Grammy Winner Treasures Father-Son Music Making
Loving bond endures and is enhanced through decades of performance together.
Howard Levy, the world-famous harmonica and keyboard virtuoso, has played with many of the great names in popular music. He’s recorded with the likes of Dolly Parton, Chuck Mangione, Paquito D’Rivera, Styx, and Paul Simon.
He toured extensively with Kenny Loggins and for a number of years was a founding member of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. He’s won two Grammys and has been nominated for another four. Many consider him a major innovator and among the greatest masters of the modern harmonica.
But for Howard Levy, some of the greatest musical moments in his career have not come in great concert halls and large performance arenas. Instead, they have come in quiet moments when he has sat close in and played in accompaniment to his father’s songs.
Most people find it hard to believe, when he tells them, but his father, Ira Levy, in his old age, still has a strong and rich baritone. He can belt out show tunes and operatic arias without the aid of a microphone. And he’s still doing it at 102.
Ira Levy lives with his wife, Arlene, who is a spry 97, at Huntcliff Summit, a senior living community in Sandy Springs, where father and son teamed up last month for a concert for the residents there.
It’s been a musical partnership for Howard that transcends age and infirmity to grow in his love and appreciation of his father over the past couple of decades.
“I started really playing for him, seriously, over 20 years ago, in Florida where they were living,” Howard Levy remembers. “And I began to really treasure those times. As he got older, he just got better. He sounded absolutely amazing into his 80s and 90s. His voice is just unbelievable.”
The older Levys were living in Boynton Beach, Fla., when the famous cantor, Alberto Mizrachi, came for a concert in nearby Boca Raton. Howard invited Mizrachi, who was a personal friend, to hear his father sing. Ira Levy was 92 at the time. Mizrachi was so impressed, he invited Ira to sing at the concert where he was performing.
“After the first line,” Howard Levy recalls, “the audience started cheering like they were at a baseball game, and someone had just hit a home run. And my dad looks at me, it’s just like with this puzzled look in his eyes. I told him to just keep singing, and we finish, and there is a leaping ovation at the end. Women are crying, men are shouting. It was something I have never seen, anything like before or since. My dad and I both, we just treasure that memory, because it was just unbelievable.”
Both Ira and his wife had loved music all their life. For several years in the late 1940s, Ira seriously considered a career in the Broadway musical theater. He had even been offered a leading role in a new musical in 1947 by Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had scored big hits with “Oklahoma” and “Carousel,” just a few years before.
But they both gave up thoughts of a professional commitment to music for the security of a highly successful career in business. Howard Levy remembers how his own early passion for music was nurtured by his parents, who often hosted lively parties with music and singing in their home. The radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera were a regular feature of weekend life and all sorts of music, both classical and popular, were always being played at home.
He believes this early immersion in all these melodies “help burn it into his consciousness,” as he put it. When he showed an early interest in studying music and developed a talent for improvisation and composition, his parents encouraged it.
Music was so important that decades later, when his parents were forced to isolate during the COVID epidemic, Howard recorded 60 to 70 instrumental tracks so that his father could continue to practice his singing to a musical accompaniment. His father uses those tracks when they perform together.
Today, with one of them well past the century mark and another fast approaching his golden years, they look to each other as a father and son whose long lives have enriched one another.
For Ira, it is the satisfaction of seeing in his son have the success in a creative life that he had once so fondly dreamed of. For Howard, it is the joy of seeing in his father a life well lived, with passion and grace.
“My father is incredibly generous with himself and his spirit. It’s just everything. I mean, even at 102 he doesn’t view his age as an impediment to anything. He just wants to shoot for the stars, really, all the time.”
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