Jazz Articles about Tony Levin

About Tony Levin

Album Review

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 ...

Extended Analysis

Exposures

by John Kelman
June 4, 2022

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 ...

Album Review

Stick Men: Tentacles

Read "Tentacles" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
May 16, 2022

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, ...

Album Review

Beledo: Seriously Deep

Read "Seriously Deep" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
April 2, 2022

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 ...

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

by John Kelman
November 12, 2021

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 ...

Album Review

Tubby Hayes: Free Flight

Read "Free Flight" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
April 3, 2021

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 ...

Album Review

Jakko M. Jakszyk: Secrets & Lies

Read "Secrets & Lies" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
October 20, 2020

Life often unfolds in unexpected ways. For some, like Jakko M. Jakszyk, it has taken some truly surprising twists and turns. That the 62 year-old multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter has attained considerably greater visibility in the last ten years than in the previous 35 has, to say the least, righted a significant wrong. Which makes the release of Secrets & Lies, Jakszk's first solo album since the The Bruised Romantic Glee Club (Iceni, 2006) and its 2009, self-released companion piece, ...