Tony Levin

Overview

Submitted by guitar-list on Mon, 2013-10-14 08:18

musical style:

photograph of Tony Levin

Tony Levin (born June 6, 1946, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American rock musician, specializing in bass guitar, Chapman Stick and upright bass (although he also sings, plays tuba and synthesizer).

Levin is best-known for his work with progressive rock pioneers King Crimson and Peter Gabriel. He has also been a member of Liquid Tension Experiment, the King Crimson-related bands Bruford Levin Upper Extremities, ProjeKct One and ProjeKct Four; his own Tony Levin Band includes Larry Fast on keyboards, Jerry Marotta on drums, and Jesse Gress on guitar; his 2007 album Stick Man led to the formation of the band Stick Men with fellow Crimson alum Pat Mastelotto and fellow Stickist Michael Bernier (later replaced with touch guitarist Markus Reuter).

A prolific session musician since the 1970s, Levin has played on five hundred albums, including those of Cher, Alice Cooper, John Lennon, Sarah McLachlan, Stevie Nicks, Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, Buddy Rich, The Roches, Todd Rundgren, Seal, and Yes. Additionally, he has toured with artists including Paul Simon (with whom Tony appeared in Simon's 1980 film One Trick Pony), Gary Burton, James Taylor, Herbie Mann, Judy Collins, Carly Simon, Peter Frampton, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe, Tim Finn, Richie Sambora, and Claudio Baglioni.

Levin helped to popularize the Chapman Stick and the NS upright bass. He has also created "funk fingers", a device for mimicking the sound of hitting the strings with drumsticks (which sounds similar to slap style bass).

Levin is also one of the first bloggers, as he began sharing his tour experiences in a diary way as early as in 1996, one year before the terms "weblog" and "blog" were coined. Read more about Tony Levin on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.