Jazz Articles about Milcho Leviev

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Milcho Leviev: Letter To America

by Nenad Georgievski
September 13, 2026

Milcho Leviev's Letter to America (reissued on vinyl from his final 2015 solo piano studio recording, on Perfect Records, originally titled Quiet March) distills a lifetime of defiance, cinematic grandeur, and cross-cultural mastery into its rawest, most intimate essence. Comprising a selection of movie soundtrack themes written over the span of 40 years, the album captures the legendary Bulgarian pianist (who passed away in 2019), revisiting the melodies that once rattled the communist regime and ultimately defined his path from Plovdiv ...

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Art Pepper: An Afternoon in Norway: The Kongsberg Concert

by Jack Kenny
June 1, 2025

This album is not just music; it is a glimpse into one of the most compelling stories in Art Pepper's musical history from the impossibly handsome alto saxophonist with Stan Kenton's orchestra to a drug-fueled inmate in San Quentin, culminating in a glorious renaissance. The sheer logistics surrounding this album are impressive. Consider this whirlwind: finishing a stint at Ronnie Scott's, early on early Sunday morning, a dash to Heathrow airport, a flight to Oslo, Norway, a car ...

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Art Pepper: Geneva 1980

by Jack Kenny
April 16, 2025

"Do not go gentle into the good night," Dylan Thomas wrote that; Art Pepper did it. He did not go gentle. He raged with his horn across continents: Asia, Europe, the Americas. There was gentleness too at times. He raged against his own wasted times. It all fuelled his playing and he was able to deliver powerful and emotionally-charged performances. Art Pepper with his dissolute, angelic face with Laurie Pepper as his Boswell collecting, remembering, recording, preserving. According ...

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Art Pepper: Unreleased Art Pepper: Atlanta 1980

by Angelo Leonardi
March 25, 2021

La serie delle performance inedite di Art Pepper giunge all'11° capitolo e si aggiunge alle altre registrazioni in studio o live (molte dell'etichetta Galaxy), che documentano la fase finale della sua carriera. Anche quest'album doppio è stato curato dalla vedova Laurie che ebbe il merito di sostenere la fragile personalità del marito, consentendogli di esprimere e documentare la sua maiuscola statura artistica. Figlio non voluto di due alcolizzati, la vita di Art Pepper era stata devastata da ...

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Art Pepper: Unreleased Art Pepper Volume Eleven: Atlanta

by Peter J. Hoetjes
February 17, 2021

Laurie Pepper expands upon the legend of her late husband, Art Pepper, with the release of Atlanta. The eleventh edition in her Widow's Taste series of uncovered treasures finds the alto saxophonist at an unspecified jazz club in Atlanta, Georgia, during the spring of 1980. Firmly planted in his comeback era, Pepper found comfort and familiarity in the use of two very different pianists. Although he preferred George Cables, whom he tagged with the moniker “Mr. Beautiful," he was occasionally ...

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Milcho Leviev: Multiple Personalities: Milcho Leviev Plays the Music of Don Ellis

by Robert R. Calder
March 3, 2007

Milcho Leviev!

The exclamation mark doesn't mean I'm a special fan. I've just heard Leviev, and to hear of him again was itself exciting. Long ago he came through the Iron Curtain from a jazz and big band career in Bulgaria, worked in Germany with the supertrombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, played on a brilliant Art Pepper album, and was associated with the late maverick genius Don Ellis until Ellis' early death. No minor/marginal performer or classical graduate trying ...