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Daniel Levin

Since moving to New York in 2001 after graduating from Boston’s New England Conservatory, Daniel Levin has been a vital part of the story of improvised music in New York City and abroad. He has recorded and released eight albums as a leader for HatOLOGY, Clean Feed, and Riti Records; six with his remarkable quartet, as well as trio and solo albums. He has worked or recorded with a virtual who’s who of new jazz, including Billy Bang, Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Rob Brown, Gerald Cleaver, Andrew Cyrille, Mark Dresser, Tony Malaby, Joe Morris, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Ivo Perelman, Ken Vandermark, and many others.

In 2011, Levin made his recorded debut as a solo cellist with Inner Landscape (Clean Feed). The culmination of more than a year of solo performances and practice, the album “delivers an important artist at his most direct, not soliloquizing but simply living and playing in three dimensions, and creating the fourth as he goes along,” according to Brian Morton in Point of Departure. Avant Music News states: "The six improvisations collected here represent a comprehensive description of the sonic landscape of the contemporary cello. Inner Landscape is a fine showcase for Levin’s technical and emotional versatility and an important document of adventurous solo string improvisation."

“Sometimes Levin shoulders the music forward with the raw power of his sonic rhetoric, sometimes he tip toes in on little cat’s feet, sometimes he’s a samurai with a calligrapher’s brush in his hand instead of a sword, sometimes a jester with a pointed truth masquerading as a bit of whimsy. Levin has a world of sound in his fingers and his cello, there are echoes of Japanese koto, Eastern European bagpipes, European classical music, jazz, as well as sounds you’ve never heard before in your life. All these sounds and others are absorbed into Levin’s personal musical vocabulary, they’re the words he uses to tell us about his inner landscape.” (from the liner notes to “Inner Landscape” by Ed Hazell)

Levin collaborates frequently with artists in disciplines outside of music as well. Working with a dancer early in his career had a major role in establishing the strong sense of physical gesture that’s always evident in his music. He continues to seek out new creative partnerships with dancers, as well as with visual artists in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, and video.

Daniel Levin Quartet
Cellist Daniel Levin’s drummerless quartet occupies a musical space bordered by many kinds of music, but fully defined by none of them. Elements of European classical music, American jazz, microtonal and new music, and European free improvisation all figure prominently in the band’s unique sound. But as critic Chris May observes in All About Jazz, “Like all the most successful post-modern creative ventures, Levin’s quartet positions its antecedents in plain sight, but rises above them to create something novel, fascinating and unmistakably of its own time.” Levin and his quartet with trumpeter Nate Wooley, vibraphonist Matt Moran, and bassist Peter Bitenc, is “a provocatively assembled group of adventurous musicians,” that makes music with “the wild chaos of nature somehow centered in a sense of harmonious majesty,” according to critic Donald Elfman.

Without drums, Levin and his band mates are free to explore rhythm, melody, timbre, and texture in extremely subtle and varied ways, creating an alluring braid of lines shaded by autumnal colors, vocal inflections, and precise dynamics. “This group is able to rethink the dynamics and dialectic of a “jazz” group and find new phrasing, spacing and modes of interaction,” notes Elfman. Levin’s compositions set a lyrical tone suffused with mystery and ambiguity. But the quartet remains poised and open to the possibilities offered by the music. “For all its balance and clarity,” says Point of Departure, “the music tempers its delicacy with a dark, unsentimental edge that pushes it past the polite banter of chamber jazz into something deeper and truer.”

For more information and music, visit http://www.daniel-levin.com

For booking, contact Vítor Lopes at vitor@filhounico.com

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Daniel Levin