Adam Levy, former guitarist for Norah Jones, will play a solo gig in Ventura
Guitarist has gone from Norah’s sideman to solo success

The guitarist, a former Thousand Oaks resident, will open for A.J. Croce at 8 p.m. Thursday at Zoey’s, 185 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. Tickets cost $20. Call 652-1137 or visit zoeyscafe.com. Levy’s website is adamlevy.com.

By Bill Locey

Posted July 14, 2011 at 6:03 p.m.

When Adam Levy was a kid growing up in the late 1970s, he used money from a paper route to buy records. “I remember buying Joe Pass’ ‘Virtuoso,’ the Dixie Dregs’ ‘Freefall,’ Dave Edmunds ‘Repeat When Necessary’ and George Benson’s ‘Cookbook’ all around the same time,” he writes on his website. “I bought a couple of Chuck Berry singles as well.”

Under-the-radar guitar god Adam Levy, having spent much of the new millennium keeping up with the Jones, will demonstrate what he has learned when he shares the bill with Jim’s kid, A.J. Croce, on Thursday night at Zoey’s in Ventura. A former Lancer from Thousand Oaks, Levy was, for many years, an integral part of that sultry soundtrack for millions as the guitar player for Miss Mellow Herself, Norah Jones. His own man for a few years now, Levy has a new album, “The Heart Collector,” and these days is just a guy and a guitar driving around, living the rock ‘n’ roll dream and all that jazz.

In the music biz, just about every frontman was, once upon a time, a sideman, doing his job like a good worker bee but increasingly becoming certain that, “I can do that.” Sometimes, they do, and sometimes it becomes painfully obvious that the sidemen as frontman should’ve stayed as a backup. Levy seems to have successfully turned the corner. He discussed all this and more during a recent phoner.

Hey, Adam, what’s the latest in your world?

I’m here right now in New York where it’s raining and hot.

So how is “The Heart Collector” doing? Are you a rich rock star yet?

(Laughs heartily.) No, I’m not a rich rock star yet but I do play one on television. It’s funny — the record is doing quite well, but a lot of what I do as a working musician still is just playing for other people. So it’s kind of an interesting life — to go back and forth being, you know, Clark Kent and Superman.

Wow, well said. You’re touching upon my next question: How do you going from being the sideman to The Man?

I was an instrumentalist for years and years and years — I played on other people’s records in the past. I played on Tracy Chapman’s records beginning in ’95 and I was just hired to play guitar. People didn’t think of me as a backup singer then something happened in the early 2000s. I started writing songs and couldn’t find too many other people that wanted to sing them. I started doing it myself. Eventually, enough people encouraged me and I had fun doing it, so that’s how I made the transition.

Fast-forward to the present, and you have a ton of solo albums, right?

Yeah, several instrumental ones before I started singing. As a vocalist, I have “The Heart Collector,” “Washing Day” and “Loose Rhymes.”

Does every sideman up there playing think, “Man, I could so do that.”

Yes.

But only a few take the plunge.

Because it’s safer. There’s probably a lot of people in normal jobs that look at their boss and think, “I could do that better,” so it’s kind of the same thing. It’s one thing to say to your boss, “Hey, I could do that better,” but it’s another thing to quit your job and do it. And that’s what I did. I left Norah’s band in 2007 and I still do some gigs for hire now and again, but basically, I’m trying to fill up my calendar with my own work.

Adam Levy’s new, 13-track CD “The Heart Collector” has been getting raves. NoDepression.com said the disc was “overflowing with warm and soulful songs that enchant the ears and captivate the heart.”

Have you always been a guitarist?

No, actually, I started out as a clarinetist.

Clarinetist? Wow.

Yeah, it’s a hard instrument. I meet more people who started on clarinet and very few still play it. I think it’s the most abandoned instrument in the world. Oh, by the way, I don’t know if you know this, but I actually grew up partially in the San Fernando Valley (and) we moved to Thousand Oaks when I was in sixth grade. I went to Aspen Elementary School in Thousand Oaks. That’s where I started playing clarinet.

What high school did you go to?

T.O.

How ’bout them Lancers?

Yeah — go Lancers — and I went to Redwood Intermediate School. So, yeah, clarinet did not work out for me, but the guitar, as soon as I picked it up, just made sense to me.

Now you’re the jazz guitarist. Why not the reggae guitarist or the hard rock guitarist?

Because I was always interested in the kind of math-and-science aspect of music: theory and how harmony and scales work. It wasn’t so much that I was drawn to jazz as a listener. I still liked to listen to rock records when I was a kid, but the more I tried to study the mechanics of music, I started going toward jazz because that seemed to be where you could get into the nerdy and nitty-gritty stuff. As a kid instead of drawing pictures of race cars, motorcycles and stuff in the margins, I was drawing scales, chords and thinking about music.

Where’d you meet Norah Jones?

We met at a bar in New York City called the 55 Bar around 1999 or 2000. It was just one of those funny things — we wound up sitting next to each other. We started talking a little bit. At that time, she wasn’t signed to a record label; she was just a musician banging around New York like the rest of us. I gave her my number and I said, “Call me sometime,” and she did and we started playing.

Mellow music like hers attracts a certain demographic, so I’m assuming you’ve encountered zero mosh pits and no drunks shouting for “Free Bird”?

No, we never had that, but strangely, there were a few fights.

Wow. A fight at a Norah Jones show?

The first time I saw it, I was totally shocked. It wasn’t an all-out brawl — just people arguing over seats, and security had to come to pull people apart, but it’s the last thing you would expect at a Norah Jones show. You’d expect everyone at a Norah Jones show to just turn to the person on their right and start making out. And mostly, that’s what happens.

How long were you keeping up with the Jones?

For eight years.

How much Norah is in you and how much of you is in Norah?

Boy, that’s hard to say — that’s a really good question. I would say the thing she instilled in me was just the confidence to write songs and also to play the way that I play. As a sideman, it’s easy to try and fit in and take the path of least resistance, but she always encouraged me to play the way I actually play and not worry about playing pretty or in a pop kind of way. The first time she heard me, I was playing with Joey Baron, who’s kind of an avant-garde New York jazz drummer, and she used to come see his band all the time. She loved it and always liked that aspect of my playing.

As to what of me is in her — well, I showed her a few things on the guitar and she plays a lot more guitar these days than when I met her, but it’s hard to say. I think I’m in her music and she’s in mine, but it’s really hard to take it apart in any more detail.

Any extra-strange gigs?

The strangest gig I ever played was at the Placer County Fair up in Roseville. We were the opening act for a celebrity goat-milking contest. After we played a set, they brought a goat on stage and had local celebrities take turns to see who could get the most milk out of a goat in 60 seconds.

Local celebrities?

Yeah, very local celebrities from Placer County. After the contest, they asked us to come back and the stage was just covered in goat milk on a hot summer’s day.

Who knocks you out as a guitar player?

I never get tired of Jeff Beck — he’s amazing. Every time I hear him, I learn something new. And Ry Cooder really knocks me out as a guitar player — I think he’s underrated, really.

What’s the best and worst thing about being a musician?

The best thing about it is that I get to live my dream. I knew when I was 12 years old that I wanted to play guitar for a living, and here I am, 44 years old and still getting to do that. Most people don’t even know what their dream is, and if they do, they probably don’t get to follow it. The worst part for me is that I’m not a night owl by nature. I wake up every morning around 5:30.

Yeah, me, too — morning is the best.

It’s so beautiful. The light is great. It’s quiet. It’s a magic time, especially in New York because New York gets so loud and crazy — it’s the one time that New York feels kind of empty. To me, the life of a rock star means taking a lot of naps so at the gig I’m energized and can still get up at 5:30 and enjoy that time and not be all bleary-eyed.

Read more: http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/jul/14/adam-levy-former-guitarist-for-norah-jones-will/?partner=RSS#ixzz1SC7CNOUy

- vcstar.com

Lib at Large: Former Norah Jones band guitarist writes songs from joy, not loss

By Paul Liberatore

Marin Independent Journal

Posted: 07/01/2011 06:49:00 AM PDT

As a guitarist in Norah Jones’ Handsome Band, Adam Levy had a sweet gig, and he knows it. He played on her multimillion-selling albums, appeared on her DVDs and toured the world with her three times.

He also wrote “In the Morning,” a song on Jones’s 2004 album, “Feels Like Home.”

“Who can know what the future holds, but I think it’s fair to say that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Levy says.

So then why, in 2007, did he quit?

“It was a very hard decision,” the 44-year-old musician admits, speaking by phone from his apartment on Manhattan’s lower East Side. “A lot of my friends were scratching their heads. But I like the idea of quitting while you’re ahead. And I’ve never looked back. It was the right decision for me.”

For one thing, had he remained with Jones, he doubts he would have had the impetus to write and record the 13 remarkable songs on “The Heart Collector,” a new solo album the roots music-oriented Elmore magazine says “captures beautifully Levy’s generously expressive singing and skilled, sensitive guitar work.”

In his songwriting, Levy draws from jazz, blues, folk, rock, Americana. He writes smart, often wryly humorous lyrics that he sings in a mellow baritone, peppering them with literary and cultural allusions. On “The Heart Collector,” for example, the track “Paint by Numbers” references an Edvard Munch painting. And “Promise to California” takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem.

A student of guitar and guitar players, Levy is a freelance contributor to San Anselmo-based Acoustic Guitar magazine. Coincidentally, he wrote this month’s cover story on Steve Earle. And, on July 13, he’ll play at the Sleeping Lady in Fairfax with Teja Gerken and Scott Nygaard, senior editor and assistant editor respectively of the magazine.

As a guitarist, Levy admits that he lacks flashy technique. His unorthodox style has him zigging when you think he’ll zag. And there’s an underlying intelligence in his playing that Jazz Guitar International describes as “guitar for the mind and soul.”

His surprising style, he believes, is a reflection of his imaginative personality

“That’s kind of how I am as a person, a daydreamer,” he explains. “To me, what’s interesting about life is the unexpected. You leave the house thinking you’re going to the store and you wind up wandering into another store because something in the window intrigues you.”

Or you wander into a coffee shop and by chance meet and fall in love with a woman who becomes your wife. That’s exactly what happened to Levy in 2006, when he was recording his previous album, “Washing Day.”

The coffee shop was across the street from the recording studio and the woman he met and fell in love with was Mia Jarlov, a grad student from Denmark who had recently moved to New York.

Their blossoming love affair took a tragic turn when she told him that she had been previously diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, that it had returned and metastasized and that she would understand if he wanted to break off the relationship.

Instead, they married. Four months later, in May 2009, Mia died. And Levy’s desire to write songs seemed to perish with her.

“To be honest, I was afraid to take out a pencil because I was already grieving so much that I feared that if I started writing songs it would all come out, and I wasn’t ready for it to come out that way,” he says.

So he took a break from songwriting, only to be gripped by a new fear. “I thought maybe I couldn’t write anymore. I wondered if I still had it as a songwriter.”

To his great relief, his writers’ block was broken on a songwriting retreat hosted by Chris Difford of the band Squeeze.

“One morning, Chris wrote the word ‘joy’ on the chalkboard,” he remembers. “So I tried to write from a place of joy. That was the beginning of the gates opening again.”

On “The Heart Collector,” Levy steered away from songs about the loss of his wife. “It would have seemed too stark,” he says. “I’ve never written about losing someone that dear.”

But in the last line of “Promised Land,” a song about his late grandmother, he wrote: “She lived a good life/She never did complain/She made her way by modest means/There were few treasures left/No pot of gold remained.”

“That always gets me when I sing it because that’s really my wife,” he confesses. “She didn’t have a lot of treasure. But, in her will, she specifically said to give her clothes to homeless teens and whatever money she had to her nieces and nephews. I think she knew I’d be in danger of holding on to everything and our home becoming a museum, and she would have hated that. So when I sing that line, it chokes me up because that line is true. That line is her.”

Adam Levy, an accomplished jazz guitarist, has recorded and toured with Norah Jones, Tracy Chapman, Amos lee and others. In February, after a successful Kickstart donation campaign, Levy released his new album, The Heart Collector.

An all-acoustic album, producer Mark Orton perfectly captured Levy’s skilled guitar playing. Mostly Levy and his guitar, there are a few tracks with very little accompaniments. In his Kickstart proposal, Levy wrote, “I want the songs to shine on their own, without much window-dressing, and I want to push myself as a singer and solo performer.” Pushing himself, Levy wrote one song a week for 20 weeks, resulting in a collection so varied and so wonderful it’s hard to name a standout. The opening track, “I Wish I Could Change Your Mind,” is a wistfully romantic ballad with beautiful jazz guitar lines. Then, Levy changes it up a little bit with the singer-songwriter vibe in “A Promise to California” and the bluesy “This is the Sound.” You will also here a sultry tango on the title track, a folksy country tune, “There’s A Light” and a Parisian accordion on “No Dancing.”

Levy stated that The Heart Collector would be his proving ground, but there really isn’t anything to prove when you’re this good and have always been this good. The Heart Collector has only confirmed, reaffirmed and validated that Levy is one of the best songwriters and musicians in the business. It is a great album overflowing with warm and soulful songs that enchant the ears and captivate the heart.

–April Wolfe @Common Folk Music

Singer-Songwriter Adam Levy Gives Life to Assortment of Eccentric Characters
On New CD The Heart Collector

The Former Six-String Sideman for Norah Jones Is A Masterful Storyteller
On Acoustic Album Blending Folk, Pop, Blues, Jazz and Americana

NEW YORK, June 15, 2011, Singer, songwriter, producer and former guitarist in Norah Jones’ Handsome Band, proves he’s a capable front man and masterful storyteller in his own right with the release of his stunning new CD, The Heart Collector, due in stores September 20, 2011 through Burnside Distribution.

Levy enjoyed a successful career as an in-demand sideman, even before he joined Jones’ band, but came late to songwriting, penning his first tunes while on tour in 2002, after Jones challenged band members, to write songs. He delivered two tracks that she later recorded, “In The Morning,” and “Moon Song.” He continued to write and released two CDs of his own while still in Jones’ band, and a third, Washing Day, shortly after he left in 2007 to follow his own path as a singer and songwriter.

In late 2009, when he hadn’t written any songs in several months, Levy came up with his own plan to write a song a week as a way to help him focus. And like Jones, he threw out the same challenge to a select group of songwriter friends including Ari Hest, Vienna Teng and Tony Furtado. Levy would come up with a title, perhaps based on a newspaper headline, an interesting phrase, or a sign and send it via email to members of this small group he dubbed The Song Club.

He spent the first few months of 2010 writing and soon had more than 25 songs. Though he hadn’t originally planned to make a record, it became apparent that recording these songs was the only thing he could do.

This is the genesis of The Heart Collector, an intimate collection of 13 acoustic songs, rich in lyrical detail and laced with lush string arrangements and accents of accordion, vibraphone, dobro, bass harmonica, Marxophone and pump organ.

He raised funds for the recording through Kickstarter and headed to Portland, Ore., to work with his friend, producer and engineer Mark Orton. They made the disc over a 10-day stretch at Orton’s Camp Watertown Studios.

The Heart Collector opens with “I Wish I could Change Your Mind,” one of two tracks Levy didn’t write with The Song Club. It’s a jazz flavored tune that he co-wrote during a songwriting retreat in Wales led by Chris Difford, one of several over the last few years in which he has participated.

“A Promise To California,” taken from the title of a Walt Whitman poem, evokes California’s golden age of the great singer-songwriters of the 70s, while “This Is The Sound,” has a bluesy feel and a title taken from the Julianna Hatfield song of the same name.

On the title track, Levy creates a Raymond Chandler-influenced film noir soundtrack, based on a character he first encountered in the Sam Philips song “Edge Of The World.”

“What is his story,” Levy mused. “What does he do when he’s not in a Sam Philips song?” Levy works a haunting, open D minor tuning on the track in which the narrator himself may or may not be the Jack-the-Ripper-esque Heart Collector.

Levy explores a decidedly lighter subject on “No Dancing,” a song inspired in part by New York City’s Cabaret Law, an obscure ordinance that dates back to the dawn of jazz and which stipulates that patrons cannot dance in any venue that does not have a cabaret license. A bar in New York where he played regularly had posted handmade signs throughout, with just two simple words, “No Dancing.”

Other standout tunes include “Painting By Numbers,” in which Levy imagines himself in an Edvard Munch painting, and “Promised Land,” about childhood visits to his grandparent’s house, a place where he first became “entranced by music and the power of song.”

Adam Levy was born and raised in suburban Los Angeles and found musical inspiration from his grandfather George Wyle, a pianist and arranger who co-wrote the opening theme to the iconic 60s television show, “Gilligan’s Island,” and the Christmas song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” He tried clarinet and piano before finding his groove on guitar.

He didn’t sing his own songs until his first solo gigs in 2005, after his first songwriting retreat with Chris Difford of Squeeze, where writers wrote in pairs and then performed the new songs each night. Though daunted initially, Levy soon found confidence in his voice noting, “for better or worse, nobody can sing my songs like me.” He recorded his first CD as a vocalist, Loose Rhymes: Live On Ludlow Street, live at the Living Room in New York in 2006.

As a singer-songwriter, his musical heroes are Chris Whitley, the Beatles, Hank Williams, Richard Julian, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Sam Phillips, Jill Sobule, Loudon Wainwright III, Tom Waits, Gillian Welch, XTC, and Neko Case. His guitar work can be heard on records by Norah Jones, Amos Lee, Tracy Chapman, Sex Mob, Hot Club of San Francisco and others.

Levy, who runs the occasional marathon, has called Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans home, and currently resides in Manhattan.

He will tour in support of The Heart Collector, this summer and into the fall.