Aidan Levy Interview
Aidan Levy is a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Aidan has a new book out called Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins. In a review, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times called it “a brimming and organized compendium, something to keep returning to like Rollins’s records.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
My career as a music journalist has its roots more than 20 years ago at my high school paper. I’m a saxophonist, so I was often assigned the “Artist of the Month” feature whenever it was a musician. Also in high school, I hosted a jazz radio show at WRTC-Hartford, the Trinity College station, so part of my music education was on the air. In college at Brown University, the Pulitzer-winning critic Richard Eder taught a class in arts criticism as a visiting professor. It was in that class that something clicked and I realized maybe I could write about music professionally. When I graduated, I pitched the Village Voice a story on Search and Restore, a New York-based arts presenter that was putting on some of the best improvised music shows in the city. The music editor at the Voice then was Rob Harvilla, who taught me a lot. I worked with many other great editors, all of whom are great writers: Maura Johnston, Stacey Anderson, Nick Murray, Brittany Spanos, and Hilary Hughes at the Voice; Evan Haga and Mac Randall at JazzTimes; Sewell Chan and Andy Newman at The New York Times; Phil Freeman at Blue Note Records Spotlight; Matthew McKnight at The Nation, among others. In 2015, I published Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed and had the privilege of working with Yuval Taylor when he was still an editor at Chicago Review Press. Yuval is currently working on a book on Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. I also edited Patti Smith on Patti Smith: Interviews and Encounters, part of Chicago Review Press’s Musicians in Their Own Words series.
While freelancing, I worked as a film and TV production assistant in New York, and eventually joined IATSE Local 52 as a union prop person. I worked on countless shows and movies: Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Gossip Girl, The Americans, and the Saturday Night Live Film Unit, to name a few. In 2014, I went back to grad school to get my PhD at Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. I studied with faculty affiliated with Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies: Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Krin Gabbard, and others. This past December, I defended my dissertation, which is on jazz and literature.