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Music Adventure
Howard Levy, as inventive as ever, leads world expedition at the Three Arts Club

By Howard Reich
TRIBUNE ARTS CRITIC

Some musicians seem to reinvent themselves with each performance, pursuing new directions and ideas at every opportunity.

Few are more protean, however, than Howard Levy, an unusually inventive harmonica player who can improvise with equal fluency and grace in pop, jazz, classical, Latin, European, Middle Eastern, and, no doubt, other idioms too arcane for public consumption.

On Wednesday evening, Levy opened the Landmark Jazz Series at the Three Arts Club of Chicago with some of the most sublimely lyric jazz playing one might hope to hear from a harmonica-or from any other instrument, for that matter.

Levy, who just returned home from a tour of Germany and evidently was inspired by the experience, led a quartet through one emotionally charged reading after another. His broadly arched solo lines unfolded with as much fervor as wit, as much musical drama as intellectual depth.

No segment of the evening summed up Levy's virtues as composer, improviser and instrumental virtuoso more vividly than "Blues Around the World," an original piece that explores a broad range of musical ideas and languages. By changing meter, tempo, tone and idiom every few bars or so, Levy created a dizzying, restless composition aptly reflecting his free-ranging musical tastes.

To hear Levy and friends shifting abruptly from lilting samba. rhythms to raunchy South Side blues, from sleekly modern jazz lines to double-time be-bop ideas, was to appreciate anew the man's expressive breadth.

But Levy wasn't the only formidable musician on stage. Pianist Jon Weber, another gifted Chicagoan, supported the soloist with some of the most elegantly polished pianism this side of Dick Hyman.

Like Levy and Weber, bassist Larry Gray commands an impressive technique, but it was his bowed passages-which yielded a radiant, cello-like tone-that best matched the melodic ardor of Levy's work throughout the evening's first set.

If drummer Jim Hines' nondescript playing rarely achieved genuine swing rhythm, Levy, Weber and Gray artfully tried to mask the problem.

In some ways, this memorable evening hinted at things to come, since Levy will be in the recording studio later this year to tape his forthcoming debut on Blue Note Records.

If that recording, to be released next year, proves as striking as this evening, the new CD might well launch Levy on a major career.