Exposé Interview with Tony Levin Band, September 2000

For more than two decades, Tony Levin has been one of the most sought-after bassists in the world, both within the progressive genre and elsewhere. His work with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel is enough to assure him a place in musical history, but there is so much more, from session work on pop albums to small-profile jazz projects. His résumé fills many pages, and even he can't remember every album he's played on.

After a series of collaborative records, mostly on his own Papa Bear Records, Tony Levin released his first album as a leader and main composer in 2000. Waters of Eden came out on Narada, a label more known for New Age acoustic guitar than progressive rock, but Levin managed to stride the categories handily, putting out a set of instrumental tracks that are melodic and thoughtful without losing energy or power.

Throughout most of 2000, Levin took his music on the road, playing clubs and small theaters across the country. For the live band, he called upon old friends Jerry Marotta and Larry Fast, two fellow alumni of Peter Gabriel's early albums and touring bands who appeared on Waters of Eden, and guitarist Jesse Gress. In addition to pieces from that album, the four played songs by King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, and Jimi Hendrix. We talked to all four of them individually both before and after their Portland show.

Tony Levin

Exposé: The first album under your own name, World Diary, was really a collection of collaborations, as were From the Caves of the Iron Mountain and Bruford Levin Upper Extremities, so this current record, Waters of Eden, is your first as a leader. Is this something you've wanted to do for a while, and do you see yourself taking this role more in the future?

Levin: Well, it isn't something I've wanted to do for a long time. It is very different than writing collaboratively, which is the way I've done my other three albums on Papa Bear Records. It's very different than – We all like being in control, so it was fun and I'd say I had a nice time with it. I don't really know if my next album will be this kind, where I do the compositions and then get the correct players to play each piece, or whether I'll go back to collaboration. So I'm not really on a direction of continuing this way necessarily. However I would say that I felt good about my kind of learning the craft of composition, and I will continue to compose. In fact I have been, regardless of whether it's on my next album or not. So sooner or later I'll find some outlet for my composition-styled work.

Good question. First came the musical idea, and I was intending on releasing it on my own Papa Bear Records, and near the beginning of when I had an idea what I was going to do musically, Narada coincidentally came to me and asked me if I'd like to do an album for them. I'm asked this every few years by different companies, and usually I don't want to. This time I thought, "Well, wait a minute, maybe this kind of music will suit them, and if it doesn't, then let's talk about it, because I don't really want to do a different kind of music. But let's talk about it." Really I just sent them tapes of the early versions of the pieces – they liked it very much and even though I love having the artistic control of releasing it on Papa Bear Records, I was kind of thrilled to see someone else pay the money for manufacturing it. And also Narada Records can distribute in a store without [me] getting too into business, which is very different than the musical stuff. The fact is, I don't distribute my records, I only sell them on the web, which is nice, but it's a pleasure to know that there are some stores around the country that actually have this record.

On your web site, on the page about Waters of Eden, you said you originally had concerns about recording it entirely digitally. How do you feel it worked out in the end?

Fine, sonically it was fine. My fears were probably ungrounded. I'll never really know, because it was a sonic thing, not a musical thing. I brought in a very good engineer named David Bottrill, who has done a lot of world music with me, and does some of the Peter Gabriel albums I particularly like. I brought him in to mix at the end, or to remix it, even though I had a very good engineer, Robert Frazza, who did the recording. So I knew that David's fresh ears to the project and his analog taste would just alleviate me of that worry. I knew if he heard some little tendency towards it sounding digital, he'd correct it. Either he did, or he didn't hear it – I'll never really know or care. I was in good hands and so I could stop worrying about that. I know it was a lot more difficult way to mix it. It would have been very easy – it was already mixed on digital audio, and it was ready to just put onto better quality tape. But instead we went into a very well equipped studio, Bearsville Studios in New York, and spent quite a bit of money and time putting things through different amplifiers and onto different kinds of tape.

This leg of the tour having just – we just finished [the previous leg] in the end of June, so really we're not changing anything just yet. It's the same. We haven't even seen each other as a group. That's why this sound check is so difficult. We'll start off, especially tonight, exactly where we left off. At the end of four days we might have added another piece or two or subtracted something – we'll vary it a little bit. Frankly, the Stick is having some technical difficulties, so we might not do one of the pieces I might have done on Stick, but to tell you the truth it's a little hard to tell until sound check is over which pieces we'll do. We will undoubtedly try to do – as we did before – a variety of things. A lot of music from the album and some Peter Gabriel music and some King Crimson as you just heard, and something very new that nobody's heard, and even if we can throw in an improv we will. Maybe we'll do "Back in New York City," a Genesis piece that I did on the very first Gabriel tour. So, as you can tell, we're not quite sure what we'll do, but we have a fairly good idea.

We usually have at least an introduction, if not a whole piece, that's improvised, but not nearly as much improvisation as, say King Crimson, where maybe a quarter of the show is improvised.

I left that to each guy. Frankly, they had all played on the record except for Jesse Gress. They had to learn how to combine the different parts that were played, or play exactly what they played. I really left each thing up to each guy. For me it was easy – I just play pretty much what I played on the record. I think I had the easiest time with that. The hardest time was Larry Fast, who had to combine maybe three synthesizer parts into one. And he did it and he probably has one playing on a sequencer while he plays the other – I don't really know how he does it.

It's a local bar band, it's nothing to go bragging about. It's a bar band we have in Woodstock which has different guys on different nights. Maybe we play a couple of gigs a month. I might be in it if I'm in town; Jerry Marotta, our drummer here, might be in it if he's in town; or a number of other bass players and drummers. I've been playing in it for years and Jesse's in it – he plays guitar along with a few other guys. So I know his playing from that. I also know him because it's a small town we live in, Woodstock, and he's well known for playing with Todd Rundgren. He's also an editor for Guitar Player magazine. When they need very difficult guitar parts transcribed, like a Hendrix part they want taken off a record, or harder than that, then Jesse's the guy who does it. So I know he's very, very quick at picking up parts. For instance, I'm asking him for the next leg in October to learn some very difficult stuff. "Sleepless" I want to do from King Crimson, which has two guitar parts, Fripp and Belew, and I said, "Jesse, play it. You figure it out and play something that sounds like both of them." So he's very good at that.

You said Uncle Funk is nothing to brag about, but is it more fun than "serious" bands?

It's fun; it's not more fun, but it's fun. I love playing the bass. I love playing music, and Uncle Funk – yes, I prefer to play original music, which is what I'm doing tonight, and what I do when I'm on the road with Peter Gabriel or King Crimson or Seal. Uncle Funk plays 60s covers, and we do it as well as we can, and people have fun and dance. You see what I mean? It's not – we don't make records, and we don't travel much further than Woodstock, but we have fun for sure. It's just as much fun, but I think it's a little more fun playing original music.

I undoubtedly will do that eventually. It's problematic to record these shows for a live album – I would love to do that, 'cause we do a lot that's not on the album, and by the end of this year we'll have done many, many shows, and it'll be really quite a band. But that's a problem because of the first album being on Narada, and I would have to talk them into it. I'm not allowed to rerecord this stuff for a few years, and they don't really do live albums, so it's unlikely that they'd like that, and I can't release it. So a live album is probably not going to happen for a few years from this line up. Whether I go right into the studio with them next year or not really depends on what kind of music I want to record. I'm not sure. I have this fall to work on other things and do some heavy decisions about whether I want to do this same kind of album or a different flavor of thing.

You have a lot of options, considering the Magna Carta work with Liquid Tension Experiment and Bozzio Levin Stevens...

I know. I love that stuff. In fact, the Bozzio Levin Stevens album, we were just talking about maybe touring with that in the winter.

It's quite a change going from the King Crimson stuff, which is pretty incendiary, to Liquid Tension Experiment, which is basically speed metal, then to your own album. It's quite a combination.

Even though it might sound like I do everything, I really don't do everything I'm asked to do. There are some that I pass on, or that I'm too busy to, or that musically don't suit me. But Liquid Tension was a stretch for me – it was much more technical than I'm used to playing – so that was kind of way off the path of what I usually do. But progressive stuff like with Bozzio Levin Stevens and with King Crimson is what I usually do, and – how should I put it? – the mellower music that I did on Waters of Eden is just another part of the music that I want to express, and I really miss doing that if I play too much progressive – how should I put it? – guy-oriented, from-the-brain music. That's fine, I like playing it, but it's just not all that there is. There's more music that I need to express, and if I go too long without it, then it builds up into a whole album.

Yeah, but not all bands want to have a balance. Some bands want to– As you know, Liquid Tension Experiment doesn't want to sing an Italian ballad!

The first Liquid Tension has more of a variety on it between a semi-jazz grooves–

Tony Levin with Funk Fingers, photo by Danette Davis

You've worked in a wide variety of situations, from highly composed ensembles to open-ended improvisation. Do you approach them differently? Do you prefer one to the other?

I don't have a preference, and I don't have a plan of how to approach music. I have been in a lot of musical situations, both live and in the studio. It's pretty easy because I'm a bass player. It's pretty simple: I go in and I listen to the music, if someone else made up the music – if it's somebody's album. I listen to the music and then I hopefully like the music – I almost always do – and then I just try to help fashion a bass part that'll be the best for that music. And it can be very different, the bass parts, and I can have different instruments, it really depends on the music. Until I hear the actual piece, I don't really know whether I'm going to play an upright bass or a cello with a bow or a heavy rock part.

Well, in a perfect world I have all my instruments. But I almost always have them send me tapes of the songs beforehand. Even if it's an artist who's known for ballads, I still won't necessarily play the same kind of part. It really depends on the music.

Has there ever been a session that you took, and you went in, and you ended up feeling kind of out of place, like you really weren't the right guy for the job?

There was a Chaka Khan album way back – maybe her first solo album – when god knows why, the producer brought me in to play funk, which I can play, but not as well as the guys who live in the genre. And many times in jazz situations... Andy Summers, two albums ago – something about Mr. X... [ed. The Last Dance of Mr. X] Actually, when he called me to do the album, I said, "Well this is straight ahead jazz, Andy. I'm not the guy." 'Cause Andy can play jazz or rock, and he kind of indicated that it wasn't jazz, and I got there and it very much was straight ahead jazz. And I did do the album, and I was there and committed to do it, but I felt very out of place. And again, it's not that I can't play that style, it's just I don't hear my bass playing in that style being comparable to many of the guys who live in that genre and devote their musical lives to playing that stuff. I don't really want to be caught trying to just copy them, so it's an awkward situation for me.

How do you adapt your playing to different drummers? For example, with Terry Bozzio as compared to Jerry Marotta?

Again, I don't have a sentence I can say about that, 'cause I don't have a plan. I just kind of listen to what's being played, and even then I don't intellectually make a decision what to play. I've been a bass player so long that I just kind of... From some inner part of me, I just get a feeling of "Hey, what if I played this?" And I don't know what this is, because right now it's theoretical, but for instance I might think, "How 'bout if I just dampen the strings and play some very sparse two notes that are very rhythmic and African-sounding?" I might say that, or inside I might just feel that. "How 'bout I take this Stick and play very busy and very high and completely different than what the drummer's doing?" Any of those things might happen. I don't really think about it. Not only that, now, even when I'm hearing it, I don't think about it.

Oh, yeah, it's easy! It's making music. We're talking about not only me, but all of the guys I work with. We're talking about musicians who are not only professional, but spent their whole lives playing the one instrument, doing what they do. It's like a bowler goes to a bowling alley sees a different configuration of pins. He doesn't really need to consult his chart, he knows what to do. I don't know what to do in the bowling case, but in the bass case...

I was about ten. So I'm fifty-four now and I've been doing nothing since! I have a wonderful family and I have some hobbies, but I don't play guitar, and I play only minimal piano. I am a bass player. The reason isn't because I'm so dumb that I'm unable to do anything, the reason is 'cause I really love bass playing, and I don't need to take it to be something else than it is. I like to, given the opportunity, to try and stretch the boundaries, but I'm very happy just playing the rote parts that are written, that can make people dance and feel good. I was when I was a kid, and I haven't changed in that way. So in a way, I'm a very lucky guy, that I'm doing what my inside really wants to do. I do other things, but I have no plans to stop playing the bass until people don't want me to play with them anymore.

What is your very first memory of being on stage in front of an audience, whether it was with the bass or something else?

That's easy. I've written a book of anecdotes about things like that, so some of them are very vivid in my mind. The book is called Beyond the Bass Clef, and is in some bookstores. My first band was called The Cavaliers, and I was maybe eleven, and we played at school dances. So I started in whatever – seventh grade? sixth grade? – playing at school dances, and I was nervous. This was an instrumental band. I was playing an acoustic upright bass – really, rock wasn't quite the same in those days – so I was nervous, and I saw all the kids I go to school with out there trying to dance to our music. I do remember it pretty well.

Tony Levin drumming in Seattle, photo by Danette Davis

Speaking of your book, have any drummers who read it commented on your chapter about drummers, where you refer to them as "child-adults"?

Not a single drummer has even read it, I don't I think. I could be wrong, but none of the many drummers I know has read it or commented about it. In fact, I just worked with Steve Gadd, a wonderful drummer. We did an album together in Los Angeles last week, and I said, "Steve, didn't I send you a book a couple years ago?" And he really didn't remember I had sent it, and didn't read it, and he didn't remember getting it, and there's a whole chapter about the guy, so I was going to ask him if he minded anything I said in it – which I didn't think he would, but it turned out that he didn't even remember I had written it!

One of the parts I enjoyed the most was your "solitary cyclist" stories. Do you have any good cycling stories that have happened since the book was written?

Nothing that exciting, I'm happy to say. It's been safe ever since the– I've spent a little less time riding because it's only with the Peter Gabriel band that we have the luxury of taking bikes on the road, 'cause he has a bigger tour trucks and stuff. And I haven't done a Peter tour in quite a few years. Even the last tour we did that ended in '94, we were more motorcycling than bicycling. But I do bicycle a lot in my free time. Thankfully no accident stories. When Peter tours again, I plan on having a lot of stories, of all kinds of adventures.

Yeah, Peter gets bored just going from gig to gig, and he likes to find adventures to do in between the shows in different places, and we've had many.

Not particularly on my own, but most of the kind of further-off-track stories in my book came from Peter Gabriel tours. That's when we go white water rafting, and up some mountain pass, motorcycling to the Grand Canyon, or sailing off the coast of New Zealand for two days to the Indian Ocean, which is fun.

I had that bad bicycle accident that I wrote about in the book. A hotel was bombed that I was in the Basque area in the north of Spain, where that happens a lot, but nobody was hurt.

I was in the hotel, but I wasn't in the lobby. That's not much, considering twenty or thirty years of touring. No planes going down.

Let's talk a little about the latest Bozzio Levin Stevens release. The press release talks about how the newer album, Situation Dangerous, is a bit more composed.

It is. The first one was basically a bit composed, but we jammed quite a bit, and we enjoyed that, but we didn't have that much time to write. This time, we had a little bit more time to write and we're faster at it. We're more used to it, and we didn't need to jam. Maybe we should have...

I like the first one very much too. I have nothing against the jams, I just felt like we took another step, not a huge step, but a small step towards being the band that we are, being our own identity, and because we knew it going in, we just kind of are a little more ourselves than we were on the first one. I know Terry Bozzio did miss there being jams – he wished there were more jams – so who knows what the next one will bring? But what we really need if we're going to be a band, I think, is to tour and to play live, and see where that takes the music. And I'm trying to do that, but it's not logistically the easiest thing to put together. So who knows? In the future hopefully we'll tour and the music will take on some stuff, and we'll probably come up with new music while we're on the road.

Always. That always happens. Steve Stevens especially, he had a lot of great ideas this time. Sometimes we'll come in with ideas that we'll try. I mean, the first two or three days we just did that. We didn't do complete pieces, we did segments, and the other guys would learn them, and we'd record them, and almost half of it we had to dump. It just wasn't suitable for the album.

Are there any future plans for the BLUE (Bruford Levin Upper Extremities) group?

Well, that's funny because two of the guys are always calling me: "Let's do some more stuff." And then the other guy, Bill Bruford, is always busy with his stuff, and so I ask the others especially Chris Botti, our trumpet player, who's now on the road for two years with Sting, so he's not available. But when he asked me to do it, I said, "Don't bother asking me! I'll do it. Go ask Bill." And Bill kind of would like to do it, but he has other projects that are further up on the list for him. So until Bill has time and wants to do it, we won't. And then if Bill does want to do it, we still have the additional logistical thing of everybody's schedules working out, which isn't easy. I love the band. I should – I put it together! And we had a great time live and I love the live album. So I very much want to work some more. Ironically, it's one of the few bands that I do where we could make it work financially. We could just go play, and people would like it and come see it. It's kind of hard to start up with Bozzio Levin Stevens or do my own Tony Levin Band tour. There's a small audience, so we have to be very careful and not book too much, 'cause it really barely pays for itself. So ironically BLUE, the one band that would pay for itself easily, isn't so easy to put together.

You've used your web site to distribute your music. Do you feel that works pretty well for you?

First of all, I've had a web site quite a while. I've had internet presence and interest for a long time. I got email in the very early eighties, maybe 1980, maybe even before, when there was no AOL. There were some other systems.

Yes, you had suction cups. But anyway, having been on it so long, I'm kind of in that school of people who don't really think a site should be for profit. So my site – I started calling it papabear.com so I haven't changed it to tonylevin.com [ed. this has since changed] – but really Papa Bear is only kind of a segment off of it, Papa Bear being my record label, which only sells my stuff. And I keep what I think is a pretty low presence of trying to sell things. I admit sometimes I get excited about a new record, like the Bozzio Levin Stevens one, which I don't even sell, but then I'll link to some way to sell it, and if it's a record of mine then of course I'll mention it, and my book I mention, so it just kind of has – and even when it started and it was only Papa Bear, I put on Funk Fingers just for the fun of sharing that. I only made more because I had the web site and I wanted to share it with bass players. Anyway, it's evolved more into what I think is a way that people who are interested in progressive music can just see what it's like behind the scenes. I know I get a lot of email from people who just thank me for having the diary up there and the photos, and they don't really go there to buy my records. And that's fine with me. And so far that's a viable thing for me because I have so much interest in the web that I'll devote the time to keeping the page interesting and up to date, and I don't really need to have income from the web to make it worthwhile.

I like it very, very much. I don't think I've had time to actually listen to all of it. I have mixed feelings, as you can imagine, [about] a Crimson album that I'm not on. And the better it is, the more I wish I was on it! But also it's a mixed thing, because I also have an appreciation of the guys playing, and I can hear little things in there that other people don't recognize from rehearsals that I was at, and stuff like that. So it has a lot of meaning for me just as music. I'm pretty comfortable by now with the fact that they're probably going to continue that incarnation of Crimson. I'm still technically in Crimson, but it sounds to me like an album that deserves to have another album of the same line up.

Larry Fast

In 1975, Larry Fast, under the name of Synergy, released Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, and jumped immediately to the forefront of electronic music. The album's title was a bit misleading, since the music consisted almost entirely of Moog synthesizers, not a rock band (or orchestra), but turned out to be a milestone. The Synergy albums that followed set the standards for electronic music throughout the seventies and eighties. In between his own projects, Fast found the time to record and tour with Peter Gabriel and many other artists. He has also stayed at the forefront of advancing technology, from new instruments to MIDI and digital watermarking.

Exposé: I read in an interview with you that you played in your first band in 1966.

Larry Fast live in Portland, photo by Danette Davis

Well, I'd already been playing for a couple years, and it wasn't until like three years later when I finally had saved up enough money to buy a reasonable electronic keyboard – probably less than that. I think it was '68.

Yeah. I mean I'd been taking piano lessons since the very early '60s, it just wasn't playing in any kind of ensemble thing. You couldn't carry a piano around, and I couldn't afford to have an organ, and keyboards weren't really that accepted yet into the band environment during the early Beatles British Invasion period. It took a little bit of time for it to insinuate in.

I held out for the British one, so I got a Vox. One of my early heroes was Mike Smith with the Dave Clarke Five, who was keyboardist with the band.

From very early on you've had a foot in the serious academic electronic world as well as the pop world. Do you find that some of the people on the academic side look down on you because of your pop work?

Well, I've never really been that much a part of it. Wendy Carlos has had more experience with that than I did, because she really came through the Columbia Princeton electronic music lab program with a masters degree, and I never did and advanced degree. So with the undergraduate composition work, I had sort of like a dark little secret that I was doing rock and pop things on the side. And I think that of all of us, Wendy really took most of the brunt of that by being so successful and so legendary that she was really not accepted by the people that she had been through the academic world with, and it was only when a couple of people with really good credentials, people like Leonard Bernstein and Glen Gould, stood up and said, "Hey, this is really legitimate, this is really good," that there was at least some recognition of what she was doing. But she'd really turned her back on the bad treatment that she got there and never really went back to academia. I was never really a part of it, and I think what's happened is a sort of third movement has come to exist, which is people like Wendy and maybe Philip Glass, Steve Reich, you know, people who do come out of the academic world, and I kind of slid in from the other direction, with some formal training, but not – I was never teaching assistant for undergraduates, or even a major in music, you know. It was just a different direction, but the ironic thing is that about a year ago I was contacted by the Columbia program. Now I serve as a kind of an informal advisor to the program there, and it's really changed a lot, because the old guard – the old serious composers, who now if they were still alive would be a hundred years old – have largely been replaced by senior people in the department who are in their forties, and the grad students are very hip twenty-somethings ,so it's really quite different. Lots is changing.

No. That was the surprising thing, it's really the same – the equipment's a little different, in a lot of ways it's a bit easier. It's a terrible analogy, but it's like riding a bike or something. And especially because it's these guys, so this is like a college reunion or something like that, and it hasn't been as though I haven't done any – I've done the Wendy Carlos things a couple of years ago, and I'd have moments here and there from my other life, my other world, my friends in Bon Jovi. I get called up on the stage occasionally on the solo tours and stuff. It's little things like that, but this is the first extended thing in quite a number of years.

For the live work here I noticed you've got the Kurzweil and a rack up there, and that's pretty much all you're using.

Exactly. In fact the Audity is doing more of that. That's an instrument they've already discontinued and replaced but it's a very good digital engine with a lot of analog class sounds capable in the architecture. During the set I'm doing one Synergy piece, and obviously that was all done with Moog modular originally, and they're digital patches, they're not samples of the Moog. They're actually rebuilding the sounds using the digital synth engine that's in the Audity with a bit of the Kurzweil, and it works great. In fact after tweaking it, they're better than a lot of the Moog sounds were originally – they've got more power and thunder and life to them. I would have loved to have had that kind of power back then.

There are some keyboard players who are analog purists and some who are totally digital, but you straddle both worlds. Of course, you started back when analog was the only option...

And I love the class of sounds the analog instruments were capable of doing. I've come to appreciate them more as time has gone on than I did at the time when that was the only stuff we had to work with, and it was very frustrating. But I'm not a purist in the sense that "if it's analog it's good and if it's digital it's bad" at any rate. They're all just tools, so it's just what tools do I use to get done what needs to get done, musically, sonically, and especially in this case, the digital instruments like the Kurzweil, like the E-MU, and there are others out there – I use more in my own studio at home, but these just suited themselves beautifully for what we're doing live here.

It's not like the old days where you had to carry multiple racks of keyboards around to get the different sounds.

When it comes right down to it, even in the last year or so I could reduce it really down to a MIDI keyboard and a Powerbook and I could pretty much do the show if I wanted to configure it, and I don't think it would sound any different. It's just really getting ridiculous at that point.

I recently reviewed a record that prominently declared that no sequencers were used in the recording, and my thought was, what's the difference?

I suppose somebody who really is a wonderful, facile, and highly trained keyboardist wants to make note of the fact that they can play that precisely, and part of the attraction is that they're a virtuoso as a keyboard player. I suppose it's nice that they can get recognition because anybody with even the most minimal chops with a sequencer can tweak it and fix all the errors until it sounds as good as that guy could probably play it in real time. I have to sort of agree with you. I sort of straddle the fence on that. I have a lot of respect for really phenomenal keyboard players. I've never put myself in the virtuoso class – it's always for rock and roll, and up to a certain level of classical work I'm perfectly adequate, but I'm never gonna be a Horowitz, I'm never gonna be the extreme top level of the classical players. I didn't take that route; I didn't do the fifteen years of running the piano exercises every day for four hours. I wanted to be in the writing end of it, so that's where I focus. I have friends who are really phenomenal keyboardists, and they're just great, and I have undying respect for what they do. But when it comes to producing a record, then I'm more of a realist. The end product is the most important thing: what are the people that are unschooled in how you make the stuff and how you play it gonna think. Are they just gonna enjoy the music, or are they not? And that's really the bottom line figure for me.

Larry Fast live in Seattle, photo by Danette Davis

After a long time of sporadic availability your Synergy catalog is finally becoming available. How has that come about?

What had happened was that Jem Records – which was the parent company of the Passport Records Group with Passport, Passport Jazz, Audion, Important Records – the record label group was always profitable, but the parent company, the record distribution company, wasn't doing so hot, and that dragged everything down. That was the bigger part of the company. At any rate, in 1988 and '89 they went through their whole bankruptcy proceedings, and they finally just bit the dust, and everything that was tied to them ended up being contested over who really owned it and who had the rights to reissue or whatever. And I was in there in federal court slugging away with everybody else that was part of it. It took five years for the cases to work their way through the courts, but around 1994 the dust cleared and I asserted that they were my records, and I had the cancelled checks and studio work orders and all the things that were part of the studio House of Music where I'd recorded, where I was actually an investor in the studio. I put everything through that, and I had paid. Even though I was a part owner, I always paid for our operating costs. So I always got things done a lot cheaper than the outside clients did, but I had the checks and the court accepted that. Ultimately there were other people that said that they owned their records as successor corporations, and they said "Nope, you guys aren't."

So almost as soon as that was done – I'd always had physical possession of the masters and had physical possession of the artwork, which was another thing that I needed, so it was just really the right to get out there unencumbered legally, and put them out and not be challenged by somebody else trying to put an injunction on me. After that, that's exactly what I did. I went right to the first album, pulled the masters back out – I have a fairly comprehensive digital studio at home, and I did all of the, in a sense, fix-ups, but they weren't really so much fix-ups as just making the CD masters the way they should have been done, and not off of the LP masters, but going back one generation earlier to the original studio mixes, and then preparing that without all the stuff you have to do to squeeze sound into grooves on vinyl – which is another whole story. But in most of my records, it was kind of sad how bad vinyl is, and how we had to really just shoehorn it in to accommodate all the bad things about vinyl. Now I can just blow all that out and get all the low end I wanted, and all the high dynamic ranges, and everything else that CDs are capable of. I could put that on the replication master, and that's exactly what I did. Synergy's been a corporation for twenty years, so I started a little label under that and got the first three albums out over about a two year period. And they started showing up on SoundScan. There was a little ad hoc distribution network, with places like The Artist Shop that were just wonderful, they were so helpful in getting this whole thing launched. Barry was just terrific, and still is just a really helpful guy.

Once things started showing up, it was one of these odd coincidences where Marty Scott – who was the original president of Passport Records and founder of Jem Records, and he's still in the media business – was having a casual conversation with one of the people over at PolyGram, a guy named Bill Levinson, and somehow or other my name came up. Bill said, "So whatever happened to those records?" And Marty said, "Hey, he's got them out, he's putting them out independently." And they checked SoundScan, and sure enough, they were showing up, so we did sell an appreciable number of copies. And then my plan had been to put out about one a year till I got the whole catalog out. Within three months, I was in the offices of PolyGram. They said, "We want to license the whole shooting match and put it all out during the 1998 year." And that's exactly what happened. So it worked out beautifully for all of us.

Now they've since been absorbed by Universal, and Universal has been absorbed by Vivendi, and I don't know what kind of restructurings are going to happen on that, but if that doesn't continue to be the home, there'll always be a home somewhere, even if I just go back to indie distribution on it. But there are other labels out there that have expressed interest anyway.

It's ironic that you should mention all the compromises you said you had to make to put your music on vinyl. There are still vinyl purists out there who insist that that's the way music is supposed to sound.

I know. I think I know what they're hearing, and a lot of it has to do with the RIAA equalization curve and the heightening that happens when it decodes, where it doesn't decode completely. Or there are a lot of little things, tricks of engineering design that have been used – I gotta go play. We'll pick this up, okay?

What about some of the current electronic stuff that's coming out? A lot of it is built on things you did back in the 70s.

I'm not as encyclopedic about knowing everything that's out there as I used to be at one time. The other thing that happens I've found, is that when I was a wannabe getting into music back in the 60s, I would buy every record that came out and I'd know every track, and I knew who played on what record. And then when I started doing it, I didn't have time to be doing the other things. So your focus gets narrowed a bit, but in one sense when the techno thing started bubbling up almost ten years ago, I thought that was pretty neat. It was pretty interesting that it was getting used, the instruments started showing up, and it was kind of nice after all the backlash during the punk movement when nothing electronic or anything that wasn't sort of thrashy guitar wasn't considered accepted. So it was nice to sort of come out from under the shadows, but like any mass movement there's ninety percent junk, ninety-five percent junk, and then some really stellar things come out of it. And they come out in the weirdest ways. I liked a lot of the early Moby stuff, and I actually like the stuff that he's doing now, you know. It's kind of different, but it wouldn't be the kind of stuff I'd choose to do, I just found it interesting probably because it wasn't what I'd do. So I'm probably not a good judge of that for other people's listening experience.

I've found that there's just so much of it that trying to figure out what's good and what's not is very difficult. I've been listening to Future Sound of London...

Which is very interesting, because I've got a big thing going with them because they sampled me without my permission.

Oh, yeah. The lawyers are talking, it'll happen. It's just a matter of, if you're not going to create stuff and sample from something else and call it your own, you better credit it. That's just fair. I don't think anybody in the pre-sampler era would have even dreamed of doing something like that. So it's just a matter of etiquette, acknowledging that somebody else put in the sweat first.

Sometimes it ends up so changed that you don't even recognize what the source was.

Well, if it does, then I think it's probably crossed the line where it's really been transformed. But when it's essentially the same thing, it's just a beat change or a beat laid over it, it might be an interesting collage work, and it might make an interesting work, but it wasn't really the work of that person who's claiming it.

In my research I've come across you talking about digital watermarks. Can you explain that concept?

It's basically a way of embedding in the audio stream a real low level, low bit rate digital information stream, that's at such a low level and so well woven in that it's completely inaudible. You cannot find it in there. It amounts to if you were comparing the data of the audio to the data of the watermark, it's an infinitesimal amount, it's very small. Anyway, it is a way of encoding a very little bit of information – usually it's just a number tag – and it's something that refers to a worldwide database that is now being compiled that lists every released piece of music. And the watermark then becomes a part of the program material and can be recovered with a fairly simple computer program and then it says, "This is the piece of music, here's the ID number." If you refer to this master database, it'll tell you who wrote it, who performed it, who the royalties should go to now if you want to use it, that sort of thing. So it's something that's going to be real important.

In fact it's already becoming important because in most of the recorded history of music in the last hundred odd years since the late 1870s, music, when it was recorded and then sold and distributed, always had some sort of a wax or plastic or shellac carrier with it. There was always a physical thing that had a paper or cardboard label attached to it that gave all that information, and that's how the whole business of music – you know, the kind of dark commercial underside we don't want to think about when we're making art, but it's how we actually get paid – that's been in place for a century or more. Now it's changing because all of a sudden music can exist without its physical carrier anymore. The only way that this kind of tracking of ownership can go on is to somehow attach it to the digital signal – and in fact these actually work with analog transformations. Once it's in there, it's in there, and it's not coming out. So the watermarking is just a system to do that, and it can be used for anything as innocuous as kind of the way I think it'll probably get used [which] is that when internet radio stations play something, when a file is transferred in a commercial way, that there'll be a little tracking that says this was sold or this was transferred, and there's a performance royalty of a penny (or whatever it's going to be) is due on it. To the free music way of thinking there's probably a more sinister way of using it, which is to match the watermark to some kind of an encryption key, that if you bought a download you have it. If you didn't buy it, you don't have it and maybe it won't play on your MP3 player. I don't know. By 2004 or something like that, that kind of anti-piracy anti-music-theft thing is not going to work, because there's always going to be a hack-around to keep it out of there. So I think that probably the more subtle, soft way of doing it [is better].

I mean, right now the same thing goes on with all broadcast music. Radio stations log what they play, TV stations log, and cable stations log, then report back to ASCAP and BMI, pay license fees, and all of us who write music get checks every so often. All this is just keeping the same system in place – basically that's where I see it being used.

But given the huge amount of music that's out there now without watermarks – I mean I can easily take out one of my old vinyl albums and rip it to an MP3, and there's no watermark on that.

It's really going to have its value in the future, as new stuff's coming on line, because there'll be the 'Nsyncs or Christine Aguilleras of the year 2007. They're going to have something on it by then. The majors are all signed onto this now, so it's something that's coming in. I was kind of a pioneer in it, so my stuff's watermarked. Wendy Carlos's stuff's watermarked. And there are other early pioneers who were part of the beta development phase of this, so we just kind of got out there early with it. You're absolutely right, there's going to be no way to corral the Beatles' catalog or the Nirvana catalog or whoever sold a lot in the last forty, fifty, sixty years that still has some value out there.

It's going to be really weird to see what happens, since there are so many things happening now that turn the whole way the music business works upside down.

And it could in theory change it so radically that there isn't the financial incentive to do this kind of thing [referring to the Tony Levin tour] anymore. Musicians do have to earn money to buy the equipment, you know, even on a local level. It's something that the society itself is going to have to work out. It's been done before. There have been upheavals before in the business. Every time there's a new technology, they go, "Oh it's all over!" Just [like] the rise of ASCAP, BMI, and the things that happened when recorded music came in and changed everything. When radio came in, [that] changed it again. There have been huge upheavals – probably even bigger than what we're seeing now. The whole concept of recorded music, and that people could buy that performance, was so radical, and it really changed everything. Copyright laws were totally rewritten to incorporate that. The ones that exist now probably can be applied. They were fairly foresighted even back in 1909, looking at what mechanical transmission was going to be. The internet hasn't really changed the fundamentals of it. This whole thing of free distribution with commercial use and non-commercial use is new, so there'll be some jockeying of the lines there.

Some people have said that it's very nearly to the point where any music pretty much by default will be distributed free, and musicians will have to make their money on other things.

And ticket sales. But that only works for the people who are selling a lot of T-shirts.

In all honesty, we did all the promotion on this whole part of the tour. The money came from the record – we lost money on the tour. Most bands lose money on the road. We lost money on the road with Peter Gabriel for probably the first six years, and it was only that record sales were good, that the records could keep underwriting [it]. So I think I've heard those arguments, and they're really for people who are wishful thinkers. I've heard that from people in the business, and they're not doing this. They're not coming from a realistic database on that kind of information.

It seems to me that the people who are really going to be hurt are the ones who aren't the really big stars -they're going to be able to make their money one way or another - but the people who are struggling and want to quit their day jobs.

But it will shake out – it's done it in the past. The whole concept of publishing... Before there were records, it was all done on sheet music, each piece of sheet music sold for a royalty. And then records came out: kind of an extension of that, and so were piano rolls. But then when radio came in, all of a sudden it was real different. At that point they had to find a new way, because it was free distribution. People could hear it - thousands of people at a time would hear it for free. So how do you get paid? And then the whole concept of blanket licensing of radio stations came in, and that's not really any different than internet radio stations. They were trying to get out of that, saying that is wasn't broadcasting, and I think that was a really nice end run that the internet stations were trying to do, because it would have saved them a lot of money. But they are doing it. It's not that different from radio. And with all the swapping that goes on, maybe it'll be the servers that have to do the licensing. There's ways to track that.

You were one of the early proponents of MIDI, and then General MIDI. Could you give a little background on your involvement with this? And how do you feel about some of the extensions to the specification that have been developed, such as those by Roland and Yamaha?

I was around, watching and experimenting, at the birth of MIDI. My work was in writing software to access the MIDI-like capabilities of the Prophet 5's Universal Synthesizer Interface around 1981. The USI was a general purpose music interface proposal made by Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits and presented at AES in a technical paper. The USI as implemented on the Prophets was remarkably similar to what later became MIDI after a multi-manufacturer conference to hammer out MIDI. When the MIDI spec was finally released, I found that I didn't have to make too many revisions in the software I had written for USI to make it MIDI friendly. The interface between different synthesizers and sequencer devices was a big leap forward and made possible a lot of the evolution of recording techniques for synthesizers leading up to digital recording on small computers. I should be clear that except for a little feedback to the people I knew who were directly involved in the engineering initiative, I didn't have a design or other connection with the development of the MIDI spec. But I was cheering on the sidelines very close to the action.

For me the advent of a solid musical protocol like MIDI and the development of really useful sequencing software (better than any of the ones that I had written) gave me and other musicians composing and arranging tools as powerful as the word processors had been for writers and editors in the previous decade. I never went back to the old way of multi-track recording once MIDI sequencers with SMPTE time code became available. I think that the ease of editing has helped me become a better composer. It's possible that MIDI will be replaced by USB or Firewire interfaces on newer instruments, but the basic way of working creatively won't change as much as refine the big changes that relatively low-tech (by today's standards) MIDI brought.

I don't have much of a connection with General MIDI. I think that the underlying concept is good for "general" use, but it's way too limiting for my uses in a truly creative way. It does make a good lowest common denominator way of playing back multimedia files. However as digital recording and small computers become more capable, it might become a common solution for a composer to record the finished mix for distribution rather than having the general MIDI device synthesize the sound, with varying degrees of success, on the the fly. The Roland and Yamaha extensions to the sound sets certainly help as long as the end user has the same sound sets, but it also adds a degree of uncertainty to the mix if there is a mismatch.

As to the general evolution of MIDI, there have been various manufacturer system exclusive additions to the original spec, which is a good thing. It allows for tailored control of very different types of instruments. As long as the basic MIDI note and performance control function parameters remain intact, then the specific extensions don't bother me.

Jerry Marotta

Like Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta has long been a sought-after studio musician. His muscular drumming, which gave life to Peter Gabriel's second through fourth albums, has performed the same magic for many other artists.

Marotta: I think it was Tony. He did the first solo record, and then I think the band that did the record was touring with him early on, and then the drummer – who was a session drummer from New York – he stopped doing it. A bunch of the guys stopped doing it, and Peter just put a different band together. And so Tony, who had known me and my brother (who's also a drummer), suggested either one of us, and my brother couldn't do it. That's how I started working with Peter.

I don't know if I'd ever played with Tony before then. I was originally – this is a long time ago, like [when I was] about twenty years old – I was working with a group called Orleans. We had a couple hits back in the seventies, and then the band broke up, and about a month later I was just looking for a gig, and this came up. So I started doing it.

Certainly your style really fit in with what Peter Gabriel was doing, with very heavy playing on the toms.

That sort of developed from working with Peter more than what I was doing before. I think all of our styles developed around what Peter was doing- that was the beauty of that particular arrangement of people. Larry and myself and Tony were the core of that band with Peter for about ten years. Guitar players would come and go, and then settled in to David Rhodes. But we really developed a style together and a sound together.

Did it just sort of fall together, or did Peter say, "Could you do something a little more..."

It was a combination of things, just kind of the way we all developed, and then Peter. Certainly the kinds of songs he was writing, and what he wanted to have happen, helped the process a lot. I think it was the perfect kind of collaborative, where everybody was developing, and it caught everybody at the right time. We all sort of got into the same mode and then it took off from there.

Interesting things. I worked with a group called Tears for Fears; I worked with Robbie Robertson from the Band – it's not progressive, but it's really good music. What else...

Working with the Indigo Girls for years; Jewel, Paul McCartney, I forget. Suzanne Vega – I've done a couple records with Suzanne, working with a producer named Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake, an engineer. I've done a lot of work with them. A couple records with a guy named Ron Sexsmith, a Canadian artist who's very, very good.

I hadn't realized you were on the Suzanne Vega albums. I guess I should read the credits more closely.

I'm a big fan of the Indigo Girls, and you fit in really well with their music, though you wouldn't think Jerry Marotta would fit in with two women and acoustic guitars. But it does work.

Yeah, it just happened to work out. I sort of had been bred to do that, [to always] adjust my style, and I had to adjust my style as much as I did for Peter for the Indigo Girls. But some of the stuff like "Galileo" I guess was a good mixture of me doing the odd kind of beat that included toms and stuff, and then doing their thing, writing those kinds of songs that they write. I just worked with them about two weeks ago on a new retrospective record. We recorded a couple of new songs, I worked with them on that. I haven't been touring with them this year, but...

Jerry Marotta live in Seattle, photo by Danette Davis

On their live album 1200 Curfews, you got a chance to play some other non-percussion instruments.

I've played saxophone with them, and lap steel, mandolin. It pretty much was an open palette there. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

Yes, lap steel's a really great instrument, but I never got to play it with anybody, and I just started using it in certain spots with them.

I've done a lot of singing. I worked with Daryl Hall and John Oates, and I sang third part with them. In Orleans I used to sing. It was really a vocal group, so I sang in that band. "Dance with Me" and "Still the One" made it big. They were very good musicians, but it wasn't a playing band - everybody sang. It was a very seventies kind of thing, big harmonies. So I've always liked singing. So we decided we might like to do "Back in New York City." We used to have fun doing that with Peter, and somebody had to do the singing. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it!

I still don't totally know the song yet, and I certainly can't sing it like Peter does. Well, I try to do a bit of that but still put myself into it. But I really enjoy doing the singing thing. I have done background vocals on records where I didn't play any drums, and just did backing vocals.

Taos drums seem to be showing up on a lot of things you've done. How did you start working with them?

Working on the first Suzanne Vega record I did, which was 99.9 Degrees, the approach was to do everything... If you go back and listen to the record, there's not really a lot of "real" drums on it, we just wanted to put – Every day we'd come in early and Mitchell and Tchad and I would assemble a kit. For every song a new kit out of percussion instruments. And I borrowed a big Indian bass drum from a friend of mine who lived up in Woodstock, who's a musician. That was the first time I ever used it, and it just sounded amazing. We ended up using it on a lot of the record. It somehow found its way into most of the drum kits. And so when we were done, of course I had to return it. When I was on tour with the Indigos not long after that, we had a day off in Santa Fe, so I drove up to Taos and I went to the company and I bought a couple of drums, and became friendly [with them], and they got wind of the fact that a real musician was interested in playing them and using them. Because mostly people sell them as furniture in people's houses for a Southwest motif, so they started really being supportive. I'd go in there and they'd have drums picked out, they'd be looking for good sounding drums, because they knew for the most part [they are] interior decorations, not drums. They just have a fabulous tone, which is fun to me because, like you said, with the heavy tom thing. With Peter I was doing a lot of heavy hitting; with the Taos drums you can't really hit them. You can, but I end up playing with mallets and brushes, and hitting them a lot softer. But they speak really well, and they're just incredible drums, the tonality on them...

Yes, and certainly in the cave, they were perfect, because regular drums would have probably been too loud. But the Taos drums with soft mallets... Because we recorded the whole thing kind of live to two track. Tchad Blake recorded it binaurally, so there was no mixing or anything. We had to blend; he had to set the microphones on the Neuman head up in the right spot to blend the band. So they worked really well in that context.

I can't argue with that. It's a very interesting sound, the combination of the environment and what you did in it.

Certainly working with Mitchell Froom has got to throw a lot of good jobs your way.

He's great, and he's fantastic. He's a wonderful human being, and also extremely talented, he's got it all. And Tchad. He and Tchad are a good combination, though Tchad's been doing a lot of independent producing lately. I spoke to him the other day, and he's getting tired of it. He doesn't really like doing it, he prefers working with Mitchell, and I think they're going to start working together again. Tchad produced this new Pearl Jam record, and it's just disappointing nowadays. Big projects like that are really disappointing. You do a certain kind of record, and then the record company comes in and they remix it and redo stuff and it doesn't end up being what you planned on doing. It's frustrating.

I've got to really start working on my own material! And then hopefully we'll keep doing this [the Tony Levin Band], we'll all develop that thing that we developed with Peter, we can get into that zone again with one another, and develop that sound. We're scratching the surface now, but there's a long way to go. Still, we all get along so well, and we all like each other a lot. Tony and my styles really mesh together. He's been my favorite bass player, and I always think I sound better when I'm playing with Tony 'cause he's such a good musician. He's complementary to what I do.

I've always liked your style putting that accent in the place you don't expect it.

Thank you. I'm always developing, and it was very nice with Peter and with these guys. We really got a chance to do that. It's not that easy to find jobs where you're able to do that. Hopefully this will turn into... The potential we already knew from years ago with Gabriel, what the potential is... We won't have Peter any longer with us, but that's been opening up a whole other area.

You know I play guitar and keyboards, and I end up writing instrumental stuff. Some vocal stuff. I produce, I've been doing production work. All I've got to do is just take some time now and develop some of my own music, which I've put off for a long time. It's so easy working with other people. Tony's been sort of inspiring to me, with [calling to Tony] – what have you got, a thousand different records out?

There's a thousand, but he's got the rights to eight hundred of them! Tony's behind, I'm way behind. He's got a couple of records out, I've got nothing. By January I should have the material.

Jesse Gress

Jesse Gress is the newcomer in the band, lacking the twenty-year history the others have together, but he is the perfect addition to the group. His encyclopedic knowledge of music, great technical facility on guitar, and keen ear make it impossible to tell he is the new kid. As Tony mentioned, he's played with Todd Rundgren and is an editor for Guitar Player magazine. He's also got a book coming out called The Guitar Cookbook.

Exposé: You've worked a lot recently with Todd Rundgren. How did you get involved with him?

Jesse Gress live in Seattle, photo by Danette Davis

Gress: Well, it hasn't been that recent. I've been working with all his live bands since 1991. I've been a big fan of his music – I grew up near Philadelphia, and I've been playing Nazz songs since I was fifteen years old. All the bands there covered Nazz tunes back in the late 60s and early 70s. He was real well known around there, so I thought he was like the American Eric Clapton, you know. I dug his guitar playing a whole lot, so I copped a lot of stuff over the years. And then it took only like 23 years later... I'd moved to San Francisco and hooked up with him out there [where] he'd done a record. You know, I figured what are the chances? Guy plays guitar, I play guitar. Stop dreaming, buddy. No, don't stop dreaming! That's the thing. I ended up befriending the guitar player he was using. [Todd had] stopped playing guitar and started sort of fronting his band around the Nearly Human time, I think it was '87. And he did a tour that was like a big Vegasy show band, which would have been really hell for me to get in on. The one I did, which was the Second Wind tour, the one after that, which was like we could wear anything we want. But [the show band] would have been the worst thing in the world to me, to finally get a gig playing with Todd, and have to wear an outfit like I would wear in the Poconos, you know, all these gigs I used to play that I hated in Pennsylvania. But I ended up hooking up with him in San Francisco for that Second Wind tour, and on and off over the years, like about four or five major tours. The Individualist tour in '95. Plus I go out and sit in with him whenever I can. We kind developed a pretty tight little working relationship over that With a Twist album. That's the only record I ever recorded with him, was With a Twist, and I did a lot of the arranging for that record.

The melodies hold up great no matter what you do to them harmonically, which was the idea there. I have a background in jazz harmony, and Todd wouldn't know a flat five chord if it bit him in the butt, so I was able to adapt a lot of his progressions to that bossa nova kind of smooth jazzy [style] and it worked great.

The amazing thing about that record is that the familiar melodies are in completely different arrangements.

That's all in the arranging. You're changing the background; you're not really changing the melody as much. He did that Astrud Gilberto, cool vocal thing where everything was sung really flat, like hardly any vibrato in his voice. It all changed when we went out and played it live, but for the recording we went to Hawaii and recorded it in a house, and after the third day everybody kind of got into this Hawaiian flow, and we were pretty productive. We were banging out two or three basic tracks a day for about five days, I think. But he was cutting vocals live with us, although I think he might have redone a lot of them. But he fell right into that thing, laying back – Actually, the phrasing's really rushed, it's way ahead, it's that [singing] "It was late last night, I was feeling something wasn't right." You know, it's all pushed ahead of the beat. He just did it. Actually, I was amazed. We didn't know what we were doing when we went in there!

I love the whole thing, 'cause I love the whole faux Polynesian culture, you know, Tiki Culture and all that fake shit. I love that stuff, and I always have. But to go out and tour with that, with a set, that was- it was like playing the same place every night. Tear it down, pack it up, haul it somewhere else, come to the next club, and looks like the same place. Which was the whole idea behind that. We were acting as if the audience came to us on the island [singing] "Somewhere on an island." And we didn't pay much attention to the people out in the house. We had people up on the stage, and that was our little bar, and our crowd, so it was a little theatrical in that sense, like a little play almost, where we'd have the bartender come on and open up shop, and then the band would come out and do a song without Todd, and then we'd do three different sets. Three different shows, like a dinner bossa nova set, like a floor show set, then like an after hours jamming kind of set, you know. A drunk at the bar, and they'd steal his wallet at the end of the night! You see, I've played gigs like that, but Todd never has. That's the funny thing. His comments were like, "Well, we're practicing for our retirement." And I said, "You know, some of us are reliving our past." I don't think he ever had to do that kind of stuff to survive, so he's got a somewhat morbid curiosity about it.

I live in Woodstock, New York, just down the street from Tony. I've lived there for about nine years. I'd been trying to figure out, "How am I going to get to play with Tony?" for about nine years, and we play together in a bar band called Uncle Funk – R&B covers and blues, you know, just jammy stuff – and Tony and Jerry have both been doing that for years. But until about a year and a half ago I never played one of the gigs with Tony. It's always sort of a revolving rhythm section, depending on scheduling and stuff. I did a couple Uncle Funk gigs with Tony, and the next thing I know, he was asking me to do this tour, which was great. But I had to blow off the last Todd tour to do it, because that didn't come up until days or weeks later. That's why Todd toured with a trio. I made it a quartet a couple times at the end, but it was mainly the trio thing.

So aside from Todd what other guitar players were your influences and idols growing up?

I came into music through easy listening music more than any kind of rock and roll. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass – I didn't have any rockers in my family to show me the way – and operettas. My sister sang in The Sound of Music, so I'm intimately familiar with all those melodies and stuff. And then the twangy sound of the guitar is what got me. I don't know, it might have been on Zorba the Greek or some Tijuana Brass thing. I sort of missed out on the Ventures and all that instrumental stuff. I've gone back and rediscovered it all now, though. Early on, the things that really nailed me were like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, the early wave of British blues artists in the late 60s, Peter Green. Then I discovered who they were listening to. BB King and Albert King, pretty much all blues. Beck is still my hero. To this day, he's still one of the only guys that I'll drive halfway across the country to see, or totally gets me writhing every time I hear him play. I got into jazz later on, and all the greats of jazz are my particular favorites: Pat Martino as much for his learning concepts as for his playing, guys like George Benson, John McLaughlin. Mahavishnu Orchestra is probably the best band that ever existed.

I'm a music editor at Guitar Player magazine. I've been there for nine years, or eight years, and I just did the transcription of the "Birds of Fire" solo, so it's sort of fresh in my mind. I went back and listened to all that stuff and I'd forgotten how truly frightening and great it was. That I think was the best band that ever existed. I have a really wide tent when it comes to listening to music. I was out buying vinyl this morning, and I look for incorrect music as much as correct music for my own entertainment purposes.

(Later, when the tape wasn't rolling, he elaborated on "incorrect" music. He enjoys hearing records by bands that aren't very good, but are trying to be, and don't realize they're actually inept.)

The jazz arranging thing, did you come by that by studying it or did you just pick it up?

I always studied on my own, but I actually studied formally with Howard Roberts and a bunch of people at the third GIT class back in 1978 when it was just a little jazz school with 30 guys in it. That's where I got to meet Pat Martino and play a little bit with Pat Metheny. People like Joe Pass were in and out of there. It was pretty much still a jazz school back then, so I still don't consider myself a jazz player, but I know a lot about jazz harmony and stuff. I don't consider myself a great jazz improviser. No "Giant Steps" for me!

Well, Tony sure likes a lot of your arranging capabilities. He can ask you to come up with something right away.

He just happened to ask the right questions! That was pretty circumstantial. The same thing happened with Todd. Like I taught myself these things years and years ago for my own enjoyment, like "Never Never Land." When you sit around and just play the guitar by itself, and you just play single notes or strummy chords, you don't get much music out of it. So that's what got me interested in jazz more than single line solos, was harmony and being able to do what I would call "chord melody" arrangements, where you sound like a piano, you've got all the harmony and melody going at the same time. So I started doing that with Todd, too. I did it with "Never Never Land" like twenty years ago, and that's the arrangement we ended up using on the record. So Tony just happened to call up, and he wanted to do a Hendrix tune and I said, "Which one?" and "That's a good idea!" And he wanted to know if I'd ever heard of a song called "Elephant Talk." I used to play Adrian Belew's solo in a dance band in the mid 80s, like in the middle of a Germaine Jackson song when everybody was on the dance floor! It's like right after "Beat It" came out with Michael Jackson and guitar, when all of a sudden [in] all of those lounge bar club gigs, it became possible for you to play anything in the world on guitar. It opened the door, and nobody whined, "Turn that down!" Well, they'd still go, "Turn that down," but they wouldn't bat an eye at funny notes, which was a big, big turning point. And I'd done a lot of those gigs; I'd played in lounges and clubs for fifteen years, everything from gospel churches to the Pocono and Catskills circuits. Traveled around, shows in Asia, Singapore, you know, playing Prince and the Pointer Sisters songs.

No, I never did a cruise ship, thank god! I look for those cruise ship records though, some of those are pretty good. Depends on the material...

(Later, when passing in the restaurant, Jesse said, "Gentle Giant! I forgot to mention Gentle Giant! I love them.")

The Tony Levin Band

Tony Levin

Larry Fast

Jerry Marotta

Jesse Gress

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