Results for "Robert Levin"

Robert Levin

Mark Shane/Joe Licari: Swing It, Brother, Swing!!

by Robert Levin
July 27, 2019

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 ...

Cecil Taylor: This Music is the Face of a Drum

by Robert Levin
August 8, 2010

[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 ...

Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s

by Robert Levin
August 8, 2010

[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 ...

The Emergence of Jimmy Lyons

by Robert Levin
August 1, 2010

[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 ...

Introducing Booker Little

by Robert Levin
July 25, 2010

[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 ...

Cecil Taylor at the Take 3, 1962-'63

by Robert Levin
July 24, 2010

[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 ...

Sunny Murray: On Taking the Leap from One Reality to Another

by Robert Levin
July 18, 2010

[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 ...

Introducing Anthony Braxton

by Robert Levin
July 17, 2010

[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 ...