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Tony Levin

Tony Levin was born in Boston on June 6, 1946. He grew up in the suburb of Brookline and began playing upright bass at 10 yrs old. In high school, he picked up tuba, soloing with the concert band. He also started a barbershop quartet. But he primarily played classical music on the upright, most notably performing at the White House with Marvin Rabin's Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra for John and Jackie Kennedy. He then attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY and played in the Rochester Philharmonic. Also at the school was Steve Gadd, now a renowned drummer, who introduced Tony to playing a higher level of jazz and rock. He traded in his Ampeg baby bass for an old (at that time) Fender Precision bass, which was his only instrument for many years.

In 1970, Tony moved to New York City, joined a band called Aha, the Attack of the Green Slime Beast, with Don Preston of The Mothers of Invention. Soon after, he began working as a session musician and through the 1970's he played bass on many albums.

In the late '70s wanting to do more live playing, Tony joined Peter Gabriel's band. He had met Peter through producer Bob Ezrin (with whom Tony had recorded Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare, and Lou Reed's Berlin.) Tony has played with Gabriel, both on the road and in the studio, since then. On that first Peter Gabriel album, Tony played some tuba as well as bass, and directed a short barbershop quartet version of a song.

It was in these early years with Gabriel that Tony switched to playing Music Man basses, and also developed his playing of the Chapman Stick. More recently, the song Big Time, from Gabriel's So album, inspired the development of Funk Fingers, which are chopped off drumsticks used to hammer on the bass strings. Levin credits Gabriel with the idea, and Andy Moore, his tech at the time, with actually making them workable.

In 1978, Tony moved to Woodstock NY, to join the band L'Image, which included his old friend Steve Gadd, as well as Mike Mainieri and Warren Bernhardt. The band, which did some very special music, broke up after a year, and Tony stayed in Woodstock, where he still lives.

On Peter Gabriel's first album, Tony met Robert Fripp and, in 1980, after having played on Fripp's solo album Exposure, he became a member of the '80s incarnation of King Crimson. The band has changed form a few times in the years since then, but Levin continues to be a member - having last toured with the band in 2008.

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Extended Analysis

A Supreme Love

Read "A Supreme Love" reviewed by Duncan Heining


Alan Skidmore is one of the finest saxophonists to come out of the United Kingdom, Europe or indeed anywhere. In fact, it was hearing Skidmore's tenor solo on “Have You Heard?" from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (Decca, 1966) that encouraged a young Michael Brecker to take up the instrument. Skidmore had also served his apprenticeship with blues singer Alexis Kornerin the sixties and by the end of the decade was equally well-versed in the blues and in the ...

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John Taylor Sextet: Fragment

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The not-for-profit Jazz In Britain label is one of the unsung heroes of British jazz. And if it is being sung, apologies, it deserves to be sung louder. While it is fitting that the musicians who make up London's new alternative jazz scene receive a massive shout out, the players who came before them, who paved the way for British jazz's current explosion, tend to get overlooked. Slowly, this is changing, and Jazz In Britain is in ...

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Extended Analysis

Exposures

Read "Exposures" reviewed by John Kelman


Between the impact of the COVID pandemic since 2020, and in the eight year-long tenure of King Crimson's final lineup, which toured between 2014 and 2021, there's been a lot revealed about its sole remaining founding member, guitarist/keyboardist Robert Fripp. Since 2012, the more than five-decade history of King Crimson, live and in the studio, has been painstakingly and exhaustively documented in a series of large multimedia box sets and smaller, more price-friendly editions of key material, often ...

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Album Review

Stick Men: Tentacles

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In the early 1960s, before every teenage rock band wanted to be the Beatles, many of them (especially in Southern California) wanted to be the Chantays (1963's “Pipeline"), The Surfaris' ("Wipeout" and “Point Panic," both from 1963) or Dick Dale and the Deltones ("Miserlou," 1962). Those days were the short-lived peak of surf rock, and it was big. All of those mentioned tunes hit the pop record charts, something that became rare for instrumental music thereafter. For some, these succinct, ...

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Album Review

Beledo: Seriously Deep

Read "Seriously Deep" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


Beledo's second MoonJune release flows through the listener's ears like the cinematic adaptation of an epic novel, but in sound. Seriously Deep quite deliberately moves from scene to scene (song to song), building up and releasing tension in music that sounds much too powerful and deep to have been primarily created by only three musicians: Uruguayan multi-instrumentalist Beledo on electric guitar and acoustic piano with drummer Kenny Grohowski and master bassist Tony Levin. Within each song, this movement consists of ...

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Album Review

King Crimson: Music is Our Friend: Live In Washington and Albany, 2021

Read "Music is Our Friend: Live In Washington and Albany, 2021" reviewed by John Kelman


You probably know the old adage about assumptions. After seeing the current (slightly fluid) King Crimson lineup twice every time the perennially groundbreaking group made it to North American shores since 2014, with no Canadian dates available in 2021 and the COVID Delta variant running rampant across the United States, the decision was made to forego traveling south to the USA to catch the band. After all, with the band touring, for the first time, on double bills with the ...

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Album Review

Tubby Hayes: Free Flight

Read "Free Flight" reviewed by Chris May


Tenor saxophonist, flautist, vibraphonist and composer Tubby Hayes, who died at the unconscionably young age of thirty-eight in 1973, was that rare thing among the first generation of British jazz musicians in the 1960s—a player who was taken seriously by the hippest American musicians and audiences. He visited New York in 1961 and 1964 for well-received seasons at the Half Note, and went to Los Angeles in 1965 for a run at Shelley's Manne-Hole. An uplifting player, a gifted composer ...

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Recording

Willie Oteri's Jazz Gunn CD project w/ Tony Levin, Pat Mastelotto, Mike Keneally and more.

Willie Oteri's Jazz Gunn CD project w/ Tony Levin, Pat Mastelotto, Mike Keneally and more.

Source: All About Jazz

Willie Oteri?s Jazz Gunn CD project with Tony Levin, Pat Mastelotto, Mike Keneally and Ephriam Owen

2/15/02 . Contact Ronan Chris Murhphy 310-200-9010

Tracking for upcoming CD Willie Oteri's JAZZ GUNN, January 3 and 4, 2002

We just finished two wonderful days of tracking at Wire Recording in Austin with Producer Ronan Chris Murphy at the helm assisted by Todd Dillon. The great Tony Levin was on Bass and Pat Mastelotto on Drums plus a little help from Mr. Ephraim ...

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Recording

Tony Levin, David Torn and Alan White - Levin Torn White (2011)

Tony Levin, David Torn and Alan White - Levin Torn White (2011)

Source: Something Else!

By Tom Johnson Something keeps pulling guitarist David Torn and bassist Tony Levin together. It's a partnership that blossomed with 1987's Cloud About Mercury, with drummer Bill Bruford and trumpeter Mark Isham, and, for what seemed like an eternity to fans, felt as if it might be a one-off project. In a way, it was. The two would return together in the late 1990s, along with Bruford, with Chris Botti taking Isham's place, this time as Bruford Levin Upper Extremities. ...

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Interview

Something Else! Interview: Rock Bassist Tony Levin

Something Else! Interview: Rock Bassist Tony Levin

Source: Something Else!

The latest incarnation for bassist Tony Levin, best known for his work with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel, is as part of a fearless new trio album with guitarist David Torn and Yes drummer Alan White. Part prog, part free-form improvisational music, part noise rock, Levin Torn White brings in each of their familiar textures and sounds, yet sounds somehow completely new. Both White and Levin have ties back to John Lennon, with the drummer performing on Live Peace in ...

118

Recording

Debut Album from Tony Levin, David Torn and Alan White

Debut Album from Tony Levin, David Torn and Alan White

Source: JamBase

SENSATIONAL DEBUT FROM NEW TRIO OF VETERANS Some combinations are truly unique, a breed apart that stretches even known factors into interesting new spaces. This is absolutely the case with Levin Torn White, the debut collaboration of powerhouse, ultra-high-end players Tony Levin (bass, Chapman stick), David Torn (guitars, textural events) and Alan White (drums, percussion). The album, which arrives today on Lazy Bones Recordings, is a fearless rush that's a bit metallic, a bit avant-garde, a bit groovy, hell, a ...

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Beledo
guitar
Nicolas Ojeda
bass, acoustic
Vladimir Samardzic
bass, electric

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Sensual

Self Produced
2025

buy

A Supreme Love

Confront Recordings
2023

buy

Exposures

Panegyric Recordings
2022

buy

Tentacles

MoonJune Records
2022

buy

Fragment

Jazz In Britain
2022

buy

Music is Our Friend:...

Panegyric Recordings
2021

buy

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