American cellist-composer Daniel Levin is known for his modern jazz-informed quartet and trio and his ad hoc, free-improvised duos and trios with musicians from both sides of the Atlantic. Solo is Levin’s third solo cello album, following Inner Landscapes (Clean Feed, 2011) and Living (Smeraldina-Rima, 2017). It was recorded at SMUP in Parede, Portugal, in March 2024.

Music critic Art Lange, who contributed insightful liner notes, wrote that Levin uses the less restrictive, free-improvised environment as a special category in his work, «one which has inspired a symmetry of contemplation and experimentation, a search for the extremes of identity, a commitment to the expansion and reorganization of sound as an expression of freedom».

solo offers two untitled improvisations. The first, short one is urgent, uncompromising and intense, aiming at pushing the acoustic cello’s sonic palette to its extreme terrains, while employing extended bowing techniques. The second, 30-minute improvisation is an ode to a spontaneous, intuitive, non-idiomatic, and non-referential sonic journey where the cello functions as a vivid, powerful sound generator, but allows Levin to alternate between the urgent and otherworldly, the fragile and poetic.

Levin, as Lange describes, explores the cello’s full sonic palette and employs sound as an expression of freedom. He explores the cello’s weight and density of tones, degrees of timbre and texture, percussive attacks, exaggerated dynamics, and the colors of alien sounds. “Improvisation composes its own identity in the breadth and being of its form”, Lange summarizes this masterful and inspired tour de force.

Eyal Hareuveni

Daniel Levin (cello)