Howard Levy: more than blues around the world

The music was American. The audience was Russian. But the language was interna-tional as Howard Levy displayed his virtuosity in a program of jazz before listeners who came from a country which had banned this form of music.

Levy, playing harmonica and piano in a concert of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, along with some of his own compositions, also discussed the music, explaining the roots of jazz and illustrating how jazz musicians approach the music.

"Improvisation is what jazz musicians do," he explained. "They like to take a piece and make it their own."

This was the music that the Communists considered "the penetration of a rotten ideology," Hill …