LEVY LOGS

Back to Levy Logs

DEEP-VOICED WORDSMITH KEN NORDINE
AND COMPOSER HOWARD LEVY CREATE
BEAUTIFUL MUSIC TOGETHER

By Mara Tapp
SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE

On this springlike Saturday afternoon, musician Howard Levy is telling "Word Jazz" creator Ken Nordine about a late-night encounter with the owner of a gas station and convenience store.

"You remind me of a guy on the radio, a guy with a real deep voice," the owner told Levy, who had stopped after a concert. "I said, 'You mean Ken Nordine?' 'Yeah, that's him.'I said,'Well, thank you very much."'

The two artists. cohorts for some 15 years, laugh.

"See now, " Nordine says jokingly, his luxuriously loamy voice familiar from many commercials, like the long-runIning Levis ads, "if I could play the piano like Howard plays the piano -"

Levy interrupts: "If someone says your piano playing reminds them of me let me know please"-their laughter builds-"I'll go and kill'em. "

They're really howling as Nordine explains, "They call me 'thumbs.'"

Nordine and Levy are at once an odd and perfectly logical musical couple-, this 79-year-old cult figure known around the world for "Ken Nordine's Word Jazz" and this 48-year-old musician and composer who's played with artists such as John Prine, Bonnie Koloc and Bela Fleck. Together the pair has performed and recorded with the Grateful Dead and performance artist Laurie Anderson, and on Saturday they will collaborate again for two concerts at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Pinning down exactly what they create together is hard. At Nordine's three-story North Side red brick house, the musician and the poet lovingly wrestle with defining what it is they do.

"It's really like being a composer in real time, or like dancing with somebody or having a conversation, but you're doing it in public for an audience at the same time," Levy says.

"Sometimes I'll say 'Hey Howard, why don't you just play what you want with the bass player and the drummer and he'll just play," says Nordine, which immediately reminds him of a number they did called "What's There to Do Without You?"

"I just sort of made up this little ballad on the spot and then I overdubbed the saxophone solo into the middle," Levy recalls. On that day, Nordine said: "Let's get the sound of the way the universe sounded before anything was happening-just before the Big Bang."

Such instructions, which might leave others speechless, don't faze Levy

"He'll do something immediately-something that he thinks is right for that-and he's never been wrong," Nordine says. "It's almost as if there's a spirit of music-an empathy is the word I love-that says: 'Here's the way I feel it.' "

Though Nordine and Levy are no strangers to improvisation, they say their particular interaction is unusual and special.

"It's really in the moment," Levy explains. "It's body language on some level," Nordine interrupts. "Let's just call it mutuality," Levy adds. "How's that? Because it's sort of two people focusing on the same thing from different angles, but we're really focused on it--whatever it is."

Both men say they work differently with each other than they do with anyone else,

"There are performers who perform very, very well but they have everything worked out to the T," Nordine says, "but ours has that freedom, that kind of, Will it come together?" His majestic voice drops to a whisper. "It's coming together. Let's keep it together. Now where will we go?"

Nordine attributes their artistic success to the free form they use, which goes to the core of creation. "Many musicians get caught up in structure, almost a rigidity," he says. "What Howard has is to be able to do 'of the moment'-what jazz really is. Jazz is a taking off within harmonic structure that's almost presumed, that's almost like a ritual. "

But too much ritual can be dangerous. "We're better in rehearsal," deadpans Nordine. "Absolutely" Levy says, laughing.

Perhaps surprisingly, both men's early musical education was classical. Nordine grew up playing string quartets with his Swedish architect father and brothers, and Levy was trained on the piano.

By the'50s, however, Nordine was reciting poetry for the drums of Johnny Frigo and the piano of Dick Marx at a Wilson Avenue club called the Lei Aloha. The shows were so popular that Nordine started making up his own stuff to keep the crowds coming back, and "Word Jazz" was born. In 1958, Fred Astaire danced to it on his first television show.

When National Public Radio syndicated 26 installations of "Ken Nordine's Word Jazz" in the mid-'70s, it created fans worldwide. Augmenting that material over the years-his current library stands at 88 programs-Nordine now syndicates himself to various public radio stations. In Chicago, WBEZ-FM 91.5 broadcasts the half-hour "Word Jazz" at midnight Sunday.

Though Nordine's poetics can be difficult to describe, Anderson has called him "first and foremost a musical storyteller-part Edward Lear, part John Cage, who uses the airwaves as his own surreal laboratory, a place where the weird and the telling can be wrought and flung into the American night."

Levy meanwhile, begged his parents in New York for piano lessons. They relented when he was about 9 and he recalls learning how to play with the right hand the first week, and the left the next week. The third week, his teacher taught him how to use both hands and he said, "Oh, good. Now I can play my music."

He hasn't stopped playing-or composing-since. "As soon as I heard something new that I liked, it was like this mania to play" Levy worked his way through marches, blues and so on.

"When I was a kid, I would sit down with a book at the piano and read the book. I'd play with one hand," Levy says. "One of my neighbors came from across the street-I'd been playing for an hour or something-she said, 'Howard that was really nice. What are you playing?' And I said, 'Well I was reading this book by Camus and improvising with the left hand.'"

Today, Levy is best described as a multi-instrumentalist. He plays piano, harmonica, zither, synthesizer and more instruments than most people can spell. Between the two of them, Nordine and Levy have dozens of recordings.

Last year, Anderson asked them back to London's Royal Festival Hall to record "Word Jazz Live from London." They'd performed with her two years before at the Meltdown festival with such stars as Lou Reed and Spaulding Gray.

"And Howard was fantastic," Nordine says. "What he likes to do is play these little instruments-little ocarina, tiny little thing-and plays it so that you'll say, 'I never knew there was so much music in that.'" He rhapsodizes about how Levy's ocarina "would flitter around like a happy bird" during his verbal riff on the bliss of larks.

Nordine says the key to his own contribution is simple. "Think of words and the language as I do: They're music. Whether we realize it or not, there are beats to what we say, and there's rhythm and there's melody and there's pacing. There's all the wonderful things that the speaking voice can do at great, great variation."

Levy takes it even further.

"Ken is really into what he's doing, which is like poetry and words, free association and things that are on many levels at once and things where it's like you drop a word and it echoes," he says. "I don't know about most 'spoken word' people. I only know that what Ken does is unique because he has the unique sensibility of translating all sorts of things into words, many of which are very intangible," he says. When they work live, Levy adds, it's like "you're creating musical sound sculptures."

The two met in the 1980s when a mutual musician friend introduced them during the "Go for the Gold" Olympic ad campaign for Levis. "Even doing commercials with Ken, it's not like doing a jingle with the normal jingle producer," Levy says. "What's wonderful about working with Ken on anything 'commercial' is that he makes it artistic."

Nordine uses the word "lucky" to describe his meeting Levy, whom he calls "a national resource."

"I've listened to a lot of players, but it's more than his technical ability," he says. "It's his sensitivity and his listening. He's able to listen, not only to what I do, but to what other musicians do. And there are a lot of musicians whose ego doesn't allow them to hear the way they should hear."

Over the years, they've become so close that Nordine now doesn't like to be without Levy

When he got the call that Jerry Garcia wanted to fly him out to California to do a 1990 New Year's Eve show at the Oakland Coliseum, Nordine responded, "'Well, I'll come out if Howard can come out with me,' because Howard knows what I do and I have to have someone translate to other musicians where we are because most musicians are a little chary of just playing without knowing what they're going to do."

Painter Ed Paschke, who has "always idolized" Nordine, says the attraction is "not only the voice but his mind." The artist has been close with Nordine for nearly a dozen years since his dream to have Nordine narrate a WTTW special about him was fulfilled.

"He paints with colors in the air, He can charge your imagination in such a way that you have the complete palette sort of floating in your consciousness," Paschke says. "In the last few decades many of these so-called categories of the 'arts' have become more blurred, and what he represents to me is someone who was way ahead of his time in that he has his thumb on the pulse of all of the exciting things. Nothing is excluded. Everything has potential to be caught up in his web of creativity"

Characteristically, what Nordine and Levy will do at this week's concerts is still up in the air.

"We'll add some 'Colors,'" says Nordine, referring to his children's book just published by Harcourt Brace, which started as an ad campaign for a paint company, "maybe the elements. I've always wanted to do the elements-how carbon feels about hydrogen and how oxygen gets along with calcium."

Their one hope is that they won't need too much rehearsal-that might endanger the spontaneity of the performances-and that they will fulfill Nordine's stated goal for the concerts: to "Have fun."