The Amy Levin Quartet’s debut EP, What I Did Over My Summer Vacation, is not what the eponymous jazz vibes player originally intended it to be. In the summer of 2008, she went over to a friend’s house to record some tracks for a scholarship application.
She was done with all four tracks in an hour, burned the CD, sent it off and never heard back.
“They just never responded,” the DeKalb Performing Arts School junior said. “We never got a ‘We got your entry’ or ‘We like it.’ Nothing.”
So Amy, with help from her parents Bob and Iris, turned the disc into something bigger than an audition: the first record from Mouzza Publications, the family’s own start-up. The Levins have already made back their investment and then some, with demand necessitating a second pressing.
WIDOMSV is also getting consistent radio play thanks to Iris’ public relations skills and experience in the record industry. The story goes that she and Bob literally drove up to WABE 90.1 FM one evening and marched a copy in to H. Johnson himself.
“He popped it into the player, listened to three notes and said, ‘Oh my G-d, this is great,’” Iris said with a smile. “He played a tune [on the air], and the phones lit up within the first 10 seconds. You would not believe how they were ringing.”
WCLK and GPB are also playing the record these days, adding to the success that convinced the family to record a second Quartet album, this one with 10 tracks. It’s different for Amy now that the expectations are higher and she’s surrounded with tremendous talent like bass player and Emory music instructor Ramon Pooser, but she has her eyes on the final goal.
“You might have an audience that doesn’t really know jazz,” she said. “But I actually really like trying to convince them that this is good stuff.”
Having been reared on the genre, it’s something she herself knows well. From when she was memorizing Lambert, Hendricks and Ross’ Sing a Song of Basie as a toddler to teaching herself some jazz piano at age seven and being struck by the vibraphone when introduced to it in the 7th grade, this style has been all around her.
Originally an instrumental major at DPAS, Amy has doubled up and added theatre since the beginning of her high school career. She said acting was at first just her way of “cheating” to get into the school, but now she’s looking at it as a potential major in college.
Which is interesting, because one thing she’s not interested in studying at university is music. Very much her father’s daughter (Bob was taught music in a non-academic way and used that method to turn Amy into the artist she is today), she’ll take matters into her own hands.
“I’m sure, wherever I go, there’s bound to be a little place that has live music,” she said, noting that the University of Georgia and a pre-pharmacy/drama double-major is her top choice for the moment. “That’s probably what I’m going to end up doing with music, making it a side-job as opposed to my main one.”
If it seems an odd choice for someone with so much talent, one need only consider the art form she was raised on and the people who taught it to her. For the Levins, only the notes, not the music, come from a book.
“There’s no word in the English language that can describe what it feels like to play music for me,” Amy said. “It’s just something that’s natural, kind of in-tune with the rhythms of my body. It works right.”
Considering quite a few of the callers H. Johnson took that fateful night mistook her for legendary vibraphonist Milt Jackson, one could easily agree.
