Tony Levin is thankful. He’s grateful, of course, for his career as a first-call session bassist and touring sideman—one that spans seven decades and ranges from Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, and John Lennon to Paul Simon, Buddy Rich, and Steps Ahead. And he feels blessed to have six solo albums that cover everything from world music and prog rock to vocal pop and vibey jazz. But for his seventh solo outing, and first since Stick Man in 2007, the humble bass icon is giving thanks to his instruments! Bringing It Down to the Bass [Flatiron Recordings] certainly has a formidable lineup, with such guests as Robert Fripp, Steve Gadd, Gary Husband, L. Shankar, Vinnie Colaiuta, Earl Slick, David Torn, Jerry Marotta, Dominic Miller, Manu Katché, Pat Mastelotto, Mike Portnoy,and Markus Reuter, but the true stars of the record are Levin’s basses, in all their tonal glory.
Over 14 tracks, Levin perfectly matches the personalities of his axes—his 4- and 5-string, fretted and fretless Music Mans; 5-string NS Design Electric Upright and NS Design Cello (tuned like a bass); Chapman Stick; and vintage Steinberger fretless—to the songs, while mixing in new and old techniques in unexpected places. Oh, and there’s also a vocals-only track that cleverly pays tribute to almost every great drummer Tony has worked with. Equally important, given Levin’s well-known skills with a camera, is the accompanying 24-page booklet that features his artful photo portraits of the instruments in outdoor settings. All of this best explained by the man himself. Fortunately, Tony had some time off at his Ulster County, New York home to discuss the record before leaving for the BEAT tour, with Steve Vai, Adrian Belew, and Danny Carey.
How did the record come about?
I’d been doing a lot of writing in recent years, especially when I’m home, but my problem is playing live is my favorite thing to do in the world, so when a tour comes up I take it. However, towards the end of 2023 I started getting the sense that if I didn’t carve out some time to finish the tracks I’d been working on, the project was never going to get done. So after touring in January and February of 2024, I took off March, April, and May to finish the record. I guess I’ve been touring pretty steadily since my last record, Stick Man, in 2007, so you could say this album was years in the making, but a lot of the material is from the last six months.
Did you have a concept for the record?
Not at first, that emerged as I went along because I had other material that didn’t fit into the eventual concept. Basically, I discovered early on that I had two albums. One with all prog rock songs that didn’t feature the bass, which I’ll finish and release at some point, and one with tunes that all featured the bass, whether via a tone, a technique, or a groove. From there I thought about a title that implies the focus of the record, and integral to the concept was that I wanted to take creative photographic portraits of all the basses I used in natural, outdoor settings. I’m grateful to Flatiron Records for agreeing to the 24-page booklet that pays tribute to these instruments, with my photos and the stories behind each of them.
What it all implies is that you have a relationship with each bass.
For sure, I feel like they’re my treasured friends, helping me make good music. Each one gives me its tone and its feel, and I happily take credit from other people for what the bass came up with. For example, often when I bring my NS Electric Upright to a session, I’ll pick it up and just play a low E, and the engineer and the artist will say, “Ohmigod, that’s exactly what we want, you’re so great!” And it’s the bass that gave that to me. Sure, I’m astute enough to play that note but it’s equally the bass. It’s the same with my StingRays; I know what they give me and I unabashedly take credit for it. In a way this project is payback time. It’s my chance to give back to the instruments.
How were the basses recorded?
All the same way, direct into Logic via a Universal Audio interface, in my studio. In a few cases I had some analog pedals before going direct but most were manipulated after, with plug-ins. Universal Audio has a Teletronics LA-2A Compressor plug-in and one that simulates vintage Ampeg amps that I used quite a bit. Then for the mix I brought in my old friend and engineer Kevin Killen. We first worked together on Peter Gabriel’s So [Virgin, 1986], and he was responsible for the “Sledgehammer” bass sound, so who better than Kevin to work on the bass sounds here and have them be the best they can be.
Another cool part of the booklet is the photo of your dad’s sculpture of a jazz bassist, which may have unknowingly influenced you to become a bass player.
That theory only occurred to me last year while I was on the road somewhere. I thought about that sculpture, which is now in my house, and I connected the dots with my older brother’s help. When my dad, who was an engineer and an artist, did that piece, I was eight-years-old, with no thought about playing bass. Yet, somehow in the next few years I decided to take up the acoustic bass; in the next few decades I became a jazz bass player; and a few decades later I became a bald bass player, like the piece! It very well could have had a subliminal influence on me. I asked Avraham Bank, the photographer who worked with me on the booklet to take side by side pictures of the piece and of me trying to pose like it, with my NS Electric Upright. It was his idea to meld the two images into one, which was very artistic, so I made that the cover of the booklet.
The opener, “Bringing it Down to the Bass,” begins with you playing solo, immediately establishing the artist-instrument connection.
I decided to open with that song because it showcases the techniques of left-hand hammering and right-hand tapping on bass—like I do on Stick but haven’t done on bass since the ’70s. I used to fool around and play the bass that way as a session musician. John Lennon heard me doing it during the Double Fantasy sessions [Warner Bros., 1980] and he asked me to start “Watching the Wheels” that way. In 1975, after Emmett Chapman invented the Chapman Stick, some musician friends told me there was a new instrument that’s played the way I was tapping on bass, which is how I started on stick. For this track, I thought of Manu Katché on drums and Dominic Miller on guitar, who I got play with when Peter Gabriel and Sting toured together. Then I had a horn section with [saxophonist] Alex Foster come in to overdub the melody. There was no room for Alex to solo, so I wrote a tag in a new groove and had him blow over that going out. I played my “Mr. Natural” Music Man StingRay Special 5-string.
“Me and My Axe” is a gorgeous fretless feature.
I wrote that a while ago, it’s kind of an instrumental love song to my instrument. I envisioned it as two voices trading, and for the other voice I thought of the singing blues guitar sound of Steve Hunter, who I’d done sessions with for Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, and who was on the first Peter Gabriel solo album and tour. And I brought in [keyboardist] Larry Fast and [drummer] Jerry Marotta, to complete the Gabriel connection. The bass is Belle, my fretless Music Man StringRay, which I tuned up a fourth [A-D-G-C]—not to play in a higher range but so the melody sits where the bass has its most singing tone and sustain. That’s important to those of us who like to play melodies. I don’t have a beautiful singing voice but I have a beautiful sounding fretless bass.
You played fretless before Jaco emerged. Did he have an impact on you?
Well, I was an upright player first and then I started playing a Fender Precision, as well, in the late-’60s. When I moved to New York, most of the session guys had a separate instrument for fretless, with maybe a heavier body, or a neck-through-body design, looking for more sustain. Every year I’d try a different one, but I didn’t love any of them. When Jaco hit the scene he indeed had a major impact on me: I stopped playing fretless for a good number of years. I liked all the technical and fast stuff he was playing, but I’m not that kind of player. However, on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira [Asylum, 1976] he played what I dreamed I would be playing musically on the fretless. Plus he was incredibly in tune and completely at one with the instrument. As a result, I didn’t want to hear myself playing it anymore and I put it away. It wasn’t until years later that I picked it back up.
Interestingly, fretless figured into your original plans for the prog rock-leaning “Road Dogs,” which features your “Funk Fingers” technique.
That’s right. “Road Dogs” is a heavy rock track where I wanted to feature Funk Fingers [Shortened drum sticks that attach to Tony’s index and middle fingers, as heard on Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”]. I played my Music Man 4-string “Grafitti Bass,” which has a very high action that lends itself to that technique, and I played the melody on my NS Cello, with overdrive. The song alternates between straight rock and the B section, which is in seven. After that, the cross rhythm of a half-time 12/8 shuffle occurred to me and we go out that way. That’s where I wanted to try fretless bass through a vocoder. I didn’t have one so I sung the phrase “road dogs,” using a low voice. After months of trying different devices I couldn’t get a vocoder sound worth a damn, plus you couldn’t understand the two words through any of them. So I left it as just a vocal part and added the extra lyrics about life on the road.
You form a nasty duo with Vinnie Colauita on “Uncle Funkster.”
That was the last track I did, a few months before release. It’s me on the bass side of my Stick and Vinnie, and we’re basically jamming and grooving to two different bass riffs. Unfortunately I couldn’t get to Vinnie in L.A. to record with him, so I used a method I learned from trading files with Stickmen that enables me to record with a drummer remotely and still get a good rhythm section feel. What I did was I cut my part and sent it to Vinnie and asked him to play with it as if we were live, doing whatever he wanted. He sent back his wonderful, one-take part and I recorded my part again, playing to Vinnie. It works much better than both of us playing to a click.
“Boston Rocks” features both sides of your stick, as well as the interesting pairing of Earl Slick and Mike Portnoy.
As someone who was born and raised in Boston, I wanted to show the two sides of the city: The rugged, rowdy, working class sports town that curses out fans of other teams, and the intellectual, university and museum side of town. The instrumental part at the beginning, which represents the more refined Boston, is part of a composition I brought in to Stickman, called “Absalom,” from our EP of the same name [Absalom, Stick Men Records, 2011]. For the contrasting next section, with my raucous, almost shouting vocals, I wanted to really rock out, so I thought of Earl, my old session mate on guitar, and Mike on drums. I wasn’t sure if it would work or if they knew each other, but it ended up being a great musical pairing. When the refined section returns, I added a poem I’d written last year about the Fens and the Back Bay area of Boston that uses some quotes from John. F. Kennedy, and then we rock out again.
How do you feel you’ve grown and developed on the stick over the years?
That’s a great question, I’ve never thought about that. In a lot of ways, I don’t feel I’ve grown at all. The stick can be a beast for me, live. Not in the studio, where you can turn off whichever side you’re not playing. But live, with both sides on, there’s a phenomenon called “cross talk” where the bass note is going to come out softly on the guitar side—especially when you’re using distortion and effects—so there’s a lot of muting that has to be done. However, I’ve been doing it for a lot of years so I’m not bad at it. I practice the stick often and the Stickmen tours challenge me technically, so overall I feel I’m about where I always am with the stick. I’ll hear other players doing things that I can’t on it, and I’ll think, Oh, you should learn more techniques. But in the real world I’m fine doing what I do on stick. The instrument retains its original appeal and purpose for me. At the time I was impressed that the stick had a unique sound and how the clarity on the low notes enabled me to play faster than I ever would on a regular bass, but on the other hand it didn’t have the same kind of punch a bass has. The key for me was joining King Crimson in 1981. I immediately recognized that this new instrument with different tunings and a guitar side was I way I could join the great musicians in the band and actually be a progressive player, not someone playing the same old blues-based parts on the same old four strings.
“Espressoville” is a killer shuffle featuring Steve Gadd and a bass solo using your fingernail technique. Can you discuss the detailed track and explain the technique?
Sure. The track starts out with my espresso machine, as every day does for me. I made a loop out of its grunts and groans and Steve plays along with that at the top. The A section has my horn section melody, which is quite complex and rhythmically unusual. My brother Pete did the arrangement. Then the B section goes to half-time, played by Joe Caro on guitar the first time, and me on Belle, my fretless the second time. The fingernail technique in my solo is me using my right index fingernail at different points along the string to induce various overtones as I pluck. I don’t know where I got that, probably from seeing gutiarists using a pick and their thumb to get overtones. The solo and the bass line are played on my Music Man “Toast Bass” 4-string, which barely survived a fire in the ’90s, the result of which has given it less sustain but more thump.
“Give the Cello Some” features your NS Design Cello.
I threw that track in at the last minute, to give the album a little break from being about the bass. I called my brother Pete and Jerry Marotta, who live in the area, and we did it in no time. I have some fun on the track talking about the instrument and the blues we’re jamming on. I can’t remember what led me to get the NS Cello in the first place. There was a tour with Peter Gabriel, with full orchestra, so maybe I thought it would be cool to have a cello. I tune it in fourths instead of fifths, as a cello is tuned, so in truth it’s a higher pitched bass. It can sound sweet, like a cello, through the piezo pickup, or if I favor the magnetic pickup and add effects it can sound like a guitar. I do both here. And the support bass is my Music Man “3-of-a-Perfect-Pair” 4-string. I had it painted the color of the King Crimson album of the same name when it came out in 1984.
“Side B/Turn It Over” seems self-explanatory and boasts your barbershop quartet roots.
I had a barbershop quartet in high school, which was my first band in a way. Later, I talked Peter Gabriel into having a barbershop quartet on his first album and tour. I tried to talk King Crimson into it in the ’80s but we didn’t have four people who wanted to sing, especially in that style. Instead, Robert Fripp took the rough demo I made to show the guys their parts and released it [as “The King Crimson Barber Shop”] on a [2001] bonus version of Three of a Perfect Pair [Warner Bros., 1984], which was a little embarrassing. Here, I wanted to use a barbershop quartet to express my poetic feelings about turning a record over, like we did in the old days. That used to be a big part of the listening experience, getting up and flipping the album to side B. Why I put a bass solo [using the magnetic pickup on his NS Electric Upright] in the middle of a barbershop quartet I’m not quite sure. There are a couple of things on the record that probably no one has ever done—this is likely one of them.
Another obvious one is “On the Drums,” your choral recitation of most of the great drummers you’ve worked with.
The idea came to me during the lockdown, when I didn’t have enough touring to keep my brain busy. It pretty much took the whole lockdown year to complete and I had no idea where I was going to use it. I started with a list of all the drummers I’ve worked with, that I could remember, and then I tried to put music to it. None of their names rhyme so it was very difficult, but I think it came out well as a tribute to them. And I like having a vocals only track in the middle of all the bass-intensive ones.
“Beyond the Bass Clef,” with violinist L Shankar moves in a new direction.
I thought of this record as an LP, so after identifying that in the previous song, “Side B/Turn It Over,” I felt like we’re in a different world now, and I had a piece in mind that was quite outside the genres covered to that point. It was almost world music, but not quite. I started with my stick, playing both sides, and I sent that to my friend L Shankar, in India. With the terrific track he sent back, the piece was almost there. So I sent it to the great keyboardist Gary Husband and told him to do whatever he wanted. When he sent it back, he had done some remarkable things. As a result, I finally and clearly heard what I should be doing on it, and what should be the melody. I played that melody on my NS Cello and I sent it to my buddy Colin Gatwood, who is a wonderful oboe player with the Houston Symphony. The last ingredient was a solo on my NS Electric Upright.
“Bungie Bass,” with David Torn and Pat Mastelotto continues the Side B, anything goes policy.
The title was meant to read “Bungee Bass,” but I spelled bungee wrong and by the time I realized it was too late to change it. My NS Elecric Upright can sound like a bungee chord or bouncing ball when I’m sliding in and out of notes, and that’s how the track starts. Pat is great at fashioning loops and interesting drum parts, and David is an amazing guitarist who sounds like no one else. There are two A sections, where David is soloing, and a pair of B sections where I imagined I was a string quartet that was sick of playing the same parts. I wrote and recorded all four parts on my NS Cello, and as I play, I do weird stuff on each one. We called it either the drunk or the rebellious string quartet.
“Fire Across the Sky” is a beautiful showcase for the stick.
I wrote that a while ago and I’ve released it in various forms, previously. Here, it’s two tracks of stick doing chordal interplay in 11/8. Midway through, I take a solo on the guitar side of the stick. What happened was several years ago I went on a writing only trip to Berlin, with my stick. I locked myself in my Airbnb and came up with a poem addressing my feelings about Jon Lennon and my history with him, as well as the basic chordal piece. The title references a café I used to go to in New York City that had John’s pictures all across the wall. At the end it felt natural to quote a beautiful classical guitar piece I used to try to play by Paraguayan composer Augustin Barrios.
“Floating in Dark Waters” has an interesting bass tone.
That’s my late-’70s headless, fretless Steinberger. Ned Steinberger was a furniture designer who was working next to the bass builder Mike Tobias in a Brooklyn cooperative, and he had an idea for a bass made of carbon fiber. He somehow found me to try it out, I wasn’t very well-known then. I loved it and bought it. I used it right away on Peter Gabriel’s tours and on John and Yoko’s Double Fantasy album. It can sound a little like an upright.
The inspiration for the piece is the soundscapes Robert Fripp would create for King Crimson that would play in the house before our shows. On some nights Robert would send me out and tell me to improvise to it. He’d give me jazz hand signals [fingers up for sharp keys, down for flat keys] to let me know the key the soundscape was in. Or if it was an atonal piece, he’d jokingly hold five fingers up and five fingers down with both hands! Anyway, I asked him if I could take one that he had done and use it for the record, and he said yes. It felt like it needed to build a little at the end, so I had Jerry Marotta add some percussion. This one is in the key of E, and I had some melodies in mind that I kept re-working.
“Coda” is a suitable, solemn closing track featuring your NS Electric Upright plucked and bowed.
I wanted to close the record with a basic, simple piece. I came up with a melody that worked on bass and I accompanied myself on piano and four parts played on my NS Cello. Those parts didn’t quite feel like real cellists playing, so I thought of my friend Linnea Olsen, who played cello on some Peter Gabriel tours. She lives in Sweden, so I sent her the track and she cut the parts. She was about to deliver a baby the next week, so I credited the baby, too, in utero! To end the piece, I wanted to overdub my NS Electric Upright playing a C major triad in a nod to the Second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9. It famously closes with only the basses playing a major triad, while everyone else in the orchestra is looking at the bass section and thinking, how did that happen?
Will you get to perform the material live?
I would love to, whether it’s a string of dates or even a one-off show, but right now between the Beat tour and other commitments I’m pretty busy through the first half of next year. We’ll see.
Penned Pals: Transcription
Tony Levin’s honored basses no doubt help facilitate his myriad fingerboard moves on Bringing It Down to the Bass, but there’s another key component behind the record’s success: Levin’s composing. From perfectly voice-led ballads and beautifully woven chordal stick segments to angular big band blasts and seamless four-part vocal passages, melody is king, and that’s what makes the music memorable.
Ex. 1 shows the opening A section of Levin’s fretless ballad, “Me and My Axe.” In a masterclass of theme and development, he begins with a two-bar theme that’s repeated, save for slightly different phrasing and the last note (D instead of B). The diatonic melody is enhanced by the harmony, moving from consonant to mysterious (the D to Dmaj7#5 and the G to the Gm6). Levin next introduces a four-bar theme in measure 5. Again, the melody is diatonic, but the harmony creates striking tension, such as the G natural in bar 2, which is the flat 9 of the F#7 chord. Recapping the theme in measure 9, Tony develops it further, hitting the track’s show-stopping moment with the high C# in bar 10 (I think of the chord as Ddim7(maj7) resolving to the D). The melody then descends to the next to the next stopping point, the 9th (F#) of the E9 chord in measure 11. In perfect contrast, the harmony in this passage is led by ascending chromatic movement in the bass, from the G2 in 10 the the Bm in 12 (which resolves nicely to the aforementioned E9). The piece has a langorous conclusion in the last four measures, with some interesting pedal harmony. Throughout, try to copy Tony’s phrasing with regard to hammer-ons, pull-offs, notes with vibrato, as well as his pushes and pulls, time-wise.
Examples 2a and 2b are from the title track tap-and-hammer showcase. 2a occurs at 1:51, where Levin’s bass break initiates the B section and a key change from G minor to A major. Dig the syncopation between Tony’s right-hand chords and left-hand bass notes, and the way he subtley changes the VI and II chords (F#m7 and Bm7) to dominant chords (F#7#9 and B7#9) the second time. He relates, “I slowed the tempo down a hair for this section because the riff felt pushed and sounded too technical at the original tempo. I knew I’d have to bring the tempo back up for the next A section (back to G minor). That’s the kind of nuanced thing you can do when you don’t have a click locking you in.” Learn the right hand part—tapped with index and middle finger—first because it has more notes on the downbeat. Then add the hammered left-hand bass part. Ex. 2b is at 4:23, showing the last II-V before the tonic Gm. For the A7 chord Tony plays two inversions of the upper notes, and for the D7#9b13 he plays an ear-grabbing triplet figure with the bass notes descending and the two upper notes ascending. He explains, “I first played the ascending right-hand lick with the same D note in the left hand. Then I thought it would be cool if the left hand descended to A, but that took some working out!” Practice the part slowly and be aware that the bass notes move less than the upper two notes.
Finally, Ex. 3 shows the main NS Electric Upright groove of “Bungie Bass.” The line sounds like it’s in an odd meter but it actually just shifts rhythmically in 4/4 (note that none of the four bars in the phrase is the same). As for the notes and harmony, Levin offers, “I thought of the bass part only as a melody, without an accompanying chord in mind. Plus I knew David Torn was going to solo over it, so it didn’t matter if I thought of it as Edim, or a bluesy Em or E7, he’s going to take it so far out it’s irrelevant.”
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By: Chris Jisi