowly but surely, I'm drifting into more sub-optimal moves because you're controlling the diagonals and you know, the files and the center and all of this. That pawn move you made in the opening was more than just driving off the bishop, it was actually trying to hold that square because later on you're gonna—” You know, so it becomes poetry. This is the beauty of chess and the architecture of it. The fluidity of it.
So similarly, in business, it's the same thing. It's like, yeah, there was a little more method to my madness with the standing and all the radical stuff, because it made space for me now, now everyone knows if you wanna have this sort of magical experience, this spectacle, but it's still music that you know, call ELEW. And then that allowed me to get my price point way up there. So then by getting my price point way up there, a la the World Poker Tour, that I'm gonna be playing for the championship table, you know, in this nice beautiful Wynn Hotel, it allows me to get my rest, which allows me to preserve my health, which allows me to work out and do things that I should be doing, which allows me to practice, most importantly. Guys that kinda get caught up in, "I've gotta do all of these gigs as a side man with these different bands," they don't have a lot of time to practice. Next thing you know, you fall in love, you take on responsibilities there, you don't have a lot of time to practice, and so then now you're in the zug. You know, now the cement is drying. Certain windows that would need a certain degree of radical change to pop through, you no longer have that flexibility in your position, so then you have to change your ambitions and you change your future. That sort or kind of thing.
So in my case, that's what I've been looking at. That zug. So yeah, by doing this radical thing, I've been able to be accepted by the art community, by elite circles that have high price points that pay me for the unique thing that I have practiced on, which creates a virtuous circle as opposed to a vicious circle. So I have a virtuous circle that allows me to practice more, allows me to focus in, allows me to go through learning curves and whatever without heavy damage to myself, and allows me to create more moves that give me time and space. I still wanna direct films, I still wanna do my whole Johnny Carpenter routine. There's a lot, so—DJing. I had to learn that skill, I had to learn computer animation. All kinds of things I've had to learn to radically expand my abilities, but each move gives me more time and space to do so, adding value.
I'll leave it at this (I know this is a long thread): A taxi driver once upon a time told me a very simple phrase, and it has remained true. He said, "If you have the right product, it's always the right time." I took that phrase and I reversed it and said, "Thus, if I have the wrong product, it's never the right time." This is how I keep myself disciplined when dealing with rejections and failures. I revert to that phrase. I must not have the right product. If things are not going my way, let's look at the product. There's gotta be something wrong, because when things are going my way, it's because I've got the right product, and it's like magic. Everything works. It's a positive, beautiful cosmic snowball. Everything's going my way. That's because I've got the right product. So it's always the right time for that product. It's always the right time.
When I have the wrong product—How come I couldn't get a record deal? So all of the things I was frustrated about, all these things of the past, now I could see. 'Cause I didn't have the right product. A record company wants more than just a couple of good notes. They need someone that can represent them. There's so many elements that come into it, but I couldn't understand them. I was too narrow-minded, and I did not understand this simple principle. I did not have the right product, so it was not the right time.
The frightening element is that you can live your whole life and never have the product if you don't work to get the right product or turn yourself into the right product, and it'll never be the right time. And so that could just be an immortally frustrating thing. So that's why I wanted to share this little moment here, because this is the key to rationalizing and dissecting what one can be feeling frustration about in the industry, et cetera. And so that's the macro picture, but it's also the same in the micro. If I'm on a chessboard, "I can't figure out how to get into this position." Yeah. You gotta sacrifice something. You're not gonna get in just by the front door. You gotta give 'em something.
Now, if I didn't notice that soon enough, if I played the opening haphazardly, and the whole board gets locked up, now I don't even have any position to sacrifice anything. So that's another set of vision, the sacrifice vision. So there's the zug vision, but then there's the sacrifice vision of, "Okay, have I even created a position where I can sacrifice a rook?" If I'm just moving pawns haphazardly, "Oh, now I can't move here," dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, but yeah, now all my pieces that I would like to sacrifice to get into the guy's position are trapped behind my own pawns. Wait a minute. I'm in zugzwang. Now I've got no good moves.
So these things, understanding zugzwang, understanding positional sacrifice, all of these things operate as guiding principles with how one moves when it seems like you can do anything. This all influences discipline. "Oh, yeah, you can play anything," but actually, you gotta realize it's very important to think about keeping your options for sacrifice open, not just for a one-to-one ratio exchange, but for sacrifice. You might need to give up a rook and a knight or a queen to get inside the opponent's position. They're not going to see that they're vulnerable to such a radical sacrifice, just like the industry didn't see that they were vulnerable to an ELEW. "This guy's gonna—Wait a minute. He's gonna wear armor, play rock? He's playing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ on America's Got Talent. He's wearing gothic boots, he's dressed in all black, no hip hop?" You know, all this stuff. But that's all tactical. Shock value. Letting people know I'm not hostile. There's so many subliminal messages that were going on, with playing politics. There's just so many elements that were going on, and that's how I was able to create a niche that could capacitate the next set of sacrifices that I would need, and thus we keep that ability to continue re-wedging into the position.
"Re-wedge." Okay. There's a wedge, great. Now let's re-wedge. "Wow, we've hit a spot where it looks like there's no more moves." Well, you know what that means. We've gotta create a new wedge before it's too late. "Okay. Wow, do I really need to create a new wedge?" Yeah. You've gotta learn how to be a DJ now. The rock got you to this point, now you gotta learn DJ, you gotta become more valuable. Now you gotta learn animation, now you gotta learn screenwriting and directing. Now you gotta—Dah-dah-dah. The right product gives you the right time.
Chris (41:18): Ah, floored. Floored. I would never cut you off there, that was gold. So, yeah. Deep stuff. I'm gonna attempt to unpack a bit of that, mostly for my own benefit, because, yeah. The thoughts that you shared there were outstanding.
So, first talking about letting the environment do the lifting. I think your Eastern approach to chess really shines through, and maybe that's some of the Sun Tzu influence, where you know, in the West we tend to think in terms of cause and effect, and really it's about working backwards from the necessary conditions for victory. So if you have a vision for, "This is what I want to achieve," thinking about what are the elements of that vision, and how can I create those elements? I can work backwards from it.
So any time someone asks me, "What should I do next," the question is, "Well, where do you want to go?" A lot of people start from the "now" versus the destination and work backwards from there.
And you explained it beautifully in chess terms, in that you both need to maximize your candidate moves as well as be able to tactically select the right move at the right time. How one moves is very important, so that time and space element where you give yourself the most opportunity to have the right move available, and then also recognizing that right move at the right time, not moving before you have all of the right pieces in place. This reverse-engineering that we have set up, created the conditions for success, and essentially the game plays itself at that point.
I love the reference to systems thinking. That's a really big one here on the show, referring to the virtuous circle of creating a positive feedback loop, where, by creating the space for practice, you ensure that you continue to improve your craft and thus expand your opportunity set and continually compounding and improving from there. And you see a lot of founders, a lot of artists get in the position of satisfying deals or taking on gigs or products, feature requests in order to keep the checks coming in, right, keep collecting checks, but at the expense of doubling-down, iterating, creating that virtuous cycle around what actually differentiates them. And because they lack time, they lack space, they are unable to create those conditions to remain relevant, to remain at the top of their profession, and they die off. I mean, as a company, as an artist. I know you're raising your hand. I got a couple more, and then I'm gonna let you back in.
ELEW (44:18): I just wanna say, the idle checks.
Chris (44:21): Yeah, yeah.
ELEW (44:22): Idle checks.
Chris (44:23): Making moves with no purpose, right? It feels like—It's like keeping the balloon in the air, but you're giving up at the cost of momentum, you're getting away from the core strategy. So, yeah. And you talked about taking on feedback. This is a really big one for online creators as well as artists where we need to have some identity separation. I like that you talked about "my product." Right? It's very easy to receive feedback either from the crickets, that, "Hey, we put this thing out in the world, we don't hear anything," or someone has some direct criticism of, "Hey, I think it should be like this." And it's very easy to not only take this criticism in stride, but to essentially incorporate it into our model if we decide that it's worth taking into our model if we have that separation for, "Hey, this must mean that I just don't have the right product." So I think this identity separation is absolutely critical for staying in the game and continuing to iterate long enough to have that connection be made. And yeah, that you need to sacrifice. What is that door you're trying to get into? You're not going to be able to walk in the front door. Everyone's doing that. What is that back door, what is that velvet rope that can be lifted for you? There's always another way in.
So, so many questions I could ask you about this. The first one that comes to mind is you have just continued to layer on abilities over the years. So we've talked about the evolution of your performance, you talked about a couple of recent ones. You know, electronic music exploded, there was all of this demand and opportunity for an artist who was able to DJ, and you in particular, to be able to combine these two methods of music creation, playing the piano while doing a DJ set. Recently you've been getting into film, so obviously editing. You've been doing some computer animation. You're working on a very, very exciting series that I don't even know—Like, we have so many things we can go into. The-meta question here, I think that if you can acquire the ability to learn, you learn how to learn. That this is the ultimate superpower. You can accomplish anything. And you've had a lot of reps at acquiring these new abilities. What have you learned about learning?
ELEW (46:57): Learning is crucial. It's essential. Anyone can do it. The hardest elements have to do with understanding one's own mind's capacity to create pain for us. This is the core of radical learning. Mastering the abyss. As far as I've experienced it, there exists abysmal pain that our minds can generate. Cognitive dissonance, which seems euphemistic to say when actively experiencing the degrees of suffering that one's own mind can trigger in the body. Yet we must prevail against our own mind's capacity to torture us, to give us abysmal pain. 'Cause on the other side of that is real power. This is learning at the most radical level. This enables radical change, this enables radical space gain, radical time gain, radical skill gain. We have to master the fine art of enduring and transcending the pain that our minds can generate for our very selves internally. That is absolutely crucial, it's absolutely essential. I used to suffer from crippling panic attacks at one point. I was, what, like twenty-six or so. Twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-five, or there. And deep, painful depressions. So I had to, you know, deal with that and master that pain that my mind was generating.
That's what got me into neurosciences. I was very curious. Like, how is it that I can be feeling this way? What's going on up there, actually? You know, I actually don't know. Well, let's learn. Let's find out who's doing what up in the brain. And I did, and boom, it gave me another wedge into pain tolerance, it gave me a wedge to create more space so that I don't jump out a window, or whatever. So learning again brings us into swift collision with the abyss, and the more you want to learn, the more vicious the difficulty of it, what it is you want to learn is, the swifter and deeper the abyss you possibly can face might be.
Some things are fun to learn, and they agree with us. But there exists other things that are absolutely alien to us. Absolutely alien. And those absolutely alien things oftentimes hold the keys to victory, but one must transcend the abyss, the pain, the fear. The fear of—That can be generated by this amount of pain. The image that comes to mind is the image of Lancelot and the sword bridge where the maiden and the dragon are on the other side of this sword bridge. And the sword is like this. It's not flat, the bridge is this. And he takes off all of his armor, and straddles and crawls across the bridge, cutting himself along this sword that he's traversing to get over there. And then once he's there, he still has to fight a dragon to get to her. But it turns out, once he got there, the dragon didn't even attack him. It just let him pass. The sword bridge. So that's a metaphor image for how these things go. I haven't thought about that in a while, but that's exactly what it is.
Chris (51:21): I've got two final questions for you, E. I'm gonna let you off easy today, and then we're gonna pick this back up. So you mention wanting to understand your own mind as the gateway into your delving into neuroscience, and out of this exploration came Counterbop. And we're gonna have to drop a couple videos in the show notes, because, man. Rockjazz is one thing. Seeing you perform Counterbop for the first time, for me I imagine, like, you're a guitarist in the UK and Jimi Hendrix walks in and you hear Jimi Hendrix play for the first time, and you're like, "I didn't know that instrument could do that. That is crazy." So talk to me about the creation of Counterbop. What did you discover about the inner workings of the mind that told you that it was possible to split your brain in two like that?
ELEW (52:22): Well, I noticed that it's a normal thing that occurs in classical music from Bach, you know, counterpoint. And Art Tatum, the great jazz pianist, was reputedly able to play two different things at the same time, two different songs at the same time. He never got recorded doing it, but it was supposedly something that he could do, legend has it. So I decided to, like Galahad, search for this Holy Grail and let nothing stop me. And so I researched every possible thing. I'm like those villain guys who have scoured the planet looking for this particular aspect that would create the ultimate power. And so, neuroscience, as I said. The buck stops here. It starts here and it starts here, the brain. There's got to be a way. And the issue, as far as Counterbop goes, was mostly about how to use the syncopations and rhythms of jazz bebop between the hands. Baroque counterpoint, which is well-documented, with Mozart, Bach, et cetera, utilized their vernacular, but the rhythms that they were using were not jazz rhythms at all, and whenever a jazz pianist would try to play two solos at the same time, it would always sound like suddenly this rigidity of—This different linguistic rigidity would come into it, a different genre, because that's the only literature that they had.
And the level of intricacy that actually comes into it when you want to try to do jazz rhythms, jazz counterpoint, we're talking about syncopations that had the nuances of Afro-Latino music, had nuances of African music, had nuance of reggae—I mean, there's so many elements—French music—that come in to try and to properly syncopate a jazz melody. "Bop, de doot, be doo ba doo ba dah ba doot, bop bop, bop, ba doo doo ba doo doo, bop bop, ba dee, dee dee doodleedoo ba doot 'n doot 'n da 'n doo dee—" That's very different from, "Bop. Bop. Ba deedlee ah doot doot dat. Doot. Dooo. Bing, ding, ding, da-duh da-dun da-dun da-dun da-dun dun." You know, it's a completely different choreography. It's set to inspire a completely different type of dance versus the pointillism that you hear in "one, two, three, four, one two—Doot da boo ba beee da ah! Bahp! Da-dee-da ba-doot 'n doh ba doo bah, ah-ah-ah-ah! Ooh, ooh." That's very different as far as the surprises that are being set off.
So to get that going on both ends where you're, now it's like popcorn. "Bop, te bop, beh, bip! Bah bop, boo-doo-bop, boo-doo-dip, boodoodip, boodoodbadip, boodoodipadoodoo-bumboo—” So to get all that stuff to happen like that is a completely different level—It's essentially quantum physics. It's the difference between quantum physics and classical physics. Classical physics, Newtonian physics, break down at the quantum level, because the quantum realm stops obeying what we would normally see and experience in Newtonian physics. So it is with Counterbop. Counterbop requires another degree of breakdown and transcendence and mastery, or more profound mastery of pointillistic rhythms than traditional counterpoint requires, because the choreography that Counterbop is set to and set to inspire is very different, potentially more complicated than the choreography that counterpoint was set to inspire.
Ballet used to be something that spoke to the national identity. That's where it comes from. Military marches and ideas of beauty and ideas of movement. But that's a Eurocentric aesthetic in terms of how they were seeing it. The African aesthetic of what beauty was and how it was to be expressed, even from their tribal artworks to their ritualisms and their sense of spirituality, or exorcisms, and all of these things, how music was used, it's very different. Same thing in India. So jazz, counter—Err, bebop, thus counterbop, is inclusive of the European Classical aesthetic, but also—Choreographical aesthetic, but also the African aesthetic, the Indian aesthetic, the Latino aesthetic, the Asian aesthetic. So all that's inside of Counterbop. Pretty much liked Mixed Martial Arts, basically. You know, you can have a classical boxer going into an MMA fight, but now you've got a guy that's gonna like to kick him in the face, or you've got a jiu-jitsu guy that's gonna bring him down. It's like, "Okay, I'll eat a couple punches just to get you down. Now I'll submit you, choke you out." You've got a wrestler who just grounds and pounds. "Like, okay, yeah, okay, that was a beautiful punch, but now I'm gonna bring you to the ground."
You know, so bebop is very much a cross-training type of sport, and so I'm taking one—Getting it in one hand is enough. To get it in both hands you have to have a very profound understanding of the science that's involved in it all. That's why neuroscience studies came into it. It was, "Okay, what are the actual resistors? What, where is the neglect? You know, what does the occipito parietal lobe do? What is the orienteering, who controls that, what's the homunculus?” It gets very broad.
Chris (58:01): Yeah. That—So much we can get into, but what really stands out is just thinking from first principles. So, first, the establishment that it is possible. Right? Not recorded, but legend has it this is something that can be done. And if it can be done by someone else, it can be done by me. And it's casting light on these invalidated assumptions. So where along the point are these points of resistance, and can these points of resistance be overcome with enough effort, or are there ways, you know, fourth-dimensionally to overcome them by just going around them? But once that sense of the possible has been established, then it's just the means of learning, of uncovering the right sub-skills to do so.
I'm not the biggest Elon fan, but the Elon example of, "Wow, it should not cost so much to get to space, and when you look at the actual components of building a rocket, hey, these individual components don't actually cost that much when you get down to the real raw materials, so if we can have better, more efficient sourcing than the US Government"—not too unheard of there—"then we should be able to build a rocket that gets to the moon at a much more affordable price." As well as, there's this assumption that rockets are one-time only, and that's a big part of why rockets are very—You know, going to the moon is so, so expensive, because you've gotta build this multi-billion dollar machine that's only going to be used once. Well, if the laws of physics don't preclude that this rocket can return to its original destination, right, if it can use that, the computing power of a modern-day iPhone back in the '60s to get ourselves to the moon, presumably with the computing power we have today and our understanding of mathematics, we can get that rocket back here.
So it's uncovering where we are treating opinions as facts. That this is actually something that can be done, we just don't necessarily have the means or knowledge to do so.
ELEW, I know it's almost showtime, I wanna make sure you have time to prepare. My final question for you. You're gearing up for a big performance moment, you're going on stage, as you're about to do at the final table today, or you're going on set as director, you're going into the studio to record your album. Put us in your mind, what does that preparation process mentally look like for you?
ELEW (01:00:29): Well, the preparation is very much one of being ready to learn. Because as they say in war, the best plan changes as soon as the first bullet is fired. Or as Mike Tyson says, the best plan changes as soon as you get punched in the nose. So one has to have a sense of vigilant openness and awareness. So that's where I go, into a place of zen vigilance and openness and awareness, so that I can have the best opportunities to implement what I've practiced. It's very—Almost every martial art, where I wanna throw this punch, or if it was chess I wanna play this move, or doo-doo. But you gotta really wait, you gotta really make sure your spot is correct. There's a word that the hustlers use in chess, a simple word. They call it the "say." He's got a say in that too. Your opponent has a say. They say. They say? They say. They say. So that's the shorthand. So like today, I don't know how my performance is set up. I saw the other artist's performance yesterday, but I don't know how they want me to do mine. So I've gotta be ready to quickly rearrange what I've got. I'm not gonna have the same amount of time, and I haven't been told.
So I've got my techniques ready to receive adjustment. Floyd Mayweather, they say his ability to adjust in the ring is what has allowed him to be undefeated. So that's the big skill, being able to adjust in real-time. So again, it gets back to zugzwang. Once the enemy has no other good moves, they gotta start playing a bad move, and now I can see you. Okay, now you're set for my technique. Now we can run routine six on you, because now you're visible now, you've made a bad move. Of course, I know why you made it, 'cause I put you in zugzwang. Of course, you wouldn't have made that move. Similarly with the piano. It's like, "Okay, I've recorded myself enough times to know that if I let this emotion trigger this movement, it's gonna come off like this. No matter what my intentions are, it's gonna sound this way, so we wanna sacrifice that, we gotta avoid that." So I'm thinking about that today as I prepare to be on ESPN, et cetera, and record at this high level, high production value. I'm thinking about, "Okay, when I go to play Smells Like Teen Spirit, or something like that, how do I in real-time keep this from sounding too harsh, but not docile at the same time? How do we rock this but keep the piano sounding sweet in general, for the production value and all?"
So I gotta stay loose. I can't jump at every moment to try to be amazing. I've gotta realize, "It's okay. Sounding good is amazing enough. We'll call our shot. We'll take, only shoot what you can hit. Let's pull it back a little bit." And that's how I got a good bootleg from Delilah, that we recorded last night. That was going through my mind. That's why it was so important for me to perform there, to kind of get this, "Lemme hear the bootleg." You know, because now I can gauge, "Oh, yeah. See, I was gonna push a little harder there, but I decided to hold back, and sure enough, it sounds better on the bootleg." Live performance can get the audience to feel all kinds of energy, but a bootleg is what these recordings are. The World Poker Tour, they'll re-air it, and the audience sitting at their home is not under the same spell that the live audience is under. They're listening to things almost more robotically. It's a whole different element that's in place, and so gotta be really aware of that, because now it's like, "Whoah, they're not under the athletic, energetic spell. They're just kinda sitting there listening. And the piano has to really sound good."
So that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about how to execute this high-energy song, but in a way where I control the sound, because it's like I'm making an album playing this thing. They're recording it. They're gonna play it, or they're gonna air it. "Hey, there's ELEW." My brand is out there. It's like, okay. I've gotta play flawlessly. Means when I'm improvising, I can't take too many risky chances, 'cause I might blow a note and I can't edit it. "So, okay. Go. Be perfect, now." It's not prerecorded. So I have to be very loose and zen in my preparation for this. This is a phenomenon, this is a situation I've gotta go into. So, yeah. Take your time, listen, and be aware of your surroundings. These are the words that are going through my head. Get that good groove. Okay, we got that. Okay. Do you know where that note is? Okay. Now play it. "You got an idea, huh? You wanna try this big thing. Okay. What's the risk there. Okay, we gotta go for it. Okay. Is your left hand stable for your right hand to make this attempt? Okay." You know, so there's—You know, these are the kinda things I'm thinking about.
Chris (01:06:09): So good. I mean, I think adaptability is the critical skill in our day and age, and you're one of the most adaptable people that I know, where you show up for a gig, you show up on set and you never know what hand you're gonna be dealt, but you're ready for all of them. And I would probably reshare a piece of advice that you gave to me to you for your performance today, that there are no wrong notes. Right? So when you play a note that's a bit off, well, whether that note's the right note or the wrong note all depends on the note that you play next. So you know, you can play it off any way that you like, and so feel free to unleash an improv, because I know that next note's gonna be perfect.
ELEW, it's been an honor. I feel just like your gigs, you're just getting warmed up, and I'm so honored and grateful for you taking the time today. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
As a final closing, you're working on so many amazing things. We didn't have time today to get into all of them, but I just wanted to give you a quick moment to highlight a couple of the things that you're working on for those listening who've been curious by hearing you speak and want to hear you play and perform and see what you're working on. So we'd love to hear just a quick, you know, synopsis of what you've got in the pipeline. I know you have a new album coming out, you're working on an amazing series with the Galactic Knight. Just kind of tease a few details for us.
ELEW (01:07:35): Yeah. So for all the sci-fi heads out there, during quarantine, I taught myself how to code, and I learned computer animation and all that, all to create the Galactic Knight. This is a superhero, the first jazz superhero, and he is the protagonist of my series Protect the Swing. Tune in to @elewrockjazz on Instagram as, you know, we roll this stuff out. I've got merchandise being developed, I've got comic strips, anime, I've got an album with some top jazz players, Christopher Bright, et cetera. I've got a video game in development with it as well. A lot of stuff. You're gonna have some fun. We're gonna have a lot of fun. Just stay tuned. Tune in. I won't spoil it, we'll keep it very tantalizing as we drip it out. But it's coming.
Chris (01:08:29): Thank you so much for joining us today, ELEW. See you all again soon.
Tasha (01:08:33): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.