Legendary bassist Tony Levin, best known for his work with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel, has announced the new album Bringing It Down to the Bass. The LP features contributions from Robert Fripp (King Crimson), Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater), Vinnie Colaiuta (Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell), and more.
The album arrives via Flatiron Recordings on September 13th, one day after Levin kicks off the highly anticipated “BEAT” tour celebrating the music of King Crimson with Adrian Belew, Danny Carey, and Steve Vai. According to Levin, the album is a long-time coming, as he’s been working on a number of the songs for years, if not decades.
“It could have been done a long time ago, frankly,” Levin said in a press release, “but it’s because of a problem I have, which is a very good problem to have. And that’s that I have a lot of touring and that’s what I love to do, playing live. It just didn’t give me much time at home to work on finishing the album that I’ve been working on for five or six years.”
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Levin, who made Consequence‘s list of the 100 Greatest Bassists of All Time, added, “But, a year ago May, I looked at my schedule and saw a lot of touring with Peter Gabriel for almost a year and then in November 2023, there was a Stick Men tour –and then in January a Levin Brothers tour – and I said to myself, ‘If I take March, April and May off from any live playing and maybe even any recording for other people and really focus on this, I can finally get this album out.’ It could have happened ten years before if I had the gumption to turn down tours.”
As for the music on the album, Levin explained, “I had pieces very much in the prog-rock vein and I had pieces that were based on the bass, and somewhere around the middle of the record I made the difficult decision to toss the prog stuff – well, not toss it exactly, save it for another album – and the more I focused, I chose the kind of pieces that had to me a sense of unity to it in that it’s about the bass. Not songs with singing about the bass, but each song is either based on a bass riff or a bass technique that I then invited some great rhythm sections to play on.”