GFS grad brings spicy sounds to Kimmel Center

Mt. Airy Grammy nominee breaks into ‘Top 10’ chart

by MICHAEL J. MISHAK

Chestnut Hill area native Aaron Levinson is quietly mounting a Latin revival from a pool house in suburban Wynnewood. With a new record label — Libertad Records — and a new album — Spanish Harlem Orchestra's Across 110th Street, Levinson, 40, is sitting pretty with a fixed Cheshire grin.

Working from a small office at the Montgomery Avenue home of entertainment lawyer and Libertad co-owner John Robertson, he and his assistant fielded phone calls hours before their inaugural act played the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater last month. They are deluged daily with email requests from musicians across the globe eager to sign with the label.

"I'm deliriously happy," says Levinson, who grew up in Mt. Airy and Germantown.

After a three-year stint heading Rykodisc's now-defunct Latin subsidiary, Libertad is yet another chance to bring salsa flavor to the bland mainstream.

If early receptions are any indication, Levinson has plenty to be happy about.

Spanish Harlem Orchestra's new record, released in June, is placing within the top 100 on Billboard's Latin chart and within the top 10 on its Tropical chart. The band finished a successful U.S. tour and left for Europe last month. Both noncommercial and jazz stations are playing the record in their rotations.

Levinson says he's not surprised to hear younger disc jockeys incorporating Latin music into their acts. "This music doesn't date," he says of traditional salsa. "It still feels fresh. It doesn't sound like an oldies band."

With Libertad, he hopes to service a growing interest.

Still in its infancy, Libertad was formed in 2002, but is quickly building an international reputation, thanks to award-winning efforts like Spanish Harlem Orchestra.

With Sony and Rykodisc distribution deals, Libertad's releases are available in 43 countries. "It's thrilling for an independent label to have such far-reaching tentacles," Levinson said.

Released in June, Spanish Harlem Orchestra's newest outing, Across 110th Street, is the label's debut album. It also marks the return of renowned world music vocalist Ruben Blades to the Salsa scene.

"[Blades] is like the Frank Sinatra of Salsa," Levinson said. "He left at the top of his game 15 years ago. The music's relevancy is drawing him back," he said.

Though Levinson is hesitant to take credit for the reunion, the producer's abilities as an ensemble architect are well known, tried and true.

He defied his music industry detractors in 2001, forming and producing The Philadelphia Experiment, a left-field jazz project that combined hip-hop, jazz and classical talents. The album, from a group that had never conducted a single rehearsal, placed within the top five on the Billboard Jazz chart. That success set the stage for Spanish Harlem Orchestra, another ensemble idea, but on a larger-scale than The Philadelphia Experiment and focused on sharing the sounds of Spanish Harlem.

The group, led by pianist Oscar Hernandez, was named "Best New Artist" at the 2003 Billboard Latin Music Awards, and its debut album Un Gran Dia en el Barrio was nominated for the "Best Salsa Album of the Year" Grammy. The record reached number three on Billboard's Latin chart and spent nine months there.

Levinson’s success comes from a lifelong practice of embracing many cultures.

While a student at Philadelphia's High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, he drew the stares of the all-black crowds in Germantown jazz clubs. During college, the white, Jewish kid from Northwest Philly surprised his Latino friends with an appreciation for Salsa music. Later, he puzzled audiences as the leader of an avant-funk band.

Levinson's vision has influenced everything from experimental electric jazz to the most traditional salsa music. His uncanny instincts for arrangement are, in part, a result of growing up amid the diversity and vibrancy of Northwest Philadelphia.

Imagination

At 13, Aaron Levinson could've easily been the unlikeliest candidate to sing on a blues jam entitled "Backseat Mama." White, Jewish and underage, Levinson sang about acts he had yet to experience (in a car he wasn't even old enough to drive) to the boogie-shuffle of a genre birthed in the black American South.

Lacking in experience, imagination provided the vision.

Joined by Adam Guth, a former classmate from Germantown Friends School (elementary school years), Levinson built a crude recording studio, comprised of a cassette player and an external microphone, to record the two-boy band's first joint composition.

Outfitted with harmonica and guitar, Guth sat before a drum kit, playing all three instruments simultaneously. Levinson took the mic. The session, recorded in Guth's Mt. Airy basement, was an early indication of a curiosity that would fuel his career as performer, record producer and label head for more than two decades. "We are not those ballad guys," he said, laughing. "We will never be those guys." (Levinson and Guth, friends since their days as students at Germantown Friends School, recently composed the soundtrack to an HBO documentary entitled "How Do You Spell Murder?" which premiered this month on cable.)

A lesson in the "right wrongs"

The son of artists — his father is an architect, his mother a painter — Levinson was raised at a time when otherworldly jazz legend Sun Ra and his Arkestra were busy, as Ra once famously declared, "saving the planet."

Levinson spent his formative years growing up in a house at the corner of Schoolhouse Lane and Wayne Avenue, three blocks from Sun Ra's Morton Street home. Cutting class one day, he ran into Marshall Allen, an Arkestra member, who encouraged the teenager to audition for a spot in the group.

To his surprise, Levinson found a Sun Ra listing in the phone book, underlined it and called the "super-extraterrestrial" musician to confirm an audition.

"Is this Sun Ra," he asked.

Levinson drops to a baritone, recalling Ra's response. "Yes."

"Are you holding auditions?"

"Yes. Wednesday evening."

A fledgling trumpet player at the time, Levinson didn't get the job, but his life was forever changed. "You didn't come prepared for Sun Ra," he said. "This was the Academy of Sun Ra. He taught you."

The lesson of "inside-outside playing" he learned on Morton Street that night has stuck with him ever since. Following jazz great Thelonious Monk's famous adage, Ra emphasized playing the "right wrongs." A musician should "play what's inside," he said, even if a chord falls outside the appropriate scale.

Sun Ra lamented that modern musicians had forgotten the lesson of Charlie Parker, Levinson said. "Musicians aren't thinking about the music anymore," he said. "They're not experimenting with the orchestral palette."

Live energy

Levinson is determined to avoid what he sees as the trappings of modern jazz. "New music is terribly similar. It's not creative. It's orthodox and very safe. The records have the same engineers," he said. "I don't want to take anything away from these professionals, but there is no sonic signature."

Throughout his career, Levinson has avoided popular recording techniques like overdubbing, heeding the advice he received as a college student from acclaimed record producer John Hammond.

"Hammond felt there was a level of artistry that took place when all the musicians performed at the same time," Levinson said of his chance meeting with the then-80-year-old producer. "They have to listen to each other."

New artists, lost classics

With Libertad, Levinson hopes to reach audiences in the telling of a story as worthy as Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club. Along with releasing new artists, Libertad will issue a series of compilations of essential and lost classics, Levinson said.

"We're trying to offer records that are great records — records that you can party your ass off to — but also records that are just as important and stand the test of time. I want to make things that will last."

Preservation is as important as the quality, he said. While the African American experience has been extensively documented through both blues and jazz recordings (along with their attendant scholarship), the Latin experience is underrepresented.

"Latin music still does not have that same context," Levinson said. "A linguistic barrier has prevented that immigrant experience from being told.