Chuck Levy: Press

CHUCK LEVY, WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS

August 23, 2010 by gainesville365

To call Chuck Levy a banjo player seems to be a bit of a disservice, akin to calling Wolfgang Puck a cook or Tim Tebow a guy who tosses a ball. Chuck Levy is an artist who has been Florida’s Old Time Banjo Champion, a Thelma Boltin awardee, and a prize fiddler; he is also a music historian and a scholar who has traveled to Africa to research the origins of banjo music.  He is known for playing the Old Time music that is the forerunner to bluegrass, which he plays in clawhammer and minstrel styles.  If you have no idea what this denotes, Mr. Levy will patiently explain it for you.

Mr. Levy brought friends Bill Paine and Aisha Ivey to play a Free Fridays show that was part concert and part educational symposium.  Also along was clogger Diane Shaw and an astounding selection of Mr. Levy’s other friends–his instruments.  These banjos, fretted and fretless, plus fiddle and mandoline-banjo were positioned on stage in such a way that they appeared to be additional guests invited to join in the half-circle trio of Mr. Levy, Mr. Paine, and Ms. Ivey.

A Chuck Levy show is an intimate exercise.  Seated close together, the three musicians might have been playing in small confines and not to the four hundred or so raptly absorbed fans who spread out around the Plaza in mellow attention.  Songs were treated to contemplative renditions as Mr. Levy introduced them by explaining a bit about each.  This was revelatory: A piece like “Cotton-Eyed Joe” might have been unrecognizable otherwise.  That much-maligned accompaniment to a barroom line dance in actuality is nearly 200 years old and is well-documented as an American folk song. As Mr. Levy performed it, visions of the stripperized Rednex version vanished and one could imagine it as the heel-toe folk dance it traditionally was. Also returning to its roots was The Rolling Stones’  ”No Expectations,” a Jagger/Richards composition written in service to the Stones’ explorations of forlorn Delta blues.

Besides Old Time Americana, Mr. Levy also tuned up some music from Africa and the British Isles. Here and there he was accompanied by the clogging (or flat-footing) of Diane Shaw, who performed on a small wooden plank that had its own microphone.  Ms. Shaw provided the only percussion of the evening, often with what seemed to be an informal, improvisational style that underscored the feeling that the concert was a living-room meeting of friends who just happened to have invited four hundred other friends over to listen to some music.

The concert was so low-key that it demanded a good deal of attention.  I spoke to a man who mistook the music as pure Irish folk and who expected something more along the lines of Irish Rovers.  Had he been paying attention, he’d have noticed that Mr. Levy thoughtfully prefaced the music with explanations of style and origin.

As an educator, Mr. Levy co-directs the Suwannee Banjo Camp, which takes place on March 18-20, 2011.  He is a preservationist working in an area that is no less vibrant for being so old. Florida folkways are strongly intertwined with banjo music, especially in the northern part of the state.   Friday’s quiet concert made for an interesting counterpart to the club music playing just around the corner, whose decibels often seemed to lay waste to civilization. 

Visit Chuck at www.banjourneys.com

What happens when an already good musician decides to broaden his horizons by learning more about the roots of the banjo and learns some tunes and songs from Gambia in the process?  A CD as interesting and enjoyable as this one. (And how did he ever get Roz Chast of the New Yorker to draw the cover?)

 

Chuck Levy has played banjo and fiddle for many years.  When you have played a while, you can find yourself, as you get deeper and deeper into the music, playing more and more rests, and fewer and fewer notes until you‘ve got the tune down to some Platonic essence.  Levy does this with familiar old-time tunes such as “Rock the Cradle, Joe”, “Cindy” and “Chinese Breakdown”.  A particular gem was “Sandy Boys,” which in my mind is a tune that is overdone and over-recorded.  Not here.  It is a beautiful fiddle-banjo duet. (Dave Forbes plays clear, precise fiddle on all the fiddle-banjo duets.)  What’s more, Levy is playing a six-string banjo with a low A string, so that without going above the fifth fret, he can play the full tune in two octaves, going low when the fiddle goes low, and high when the fiddle is high.

 

On his website  (www.banjourneys.com) and his interview with Bela Fleck in the last issue of the OTH (Volume 12, Number 5), Levy discusses his interest in the African roots of the banjo, his trips to Gambia, and his development of a Western version of the akonting, “banjonting” – a three string instrument of levy’s own devising.  OTH readers who own the Bob Carlin/Cheick Hamala Diabate collaboration From Mali to America (reviewed in Volume 11, Number 2 may be surprised how different Levy’s African songs and tunes sound:  They are sung as well as played, they use a Western-sounding diatonic scale instead of microtones, and seem rhythmically more regular.  On reflection, why should this be surprising?  Mali and Gambia are at least 200 miles apart.  Think of the differences between Georgia and Kentucky fiddling in the 1920’s.  “African akonting music” is no more a monolith than “American banjo music”.

 

There are four songs form Gambia on Banjourneys, each one played on the banjonting with Mike Eberle doubling on fiddle while Levy sings and plays.  Each one sounds as if it has a “simple” melody with repeated words.  Making it sound easy is something that good musicians know how to do; a construction project seldom looks complex once the scaffolding has been taken down.

 

Levy is also fascinated with the low tones of the cello-banjo—as in “Doctor Levy’s Walk-Around,” an original minstrel-style tune, and the “Walk Into the Parlor” medley also done in the style of the 1850’s.  he extends his fascination with the bass notes by playing a six-string banjo with an added low bass string, allowing the melody notes to be played an octave below the banjo’s normal range.  (This has already been mentioned while praising “Sandy Boys” above.)  In fact, the only cut on this CD done with a “standard” five-string banjo is Ola Belle Reed’s “Boat’s Up the River”.  Two nice fiddle tunes, both done with two fiddles with Mike Eberle, and a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “No Expectations” round out this CD. 

 

I think this CD is an opportunity to follow some of the roads taken by a fine traditional musician (in several widely different traditions) who has found his own balance between honoring tradition and creating new music.  Many of these roads I would never have found myself, and I am glad Levy showed them to me.