I Learn What I Think, By Complaining

Last Tuesday, I spent our “Shut Up & Write” session here at the bookstore drafting a complaint about an old friend’s memoir which I had just finished reading: I Speak Music: Stories from My Improbable Life, by Howard Levy

I wrote what annoyed me: Howard hadn’t spent enough time expressing his opinions and expounding his ideas. I’d always wanted to learn his viewpoints but, in his book, he hadn’t given me what I expected. Instead, he’d recounted scads and scads of anecdotes. So, I’d learned all about his life, but little about his most personal thoughts.

For the next several days, on and off, I continued to jot down my feelings about I Speak Music. Gradually, I developed a different perspective. I realized that the problem had been my expectations. Howard wrote the book he decided, not the one I wanted him to write, and that’s my problem, not his.

Also though: I noticed that I could read between his lines. By interpreting his anecdotes, I could deduce the answers to my questions.

Finally, I wrote a review and posted it on Goodreads and Amazon. Then, I ordered copies to sell here at Book & Puppet Company.

It’s a landmark memoir. I highly recommend it.

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I Speak Music: Stories from My Improbable Life, by Howard Levy

From an Extravagantly Gifted Musician Comes a Generously Personal Memoir

This passionate and intimate narrative takes us with Howard Levy into unimaginable situations (the Dutch hotel room where at 4am, the brilliant Cuban-defector-saxophonist Paquito de Rivera “decided to pay us our weekly salaries, right there in front of Arturo [Sandoval; Arturo was Paquito’s former bandmate, a trumpeter who hadn’t yet defected from Cuba]. We were each getting $1,000 a week, very good money for jazz musicians at the time. [Paquito] was peeling off hundred-dollar bills from a big roll of cash while Arturo watched like a hungry lion. Paquito casually and slowly uttered these words: ‘So, Arturo, man—when you gonna come to the States?’”), while also recounting Howard Levy’s own idiosyncratic life-decisions (as an eleven-year-old child-prodigy Howard decided not to go to Paris to study piano and composition with the world-renowned Nadia Boulanger, because Howard had better things to do at home in Far Rockaway, but, as a teenaged Manhattan street musician, “A crucial breakthrough happened one summer day as I was walking through Central Park playing my tenor [sax]. A guy sitting on a bench seemed to enjoy my playing. As I passed by, he looked up. ‘Have you ever taken any lessons?’ ‘No, I’m trying to teach myself.’ ‘I’ve played with Sun Ra,’ he said. That made me take notice. ‘There’s a book you should get that will really help you,’ he continued. ‘It’s called 'Top Tones for Saxophone' by Sigurd Rascher, and it will change your playing from the inside out.’ He spoke with absolute sincerity and genuinely seemed to care. I thanked him gratefully and immediately went down to one of the music stores on West 48th Street and bought it. (I still have that original copy.)”). All of which is to say: Howard Levy is not just your everyday musical genius, he’s a radically egalitarian human being, who is also—as another musician declared—a sponge. Howard Levy respects, learns, and plays everyone’s music: jazz, folk, blues, classical, rock, Middle Eastern, Indian, Eastern European, Brazilian, 5/4, 15/8, free form, every mode, every scale—but he somehow transcends and unifies all these musics. In I Speak Music, we accompany Howard nonstop all over the world, on hilariously horrifying travel adventures (airport-taxi-toilet-backstage-onstage-restaurant-hotel-airplane), into highly inadvisable circumstances (driving directly beneath the eye of Hurricane Irene!), playing gigs with dozens of bandleaders who’ve needed his unfathomably gorgeous playing on harmonica, piano, ocarina, mandolin, saxophone (plus, throat-singing!). No musician who’s in constant demand, and capable of performing while suffering an array of ailments (twisted chest-muscle, cracked tooth, oxygen-deprived at 9,000 feet), has the free time to write a lengthy, detailed memoir, so thank goodness Howard Levy really is the hardest-working man in music (and, a charming raconteur to boot), because, amidst the constant touring, recording, composing, and teaching, he somehow did make time to invite us along, through I Speak Music, into his crazy—I mean INSANE—world, to join in breathlessly when he suddenly experiences one of his mindbending, other-worldly, musico-spiritual epiphanies.

You gotta read I Speak Music.