Southern Songbook: Rethinking the Same Old Songs

Music’s past and present converge at the Southern.

Desdamona performs with Carnage as Ill Chemistry

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By: Quinton Skinner |   November 2010   |  From the print edition

Getting Adam Levy on the line involves a respectably vigorous game of phone tag, which is no surprise given his Zelig-like ubiquity on the local music scene.

“I’ve got like six bands going on,” he says with more enthusiasm than exasperation. “Not to mention I’m teaching songwriting and career mentoring.”

In his presumably limited spare time, Levy is co-hosting (with DJ Jake Rudh) this month’s inaugural installment of the Southern’s “Southern Songbook” series, which explores the artistic history of popular song through performances and dialogues with Twin Cities musicians and songwriters.

“I lined up some of my favorite hip-hop, folk and indie artists,” Levy says of the show. “And I asked them to choose their favorite song from the American jazz canon between 1925 and 1965.” The musicians will perform their chosen song at the event, which is named, appropriately, “Lush Life.”

Levy’s call yielded material from artists and composers as diverse as Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael, Burt Bacharach and Antonio Carlos Jobim. And in an evening anchored by house band Heiruspecs, the idea is less a dry homage to past musical accomplishments than an exploration of how the professional songwriter of the past shaped forms that we take for granted today.

“The idea is to get people outside their comfort zones,” Levy adds. “Because anybody who plays music now is eating a free lunch from that tradition of Broadway tunes, Tin Pan Alley and jazz standards—those are what gave birth to contemporary popular music.”

“Lush Life” is part one of a three-part series running into next year. For this kick-off, Levy and Rudh will be joined by a slate of guest performers including Mayda, Ill Chemistry, Toki Wright, Omaur Bliss and Janey Winterbauer. Levy speaks with a promoter’s zeal about the range of his line-up, though in the next breath he reveals a scholar’s depth of thinking about his chosen field.

“The American songbook is a history of interpretations of songs that were written for other people,” Levy explains, noting that luminaries such as Lennon-McCartney and Dylan were “the inheritors of that tradition and destroyers—since after a while they were no longer inheriting bodies of work but creating their own.”

Levy is no slouch in the latter pursuit. Before we sign off, he lists some of his ongoing projects: his old band the Honeydogs; an indie project with a string quartet; work with film arrangers; electronic chamber music; a project for kids; and cover band Hookers and Blow.

“The timing on this wasn’t the greatest,” Levy says of the work required to put together “Lush Life,” but it’s clear he can’t help himself, not when there are songs to be played. And with that he’s gone, one assumes to pick up the thread of the next tune from the ether—or the canon.

Lush Life: Interpretations of the American jazz canon
Saturday, November 14

Southern Theater
1420 Washington Ave. S., Mpls.