Articles by Robert Levin
Mark Shane/Joe Licari: Swing It, Brother, Swing!!
by Robert Levin
The title of the album is Swing It, Brother, Swing!! but it could just as well have been tagged After Hours. Not that this small gem of an album, rooted in the sensibility and protocols of the swing era (and in certain of that period's antecedents) isn't a model of forward propulsion. Indeed, in both its slow and middle tempo numbers, it swings mightily. But the alternate tile speaks to the music's intimate, late night mood it immediately evokes.
read moreCecil Taylor: This Music is the Face of a Drum
by Robert Levin
[Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Jazz & Pop Magazine (April 1971)]As an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, Cecil Taylor has finally been able to realize a long-held ambition--the command of a large orchestra. Comprised of fifteen of his students (and augmented by Jimmy Lyons, Sam Rivers, Leroy Jenkins and Andrew Cyrille), the “Cecil Taylor Ensemble" recently played concerts at Wisconsin and at Dayton University in Ohio and it is scheduled to make ...
read moreFree Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s
by Robert Levin
[Editor's note: Revised and expanded here, this piece originated as an oral essay for an installment of the Cosmoetica Omniversica internet radio series on the arts and sciences. The series was hosted by Dan Schneider and Art Durkee.] More or less officially unveiled with the first New York appearance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Café in the fall of 1959, free jazz (or new black music, space music, new thing, anti-jazz or abstract jazz ...
read moreThe Emergence of Jimmy Lyons
by Robert Levin
[Editor's Note: From Jazz & Pop Magazine, 1970] Since 1960, when he began working with Cecil Taylor, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons has been developing from a somewhat diffident musician into one of the more potent voices in the New Music. In recent recordings and appearances with Taylor, Jimmy has been playing with a glowing assertiveness and an often stunning beauty. This past spring, Jimmy's first record under his leadership, Other Afternoons on the French BYG ...
read moreIntroducing Booker Little
by Robert Levin
[Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Jazz & Pop Magazine, 1970. Little died in 1961, just a few months after this interview was originally published in Metronome]Booker Little, twenty-three year-old composer, arranger and trumpet player (the order is arbitrary, each role has equal importance to him), has lately come to demonstrate, in recordings and as the musical director of the Max Roach group, a talent that promises size.As is true of many jazz players of ...
read moreCecil Taylor at the Take 3, 1962-'63
by Robert Levin
[Editor's Note: Excerpted and adapted from a work-in-progress, Going Outside: A Memoir of Free Jazz & the '60s] In the summer of 1962, Cecil lands a three-month, four-night-a-week gig at The Take 3, a coffee house on Bleecker Street. It's right next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen had performed just weeks before. (Allen was second on the bill and I'd thrown him a quick couple of lines in the Village Voice column--something about how ...
read moreSunny Murray: On Taking the Leap from One Reality to Another
by Robert Levin
[Editor's Note: From a work-in-progress, Going Outside: A Memoir of Free Jazz and the Sixties][Author's Note: Sunny Murray is widely regarded as the preeminent drummer of the free jazz movement. The “Jeanne" mentioned below was Jeanne Phillips. Although there were, to be sure, significant differences--she was black, she worked a forty hour-a-week civil service job and her one bedroom flat on West 10th Street in New York City was no showplace--Jeanne, who was astonishingly astute ...
read moreIntroducing Anthony Braxton
by Robert Levin
[Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Jazz & Pop Magazine, 1970]To anyone still questioning the validity of the systems and methods at which Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman arrived, I would first of all recommend that he listen more attentively to the work of those men. But I'd also suggest that he make it a point to hear the strong and very exciting musics of an emergent collection of musicians from Chicago who constitute what is already ...
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