String Juggler: Adam Levy and His Many Musical Hats, Part 1 of 2
Talking with the jazz guitarist, composer, and educator about his winding path to becoming a singer-songwriter, plus a transcription of his song “Got My Joy”
If memory serves, sometime in the early 2000s, when I was an editor at the now-defunct monthly Guitar One in New York, I got an email from Adam Levy, who was looking for new freelance writing outlets. It pained me to let him know that the magazine’s stable of writers was full. I was so disappointed not to have the opportunity to work with the esteemed jazz guitarist and composer, whose solo on Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason” I had lodged in my memory note for note.
Many years later, when I moved to Los Angeles, I learned that Levy lived there, too, so I dug up his email address and reached out. Ever since then, around 2012, we have met for the occasional coffee as well as texted about guitars and music. I was thrilled to finally work with him in editing some incisive lessons and features he wrote for Acoustic Guitar magazine—though it’s a stretch to call it editing, as all of his drafts were essentially ready for publication upon submission. It was a sad day for me when Levy announced he was retiring from music journalism several years ago.
Levy, who is 57, has an uncommonly deep skill that sets him apart from other improvising musicians. He has enjoyed high-profile gigs performing and recording with singer-songwriters like Chapman, Norah Jones, Ani DiFranco, Rosanne Cash, Allen Touissant, and others, while creating his own body of work in various settings, all now available on his Bandcamp page. He has worked as a music journalist and educator, teaching at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles College of Music, and New York University, as well as through various instructional videos and books, most recently including the excellent String Theories (with coauthor Ethan Sherman), and Guitar Tips, his excellent YouTube series.
I caught up with Levy not long ago to talk about the many roles he has assumed in his musical life and the lines that connect them. In the first part of this two-part conversation, he remembers what it was like to bond with the guitar in an era when extreme technical proficiency was placed at a premium. He also shares the lessons he learned from his grandfather George Wyle—best known for writing the theme song for Gilligan’s Island and the seasonal favorite “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”—and how, thanks to encouragement from Chapman and Jones, he found his voice as a singer-songwriter.
What was it like for you getting started off in Los Angeles during the heyday of the shred era?
It was confusing. I started playing guitar a couple of years before high school, in the early ’80s. Shred was pretty much everywhere; there were loads of big radio songs had that incredible guitar. I was well aware of GIT [now Musicians Institute], this school for guitarists in Hollywood. At that time, I was already more interested in jazz. GIT published this book called Ten. It had ten chapters with ten iconic guitar players—either people who had taught at GIT or had a friendship with the school. There were lessons in there from players like Eddie Van Halen and Don Mock. But it was all under one umbrella of a kind of athleticism on the guitar. And I was already bad at sports—the reason I picked up a guitar in the first place was because I could not catch or throw. So I was not then going to be interested in an athletic approach to the guitar played by real hot dogs and showboaters. I just decided I wasn’t going to do it.
But at the same time, I was totally fascinated by some of the first live guitar-oriented shows I attended. I saw Allan Holdsworth on the I.O.U. tour, Steve Morse and the Dixie Dregs, and Eric Johnson. I was excited by those guys, who were very much driving guitar culture at that time. Nobody was talking about Hank Garland or players like that; nobody seemed interested in slow, tasty guitar at that time. But I stuck with it because that was what I liked. Hooky parts like the guitar breakdown in the Linda Ronstadt song “You’re No Good”—that, to me, was endlessly more captivating than the entire first Van Halen record. I’m sorry to say that to anybody who might be disappointed, but I was just into cool parts and cool tones that related to singing. And so I just had to make a decision that I wasn’t going to try to keep up with the Joneses, basically.
You played with your grandfather George Wyle in your formative years. What was it like having this kind of old-school composer and orchestrator at your disposal?
I learned a lot. He would not have called himself an improviser. He wasn’t trying to play a lot of busy stuff with his right hand and wasn’t interested in bebop or anything like that. But he was an improviser in that I would sometimes tell him that I wanted to learn how to play a standard I thought he might know, something like “Sweet Lorraine” that I’d heard on a Nat King Cole record. My grandfather was a professional musician, and he collected songbooks, so he always had resources right at hand. I would see him looking at these vocal-and-piano arrangements on the page and interpolating the piano parts, making them more musical. He could see what the important parts were, like, Oh, there’s this line I have to play with my thumb on that minor chord, where it goes from the five to the sharp five to the six. But I’m not going to do it exactly the way it’s written, because that’s not how I hear it. He was very much an improviser in that way, and in the way that if somebody sang a song, he could instantly craft an arrangement around it. So he was an arranger more than a jazz guy. That his superpower.
At the same time, my grandfather loved to get out a big score pad and write stuff out. We made a record together, and a lot of it is [prearranged] on the page—more than you might think. I learned that you can take a song and, instead of trying to turn it into some hot bebop thing, you can keep it interesting for the listener by changing keys and registers. Before that, I might have looked at a song and thought about the hottest chords I could use in harmonizing it, but my grandfather could keep an arrangement just as interesting by looking at register and density and key changes, pulling other levers that hadn’t occurred to me. On guitar, it’s always like, play faster, higher, and louder, but he showed me that there are a lot of other ways to keep people’s attention while still staying in the song.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Eclectic Guitar to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.