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A Harmonicist's Prayer
Andrew Muchin

When Howard Levy plays the harmonica, for your davening or dancing pleasure, it's like Benny Goodman leading the klezmer band at your nephew's wedding. The music is world-class, unexpected and ticketed straight for your soul.

Andrew Muchin

When Howard Levy plays the harmonica, you hear more than the blues. Sure, his tone can turn mournful and his tempo can swagger. But this mouth-organ master cascades through fiery jazz, wrings every nuance out of a concerto and soars and grooves to the World Beat. Lately, the Chicago-based Grammy-winner also “plays the Jews.”

He plays synagogue music, that is—an original blend of jazz, Middle Eastern and cantorial styles that’s liberating and impeccable. Levy playing for your davening and dancing pleasure is like Benny Goodman leading the klezmer band at your nephew’s wedding. The music’s world-class, unexpected and ticketed straight for your soul.

“The harmonica is a direct expression of my soul, it’s like singing for me,” Levy says. Like many serious musicians, he considers music-making to be a form of prayer. “You just receive a certain thing and transmit a certain thing. When I’m improvising, I’m feeling everything in the room and I’m trying to unify the feeling.”

A composer, teacher and performer on piano, mandolin, penny whistle and hand drums, Levy is revered by harmonica players the way guitarists venerate Jimi Hendrix. He’s known for developing a revolutionary note-bending technique, called overblowing, that expands the sound of a standard ten-note diatonic harmonica to the full range of notes.

Levy has played harmonica and piano on more than 100 albums and in concerts by artists as diverse as folk singer Pete seeger, fusion band Spyro Gyra and arena rockers Styx. He gained national attention in 1989 as a member of banjo master Bela Fleck’s band, the Flecktones.

He performs regularly across the United States and Europe with the World Music band Trio Globo, leading his acoustic Express swing quartet and his Afro-Cuban big band Chevere, fronting orchestras with his own compositions and jamming with fellow Chicago Jewish harmonica player Corky Siegel. Levy’s also a regular guest on public radio’s “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Until three years ago, he had never written Jewish music. Rabbinical student Ruth Durschlag and Cantor David Landau were forming a Shabbat chavurah—an alternative prayer group—and heard about Levy. “They came over to my house.” Levy recalls. “They said, ‘We want services to be real musical and very spirited.’” Levy played and his two visitors danced. In the ensuing weeks he composed liturgical pieces and arranged the nigunim—Hasidic melodies—for Landau to sing.

He began playing at monthly services backed by his son, drummer Miles Levy, and bassist Eric Hochberg, in a trio he called the Levites. “I listened to everything that Ruth and David were saying and tried to bring in music that connected the prayers together—the singing, the dancing, the mood,” Levy says. “It was more like composing music for a play or a movie; it is the soundtrack for what’s going on.”

The chavurah broke up when Durschlag left Chicago for further rabbinic study but Levy continues his Shabbat gigs, backing acclaimed cantor Alberto Mizrahi around the Windy City. This may make Levy the only top jazz and world musician to play regularly for Jewish worship. “I find it upsetting that the quality of music is mediocre in many synagogues. I think that a lot of Jewish people don’t have as high a standard for music they hear in synagogue as they do in the concert hall.”

Levy wishes that contemporary Jews would follow the example of ancient Jews who played lyres and harps in their temples to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord.”

His inspiration comes in part from saxophonist John coltrane, who in the 1960s moved from bebop to free jazz to a spiritual improvisational style. On his 1965 album “A Love Supreme,” Levy says that Coltrane played the song “Psalm” “exactly like the cantor chanting the Torah portion.”

There’s something about Jewish music that sticks to Levy’s kishkas. “I like some of the blessings—the ‘Borchu.’ I like the ‘Hatzi Kaddish.’ I like the ‘Aitz Chaim’ hymn. They’re just beautiful tunes.

“I grew up going to an Orthodox temple in Queens with a real good cantor. The cantor sang a cappella, facing the ark, with no microphone. His voice would bounce off the wall. His face would turn red; he’d really get into it.

Just like the black church, like gospel singing. It was totally soulful.”

For many years, his memories of synagogue music were Levy’s touchstone to Judaism. “I’m very much like a lot of Jewish kids who go to Hebrew school and have a bar mitzvah and say, ‘I’m glad that’s over,’ ” he acknowledges. “Yet Jewish music always felt right.”