Howard Levy
Performance Details
Date: February 28, 2020 at 7:30pm
Location: Williamsburg Regional Library
Admission: $5, free with William & Mary ID
Howard Levy is a musician without limits. His musical adventures include journeys into jazz, pop, rock, world music, Latin, classical, folk, blues, country, theater, and fi lm. Mr. Levy is a multiple Grammy Award winner and has appeared on hundreds of CD’s. He has performed many times on American and European television and radio including frequent appearances on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. Universally acknowledged as the world’s most advanced diatonic harmonica player, Levy developed a fully chromatic style on the standard 10 - hole diatonic harmonica, revolutionizing harmonica playing and taking the instrument into totally new territory. Mr. Levy was a founding member of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, a unique band that set the musical world on its ear back in the early 1990s. He has performed and/or recorded with Dolly Parton, Styx, Bobby McFerrin, Paul Simon, John Prine, Paquito D’Rivera, Rabih Abou Khalil, and many others. In 2001, Levy was commissioned by the Illinois Philharmonic to compose a harmonica concerto, the fi rst ever written for diatonic harmonica. He has performed the piece more than 20 times in the U.S. and Europe. Mr. Levy will be accompanied by William & Mary faculty members Harris Simon and Christine Niehaus.
Harris Simon, jazz pianist, hails from New York City. He has performed with many well-known jazz musicians and vocalists including Sonny Fortune, Clifford Jordan, Michael Brecker, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, George Duvivier, Red Mitchell, Earl Coleman, Jay Clayton, and Stephanie Nakasian. He has played at jazz festivals in New York, Montreal, Montreux, Edinburgh, Warsaw, Tokyo, Helsinki, and Stockholm, among others. In 1983, Mr. Simon won First Prize at the Kalisz International Jazz Piano Competition in Poland. In 2013, he performed at Carnegie Recital Hall in a program sponsored by the Muscarelle Museum. In 2017, Mr. Simon was a guest artist with the Blue House Jazz Orchestra at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden. Locally, Mr. Simon has performed with the Williamsburg Symphony and has been a regular at An Occasion for the Arts and the Winter Blues Jazz Fest.
Christine Niehaus has performed concerts in Russia, Sweden, France, Japan, Slovenia, Hong Kong, and Italy. In the U.S., she has performed at Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Institution, the White House, and the Kennedy Center. The Columbia Flier named her solo recital at the Smithsonian one of the “10 Best Concerts of the Year.” The grand prize winner in the 1985 International Piano Recording Competition, Ms. Niehaus performs frequently with the Virginia Symphony and is Principal Keyboardist with the Williamsburg Symphony. She earned a B.M. and M.M. from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and pursued doctoral studies at the University of Maryland. Ms. Niehaus joined the faculty at William & Mary in 1994 as the Harry C. and Tina Jordan Gravely Class of 1939 Artist-in-Residence.
