ELEW Finds His Frequency: From Camden Roots to ELEW Plays Sting at SFJAZZ

Pianist Eric Lewis (ELEW) grew up in a house where music was infrastructure. He is the fourth generation of classical musicians in his family, raised in Camden, New Jersey, where practicing the piano felt like another chore alongside washing dishes and mowing the lawn. That immersion, combined with conservatory training, forged a touch that is both athletic and precise. Even in conversation, the awe is evident as he describes a childhood with multiple pianos under one roof and a routine that normalized craft at an early age.

At the Manhattan School of Music, Lewis studied on a Rodgers & Hammerstein scholarship and absorbed lessons from mentors who tightened his time feel and expanded his harmonic imagination. His path through jazz included work with Wynton Marsalis and a pivotal encounter with the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition (1999).

A phone call from Elvin Jones changed everything. "For two years, it was just like father and son—absolute nectar," Lewis recalls. Those green-room hangs with Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Freddie Hubbard were not just stories; they were an apprenticeship inside the lineage. Industry gatekeeping pushed Lewis to reframe how a piano could carry energy. A student nudged him toward Linkin Park's Meteora (Warner Bros., 2003). What he heard in the drums and the singer's raw edge reminded him of living inside Elvin's velocity; the lyrics' directness mirrored emotions he had wrestled with.

"What if I could create a piano style threaded through the guitar-driven ethos of rock for that audience?" he asked himself. The answer became Rockjazz—mostly rock and some jazz—by design. It was not a novelty but a method to translate voltage into pianistic terms. Rockjazz reimagined the solo piano as a kinetic installation: standing technique, inside-the-strings articulation, percussive muting, and prepared timbres that feel like orchestration rather than stunts. The show scaled from clubs to tech conferences and film events because the musical grammar stayed clear: left-hand weight, right-hand line, and the throughline of groove.

"All the betrayal I felt led to my fiery and humongous treatment of rock," he says, linking emotional urgency to rigorous technique. That voltage search now flows into a dialogue with Sting's songbook. Lewis recently opened dates on Sting's My Songs tour and is finishing ELEW Plays Sting, a solo project that treats the material as what he calls "piano portraiture." "'Message in a Bottle' is a fantastic tune that captures the psychology of trying to get your message out," he says, a line that doubles as an artist's manifesto.

The album emphasizes counterpoint: a bass line with heft in the left hand, a tenor-range melody carried in the right, and inner voices braided between. One announced guest, Immanuel Wilkins, appears on "Walking on the Moon," and there is an Ornette Coleman-leaning excursion tied to The Dream of the Blue Turtles (A&M, 1985). The goal is less a covers record than a composer-to-composer conversation. The work has not been casual. "I have been working on this over and over—I worked myself into bad health one time on this," Lewis admits, half-laughing at his perfectionism.

He plans to share initial tracks in September 2025. The live question arrives at SFJAZZ's intimate Joe Henderson Lab: four solo sets across two nights. Expect a surge from the opening—often "Message in a Bottle"—and a program that threads the needle between agile grooves, shadowed ballads, and erudite hooks. He will tap the full palette: inside-piano muting, percussive taps, prepared timbres and nuanced pedaling to shape decay and resonance. "It is going to be high energy and high virtuosity," he adds with a grin. "I am just going to release the Kraken."