IF IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE for a virtuoso reedman to step out of a jazz 78 in a kind of “Purple Rose of Cairo” move, that person would be clarinetist Dan Levinson. He has been performing for over 30 years, but he has been performing music that dates back to the ‘teens (the 1910s, that is), faithfully recreating the original styles even as he adds his own original voice to the mix. That’s why the New York-based musician has been in international demand, a jewel in any ensemble that hires him.
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| Dan Levinson Photo by Dino Petrocelli |
“Molly is from Roseville, California, which is about 20 minutes outside of Sacramento. And I was performing with the Reynolds Brothers Rhythm Rascals, which was led by Ralf Reynolds and John Reynolds, who are the grandchildren of Zasu Pitts. I performed with them from the late 80s to the early 2000s. This was at the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee, where Molly’s father was a volunteer sound engineer. She’d been coming to that festival since she was about ten years old. And the Reynolds brothers knew her and had invited her to sing with the band. So I met her when she was sitting in with them. “For me, it was like when a cartoon character’s eyes bulge out – she was just a dream. And it was not only physical but also something about the way she sang. She just sang the song. She didn’t do the jazz inflections that for me have been such a turn-off over the years and still are. I mean, if Molly had gone up there and done a scat chorus, we wouldn’t be together.”
They stayed in touch, writing to each other for a couple of years. “And then in 2003 she moved to New York and we were living together, and we got married in 2008. And our daughter Aven was born in 2016.” He confesses that it can be a challenge raising a high-spirited six-year-old when you’re 57, but he’s delighted to be a dad.
Like many Manhattan-based jazz enthusiasts, I’m sure I first saw Dan in late 1985. I wasn’t Manhattan-based myself, but traveled frequently to the city to see concerts, and I invariably visited Tower Records at East 4th Street and Broadway. That’s where I saw him. He was the tall, skinny kid working in the Nostalgia department, which I haunted. I probably spoke with him. But I could never anticipated at the time that he would become a world-renowned clarinet and saxophone virtuoso.
He got the Tower Records job the same way he’s gotten most of his jobs, through luck and perseverance. “I was in my third year at NYU, and the drama department was right across the street from Tower Records, where I was spending so much money that I thought, ‘If I get a job there I’ll make extra money, which I could spend on records, and I’ll even get a discount.’ So I went to see the manager of the store, who had his office in the basement, and said, ‘I’d like to apply for a job.’ And he said, ‘We have no openings in rock right now.’ ‘No, no,’ I told him. ‘I want to work in the Nostalgia department.’ He said, ‘How soon can you start?’ It was the day before Thanksgiving, and I said, ‘Tomorrow.’ So I started Thanksgiving Day, 1985, and soon I had records stashed in my locker and behind the bins and everything, and as soon as I got a paycheck, I bought them. I was making $3.85 an hour, and our discount was only ten percent. So I ended up spending much more money than I would have had I not known about all those records.”
He found the job frustrating for other reasons as well. “I was so dissatisfied with the service I’d get in that department that I thought they needed somebody who knows about this music and is interested in it. So there came a day when I realized I was so sick and tired of people coming in and saying ‘Where’s the restroom,’ – and my girlfriend pointed out that I had become as bitter as all the employees I was trying to replace. And I thought, okay, I don’t belong here. I lasted six months.”
We know Dan best as the early-jazz devotee who worships Benny Goodman (and has led many a tribute concert with unrivalled accuracy), a 30-year member of Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks, and a leader of a variety of ensembles that recreate the lineup and repertory of groups from the first half of the 20th century. There’s the seven-piece Swing Wing, modeled after a Paul Whiteman ensemble; the Palomar Quartet, recreating the classic sound of the Benny Goodman Quartet; the Bix Centennial All-Stars; the Canary Cottage Dance Orchestra, a six-piece group playing the “rag-a-jazz” of the 1910s; the Roof Garden Jass Band, which echoes the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; and Fête Manouche, capturing the spirit of Django Reinhardt. He also has issued CDs saluting Bix Beiderbecke, Artie Shaw, and other notables. And he’s proud of the CD “One Step to Chicago,” which took a 30-year journey from its recording to its recent release.
“We recorded it on July 31, 1992, one day after a concert we performed as part of the Dick Hyman ‘Jazz in July’ series at the 92nd Street Y. Hyman chose me for the Chicago Jazz program, saluting Frank Teschemacher, I think because Teschemacher himself had limited facility on the instrument, hadn’t been playing very long. And neither had I. Hyman had Ken Peplowski and Kenny Davern on the concert, but he didn’t think they were right for the role of Teschemacher, so he got the music to me a few months in advance, I practiced the hell out of it. And come the rehearsal in June, he invited legendary producer George Avakian, who said, ‘We need to record this session.’ We showed up at 10 AM at the studio the day after the concert, some looking better than others. Remember Bud Freeman’s line when he arrived at 10 AM for the Great Day in Harlem photo shoot? ‘I didn’t even know there were two 10 o’clocks in one day.’
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Dan Levinson didn’t start out as an instrumentalist in search of music to play; his obsession was the music itself, “and I knew I wanted to find more of it. I was not a musician. I knew some ragtime piano, I played some rock guitar. But I didn’t start playing clarinet until I was 20. I wanted to play a frontline instrument in a traditional jazz band, but even then it took me a while to get into the groove of practicing. Eventually I was doing it every day in the NYU practice rooms: I started at two or three in the afternoon and did it until they threw me out at around 11.” Looking at the bios of the great players, 20 is a later-than-usual age at which to start, “and I’m still catching up,” Dan says, with no false modesty. “I mean, I don’t have the facility and, perhaps, the qualities that develop if you pick an instrument up as a child. There’s still a part of me that feels that I don’t have what other musicians have because I started so late. But one thing I do have is the passion that comes from being a fan of the music.”
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| Dan in Albany, NY Photo by B. A. Nilsson |
Vintage music wasn’t nearly as readily available then, but he found vintage records to borrow from the Santa Monica Public Library, “and an RCA Victor reissue from the ’5
0s started off with Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden’s version of ‘Rockin’ Chair’ and had a nice assortment of good material on it. The last track was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s ‘Livery Stable Blues,’ from 1917. That one just knocked me out. I felt like I’d discovered a hidden treasure, and played it for other people, thinking they’d agree. They hated it.”
He began by listening both to original recordings and recreations, “but eventually I didn’t want to hear recreations at all. I became obsessed with finding the originals in good audio restorations, especially if it was done by John R. T. Davies. He became a guru of mine as well as a friend. Anything that his name was on, I would buy because he was a musician and sensitive to pitching these things correctly and getting everything that was in the grooves into his transfers.
So that’s how I got into this music, first on my own at the library, taking records out and then through meeting other people and sharing recordings. When I first heard that music, it was something that felt like it’s always been a part of me.”
His interest in acting also led him to musical theater. “I was listening to early shows, from the ‘20s to the ‘50s and ‘60s, I guess. My all-time favorite show was and still is ‘The Music Man,’ for obvious reasons, and ‘Guys and Dolls’ is another. Also ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ‘Oliver,’ the last two because I like the ethnicity inherent in them. When I was in high school, I acted in ‘Oklahoma,’ ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ and ‘Brigadoon.’ So I know those shows pretty well, too. And then the Smithsonian put out a bunch of recreations, so to speak, cast albums that never existed made up of recordings made arounf the time of the show. They did shows like ‘Ziegfeld Follies of 1919,’ a 1928 production of ‘Whoopee!,’ George Gershwin’s ‘Lady, Be Good,’ and Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Face It,’ ‘Red Hot and Blue’ and ‘Leave It to Me.’”
“My first real love was theater, which is centered in New York. But I grew up in Los Angeles and Hollywood, which didn’t seem like anything spectacular. Maybe if I’d grown up in New York, I would have gotten interested in movies.”
As it happened, movies were a large part of Dan’s life. “It’s funny what people think when I say that my father was a Hollywood producer,” he explains. “It was not that glamorous at all. My dad got out of the army in the late 1950s and didn’t know what to do with his life. A friend of his said, ‘Well, you’ve always loved films, maybe you could get work at one of the studios.’ So my dad got himself a job in the mailroom at Universal Studios. Then he entered the Directors Guild’s Assistant Director Training Program – entered it the year I was born, 1965 – and began working as a second assistant director, and then an assistant director. And in 1974, he began his first job as a production manager. I think that was on ‘Harry and Tonto.’ Some of the other pictures he worked on as an assistant director included ‘Shampoo’ and ‘Sweet Charity.’
“He went on to work on ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘Killing of a Chinese Bookie,’ and then in 1978 he was given his first Production Manager credit on a film that was not expected to do well, called ‘Breaking Away.’ My father got me a couple of one-liners in films he was working on so I could get my SAG card. The first one was ‘Teachers.’ I went to Columbus, Ohio, and had a scene in the restroom where JoBeth Williams runs into the men’s room where I’m in a stall, and I open the stall door and see her and say, ‘Oh, excuse me.’ I ended up on the editing room floor. Later that year, I got a line in a movie called ‘Poison Ivy,’ which starred the then-unknown Michael J. Fox and Nancy McKeon. And Robert Klein was in it. I played a camp counselor. But by that time, I knew I wasn’t going to go in that direction.”
His favorite of his dad’s films is “My Favorite Year,” directed by Richard Benjamin, on which Art Levinson was a unit production manager. “I got to hang out on the set at MGM. I would go from school to this set to watch them shoot that movie with Peter O’Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, and Adolph Green. My father did five films with Richard Benjamin, whom he enjoyed working with very much. Dad worked steadily until 2003, and then the work dried up, just as he turned 70. He wasn’t in demand anymore. He lived another twelve years and died in 2015.”
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Dan first visited New York in 1981, when his father was shooting “My Favorite Year,” “and I fell in love with the city. So that’s all I could think about when I thought about colleges.” He nevertheless took what seemed a more practical approach, so that Carnegie Mellon was his first choice, selected for its renowned music and theater department. “My second choice was Northwestern. I didn’t get into either one. My third choice was with NYU, which I did get into, along with the dream of living in New York City. And I shudder at the thought of what I would be doing today if I had moved to Pittsburgh, or Evanston, Illinois, because it was while I was in college that I made all the connections with the people I still associate with today.”
NYU had two musical-theater departments, “which I didn’t know at the time. There was the Tisch School of the Arts, which had the main drama department, but in the early ‘80s they decided that musical theater was not a direction that they wanted to go in. And there was the NYU music department, which was part of the school of education, nursing, and arts professions, located in a different building, where they also had a musical theater department geared towards performing in musical theater. I didn’t know any of this.” Dan got into the Tisch School. “I told them that I wanted to do musical theater, but the two schools were feuding at that time, so they didn’t tell me that I should try the other school. What they said to me was, well, we don’t have much in the way of musical theater, but we’ll put you in Circle in the Square, which had their last vestiges of the musical theater program they were phasing out.”
Simultaneously – and fortunately – he was growing more and more interested in traditional jazz from the 1920s. “By 1985, I was at a crossroads: Do I want to go into theater? Or do I want to play jazz? I didn’t play an instrument, but I decided I wanted to play jazz. And I was also looking at my life, graduating in three years and knowing that I wasn’t going to have any support from my parents once I got out of college, and that I’d have to do it on my own. So I went into high gear and started practicing the clarinet – and meeting people.” Among them was trombonist Dan Barrett, with whom he is still a great friend. “He became a great mentor and a hero of mine, and he was also one of the only people who acknowledged my existence back then.
“I tended to be Mr. Cellophane. My Dad took me to to Eddie Condon’s when he first visited me in New York in December of 1983.” This was a small jazz club on West 54th Street following in the tradition of renowned guitarist and party host Condon, who died in 1973. “Condon’s stayed open for another two years and I was a regular there. Nobody ever seemed to notice me. I was there all the time. And then one day, Dan Barrett, who’s still my favorite living musician in the world, was subbing for the regular trombonist, and he got off the stage and said, ‘You seem kind of young to be listening to this music.’ I said, ‘This is the only music I listen to. I love this music.’ He asked if I played an instrument and I said I was thinking about the clarinet. So he invited me to his apartment and made me tapes and told me what to listen to, and was a great influence on me.”
This was also around the time that Dan met clarinetist James ‘Rosy’ McHargue. “He lived in Santa Monica, and during one of my visits there, my father said, ‘There’s a fellow who has a regular gig at a place nearby, and I was thinking maybe you’d like to go hear him.’ He was playing at an old place called Sterling Steakhouse on Ocean Avenue, overlooking the water. Rosie had a Dixieland band, and played every Friday and Saturday night till two in the morning. And I went there and I met Rosie and he was very warm and, friendly. Then, the following spring, in 1985, I went back on my own and re-introduced myself, and said I was just starting the clarinet. And he said, ‘Come over to the apartment tomorrow and we’ll listen to some records.’”
McHargue was born in 1902 in Danville, Illinois, and moved to Chicago in his teens and began working with jazz musicians when jazz was still young. “He heard the records of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band on his mother’s Victrola and wrote out Larry Shields’s clarinet parts – as they came out! And he became a huge fan of the Memphis Five and Miff Mole specifically, and Bix Beiderbecke – those were his heroes, and he got to know these guys from being on the scene with Benny Goodman, Red Nichols, Miff Mole, Jimmy McPartland, throughout the 1920s, and he was around Chicago when all this stuff was happening. Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, he was there. He played with the big bands – he played with Ted Weems in the 30s, then moved to California in 1943 when the recording ban forced a lot of musicians out of New York City. He was one of those in that mass migration. He joined Kay Kyser’s band, played with Eddie Miller, Red Nichols, and then in the early 50s, Rosie was part of a TV show on KTLA Channel Five called the ‘Dixie Showboat.’ And he led his own band from 1952 until the year he died, which was 1999. He was 97, and he was playing right up until the end.
“So I met him when he was only 82 years old. He was 63 years older than I was. I went to his house realizing that I was sitting with a legend who had known all the great jazz musicians. And he would play 78s for me. None of them had sleeves. They were just stacked vertically and he’d pull one out and play it and say, ‘This is Beiderbecke, this is Miff Mole, this is Larry Shields.’ He taught me who the musicians were and what good music was – and what I shouldn’t be listening to.”
McHargue was the first person to invite Dan to sit in with his ensemble. “I cringe at the thought of how I must have sounded. No technique, no concept of intonation on my instrument. That was in 1986, the first time that I played in public. So Rosie was my friends for 15 years. I eventually would lead his band at jazz festivals. When he got into his 90s, he became a superstar throughout California. For the first time in his life, he really was a superstar. And it was beautiful.”
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Another significant meeting set Dan on the course he still travels today, and it began with a pair of LPs recorded by Max Morath, a pianist and singer who is best known for his ragtime performances – but who performs all manner of vintage songs. The mid-‘70s Vanguard recordings are “Irving Berlin: The Ragtime Years” and “Jonah Man: A Tribute To Bert Williams,” which Levinson listened to over and over. “And one day I decided to find him. I called Information and they gave me his phone number. I had some balls in those days – I don’t think I would do that now. I called the number and said, ‘Mr. Morath, you don’t know me, but my name is Dan Levinson. I’m learning to play the clarinet. I live in New York City. And I’ve just been listening to “Jonah Man” and your Irving Berlin ragtime album. And I have to say that those are two of my favorite albums of all time. And he said, “Well, we have something in common, because those are my two favorite albums, too. And they’re also the ones that went out of print the fastest, which means that the public didn’t like them.”
“I had not intended to use this job as a springboard to break into the business. But through him, I met a lot of the people and got to know a lot of the people who are still my associates. People like Vince Giordano and Richard Kimball – so many people. And Hyman was supportive of everything I wanted to do, and he also influenced me in other ways. He said, ‘You know, Dan, you can’t make a living playing clarinet like Larry Shields. You also have to play the saxophone.’ And I said, ‘Well, Benny Goodman didn’t play the saxophone.’ And Hyman said, ‘First of all, Benny Goodman is Benny Goodman. And secondly, he did play the saxophone before he started leading his own band.’ And then I cited another one of my heroes, Kenny Davern, and said he doesn’t play the saxophone, and Hyman said, “That has hurt him. But even Kenny will play the baritone saxophone if he has to. You need to play the saxophone.’ So I got myself an alto saxophone in 1988. And that was how all of this got started.”
During the ensuing decade, Dan’s fortunes continued to blossom. “I was ascending rapidly,” he says. “In 1998, I had my picture on the cover of the ‘Mississippi Rag,’ which was the predecessor to the ‘Syncopated Times.’ I had my picture on the cover, there was a story about me. And I seemed to be getting a lot of really big jobs that year. I had been playing ‘Jazz in July,’ with Dick Hyman every year, but always as a member of Vince Giordano’s band. And for the first time I was a featured soloist with a bunch of my clarinet heroes, Kenny Davern, Ken Peplowski, Walt Levinsky, Allan Vaché, on a program called ‘Licorice Shticks.’ And then – this is where the diminished chord comes in – I was diagnosed with throat cancer.
“I was 33 years old. The only symptom I had was a small bump on my jawline, which got larger, and eventually I had swelling in my neck. It took me about six weeks to get an appointment to have that bump removed and biopsied. And during that time I quit smoking. I didn’t smoke all that much, but when I got the news that I had cancer, I thought it was a result of that. Even the doctors who diagnosed me at the time said it’s not something we see in 33-year-olds. It was an anomaly. A mystery.
“It was most likely HPV, which you can get in a variety of ways. In fact, about 75 percent of the population has HPV and we just walk around with it. Years later, it can manifest as head or neck cancer. But in 1998, those studies had not been done. They only knew of it as something that lifelong smokers and drinkers had. So the first doctor I saw was going to perform what they call a median mandibulotomy, where they break open the jaw in order to access the primary at the back of the throat. And in doing so, they split the lip, and then they sew it back together and – you’re messed up. And I had a doctor who said, ‘This is the only way we know how to treat it. There’s no other option.’ So I was all set to have that done, I had a date for surgery – but I have a cousin who’s a pathologist, and she said, ‘I want you to see Mark Urken at Mount Sinai. He’s the chairman of the Irvine allergy department and one of the top surgeons in the country, so I’d like you to get an opinion from him.
“He was not taking new patients at the time, but because of my connection with my cousin, he got me in and they did nother biopsy and more tests and confirmed the diagnosis. But he said, ‘I’m going to give you another option for treatment, which is just to do surgery, to remove the metastasis in the neck and remove lymph nodes and take out the sternocleidomastoid muscle and then we’ll treat the primary with radiation and chemotherapy.’ And I said ‘What are my chances of survival from one treatment versus the other?’ He said, ‘They’re really about the same, so I’d like to offer the less invasive.’ Then I asked him if he’d ever performed a median mandibulotomy on a clarinetist and he said no. ‘Then you don’t know if I’d be able to play again?’ I asked, and he said, ‘I don’t.’ So I opted for the second option, and I owe my career to Mark Urken and his associates for giving me the option, for saving not only my life, but also my career.”
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“In April 1999, I was at Rosy McHargue’s 97th birthday party. I had just completed my third round of cancer treatment, so I was not able to play. I never told him. I wore a turtleneck so he couldn’t see the scars on my neck. He died in June. And I was still recovering from my treatment. But I had one final conversation with him on the phone. And he said to me, ‘You sound terrible.’ And I said, ‘So do you.’ That was the last time I talked to him. He died a few days later. But I said, ‘I love you, Rosy,’ and he said, ‘I love you, too, Dan,’ and it was a beautiful moment, I was able to say, ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.’ There’s nobody that had a bigger influence on me than Rosy. I did an album in his memory called ‘Where the Morning Glories Grow, a Centennial Remembrance of Rosy McHargue,’ and I played arrangements that he’d written with musicians that had worked with him and he respected.”
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Dan’s path had crossed casually with Vince Giordano’s during those early New York years, but he got to know the bandleader and score-collector better while working for Dick Hyman. “And he knew I was interested in old music, so Vince also hired me to work at his house doing music copying and some filing. My dream was to play in the Nighthawks, but I’d only been playing for a couple of years at that point. Vince was nice enough to let me make photocopies of the more challenging solos.
“It wasn’t until 1991 that I did my first performance with the Nighthawks. He had two bands, and Vince was out with the A band. I played with the B band. I was terrible. I think if he had been there he never would have hired me again. Then I got an offer to go to New Orleans to play with a band down there, so I lived there for six months and got my fill of that, and that’s another story for another time.
“I got a phone call from Vince in April 1992. He said, ‘I have an opening on tenor saxophone in my band, and I think you’d be perfect for it.’ So I moved back to New York and joined the Nighthawks. It was a little rocky at first, because he’d fired a bunch of musicians and they took it to the union, so I wasn’t able to play all of the dates I was originally supposed to play. And moving back to New York meant I had to re-start my career. You don’t just come back and say, ‘Hey, everybody, I’m here again.’ But I’ve now been able to play my dream job for nearly 30 years.”
As with all performing musicians, Dan’s work essentially evaporated during the Covid years, but, kept afloat by pandemic money, he was able to turn to more active fatherhood and to spend more time with his own recorded music collection. He has turned from seeking the restoration work of others to doing his own work bringing rare and classic 78s back to life. And forget Spotify: he travels with a portable hard drive containing thousands of hours of his favorite tunes.
But performances are slowly returning. In September, he performed again with the James Langton’s New York All-Star Big Band at the Morristown, NJ, Jazz and Blues Festival; October dates included a tribute to Ian Whitcomb in Canoga Park, CA, and a return to Morristown for a benefit concert at the Bickford Theatre. As is true for so many performers, there’s a struggle between the homebody and the star, but it’s the star who makes money. “So I guess I am looking forward to being on the road again,” he says.
– A shorter version of this piece appeared in The Syncopated Times, October 2022
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